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Business 2.0 Magazine: MySpace purge draws sharp reactions

From Business 2.0 Magazine:
  • SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0) - When Friendster started deleting profiles it deemed risque or otherwise objectionable, users bolted for the exits, helping to boost rival social networks like MySpace. Could MySpace be making the same mistake? Author Nicholas Carr characterized a recent move to close 200,000 accounts as a "purge." Ross Levinsohn, head of MySpace parent News Corp.'s (Research) Internet division, said the move was motivated by concerns for teen safety. That's certainly credible given the spate or recent incidents in which adults have been arrested for soliciting sex from minors met on the site. But mainstream marketers' concerns about questionable content may just go just as far in explaining its recent reform campaign. And with 250,000 new accounts opened daily, the closures hardly seem large enough to slow MySpace's momentum.

Will this impact on MySpace? Should MySpace be censoring accounts?

Australian Code on Spam

Last week the ACMA registered a code of practice for internet service providers and email service providers on countering spam. Read the press release and the Code.

Do you think this Code will help reduce spam? Why? Why not?

Back to blogging

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last week. But I'm back and I promise to keep blogging until I take another week off from blogging over Easter.

IIA Questions ALP Policy Position on Internet Content

For Immediate Release

Tuesday, March 21 2006

The Internet Industry Association has questioned the rationale for the
fundamental change to Australia's internet content regulatory scheme
proposed by the ALP today.

"We are not convinced that Australian families will benefit from
fundamentally changing a scheme which is internationally recognised as
the most advanced of its kind in the world", said IIA chief executive
Peter Coroneos.

Mr Coroneos added: "Under the government-backed Internet Content Code
scheme which applies in Australia, ISPs are already required to provide
their customers with access to a filter or filtered feed. Furthermore,
these filters must pass rigorous independent testing to ensure they not
only catch the kind of content referred to the in the Opposition's
proposal, but also thousands of other sites which are likely to cause
offence to adults and potential disturbance to children. On top of all
this, the scheme prohibits ISPs from profiting from the provision of
these filters - they must be offered on a cost recovery basis, and some
ISPs even offer them for free."

Under Australia's Broadcasting Services Act, industry Codes of Practice
are developed and enforced. The Codes apply to all ISPs in Australia who
are required to adhere to the scheme, and substantial penalties exist
for non-compliance. These penalties are enforceable in the Federal Court.

Mr Coroneos added: "It is important to recognise that the UK 'Cleanfeed'
scheme (upon which the Labor proposals are modelled) was a
market-drivien initiative which arose because the UK lacked the strong
legislative protection available to Australians. We can't understand why
we'd adopt measures that will impose significant extra costs on users,
degrade network performance and deliver no real upside for Australian
families beyond that currently available."

"For families and those concerned with child safety the message is
simple," Mr Coroneos concluded. "Follow the advice given by your ISP and
take advantage of the tools and services they provide to shield your
children from unsuitable sites."

Ends

More information about the IIA Codes and family friendly filters is
available at www.iia.net.au/guideuser.html. For details of Australia's
co-regulatory scheme see www.acma.gov.au. For general information about
protecting children online, see www.netalert.net.au.


For further information please contact:
Peter Coroneos
Chief Executive
Internet Industry Association
www.iia.net.au
phone (02) 6232 6900

Tales from the Public Domain: Bound By Law?

Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University School of Law, which focuses on the delicate balance between intellectual property and the public domain - the realm of material that is free to use without permission or payment - has published a comic book that provides a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture. You can check out the comic book here.

Michael Geist: Keepmusiccoming.com Goes From Bad To Worse

From Michael Geist's blog:
  • "I recently blogged about CRIA's failure to renew keepmusiccoming.com, which it used as part of its 'educational' campaign to convince users to stop downloading. A blog reader has noted that the situation has gone from bad to worse as the site is now owned by a Russian download service offering up thousands of MP3 files it says are legal for nine cents each. Bear in mind, there are thousands of CDs sitting in Canadian stores today encouraging people to visit keepmusiccoming.com."

Google's GDrive

Google revealed last week that it had inadvertently disclosed its closely guarded financial projections and also let slip information about a personal, digital storage service that is in the work, known as GDrive. GDrive would be an online storage service that would give users an alternative to storing data on their personal computer hard drives. Such a service could allow users to get access to their files wherever they are, whether from a laptop, cell phone or personal digital assistant.

Read more here.

Government censorship in Australia?

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Friday that a spoof John Howard website that featured a soul searching "apology" speech for the Iraq war has been shut down under orders from the Australian Government. Read the article here and view a copy of the "speech" here.

Is this censorship? Should the Australian government be allowed to ask Melbourne IT to shut down the site?

EFF: Proposed New Jersey Laws Would Chill Free Speech

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is objecting to a proposed New Jersey law that would require internet service providers to record users' identities and reveal them in any claim of defamation. The EFF believes that this would remove anonymous speech from the internet, thereby chilling free speech protected by the First Amendment.

Read EFF's open letter to three New Jersey congressmen.

US trys to stop internet gambling

Last week a United States House committee approved a bill aimed at stamping out the $12 billion internet gambling industry by stopping businesses from accepting credit cards and other forms of payment. Read the article from the Washington Post (free subscription required).

What dangers are posed by internet gambling? Should internet gambling be banned? How can we regulate internet gambling?

More censorship in China

On Friday a Chinese court jailed a teacher for 10 years on Friday for publishing anti-government views on the internet. Read CNN's report here.

dot.XXX legislation proposed in the US

Two US senators have proposed legislation that would establish a new ".XXX" domain for racy or sexually explicit websites. The bill proposed by senators Mark Pryor and Max Baucus, both Democrats, calls upon the US Department of Commerce to exclude sexually charged content from established website domain names such as .gov, .com, .org, .net, and .edu.

Read more here.

China defends internet censorship

On several occasions this blog has discussed content regulation of the internet in China. Last week, the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, offered a defense of China's internet censorship. Read more here.

ICANN to test non-English domain names

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has outlined a plan for testing domain names entirely in non-English characters, bringing closer to reality a change highly sought by Asian and Arabic Internet users.

Read more here.

France to open up iTunes

France is pushing through a law that would force Apple Computer Inc to open its iTunes online music store and enable consumers to download songs onto devices other than the computer maker's popular iPod player. Under the proposed law it would no longer be illegal to crack digital rights management if it is to enable to the conversion from one format to another.

Read more here.

What might the implications of this proposed law? Should other nations consider implementing a similar law? Why? Why not?

More criticism of AOL's attempt to create a two tiered email service

In previous weeks, this blog has linked to stories on the introduction of a two-tiered system of email. Now Californian state Senator Dean Florez, a Democrat, has criticized AOL's attempt to create a "two-tiered world of e-mail service."

"It seems to me that AOL is setting a horrible precedent here," he said. "The whole ideal of Net neutrality gets wiped away, and we are left with an Internet of haves and have-nots."

Read more here.

ID theft in South Korea

The Korean government will strengthen its measures to prevent crimes related to the stealing of personal
information, amid increasing concerns over privacy theft on the Internet. The Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs has proclaimed a new law, under which one could serve up to three years in prison or face a maximum 10 million won fine for unauthorized use of personal information.

Read more here.

Creative Common license upheld

The first known court decision involving a Creative Commons license was handed down on March 9, 2006 by the District Court of Amsterdam. The case confirmed that the conditions of a Creative Commons license automatically apply to the content licensed under it.

Read more at the Creative Commons blog.

Google wins a court battle

Today a US District Court judge ruled that Google did not violate copyright law when it automatically archived a posting on Usenet by Gordon Roy Parker and by providing excerpts from Parker's website in its search results.

Read a summary of the case here. The judgment is also available to read.

Microsoft to help parents monitor their children

Microsoft has announced plans to include a free service to help parents control and monitor what their children are doing online in its upcoming Windows Live offering of Web services.

Read more here.

Do you think this will be an effective way to regulate content on the internet?

For LWB141 Legal Institutions and Method students

For a copy of the PowerPoint slides used Peter Black's week 3 tutorial, click here.

Australian IT: Cybersnooping laws differ in Australia

According to Australian IT, the law relating to cybersnooping are are different in different Australian states and there seems to be little prospect of a uniform "cybersnooping" rule appearing any time soon. Read the article here.

Microsoft joins the fight against spam

Microsoft has joined the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, the organization announced Tuesday. The move brings the software giant's Outlook, Exchange Server and MSN Hotmail products and services into the effort, which is dedicated to combating spam, phishing, viruses and other security threats distributed via e-mail.

Read more here.

Do you think the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group will be effective in reducing spam?

Abu Ghraib photos online

The online news magazine Salon.com has published what it says is the complete archive of the Army's photographic evidence in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse investigations. The archive included a photo depicting a naked Iraqi detainee with bleeding wounds allegedly from an attack by U.S. military dogs.

Most of the photos had been published before. Salon.com said it was the first news organization to publish the full file of photos collected by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, which previously released some in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Read more here. To see the pictures, click here.

Should these images be available on the internet? What policy considerations underpin your opinion on this issue?

Online international paedophile pornography ring

27 people who were part of an international paedophile pornography ring that streamed live molestations of children over the internet have been charged with possession, receipt, distribution and manufacture of child pornography.

Authorities have identified seven child victims, including an infant whose molestation in April by a suburban Chicago man was transmitted live via an internet chat room to a co-conspirator who used the screen name "BigtDaddy619".

Four of those charged allegedly molested the children, making the resulting images available in the chat room called "Kiddypics & Kiddyvids," that facilitated trading of thousands of images and videos, the statement said.

Read the full story here. See one of the indictments here.

ISP held not liable for passively posting defamatory content

A UK court has ruled that an internet service provider (ISP) cannot be held liable for passively posting defamatory content. The court ruled that "an ISP which performs no more than a passive role in facilitating postings on the internet cannot be deemed to be a publisher at common law." The court did acknowledge that
"if a person knowingly permits another to communicate information which is defamatory, when there would be an opportunity to prevent the publication, there would seem to be no reason in principle why liability should not accrue."

The case is Bunt v. Tilley [2006] EWHC 407 (QB) (10 March 2006).

Google to put whole books online

From SiliconValley.com:
  • Google is expanding its role in the publishing world from a search engine for books to a distributor making entire books available to read online.
    The company launched a new program Friday that allows traditional book publishers in the United States and Britain to sell and set the price for access to full copies of their books, Google spokeswoman Megan Lamb said Monday. Consumers who purchase the access cannot save copies of the books or individual pages to their computers and can view them only through a Web browser.
    "We are collaborating with publishers -- in response to demand from them -- to develop a suite of online tools that will enable publishers to experiment with new and innovative ways to generate more book revenue,'' Lamb said in an e-mail.
    The new program is open only to U.S. and U.K. publishers at this point.
    Several points remained unclear: whether Google would get a cut of the price paid for access to a book; whether customers who purchase access to books see advertising while they read the books; and whether independent authors will also one day sell full access to their books through the service.

Read the full article here.

US Family Entertainment and Copyright Act

A pair of apparent Ryan Adams fans violated the new US Family Entertainment and Copyright Act when they made portions of the singer's latest album available on a website frequented by his fans. The indictments are believed to be the first under the pre-release provision of the 2005 FECA law. Read more here.

Reinventing the internet

The Economist wonders what the internet would look like if a clean slate redesign was implemented. Read more here and listen to an audio interview with Tom Standage, Technology Editor of The Economist here:
  • The internet has been a hotbed of innovation because it’s "dumb". The designers didn’t presuppose how the internet would be used and that has made it extremely flexible. But what we are running into now are scaling and security problems, and some people are asking: if we were building the internet from scratch, what would be the ideal clean-slate design?

Do you think the internet should be redesigned from scratch? What do you think the internet would look like? Do you think that such a redesign could ever realistically happen?

Legal to search a computer for child pornography

The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that police may search computer hard drives for child pornography if their owners subscribe to websites selling the images. The panel found that there was a "fair probability" customers of child pornography Web sites receive or download the illegal images, opening the door for police searches.

The opening two paragraphs of the opinion summarise the issue:
  • The term "Lolita" conjures up images ranging from the literary depiction of the adolescent seduced by her stepfather in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel to erotic displays of young girls and child pornography. This case requires us to consider probable cause to search a computer for child pornography in the
    context of an Internet website, known as "Lolitagurls.com," that admittedly displayed child pornography.
    Micah Gourde appeals from the district court’s denial of his motion to suppress more than 100 images of child pornography seized from his home computer. Gourde claims that the affidavit in support of the search lacked sufficient indicia of probable cause because it contained no evidence that Gourde actually downloaded or possessed child pornography. We disagree. Based on the totality of the circumstances, the magistrate judge who issued the warrant made a "practical, common-sense decision" that there was a "fair probability" that child pornography would be found on Gourde’s computer. Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 238 (1983). The Fourth Amendment requires no more.

The full opinion is available here. A news story reporting on the ruling is available here.

How should damages be assessed for privacy and cybersecurity breaches

Listen to this podcast where I discuss how damages should be assessed in privacy and cybersecurity lawsuits. The Lawyers Weekly Show host J...