In late November, Twitter started contributing its DMCA takedown letters to Chilling Effects, the online clearinghouse jointly organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and many universities and law schools.

Chilling Effects says it received records of 11,500 total takedown notices in 2010, as of Dec. 15. Major contributors include Google, Yahoo and Digg.

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick flagged the Twitter takedowns, noting that many of them are for tweets that contain links to copyrighted material. Why go to Twitter and not the content host itself? he asks.

Chilling Effects founder Wendy Seltzer said she believes Twitter has been getting the takedown notices for a while but only recently started submitting them for public posting.

Using Twitter to get out the word about content may well be a growing phenomenon. In August, BitTorrent released a tool for more easily tweeting about torrent files. A friend of mine who’s an avid Green Bay Packers fan recently told me about a Twitter account he follows to find streams of football games he doesn’t have access to on TV.

“It’s interesting that they are receiving takedowns, given that most of what they’re hosting is little 140-character bursts of expression,” Seltzer said on a phone call yesterday. “Copyright holders are pushing the complaint out further, not going after the user who hosted, or even the user who pointed, but going after Twitter because it’s made itself a central location for the collection of information.”

Seltzer said that under the U.S. Supreme Court Grokster ruling, it’s possible that users could end up on the wrong side of the law for inducing infringement by posting a link with the intent to encourage their Twitter followers to access or download infringing material. But as long as Twitter complies with takedown requests, it should be within the safe harbor rules of the DMCA, which protect providers of information tools, said Seltzer. “Twitter doesn’t have an intent to infringe, so they would have a solid argument.”

A spokesperson for Twitter declined to comment, citing mellowness in the office over the holidays.

The firm’s clients include several prominent Internet companies, including Yahoo, social gaming giant Zynga, Myspace (a unit of News Corp., parent of this Web site) and Cablevision.

Granick gained a reputation as a lawyer willing to defend accused computer hackers. Her clients have included the hacker-turned-journalist Kevin Poulsen. I wrote this profile of her for Forbes.com in 2000, describing her as the person you might call if your day begins with an FBI raid.

About the same time, she gave a heavily attended talk on “Hacking and the Law” at the DEF CON 8 hacker conference in Las Vegas. She went on to become executive director at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society. She also taught at Stanford.

I caught up with her yesterday, and she said part of her role will be to help establish ZwillGen’s office in San Francisco. The firm has been adding legal talent at a rapid clip. In June it added three lawyers: Elizabeth Banker, a former associate general counsel at Yahoo; Bart Huff, a former assistant United States attorney in Chicago with a history of prosecuting computer crime; and Leota Bates, a former associate at Perkins Coie in Washington, D.C. Granick is the firm’s eighth attorney.

Will she still have time to take calls from hackers staring down FBI agents? “I think I’ll still be able to do that,” she said. “They wanted me because of my experience and because of who I’ve represented.”

No confirmation from Google (GOOG) yet. But assuming this is a done deal, it’s a big one in the intellectual property world: Von Lohmann has been a prominent advocate for tech companies in legal fights and is best known for backing the likes of YouTube, LimeWire and Grokster in their battles with copyright owners.

There was this from the Progress & Freedom Foundation: “By giving users powerful new tools to further protect their privacy, Facebook has employed a potent weapon to deal with marketplace apprehensions: self-regulation.”

This from Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York: “Facebook has heard the call of its users and realizes that much greater privacy protections are needed. This is a significant first step that Facebook deserves credit for.”

This from the ACLU: “After months of privacy-failing moves, Facebook is finally friending privacy again….While it’s true that users have more control than they did yesterday, there are still important steps that must be taken.”

And, finally, this from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The changes are pretty good, though more is needed.”

Consensus, then, seems to be that the privacy settings Facebook introduced today are an improvement over the old. That said, it’s important to remember that the old were sorely lacking, that the new were introduced under duress and that they DON’T do one thing that critics have been clamoring for: Make the highest privacy settings the default.

Which is really pretty weak, when you think about it, as Jeffrey Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy notes:

Facebook made some positive changes today, but only because of political pressure from policymakers and privacy advocates on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. Zuckerberg’s failure to acknowledge the political realities don’t bode well for Facebook’s future approach to privacy: he appears to be living a Alice in Digital Wonderland fantasy, where he only makes changes on privacy because he has the goodwill of its users in mind. Just last December 9, after all, Facebook made one of its typical self-reverential announcements that it was “rolling out easy-to-use tools to empower people to personalize control over their information.” These changes triggered a user revolt, letters from Senators, an opinion ordering a reversal from the EU, and concern from the FTC.

Latest data point: No matter what you do to stay anonymous, there’s a good chance your Web browser is betraying your identity, by leaving a unique fingerprint every time you visit a site.

A study conducted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that 84 percent of browsers leave a unique marker, via different combinations of settings and configurations. That percentage moves up to 94 percent if your browser uses plug-ins for Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash and Oracle’s (ORCL) Java.

What to do about it? There’s not a lot an individual user can do, the EFF says. But it says these kinds of broswers tend to be less identifiable than others:

• Those with JavaScript disabled (possibly using a tool like NoScript)
• Those that use TorButton, which successfully anticipated and defended against many fingerprinting measurements
• Mobile devices like Google’s (GOOG) Android and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone (the study was conducted in January and February, before the iPad hit the market)
• Corporate desktop machines that are precise clones of one another

So if you’re the kind of person who only browses the Web via your smartphone, perhaps you’ll be okay. Otherwise, “the best solution for web users may be to insist that new privacy protections be built into the browsers themselves,” the EFF suggests.

Or, failing that, accept that absolute privacy–the kind where no one has any ability whatsoever to track your actions–may be unattainable on the Web. The real solution may not be a technical one, but a social one, whereby we come to a rough agreement about what we’re okay sharing and what we really, really need to keep to ourselves. That could take a while.

The tech-advocacy group highlights a handful of cases it calls “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse,” usually involving businesses or organizations that cry foul–or issue takedown notices–even when their copyrighted materials are used in accordance with fair-use laws.

Among the honorees are National Public Radio, which tried to get an All Things Considered segment removed from YouTube because it appeared in an anti-same-sex-marriage ad. Others include NBC, for yanking an Obama campaign video that used archival footage of Tom Brokaw, and the National Organization for Marriage, which pulled YouTube footage of Rachel Maddow criticizing the audition tapes of one of its ads opposing gay marriage.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

According to the FTC, the roundtables will address topics such as social networking, cloud computing, online advertising and mobile marketing, the goal being “to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation.”

Behavioral advertising, in particular, has come under fire by privacy groups. Earlier this month, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union and other related organizations called for stronger rules limiting what kinds of personal information are collected by marketers and how long they can hold on them.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The coalition, which included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, singled out behavioral advertising, in which Internet users are tracked, analyzed and served ads based on the information gleaned from their movements, in its recommendations. Doing something about the practice has become more urgent as consumers go online for increasingly sensitive transactions, members of the group said on a call with reporters.

“We want consumers to be able to take advantage of all of the new technologies without the technologies taking advantage of the consumers. Right now, that balance is not there,” Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The country’s parliament passed Section 92a of the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act in 2008, also known as the “three-strikes” rule, which would have come into play in February 2009. If an Internet user was even accused of file-sharing or otherwise violating copyright laws, his or her Internet-service provider would cut off service.

The implementation of the amendment was pushed back to March 27 so that ISPs could agree on a code of conduct, but the rallying cry from Internet free-speech organizations such as the Creative Freedom Foundation pushed the Parliament to rethink its strategy.

How could a democratic government consider cutting off Internet access for people who haven’t been convicted of a copyright violation? Danny O’Brien, the international outreach coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that New Zealand changed its copyright law to be in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the U.S., but then chose to interpret the language differently than the U.S.

Read the rest of this post

We hold these truths to be self evident:

That as long as Apple’s iPhone is locked, there will be those who wish it open. And that as long as this is the case, iPhones will be jailbroken and outfitted with third-party applications not vetted by Apple. And this will remain so regardless of whether or not Apple manages to convince the U.S. Copyright Office that jailbreaking an iPhone is copyright infringement and a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So all this jawing over Apple’s legal stance on iPhone jailbreaking is ultimately for naught.

So the Electronic Frontier Foundation can argue that jailbreaking is protected under fair-use doctrines. And it can urge the Copyright Office to add a jailbreaking exemption to the DMCA on the grounds that “the culture of tinkering (or hacking, if you prefer) is an important part of our innovation economy.” And Apple (AAPL) can insist that such an exemption is “an attack on Apple’s particular business choices with respect to the design of the iPhone mobile computing platform and the strategy for delivering applications software for the iPhone through the iPhone App Store.”

And they can go round and round and round. But their sparring and bloviating will ultimately be meaningless. Because if Apple’s history with iPhone jailbreaks (see stories below) has taught us anything, it’s that they’re essentially unstoppable.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple HQ on Defcon 1 Tantrum Alert After iPhone 2.0 Crack
• iBrokeIt
• Latest Use for $100 iPhone Credit: Replace Inoperable iPhone

We hold these truths to be self evident:

That as long as Apple’s iPhone is locked, there will be those who wish it open. And that as long as this is the case, iPhones will be jailbroken and outfitted with third-party applications not vetted by Apple. And this will remain so regardless of whether or not Apple manages to convince the U.S. Copyright Office that jailbreaking an iPhone is copyright infringement and a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So all this jawing over Apple’s legal stance on iPhone jailbreaking is ultimately for naught.

So the Electronic Frontier Foundation can argue that jailbreaking is protected under fair-use doctrines. And it can urge the Copyright Office to add a jailbreaking exemption to the DMCA on the grounds that “the culture of tinkering (or hacking, if you prefer) is an important part of our innovation economy.” And Apple (AAPL) can insist that such an exemption is “an attack on Apple’s particular business choices with respect to the design of the iPhone mobile computing platform and the strategy for delivering applications software for the iPhone through the iPhone App Store.”

And they can go round and round and round. But their sparring and bloviating will ultimately be meaningless. Because if Apple’s history with iPhone jailbreaks (see stories below) has taught us anything, it’s that they’re essentially unstoppable.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple HQ on Defcon 1 Tantrum Alert After iPhone 2.0 Crack
• iBrokeIt
• Latest Use for $100 iPhone Credit: Replace Inoperable iPhone

Uri Geller, the purported spoon-bending paranormalist, apparently did neither when in May of 2007 he sent a DMCA take-down notice to YouTube demanding that it remove a clip debunking his “supernatural” abilities. And boy, did he ever pay for it.

You see, Geller didn’t own the video. And that made his DMCA take-down notice unlawful, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out when it filed suit against him for misrepresentation of copyright claims. “We’ve seen a rash of people abusing the DMCA lately, attempting to take down legitimate criticism and commentary online,” EFF staff attorney Jason Schultz said at the time. “To allow thin-skinned public figures like Uri Geller to abuse this system forces critics to remain silent and creates unfair hurdles for free speech to thrive online.”

Well, the hurdle to which Schultz was referring was knocked down today when Geller settled the EFF suit. Under the terms of the settlement, Geller will license the disputed footage, all eight seconds of it, under a noncommercial Creative Commons license. A monetary settlement was also reached, but the terms are not public–unless you too are a paranormalist and can divine them.

And as for the “those-who-would-sacrifice-liberty-for-security- deserve-neither” crowd? Well, perhaps they can find some solace in this comment from Senator Christopher S. Bond, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: “There’s nothing to fear in this bill, unless you have Al Qaeda on your speed dial.”

All depends on who you ask, I guess, because the Electronic Frontier Foundation says there’s actually quite a bit to fear no matter who you have on speed dial.

“It is an immeasurable tragedy that just after its return from the Fourth of July holiday, the Senate has chosen to pass a bill that betrays the spirit of 1776 by radically expanding the president’s spying powers and granting immunity to the companies that colluded in his illegal surveillance program,” said Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “This so-called compromise bill represents a shameful capitulation to the overreaching demands of an imperial president. As Senator Leahy put it in yesterday’s debate, the retroactive immunity provision of the bill upends the scales of justice and makes Congress and the courts handmaidens to the White House’s coverup of its illegal surveillance program.”

And as for the “those-who-would-sacrifice-liberty-for-security- deserve-neither” crowd? Well, perhaps they can find some solace in this comment from Senator Christopher S. Bond, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: “There’s nothing to fear in this bill, unless you have Al Qaeda on your speed dial.”

All depends on who you ask, I guess, because the Electronic Frontier Foundation says there’s actually quite a bit to fear no matter who you have on speed dial.

“It is an immeasurable tragedy that just after its return from the Fourth of July holiday, the Senate has chosen to pass a bill that betrays the spirit of 1776 by radically expanding the president’s spying powers and granting immunity to the companies that colluded in his illegal surveillance program,” said Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “This so-called compromise bill represents a shameful capitulation to the overreaching demands of an imperial president. As Senator Leahy put it in yesterday’s debate, the retroactive immunity provision of the bill upends the scales of justice and makes Congress and the courts handmaidens to the White House’s coverup of its illegal surveillance program.”

The federal judge presiding over Viacom’s (VIA) $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google (GOOG) and YouTube denied a motion for the pair to produce their source code Wednesday. “YouTube and Google should not be made to place this vital asset in hazard merely to allay speculation,” U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton wrote.

Apparently he didn’t feel quite as strongly about the privacy of YouTube users because he felt entirely comfortable turning that over to the media company. And so he ordered Google to provide Viacom with YouTube’s Logging database, which contains:

…for each instance a video is watched, the unique “login ID” of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to the internet use to identify the user’s computer (“IP address”), and the identifier for the video. That database (which is stored on live computer hard drives) is the only existing record of how often each video has been viewed during various time periods.”

To Stanton such data isn’t a “vital asset,” although the authors of the Video Privacy Protection Act and anyone else with an interest in personal privacy would likely disagree. Said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “The Court’s erroneous ruling is a setback to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube. We urge Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users.”

And Google will almost certainly do that. But it may have its work cut out for it, because in this case it’s fighting not just Viacom and the presiding court, but itself. You see, in granting Viacom’s request for YouTube’s Logging database, Stanton cited Google’s own argument that IP addresses aren’t always personal data. “Defendants argue that the data should not be disclosed because of the users’ privacy concerns, saying that ‘Plaintiffs would likely be able to determine the viewing and video uploading habits of YouTube’s users based on the user’s login ID and the user’s IP address,’ ” Stanton wrote. “But defendants cite no authority barring them from disclosing such information in civil discovery proceedings, and their privacy concerns are speculative. Defendants do not refute that the ‘login ID is an anonymous pseudonym that users create for themselves when they sign up with YouTube,’ which without more ‘cannot identify specific individuals,’ and Google has elsewhere stated:

We … are strong supporters of the idea that data protection laws should apply to any data that could identify you. The reality is though that in most cases, an IP address without additional information cannot.”

–Google Software Engineer Alma Whitten, Are IP addresses personal?, GOOGLE PUBLIC POLICY BLOG (Feb. 22, 2008)

Ironic, no?

The concept is simple: The music industry forms a collecting society, which then offers file-sharing music fans the opportunity to ‘get legit’ in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month. So long as they pay, the fans are free to keep doing what they are going to do anyway–share the music they love using whatever software they like on whatever computer platform they prefer–without fear of lawsuits. The money collected gets divided among rights-holders based on the popularity of their music. In exchange, file-sharing music fans will be free to download whatever they like, using whatever software works best for them. The more people share, the more money goes to rights-holders. The more competition in applications, the more rapid the innovation and improvement. The more freedom to fans to publish what they care about, the deeper the catalog.”

–Excerpt from “A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, April, 2004

Turns out that the Electronic Frontier Foundation was simply ahead of its time when it suggested that the recording industry adopt a voluntary collective-licensing model for music. Because the record labels are finally warming to the idea.

During tomorrow’s South by Southwest “Mobility, Ubiquity and Monetizing Music” panel, Jim Griffin, managing director of OneHouse–a digital entertainment consultancy that works with three of the four major labels–will argue the case for a file-sharing surcharge.

Like the “File-sharing Monetization” proposal recently pitched by the Songwriters Association of Canada and the EFF plan that the industry dismissed back in 2004, Griffin’s proposal would have Internet Service Providers add a flat-rate fee to their monthly charges to underwrite the cost of unlimited music downloads. The resulting funds would be divvied up among songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels.

“It’s monetizing the anarchy,” says Peter Jenner, head of the International Music Manager’s Forum, who will join Griffin on the panel. “The labels are beginning to like the idea of an access-to-music charge, because they’re increasingly aware that their current model is broken.”

The concept is simple: The music industry forms a collecting society, which then offers file-sharing music fans the opportunity to ‘get legit’ in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month. So long as they pay, the fans are free to keep doing what they are going to do anyway–share the music they love using whatever software they like on whatever computer platform they prefer–without fear of lawsuits. The money collected gets divided among rights-holders based on the popularity of their music. In exchange, file-sharing music fans will be free to download whatever they like, using whatever software works best for them. The more people share, the more money goes to rights-holders. The more competition in applications, the more rapid the innovation and improvement. The more freedom to fans to publish what they care about, the deeper the catalog.”

–Excerpt from “A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, April, 2004

Turns out that the Electronic Frontier Foundation was simply ahead of its time when it suggested that the recording industry adopt a voluntary collective-licensing model for music. Because the record labels are finally warming to the idea.

During tomorrow’s South by Southwest “Mobility, Ubiquity and Monetizing Music” panel, Jim Griffin, managing director of OneHouse–a digital entertainment consultancy that works with three of the four major labels–will argue the case for a file-sharing surcharge.

Like the “File-sharing Monetization” proposal recently pitched by the Songwriters Association of Canada and the EFF plan that the industry dismissed back in 2004, Griffin’s proposal would have Internet Service Providers add a flat-rate fee to their monthly charges to underwrite the cost of unlimited music downloads. The resulting funds would be divvied up among songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels.

“It’s monetizing the anarchy,” says Peter Jenner, head of the International Music Manager’s Forum, who will join Griffin on the panel. “The labels are beginning to like the idea of an access-to-music charge, because they’re increasingly aware that their current model is broken.”

The music video parody by the San Francisco singing group has wowed the Web.

I posted about the removal here.

Shields defends the use of all material in the very funny video, noting it is a satire and they are not making any money it, pointing to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s explanation of fair use rules in place:

A Wide Berth for Transformative, Creative Uses: Copyright owners are within their rights to pursue nontransformative verbatim copying of their copyrighted materials online. However, where copyrighted materials are employed for purposes of comment, criticism, reporting, parody, satire, or scholarship, or as the raw material for other kinds of creative and transformative works, the resulting work will likely fall within the bounds of fair use.”

Here’s an interview with Shields that BoomTown did today (and posted on YouTube!):

Anyway, together with NBC and Disney, AT&T has invested a combined $10 million in Vobile, a company whose VideoDNA is rumored to be the gold standard of video content recognition systems and is considering deploying it at the network level.

The mechanics of the initiative haven’t all been sorted out, but sources tell BusinessWeek that one scenario involves traffic on AT&T’s network being routed through racks of Vobile servers that would scan it for NBC Universal and Disney content. And perhaps child pornography as well, you know, just to make the idea of network-level monitoring a bit more palatable to the masses.

Such a strategy, if AT&T were to pursue it, would make the company the first major Internet carrier to implement a network solution to copyright enforcement. And it would beg a number of questions: Will AT&T police the Internet traffic of its customers alone? Or will it police traffic over all its backbones and peering points (IE: traffic from other ISPs)? The answers could be troubling.

Suffice to say privacy advocates who’ve been railing against AT&T over the NSA debacle and issues of Net neutrality aren’t exactly thrilled with the company’s latest move. “They better be very careful,” warned Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “This is serious, serious stuff, to basically invade the privacy of all of your subscribers.”