So that we're not the only single blog in the known universe and beyond who misses the chance to comment on the FTC's boneheaded guidelines requiring bloggers, celebs, reviewers and others -- basically anyone who you might read online -- to disclose any "material relationship" with companies they review.

I tend to look at everything in terms of Pros and Cons. Here's the list I came up with.

The bad

• The FTC has passed an over-reaching regulation which is unenforceable at best, and is a violation of free speech at worst.

The good

• The FTC has passed an over-reaching regulation which is unenforceable at best, and is a violation of free speech at worst.

There are about a million better things the FTC could be doing with its time. Even if you wanted to narrow the to-do list to just Internet related issues, the list is still enormous. How about click-fraud? Noni Juice? Teeth Whiteners? Loose 200 pounds in 37 seconds? And all those hot single girls who are looking for a man like you -- and happen to be conspicuously located in teh same city as what geo-location returns for the IP of your upstream router?

There's a significant amount of misunderstanding of how Internet publishing works in this regulation, but this is the moment where I find the clue train leaves the station with absolutely no-one aboard. AdAge reports that Richard Cleland, assistant director- division of advertising practices at the FTC interprets the regulation to include, "posts on review sites such as Yelp or online stores such as Amazon."

Does that mean when I drop a review on Urban Spoon of my favorite eatery -- who happen to throw me a freebie every once in a while for being a loyal customer -- the FTC will sick it's blogger enforcement team on me? When they figure out exactly how to enforce this, call me.

Until then I'll be driving the Windows 7 box graphics wrapped Porsche Cayman that Microsoft sent me. *

* Kidding. But Ballmer, if you're interested, drop me an email and I'll send you my address

For what it's worth, take the jump to read my quick diatribe on Weblogs, Inc gimmies policy -- which is likely the strictest in existence among blog networks.

File this one under "LOLcats in real life." A Florida man accused of downloading over 1,000 illegal child porn images tried to lay the blame on his cat. Allegedly, the cat would jump on his owner's keyboard, and the offending images would just appear. The cat had the last laugh, though, as police have now ruled him out as a suspect.

After failing to win the cops over with his implausible tale, the man faces 10 counts of possession of child pornography. He's now being held on $250,000 bail as he awaits trial. Meanwhile, the cat is staying with relatives. Presumably, no illegal photos have appeared on their computers, but I'm sure they're keeping a close eye on the suspicious feline.

This is a software blog, not a clearinghouse for legal advice, but I have to say that I'd probably change my site design around a bit if I owned lawmail.org. Law Mail is a certified email service -- for lawyers! -- that provides secure, private, tracked messaging for the transmission of legal documents. Good idea. The legal profession is largely still mired in the dark ages of faxes and snail-mail because of the need to verify important documents.

Here's the bad idea: the Law Mail site might look a bit familiar to you at first glance. Specifically, it might look a heck of a lot like Google. From the primary-colored serif logo to the barely modified Gmail favicon, everything about this site added up to confuse me about whether it was actually a new service from Google. And that's not even mentioning that the phrase "powered by Google" shows up all over the Law Mail site. Sure, tech-savvy people know that "powered by" doesn't mean "owned by," but it throws you off for a second.

Law Mail is a pretty good idea for a service, but it's an idea that needs credibility to function. Whether or not you think they're trying to borrow some credibiity from Google, the fact that you have to think about it means they're dead in the water. It's not too late to rebrand and hire a savvy designer, and I hope that's what Law Mail will do. It would certainly keep them from getting a few Law Mails of their own from Google's attorneys.

Way back in 1998, US president Bill Clinton signed into law a measure called the Child Online Protection Act. And it's never actually been enforced.

As the name suggested, the law was intended to help protect kids from the dangerous things that can be found on the internet, specifically pictures of naked people. But critics said it limited free speech, and didn't make it clear how to distinguish between sexually explicit internet content and educational web sites. For example, would a web page showing young women how to perform self examinations for breast cancer be banned?

Before the law could ever take effect, it was challenged in the courts, and it's been bouncing from one court to the next for the last 10 years. Today, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, effectively killing the law and keeping the web safe for pornographers and health professionals alike. Until Congress passes another law aimed at protecting kids.

Back in October of 2007, a federal jury ruled in favor of the RIAA and fined the defendant, Jammie Thomas, an outrageous $220,000.00 US for sharing 24 songs on a P2P network. Not surprisingly, Ms. Thomas filed an appeal. Her case was indirectly strengthened when a New York federal judge ruled that the RIAA could not strictly sue individuals under the "making available" claim -- the argument that merely making a file available to download constitutes subjects the user to copyright infringement and punitive penalties -- they would have to prove the person actually downloaded said files. Yesterday, a Minnesota federal judge declared a mistrial in the Jammie Thomas case, effectively setting the RIAA's court victory record back to zero.

The basis of the mistrial were the jury instructions. Initially Judge Michael Davis instructed jurors that could find Thomas guilty of copyright infringement if copyrighted MP3s were made available via a peer-to-peer network, "regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown."

In August, Judge Davis had a change of heart and called both sides back to court, requesting arguments over the "make available" claim. With yesterday's decision, Jude Davis ruled that the jury instructions were "erroneous, and that error substantially prejudiced Thomas' rights."

Although a mistrial was declared, the case was not dismissed with prejudice, meaning the RIAA can sue Thomas on the same grounds, assuming they can make the argument that actual distribution, and that Thomas was responsible for infringing downloads.

On page 41 of the 44 page ruling, Judge Davis also commented on the extraordinary punitive damages in this case:
"The Court would be remiss if it did not take this opportunity to implore Congress to amend the Copyright Act to
address liability and damages in peer? to?peer network cases such as the one currently before this Court." We can only hope Congress listens.

The complete ruling can be downloaded here.



[via Tech Dirt]

A couple is accusing Google of diminishing the value of their property and causing them "mental" suffering" for including their recluse home in the Google Maps Street View project. The road leading up to their house is apparently labeled "private", something the Street View operator must've missed. We checked the Street View footage up to the house and didn't notice any clear "private" signs, but don't take our scientific analysis as fact.

They didn't like that Google invaded their "privacy". Some of the court papers are available online, and if you check them out, you'll notice mainly boring gibberish but also the address of the home. Suing Google has already done more damage to their "privacy" than the pictures on their own.

Aaron and Christine Boring want at least $25,000 and the 360 degree pictures destroyed, but something tells us the case doesn't stand a chance against Google's well paid, state-of-the-art, corporate lawyers, which come from the best lawyer factories in the nation.

Lately, some ISPs have been using BitTorrent throttling techniques to prevent BitTorrent programs from working properly. It is understandable that ISPs need to manage their networks in order to ensure that every customer gets a fair share of the bandwidth pie, but as individuals, traffic throttling techniques take away from the service we were promised when signing up.

If you choose to share the data collected via the Network Status Monitor, the Azureus team may analyze and compare it with the data collected from other users in order to develop ways of circumventing BitTorrent throttling. The plug-in only works on Windows machines for now, but Mac support is coming.

Due to another company trademarking "G-Mail" in Germany, similar to Google's "Gmail" in the US, the search engine giant lost an appeal to use "Gmail" in the European Union. G-Mail stands for "Giersch Mail" in Germany, where Daniel Giersch runs an electronic postal delivery service -- if that's not email, we couldn't say what it is.

As a result, Gmail is now known as Google Mail in Europe. Google's email service is also known as Google Mail in the UK, where another company trademarked "Gmail" shortly after Google launched the service.

And the moral of the story is: The next time you launch any product or service, make sure to trademark the name before. As for Google, the company "got caught slippin" -- as we say in the hip hop world -- so too bad, so sad.

When we first heard about the RIAA's recent filesharing suit victory and the 220k dollar judgment against the user in question -- we thought, "You'd have to be mad to share enough songs to rack up a judgment that large."

Not so fast, jack. The offending copyright infringements totaled just 24--that's right, twenty-four copyright protected files on the user's drive. Breaking down to nearly 10 large per infringement; the defendant Jammie Thomas was hit square in the face with the book the court threw, wiping out her finances and sending her out of the courthouse literally in tears.

As an aside, we're left to wonder if the artists infringed upon could have generated the kind of revenue which would make such an enormous judgment possible if it weren't for the enthusiasm demonstrated by fans like Jammie. After all, a business needs its customers and, like it or not, rabid filesharers are also some of music's biggest fans, and the recording industry's bread and butter.

Nevertheless, Jammie, a MySpace user, has apparently raised nearly a thousand bucks to fund her appeal of the case, courtesy of her MySpace friends. She's also receiving funds from her Native American tribe, but not nearly enough to match the might of the RIAA, whose pockets have grown deep through record sales and insanely lopsided settlement agreements.

Declan McCullough of CNET wrote that the jury instructions given before deliberation may have been slanted in favor of a heavy statutory damage claim, as high as a hundred grand per incident. Is it just us, or does this kind of onesie-twosie infringement seem like it should be covered by a different set of fines? You can get a DUI with children in the car and still get off cheaper than Jammie Thomas did.

If you're a file pirate living in the EU, you may have reason to celebrate. Juliane Kokott, Advocate General to the European Court of Justice declared today that European ISPs cannot be forced to reveal the identity behind accounts identified for sharing copyright protected material.

The statement was directed to a panel of judges mulling over the legality of a Spanish file-sharing case, and could be a harbinger of things to come in the EU. Kokott's declaration essentially asserts that although ISPs can be required to turn over identities in criminal matters, file-sharing is a civil issue and therefor doesn't enjoy the same legal privileges.

Debbie Foster who recently went head to head with RIAA and then subsequently won a dismissal with prejudice in Capitol Records v. Foster is also getting the last laugh since her attorney's fees of $68,685.23 must be paid by RIAA.

The saga began in November 2004 when Foster was sued by RIAA for copyright infringement. Rather than bowing down and taking it, Foster denied the allegations and began a legal fight with the music industry which just ended with her award for the attorney's fees.

The $68,685.23 award represents Foster's attorney's fees, and does not include the nice, big, fat attorney fees of RIAA's own counsel. You can make a fair assumption those fees are at least that of Ms. Foster's, if not more.

Let's see. Two years, hundreds of thousands of dollars, bad press, huge loss in court - not pretty. There's an old saying "He who laughs last, laughs best." As RIAA licks its wounds and hopefully figures out a new paradigm, we're laughing with Ms. Foster today.


[via ars technica]

If you ever needed proof that big media and big government are a big crock of... well, let's just say look no further than the SPY Act. The U.S. House of Representatives already sold you down the river but, the bill is currently making it's slimy way through the Senate. The EFF has an action alert on how you can tell your Senator exactly what you think of making it legal for the recording industry to install spyware on your box.

The EFF's alert puts it succinctly, "The SPY Act is supposed to help stop spyware, deceptive adware, and other malicious software, but it is unlikely to do any good and could actually make things worse. If enacted, it would block lawsuits similar to the one EFF brought against Sony-BMG for infecting customers' computers with privacy-invasive copy protection."

The EFF did PC users a serious solid by slapping Sony for invading your machine through trojaned music CDs. This bill would essentially give the media industry carte-blanche to install what they wish any time you insert a disc you've paid for.

[via Boing Boing]

After Microsoft made the claim that Linux infringes on 235 of its patents, some folks became worried that the company might begin suing companies who use OSS. Even individual users have launched a 'Sue Me First' campaign, challenging the company to "put its lawyers where its mouth is" and prove the patent infringement.

Fortunately, Microsoft might not attempt to succeed where the SCO failed - at least not yet, anyway. In a statement emailed to ZDNet UK (though, strangely, posted on ZDNet Asia), a Microsoft spokesperson assured us that they would not litigate for now. "If we wanted to go down that road we could have done that three years ago" said Mr. Spokesperson. Funny - everyone was kinda under the impression that Microsoft has already been there, done that (for a recap on Microsoft's relationship with the SCO: MS was apparently funding the SCO's patent litigation efforts against IBM and their use of Linux).

The latest theory that takes into account this promise of no immediate litigation is that Microsoft is simply trying to scare OSS-slinging businesses into rethinking their position. Perhaps Redmond can convince these companies to rejoin the red, green, blue and yellow side of the fence - or at least into OSS that is sanctioned by Microsoft and/or Novell.

It's still early on in this whole patent infringement situation Microsoft has drudged up again, but the company surely isn't hurting for cash with which to fuel their army of lawyers. Still, during a time where Microsoft's reputation is likely at an all-time low and users are switching in record numbers to free and/or fruitier pastures, pulling a stunt like suing users or even businesses that pick up copies of software they haven't yet proven is infringing on anything isn't the brightest move they could make.

[via Slashdot]

In March, the state of Utah passed the Trademark Protection Act, designed to protect companies that register their trademarks in Utah.

Essentially, the law creates a database of trademarked terms, and prevents online advertisers from using those terms as keywords. In other words, if you're Mazda, you can't buy paid advertisements from Google that will show up when users search for Pontiac.

While some bloggers have declared that the bill shows an inherent misunderstanding of how the web works (every company that ever buys keyword advertising will have to check with Utah's state registry to make sure the term isn't trademarked in that state), it's amusing that the Utah lawmakers behind the bill have taken to the blogosphere to defend the law.

[via Slashdot]

When politics and computing mix, the results aren't usually pretty. Politicians have fundamental misunderstandings about computing, the internet and how computers and people interact; a fault which often causes them to enact useless or even harmful legislation. Senator Sam Brownback is pushing a bill that would force the people who rate video games to play the full game in order to render a rating. Ed Felten of Freedom to Tinker explains why this shows a complete misunderstanding of games, and computer science.

He writes, "Nonexperts are often surprised to learn that programs can do things the programmers didn't expect. These surprises can be vexing; but they're also the main reason computer science is fun." Felten gives an example of a simple Python script which even source code inspection wouldn't explain. It's only three lines, games run into millions of lines of code.

import sys, sha
h = sha.new(sha.new(sys.argv[1]).digest()[:9]).digest()
if h.startswith("abcdef"): print h[6:9]

Can you predict every possible outcome from these three lines of code? Would it ever print anything kids shouldn't see, like, for example, a four letter word?