After a challenge to a similar state law in Utah last week, a federal judge restored a sex offender's right to anonymous speech online. Though the judge stated that this decision should not apply unilaterally to all registered sex offenders, her ruling is the first to question the conventional wisdom: that curbing online speech can curb sex crimes.

Free speech advocates and social network analysts have long been claiming that this approach won't work. First, there's the problem of the expansive definition of "sex crime" — from violent assault to public nudity. On that basis, Flickr has at least one employee who, after bending over bare-assed for his colleagues, could be banned from the Internet. Add to that that state and Federal lawmakers still can't seem to grasp the qualitative difference between a sixteen year old flashing her boycrush and a fifty year old posing as the same sixteen year old. Toss with a little bit of election-year mania about being tough on crime, and you get a botched bill that may only drive sex offenders further from the public eye — the opposite of the safer, happier Internet McCain hoped to create.

(Photo by soggydan)

Enomoto claims the checkup results were a convenient lie, and that Space Adventures had never had permission to offer the spacewalk but demanded another $10 million from him for the privelege anyway. He also alleges that Ansari basically bought her way ahead of him in line by making an "investment," which he was also pestered to do. Space Adventures's attorney John Villa says the company will not be offering a refund, and that's that. Sounds like a typical tourist package shakedown, frankly — wonder how much they'll take Ultima creator Richard Garriott and Google cofounder Sergey Brin for between now and liftoff?

Facing an iPod-related patent infringement lawsuit from a company called Burst, Apple's lawyers had to be delighted to find a British inventor who filed lapsed patents on a music player back in 1979. So they called Kramer and asked him to tell a judge that whatever Burst's claims about creating the technology behind the iPod, he came up with the iPod first and was happy to see it doing so well.

"The questioning by the Burst legal counsel there was tough, ten hours of it. But I was happy to do it," Kramer told the Daily Mail. "To be honest, I was just so pleased that finally something that I had done which has been a huge success and changed the music industry was being acknowledged."

For his pains, Kramer received a consulting fee from Apple and is now negotiating compensation for a copyright he owns on a patent drawing that looks like most any early MP3 player. Apple and Burst settled out of court.

"They have a massive failure to disclose,'' Minor told Bloomberg. "They have an economic interest to misrepresent the facts." Minor plans to countersue.

Longtime CNET employees might say the same about Minor. In March 2000, when he stepped down as CEO right before the Nasdaq peaked, he said, "As a large shareholder, I would not have made this move unless I thought I would generate more value to shareholders this way." Inside the company, he encouraged employees to hold onto their shares, too.

It was technically true that Minor remained a large shareholder. But through a financial maneuver known as a collar, he guaranteed that his shares would hold their value, even if the stock price dropped. The CNET employees he encouraged to stay and hold onto their shares had no such protection. It was a massive failure to disclose. He had an economic interest to misrepresent the facts.

The curious thing: Having protected his CNET fortune eight years ago, why did Minor claim he didn't have the money to pay for the art he purchased? He's spending heavily on real estate, including a $15.3 million, 476-acre estate in Williamsburg, Va., and Florida's Hialeah Park racetrack. Could Minor's investments have gone so sour that he's been caught in a cash crunch? If so, forgive CNET employees who saw their options sink underwater, on Minor's advice, a moment of schadenfreude.

Illston, who won fans among copyright wonks for ruling in favor of fair-use DRM hacks, is pretty clear that she doesn't see the lost evidence as an accident: "It is appropriate to infer," she wrote, "that the emails and software materials would demonstrate Ellison's knowledge of, among other things, problems with Suite 11i, the effects of the economy on Oracle's business and problems with defendants' forecasting model." Oracle spokespeople are keeping a tight lip on the situation.

Ressi had the cheek to make a little video where he personally delivers the documents EDF requested. He assures the audience that they contain no information that will identify "John Doe," the unnamed defendant in the suit. The smiling Ressi makes a thumbs-up gesture at the end, clearly mocking the litigants. It also suggests that such charming and friendly customer service can be yours if you pay to promote your fund on the site.

]]> Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:00:00 PDT Jackson West http://valleywag.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5041791&view=rss&microfeed=true An Alabama woman says Apple's become "unjustly enriched at the expense of Plaintiff and Class members" because her iPhone 3G doesn't get a good reception. She says where she lives supposedly gets good AT&T coverage and that her iPhone doesn't work as well as Apple said it would in its commercials. It's a common complaint. Check out the video comparing the speed of an iPhone in an Apple commercial versus real life embedded below . But we have to ask: instead of filing an expensive lawsuit, why doesn't the plaintiff just junk her iPhone and buy a Palm Centro or a Nokia N90? That seems easier and, you know, vastly less annoying to the rest of us.

Last September, Gremach bought a large stake in several Mozambique coal mines and a blogger going by the name "Toxic Writer" soon began attacking the company. In February, Gremach sued the blogger. An Indian court sided in Gremach's favor on Feburary 26, ordering Google to remove the defamatory article and ID the blogger. So far Google hasn't complied, which is why it's now the defendant.

In the past, Google's jumped at the chance to ID users who break local laws. In February 2007, Google turned over to News Corp. YouTube users who had uploaded copyrighted shows. Last fall, Google helped Indian police jail a man — the wrong man, turns out — for posting an insulting picture of an Indian historical figure.

The users want Facebook and its partners to delete all stored information, the return of any "ill-gotten gains" — of which we understand there to be none — and for the court to "award restitution." If the plaintiffs win the case it'll at least be interesting to see how much our justice system values a good Christmas surprise in monetary terms. Meanwhile, the technology behind Facebook Beacon is back, but now its called Facebook Connect and now its entirely opt-in.

The news is hardly bad news for the Winklevoss brothers and ConnectU's third cofounder, Divya Narendra. Court papers say the three will get "millions" of dollars in cash as well as stock in a startup too popular with mainstream America's millennial generation to fail. (The Winklevosses were fighting the settlement after they discovered that the Facebook common stock they would receive was worth less than they supposed.) Plus, there's still that shot at gold.

In the video above from last year, attorneys from law firm Cohen & Grigsby detailed how the firm suggests a minimum of job opening ads are placed in markets where it's unlikely a qualified applicant will apply, so few are received. The firm also provides the company with a checklist which the employer can use to quickly process — and reject — any applications it may receive so that the company can permanently certify the foreign national. If a citizen passes that test, there are further tricks to making sure something arises from the interview process that disqualifies them. Disqualifying Americans also works in the favor of companies overall, since it allows them numbers to cite when complaining about the need to raise immigration quotas and expedite the process.

Fragomen is citing the First Amendment and due process in arguing that it should be allowed to offer counsel to employers. Meanwhile, up to 3,000 applications are on hold pending the investigation.

He's a leading Dallas attorney who even sued the firm he cofounded, Baron & Budd, and is a regular on blog Overlawyered. More interesting is that Amanda Congdon intervened in order to protect her claim on part of the company. Meanwhile, the younger Baron complains all this legal wrangling tied his dealmaking hands, and that the company nearly went broke twice this year.

The Rocketboom episode neatly explains why the world of online video so resembles film school, a parent-funded enterprise of self-indulgent auteurs with macroambitions viewed by microaudiences (including yours truly). Sony's deal doesn't affirm the potential of online video as a means of creative expression; it simply tells us that the rich, despite themselves, can't help getting richer. (Photos by Eric Skiff and Alex de Carvalho)

The suit was filed in Rome civil courts, and will certainly test the Italian implementation of the European Union Copyright Directive — a law similar to the DMCA in the U.S., but considered a little more friendly to copyright holders. It can't help YouTube that the case will be argued in a country where Berlusconi was just reelected to another term as prime minister after being acquitted last year of corruption charges stemming from allegations of bribing judges. (Photo by AP/Andrew Medichini)

Over 200 big corporate customers like the American Red Cross and Southern California Edison are now without an alternative to Oracle's legendarily steep support fees. At the same time, SAP announced a new fee structure that fixes support costs at 22 percent of the original purchase price, compared to TomorrowNow who simply charged half of whatever Oracle did. Oracle in turn announced a 15-20 percent increase in support fees for U.S. customers. Hey, everybody wins!

If you're not familiar with IT at the big-corporation scale, enterprise software support fees are huge extra payments tacked on to any major software purchase for a large company — paying 22 percent of the original license, annually, isn't unusual. These fees in theory cover the cost of application support, patches and upgrades. Here's what's happening with Oracle: Big corporations trying to deal with a stalled economy are held in a stranglehold by application providers like Oracle, who can charge a lot for ongoing support because it's still cheaper than changing applications for 3,500+ users.

A newer option for enterprise customers is SaaS — software as a service. Instead of being installed on the customer's computes, the app is maintained on a Web server owned by the vendor. SaaS supposedly lowers the customer's infrastructure cost — no servers to own or maintain — and makes it easier for them to switch brands if they're not happy. But switching apps isn't free or easy if you're the electric company. Who's going to pay for TomorrowNow's shutdown? Probably you.

Nonsense. How typically self-important of Internet users, to think that Viacom cares about the dozens of South Park videos they watched. Viacom is not being disingenuous in saying it never meant to violate Internet users' privacy, I've come to believe.

So why are they seeking the data? The case revolves around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives Internet service providers a "safe harbor" for hosting copyrighted content. But that protection rests on the notion that the people who operate a website don't really know what's on it.

If Viacom can show YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, or other top officials, viewed copyrighted content while logged into the site, wouldn't that weaken YouTube's rights under the DMCA? Even worse, what if Hurley or Chen uploaded copyrighted clips themselves?

Tellingly, in reaching a deal to protect YouTube users' privacy, Viacom and Google excluded data about YouTube and Google employees' use of the site.

Google's best defense might be to go negative, airing reports about Viacom executives' use of the site. That might not give YouTube any more legal protection — but it would make its legal foes squirm. Viacom's Ifilm subsidiary, for one, has been caught hosting copyrighted content without permission.

There's one thing that might save Chad and Steve: They've never seemed that interested in online video. The pair, both former PayPal employees, stumbled onto the idea, and conceived of YouTube first as a site to host shopping videos for eBay listings, then as a video-dating site. They've always been more interested in cynically exploiting online video as a business than exploring the potential of the medium. An announcement of Google's sale to YouTube is one of the few times the two actually made an appearance on it.

So there's the irony: The less Chad and Steve used YouTube, the more likely they'll come out of this lawsuit unscathed. But Viacom's legal strategy suggests that every video they viewed will count against them.

Accessing PsyStar's website has become problematic, though it's not clear if it's due to court inunction or just the amount of public interest the company has generated. You have to give PsyStar credit for their moxie, though — running Windows, Linux or OS X on the same, relatively inexpensive and modifiable box as demonstrated in a promotional clip from PsyStar is the stuff übergeek dreams are made of.

Viacom wanted to carve out the records of YouTube employees' video views to show that they knowingly viewed copyrighted content — and in some cases, uploaded it. But Google could easily use its records to show Viacom employees doing exactly the same thing. It would hardly be a shocker: Viacom's Ifilm site is rife with pirated videos, but the site's traffic is too insignificant for copyright holders to get fussed.

Showing Viacom's double standards is an obvious move. What Google's lawyers are probably too naive to contemplate: Scouring YouTube's video logs for truly embarrassing videos viewed by Viacom employees, and leaking them to gossip blogs. That would be a dreadful invasion of privacy, of course — exactly what Viacom was asking for, before it finally backed down.

Is this a license to freak out? Walters says no:

The ultimate purpose for this analysis was to demonstrate that “community” for the McCowen prosecution was quite a bit more receptive to, and accepting of, sexual subjects than the prosecution either suspected or wanted to ever admit.

Should the Google Trends obscenity defense get its day in court, it's not likely anyone will be taking the stand, defending their sexual interests after being presented with a Google Doc breaking down their search history. What the frequency of search terms could reveal is that one's neighbors are searching for the same things, no matter what they tell their spouse. Just looking up how to hire an escort, for example, doesn't mean one's going to do it. But prosecutors may not be able to claim that a sex act disgusts a community when computer logs show no one can stop Googling it.

Everyone agrees that an individual's sexual curiosities should never stand trial. Overwrought privacy fears, however, shouldn't stop us from using anonymized search data to define community standards accurately and scientifically. A judge can no longer declare that he knows indecency when he sees it. Thanks to Google, we now have real data on the subject. Not using it seems obscene.