You might be thinking: A thermostat’s a thermostat … right?

In Honeywell’s view, it’s not so simple. In the complaint, filed in a U.S. district court in Minnesota, the maker of aerospace systems, consumer products and technology solutions identified seven patents it believes Nest Labs infringes on.

Honeywell is also seeking damages from Best Buy, which features and sells Nest’s product in home-energy departments around the U.S. (Best Buy also sells Honeywell programmable thermostats.)

Nest Labs was recently launched by Matt Rogers and Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who worked on the iPod. Last fall, Nest Labs began selling the Nest Learning Thermostat, a buzzed-about, easily programmable “smart” thermostat that uses the same wheel interface as the original iPod. The device can be controlled from a user’s smartphone, tablet or Web browser, and Fadell has been quoted as saying the Nest will save users up to 30 percent off their utility bills. With Nest, the uncool thermostat suddenly became a hot item.

Nest Labs did not respond to requests for comments on the suit, except to release a statement yesterday, saying they had not yet reviewed the actual filing, and that the company will provide comment once they’ve had the opportunity to review it.

Speaking for Honeywell, Bruce Eric Anderson, the company’s director of external communications, expounded on Honeywell’s statement from yesterday, saying that intellectual property is a “part of what Honeywell is as a company. We have 20,000 engineers that come here every day and it’s about protecting those individuals. This suit is not unique,” Anderson added.

Rather than go through the filing patent by patent, here are a few of the key sticking points of the suit:

First, Honeywell points out that it commercialized the first adjustable thermostat that allowed users to sleep through the night without having to manually turn their furnaces on and off; and that it is a global leader of innovative thermostats, and created the iconic “round” thermostat that’s now featured in the Smithsonian museum collection.

Honeywell goes on to mention more recent innovations, including its Prestige 2.0 Comfort Systems and RedLINK Wireless Comfort Sytems. More on the Prestige in a bit.

In the section titled “Acts Giving Rise to the Action,” the Honeywell filing points to various features of the Nest thermostat that have been promoted by Nest Labs and Best Buy as “innovative,” including the ability to connect the device to the Internet, store private data and control the Nest remotely through a Wi-Fi connection. Honeywell also takes issue with Fadell and Rogers having said that there hasn’t been any real innovation in decades in the thermostat space, though the sources of this quote and others are unclear.

Honeywell alleges that Nest Labs does not appear to have originated the design or functionality of the Nest thermostat — and says the key functional features at the core of the device are the results of years of research and development that culminated in patents owned by Honeywell.

For example, Honeywell’s complaint says, the fact that the Nest thermometer came with a patented “question system” — “What are the lowest and highest temperatures you’d like when you are away?” — is not new. Honeywell’s Prestige thermostat, introduced in late 2008, also incorporates an “interview-based interface.”

Honeywell also says that controlling a thermostat remotely through the Internet is not a Nest Labs innovation.

Interestingly, General Electric also offers consumers — as part of a home-energy management system — the ability to remotely control a GE “smart” thermostat from a smartphone or home computer. “Connect seamlessly to your programmable thermostat to remotely adjust your home climate,” says GE’s Web page for this feature.

When I asked Anderson whether Honeywell had ever examined GE’s system, he simply said, “I don’t know. I’m not familiar with that product.”

In the filing, Honeywell also references this AllThingsD video from last November as showing evidence that Nest Labs was examining “numerous” Honeywell thermostats in its research, indicating that Nest — which it calls a “well-funded, sophisticated company” — was well aware of Honeywell’s contributions to the thermostat industry.

So, Honeywell says, it has suffered and will suffer monetary damages and irreparable harm as a result of Nest Labs’s infringements, as well as from Best Buy’s infringements by using, offering to sell and/or selling the Nest device.

Since we don’t have a more detailed response from Nest Labs yet, it’s hard to know how this will play out. It’s also unclear whether Honeywell contacted Nest Labs prior to filing the formal suit.

Ed Weisz, a senior intellectual property lawyer at the firm of Cozen O’Connor (which is not involved in the Honeywell suit), says that most cases like this one result in a settlement. However, if it is determined that there has been a patent infringement, Weisz says, Honeywell could seek an injunction — which the courts may be more likely to grant, because there’s actually a product already out on the market.

Weisz also said that, while Best Buy is enjoined in the suit, he doesn’t think the retailer will be on the hook for additional damages, as their sale of goods — even ones that might infringe on IP — will be covered by the Uniform Commercial Code.

“It’s way too premature to have any read on the merits of this,” Weisz said.

What we do know is that in Silicon Valley — and in Honeywell’s case, outside of the Valley, too — tech-patent lawsuits are hardly uncommon, especially in the smartphone and tablet market.

We’ll keep you posted as this story evolves.

Some initial reactions to the proposal, which was pre-announced at the DLD conference in Munich and then published on Wednesday, were harshly critical.

Writer Jeff Jarvis was armed and ready to rebut European Commissioner Viviane Reding’s opening address on “the right to be forgotten” at DLD, having criticized her data protection stance in his new book “Public Parts.”

“I very much fear Reding’s ‘right to be forgotten’ and its impact [on] free speech and the right to know,” Jarvis wrote.

A European Microsoft executive was also quick with the skepticism. “We have been pushing for harmonisation of privacy laws for several years, but we are concerned that these proposals may be too prescriptive,” Ron Zink, who is Microsoft Europe’s chief operating officer and associate general counsel, told the Financial Times.

Analysts and industry groups called Reding’s ideas “draconian,” “prescriptive,” “onerous” and expensive.

But now that Reding has formally proposed her legislation, Web companies seemed more measured in their response. Though they didn’t endorse the bill, they seemed willing to work with it. Of course, they’d prefer to avoid walking into fines of up to two percent of their revenue.

In statements emailed to AllThingsD, Google asked for a “simple” solution, while Facebook continued to talk up its positive impact on European jobs.

Said Google: “We support simplifying privacy rules in Europe to both protect consumers online and stimulate economic growth. It is possible to have simple rules that do both. We look forward to debating the proposals over the coming months.”

A Google executive at a conference in Brussels further questioned how, exactly, third-party sites could be responsible for deleting all instances of data online after it had been posted.

Here’s Facebook’s extended statement:

The revision of Europe’s Data Protection framework is an important opportunity to develop regulation that both protects privacy and supports the creation and growth of modern services over the global Internet. We welcome the move towards more harmonization of Data Protection laws in the EU which will help create legal certainty and confidence for companies to operate.

We agree with the recent statements made by Commissioner Reding that the new regulation should foster growth and job creation. Services like Facebook already contribute significantly to economic activity in the EU and can be a major driver of growth and new jobs in the future.

We will continue to work closely with politicians and regulators in the EU in order to share our experience and expertise and contribute to achieving sound privacy regulation and a thriving digital sector.

Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik, whose company offers what could be seen as “the right to be forgotten” as a paid service to customers, said he didn’t necessarily support Reding’s proposal but he disapproved of industry hysteria around regulation of the Internet.

“I think that light regulation is often a stimulant to innovation,” Fertik said.

“Right now the absence of law supports the incumbents of the Internet, which are advertising businesses,” he added. “But what’s bad for Facebook today may be good for a thousand companies tomorrow. The biggest promise of the right to be forgotten is it’s going to enhance the trust of the Internet, which could be a boon to e-commerce.”

As for some other major Web companies in the business of identity and user-generated content, Twitter declined to comment on EU data protection policy, while Tumblr — which had been especially active in fighting SOPA — did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers on Thursday expressed concerns about Google’s new unified privacy policy.

Viacom and Google, who have been tangling over copyright violations at YouTube since 2007, will be at it again today at a federal courthouse in New York. The two sides will start oral arguments for Viacom’s appeal of the case, which Google won decisively in a 2010 ruling.

In the past, both sides have tried digging up evidence to discredit each others’ arguments, and while both came up with plenty of embarrassing stuff, they couldn’t find a smoking gun.

So now we’re back to the basic question of the case: How much protection does the Digital Millennium Copyright Act offer YouTube, or any other site that lets users upload and distribute content they don’t own?

That question has come up to the courts in at least three different suits in recent years: Viacom versus Google, Universal Music Group versus Veoh, and EMI versus MP3Tunes. And in all three cases, federal judges have offered up the same response: The DMCA gives Web sites enormous latitude. As long as the site serves a legitimate function, it can’t be held responsible if users upload stuff they don’t own. If copyright owners find something that shouldn’t be there, and they ask the site to take the offending piece down, the site has to comply. But that’s about it.

So far, that’s very encouraging news for all manner of digerati. And in theory, it’s quite threatening to media companies and other people who create, finance and distribute intellectual property for a living.

But things might not be quite so dire for the media guys. While you can read the recent court rulings as an invitation for a free-for-all, it looks a little different in the real world.

YouTube, for instance, has spent a lot of time and money creating systems to filter content on its site, which hoovers up more than 24 hours of stuff every minute. And it works hand in hand with most big media companies to help them keep stuff they don’t want off the site — and to help them distribute other stuff they do want there.

Included in that list of companies playing very nicely with YouTube — Viacom’s sister company, CBS. And once this suit finally gets settled — which could still take years — my hunch is Viacom will want to work closely with the world’s biggest video site, too.

[Image credit: Sweetheart/Shutterstock]

The bill requires that online retailers charge sales taxes on purchases even where their “presence” is not physical but through affiliates. Amazon had warned participants yesterday that it would have to turn off the program later this year if the bill was signed, and Gov. Jerry Brown made it official later in the day.

There’s some question as to whether the law will be challenged in court on the grounds that it violates federal law, because it is broader than similar laws that have led to Amazon cutting affiliate programs in Connecticut, Arkansas and other states. In states where it has a physical presence, such as its Washington home base, Amazon does charge sales taxes.

In a statement, Paul Misener, Amazon VP of Global Public Policy, said, “This legislation is counterproductive and will not cause our retail business to collect sales tax for the state.”

I’d say it’s astonishing no one has done it before, but it’s not: The music business has a long tradition of resisting good ideas. So how did the Turntable.fm guys finally get the industry on board?

They haven’t. The start-up doesn’t have deals in place with any labels or publishers.

[Record-scratch sound here.]

This doesn’t mean that Turntable.fm is illegal. The company believes it’s obeying the law, and it might be right. But this thing has gotten so buzzy, so fast, that it’s going to be hard for the label lawyers to stay away.

Here’s how Turntable got started, how it works, and why it might be able to stick around. But if you haven’t already, go play with it now, just in case.

The backstory:

Turntable started as Stickybits, which did something hard to explain involving barcodes and geotagging, and seemed more like an art project than a business. Last year it raised nearly $2 million.

This spring, CEO Billy Chasen abandoned that idea and used his remaining money to build Turntable. This one is easy to describe.

Here goes: You and up to four other people take turns streaming just about any song you want for anyone who wants to listen, for free, in one of the site’s “rooms.” A deal with MediaNet, a digital content provider, gives Turntable access to millions of songs, and if the song you want to play isn’t there, you can upload your own MP3 to the site and play that. There’s a chat feature so you can compare notes, and you can “follow” your pals.

That’s about it. There’s a “gamification” element where you can collect points and rewards for playing music people like, but that’s definitely secondary. The real thrill is sharing music, and discovering music.

The law:

So how can any of that be legal without label deals? In short, Chasen believes he’s able to run the service under the protection of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) — the same law that lets Pandora operate without label deals — as a “non-interactive” Web radio service.

That description will seem odd to most people who’ve used Turntable. Because the service doesn’t seem like radio at all, and it is most definitely interactive.

You pick the songs you want to play, and the order you want to play them. And if you’re really into it, you’ll change that on the fly, based on the song the person before you just played.

But if you spend enough time mucking around with Turntable, you’ll start to run into small constraints here and there. You can’t play music in a room by yourself, for instance. And there’s a limit on the number of times you can play a song by a single artist per hour. And you can’t see the next song another user has cued up.

None of these limits seem like real limits, because they don’t detract from the service’s core appeal. But these are all rules that “DMCA-compliant” Webcasters work under, and they’re evidence that Chasen is trying to do the same thing. If it works, he’ll simply pay music owners a flat fee for each song he streams every month, just like Pandora does.

The precedent:

In addition to Pandora, Chasen has another model to work with here: 8tracks, a three-year-old service that also lets you play any music you want, and listen to other people’s music, for free, using a DMCA license. The main difference is that instead of playing the songs live, you create “mixtapes,” which other users play back on their own time.

8tracks never got the same kind of buzz that Turntable is getting, but it has diligently built up a fan base, and now draws more than two million users a month. Just as important, it’s been able to stay out of legal trouble. I think it’s a pretty great story.

There’s a technical difference between 8tracks and Turntable, too: 8tracks relies on songs its users own and upload, while it seems like most people on Turntable are using the tracks Chasen and Medianet provide. That distinction seems like a small one, but some music biz folks I’ve talked to have pointed to that as a red flag.*

The problems:

The risk for Turntable is the same one every music start-up without label deals faces: Not that a court will find them guilty of something, but that they’ll have to spend a lot of time and money on lawyers.

And while it seems blindingly obvious that Turntable.fm is a great thing for the music business — it lets music fans tell other music fans about music they like, the best possible advertising — I wouldn’t put it past a label or two to gripe about the service. Particularly if it makes the leap from the digerati into the mainstream.

(It’s important to note here that there are lots of traditional music business folks who are resentful of Pandora’s success, even though the company pays out more than half its revenue to copyright owners.)

If Turntable does sidestep legal challenges, it will have to make money one day, too. This is also an issue, since no one’s actually proved that free, ad-supported Web music can be profitable.

But I’m much less worried about this one. If it gets to that point, the Turntable guys should at least be able to tell advertisers that their ads will be much more effective, since Turntable users spend a whole lot of time looking at their screens.

Does any of this matter?

I’m an unlikely candidate to get swept up in the buzz around a hot Web site.

I’m reflexively cautious about that kind of behavior, and it’s easy to point to buzzy start-ups that shot up, then cratered (Myspace), or never got above the buzz stage to begin with (Chatroulette). And even if Turntable does stick around, it’s possible that it’s just a feature and not a business.

But this one feel pretty special. We’ve had plenty of music sites, and plenty of social sites, but none that mixed them well together. I hope they make it work.

——————————

*Don’t want to bog this down in legalese, but note that Google and Amazon’s music locker service, which doesn’t have the labels’ blessing, relies on music its users provide. But Apple got the labels’ blessing to provide a “scan and match” service, where a single master track could be used by multiple listeners. I wouldn’t be shocked to hear a music label lawyer tell Turntable its model is closer to Apple’s, and requires a separate deal.

Microsoft’s legal eagle Brad Smith didn’t even bother to pretend the software giant’s filing of a formal antitrust complaint against Google with the European Commission wasn’t a wee bit ironic.

Wrote Smith in a blog post late last night:

“There of course will be some who will point out the irony in today’s filing. Having spent more than a decade wearing the shoe on the other foot with the European Commission, the filing of a formal antitrust complaint is not something we take lightly. This is the first time Microsoft Corporation has ever taken this step.”

But take it the company did, noting: “Microsoft is filing a formal complaint with the European Commission as part of the Commission’s ongoing investigation into whether Google has violated European competition law.”

Google, no surprise, disagreed, via a statement from a spokesman.

“We’re not surprised that Microsoft has done this, since one of their subsidiaries was one of the original complainants. For our part, we continue to discuss the case with the European Commission and we’re happy to explain to anyone how our business works.”

Here is the whole Microsoft post, in which Smith outlines Microsoft reasons for its action:

Adding our Voice to Concerns about Search in Europe

30 Mar 2011 9:00 PM

Posted by Brad Smith

Senior Vice President & General Counsel, Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft is filing a formal complaint with the European Commission as part of the Commission’s ongoing investigation into whether Google has violated European competition law. We thought it important to be transparent and provide some information on what we’re doing and why.

At the outset, we should be among the first to compliment Google for its genuine innovations, of which there have been many over the past decade. As the only viable search competitor to Google in the U.S. and much of Europe, we respect their engineering prowess and competitive drive. Google has done much to advance its laudable mission to “organize the world’s information,” but we’re concerned by a broadening pattern of conduct aimed at stopping anyone else from creating a competitive alternative.

We’ve therefore decided to join a large and growing number of companies registering their concerns about the European search market. By the European Commission’s own reckoning, Google has about 95 percent of the search market in Europe. This contrasts with the United States, where Microsoft serves about a quarter of Americans’ search needs either directly through Bing or through our partnership with Yahoo!.

At Microsoft we’ve shown that we’re prepared to work hard and invest literally billions of dollars annually to offer Bing, a search service that many now regard as the most innovative available. But, hard work and innovation need a fair and competitive marketplace in which to thrive, and twice the Department of Justice has intervened to thwart Google’s unlawful conduct from impeding fair competition. In 2008 the DOJ moved to file suit against Google for its unlawful attempt to tie up and set search advertising prices at Yahoo!, causing Google to back down. And last year the DOJ formally objected to Google’s efforts to monopolize book content, a position affirmed by a federal district court in New York just last week. Unfortunately, even this has not stopped the spread by Google of new and disconcerting practices in the United States.

As troubling as the situation is in United States, it is worse in Europe. That is why our filing today focuses on a pattern of actions that Google has taken to entrench its dominance in the markets for online search and search advertising to the detriment of European consumers.

How does it do this? Google has built its business on indexing and displaying snippets of other organizations’ Web content. It understands as well as anyone that search engines depend upon the openness of the Web in order to function properly, and it’s quick to complain when others undermine this. Unfortunately, Google has engaged in a broadening pattern of walling off access to content and data that competitors need to provide search results to consumers and to attract advertisers.

On PCs it is usually not difficult for people to navigate to any search engine. Google in fact makes this point virtually every time someone raises antitrust concerns about their practices. Their defense ignores the hugely important fact that there are many other important ways that search services compete. Search engines compete to index the Web as fully as possible so they can generate good search results, they compete to gain advertisers (the source of revenue in this business), and they compete to gain distribution of their search boxes through Web sites. Consumers will not benefit from clicking to alternative sites unless all search engines have a fair opportunity to compete in each of these areas.

Our filing details many instances where Google is impeding competition in these areas. A half-dozen examples below help illustrate some of our concerns.

First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube–and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.

Second, in 2010 and again more recently, Google blocked Microsoft’s new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube. Google has enabled its own Android phones to access YouTube so that users can search for video categories, find favorites, see ratings, and so forth in the rich user interfaces offered by those phones. It’s done the same thing for the iPhones offered by Apple, which doesn’t offer a competing search service.

Unfortunately, Google has refused to allow Microsoft’s new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do. As a result, Microsoft’s YouTube “app” on Windows Phones is basically just a browser displaying YouTube’s mobile Web site, without the rich functionality offered on competing phones. Microsoft is ready to release a high quality YouTube app for Windows Phone. We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to provide.

Third, Google is seeking to block access to content owned by book publishers. This was underscored in federal court in New York last week, in the decision involving Google’s effort to obtain exclusive and unfettered access to the large volume of so-called “orphan books–books for which no copyright holder can readily be found. Under Google’s plan only its search engine would be able to return search results from these books. As the federal court said in rejecting this plan, “Google’s ability to deny competitors the ability to search orphan books would further entrench Google’s market power in the online search market.” This is an important initial step under U.S. law, but it needs to be reinforced by similar positions in Europe and the rest of the world.

Fourth, Google is even restricting its customers’–namely, advertisers’–access to their own data. Advertisers input large amounts of data into Google’s ad servers in the course of managing their advertising campaigns. This data belongs to the advertisers: it reflects their decisions about their own business. But Google contractually prohibits advertisers from using their data in an interoperable way with other search advertising platforms, such as Microsoft’s adCenter.

This makes it much more costly for Google’s advertisers to run portions of their campaigns with any competitor, and thus less likely that they will do so. That is a significant problem because most advertisers figure that they have to advertise first with Google. If it’s too expensive to port their advertising campaign data to competing advertising platforms, many won’t do it. Competing search engines are left with less relevant ads, and less revenue. And while this restraint isn’t visible to consumers, its effects are nonetheless felt across the Web. Advertising revenue is the economic propellant fueling the billions of dollars needed for ongoing search investments. By reducing competitors’ ability to attract advertising revenue, this restriction strikes at the heart of a competitive market.

Fifth, this undermining of competition is reflected in concerns that go beyond Google’s control over content. One of the ways that search engines attract users is through distribution of search boxes through Web sites. Unfortunately, Google contractually blocks leading Web sites in Europe from distributing competing search boxes. It is obviously difficult for competing search engines to gain users when nearly every search box is powered by Google. Google’s exclusivity terms have even blocked Microsoft from distributing its Windows Live services, such as email and online document storage, through European telecommunications companies because these services are monetized through Bing search boxes.

Finally, we share the concerns expressed by many others that Google discriminates against would-be competitors by making it more costly for them to attain prominent placement for their advertisements. Microsoft has provided the Commission with a considerable body of expert analysis concerning how search engine algorithms work and the competitive significance of promoting or demoting various advertisements.

Over the past year, a growing number of advertisers, publishers, and consumers have expressed to us their concerns about the search market in Europe. They’ve urged us to share our knowledge of the search market with competition officials. As they’ve pointed out, the stakes are high for the European economy. On any given day, more than half of all Europeans use the Internet, and more than 90 percent of them look for information about goods and services on the Web. Indeed, the European Commission’s Digital Agenda made clear that commerce is moving online, where two-thirds of Europeans begin their shopping process. It’s therefore critical that search engines and online advertising move forward in an open, fair and competitive manner.

There of course will be some who will point out the irony in today’s filing. Having spent more than a decade wearing the shoe on the other foot with the European Commission, the filing of a formal antitrust complaint is not something we take lightly. This is the first time Microsoft Corporation has ever taken this step. More so than most, we recognize the importance of ensuring that competition laws remain balanced and that technology innovation moves forward.

We readily appreciate that Google should continue to have the freedom to innovate. But it shouldn’t be permitted to pursue practices that restrict others from innovating and offering competitive alternatives. That’s what it’s doing now. And that’s what we hope European officials will assess and ultimately decide to stop.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Twitter has been ordered by a U.S. federal judge to turn over documents related to several people involved with WikiLeaks to the Justice Department.

Tonight, a Twitter spokeswoman responded to a request for comment on the situation:

“We’re not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so. We outline this policy in our law enforcement guidelines.”

In an onstage interview I did with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo at a D@CES event last night in Las Vegas, he referenced the issue, but would not give any specifics.

While he said he could not talk about WikiLeaks specifically, he indicated that he disliked government mandates to keep things quiet and reiterated Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information.

“We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can,” said Costolo, who also used Twitter crackdowns in China as an example.

It might be a Herculean task to fight the federal government, which is aggressively going after WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Some Web companies, such as eBay’s PayPal unit, have cut off WikiLeaks.

On the other hand, Twitter took legal action to unseal the court order, which allowed it to inform those involved, giving them 10 days to object. Otherwise, the San Francisco microblogging service would have had to turn over information without the knowledge of these users.

There will surely be more of these to other Web companies, with obvious candidates being Google and Facebook.

The order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is ordering Twitter to fork over subscriber names, user names, screen names, mailing addresses, residential addresses and more of several people involved with WikiLeaks.

But you can read for yourself–here is the court order, as well as the unsealing order:

twitter1

twitter2

For all those in a tizzy–including BoomTown–about Facebook’s deal with Goldman Sachs, which some think is designed to circumvent securities rules related to shareholder numbers and financial disclosure, meet Section 12(g)(1) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Because if anyone cared to read the actual text of the law in question (as I did, after it was pointed out to me), even if it was determined that Facebook had 500 shareholders at this very moment, it is technically not required to disclose any of its financial details until May of 2012.

As in next spring, which is exactly when its execs have told many sources it will finally have its much anticipated IPO. Thus, look Facebook to finally go public in the second quarter of 2012.

As far as government literature goes, 12(g)(1) is pretty clear, noting that any company of Facebook’s size, after it reaches 500 shareholders, must make financial and other disclosures “within one hundred and twenty days after the last day of its…fiscal year.”

For Facebook, its current fiscal year ends December 31, 2011, making its disclosure deadline April 29, 2012.

As the New York Times noted today:

“Section 12 (g) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 came about in the 1960s as over-the-counter trading in shares of privately held companies began to heat up and regulators worried that investors were not getting enough information.”

The huge amount of time Facebook has to adhere to the private company disclosure law has not been noted in copious coverage of the deal, in which Goldman Sachs clients would be able to invest up to $1.5 billion in the Silicon Valley company, as part of a single entity “special purpose vehicle.”

But it brings into focus–given its long lead time–whether Facebook would go to such lengths to keep its shareholder size small at this point.

Nonetheless, from a perceptual viewpoint, the Goldman investment has brought unneeded scrutiny to Facebook, from both the public and also government regulators.

It has also painted the company–which has an everyman, mainstream image, in general–as elitist and consorting with rich Wall Street bankers.

In any case, with the Goldman deal, a lot of financial information about Facebook is now seeping out anyway, as part of the investment bank’s offering documents to the clients it is presenting the Facebook opportunity to.

As The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday:

“According to people familiar with the document, Facebook had net income of $200 million in 2009 on revenue of $777 million. Figures for 2010 weren’t disclosed, but analysts have said the company’s revenue last year could be as much as $2 billion, fueled by advertising growth.”

Whether that smallish net income and revenue deserves a $50 billion valuation or not will be up to investors to decide. But, as the Journal also pointed out, the Facebook offering is oversubscribed already, even without any significant information about the company’s finances.

Which Facebook can keep from us all for a while–although I urge CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google-style, to FREE THE DATA!

And if you don’t believe me, please enjoy the 12(g)(1) below:

Every issuer which is engaged in interstate commerce, or in a business affecting interstate commerce, or whose securities are traded by use of the mails or any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce shall—(a) within one hundred and twenty days after the last day of its first fiscal year ended after July 1, 1964, on which the issuer has total assets exceeding $10,000,000 and a class of equity security (other than an exempted security) held of record by seven hundred and fifty or more persons; and (b) within one hundred and twenty days after the last day of its first fiscal year ended after two years from July 1, 1964, on which the issuer has total assets exceeding $10,000,000 and a class of equity security (other than an exempted security) held of record by five hundred or more but less than seven hundred and fifty persons, register such security by filing with the Commission a registration statement (and such copies thereof as the Commission may require) with respect to such security containing such information and documents as the Commission may specify comparable to that which is required in an application to register a security pursuant to subsection (b) of this section. Each such registration statement shall become effective sixty days after filing with the Commission or within such shorter period as the Commission may direct. Until such registration statement becomes effective it shall not be deemed filed for the purposes of section 18. Any issuer may register any class of equity security not required to be registered by filing a registration statement pursuant to the provisions of this paragraph. The Commission is authorized to extend the date upon which any issuer or class of issuers is required to register a security pursuant to the provisions of this paragraph.

The release of funds follows a number of denial-of-service attacks earlier this week that were aimed at the document-leaking site’s providers. Most of the providers are now refusing to work with WikiLeaks after the U.S. government accused it of being in possession of documents that were provided in violation of U.S. law.

Yesterday, WikiLeak’s founder Julian Assange was arrested and denied bail in London. He’s accused of sexual misconduct in Sweden.

While PayPal is releasing the residual funds to WikiLeaks, it is not reinstating the ability for it to receive donations.

PayPal was caught up in a brief media storm this morning, after PayPal’s VP of Platform Osama Bedier gave the impression at LeWeb in Paris that PayPal had cut off access to WikiLeaks because of direct pressure by the U.S. government.

PayPal now wants to set the record straight, and says that it reviewed its policies regarding WikiLeaks after the U.S. Department of State publicized a letter stating that WikiLeaks may be in possession of documents that were provided in violation of U.S. law. The letter was published, and not sent to PayPal directly.

“PayPal was not contacted by any government organization in the U.S. or abroad. We restricted the account based on our Acceptable Use Policy review,” writes PayPal’s General Counsel John Muller. “Ultimately, our difficult decision was based on a belief that the WikiLeaks website was encouraging sources to release classified material, which is likely a violation of law by the source.”

Further, the company disclosed that twice before–in 2008 and 2009–PayPal reviewed and restricted the account associated with WikiLeaks “for reasons unrelated to our Acceptable Use Policy. As soon as proper information was received from the account holder, the restrictions were lifted.”

PayPal has been one of many providers that have been the victim of computer attacks, where servers were inundated with traffic. A spokesperson told us that it mostly affected the company’s blog site, and did not directly affect its payments services.

Other affected companies include MasterCard and Swiss bank PostFinance, The Wall Street Journal reports. No one is yet claiming responsibility for the attacks, but some say they are being organized by the ad hoc “Operation Payback.”

Google earlier this year said that the camera-equipped cars it uses to mark the location of wireless networks and take pictures for its Street View service had for years inadvertently collected data from publicly accessible wireless networks. Google initially said that no significant personal data was collected, but last month admitted that emails and passwords had also been copied.

On Wednesday, U.K. Information Commissioner Christopher Graham, the regulator in charge of data protection, issued a statement saying that, as a result of the “significant breach” of law, his office would audit Google’s data-protection practices in the U.K. and ask the Mountain View, Calif., company to sign an official commitment affirming that such breaches wouldn’t occur again. The U.K. regulator had earlier found that Google didn’t collect meaningful personal details.

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A 2005 California law bans those under 18 from buying or renting violent videogames that appeal to “a deviant or morbid interest in minors.” Lower courts struck down the law, under precedent authorizing government to restrict youth from only one type of material, obscene sexual content.

In seeking the law’s reinstatement, Zackery Morazzini, a deputy state attorney general, told the court: “California is no less concerned with a minor’s access to the deviant level of violence that is presented in a certain category of video games” than it is with sexually explicit material.

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They didn’t bother to obliterate the U.S. Supreme Court. But in the real world, that’s where the $10.5 billion videogame industry faces its greatest threat. On Tuesday, the court’s nine justices will consider whether to strip First Amendment protection from violent videogames that critics say appeal to the deviant interests of children.

A 2005 California law prohibits selling or renting such games to minors based on legislative findings that they stimulate “feelings of aggression,” reduce “activity in the frontal lobes of the brain” and promote “violent antisocial or aggressive behavior.” The law never took effect because lower courts found it violated free-expression rights.

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Another reputation smeared in the Hewlett-Packard/Oracle slag-fest. Turns out Joe Nocera (pictured here)–the New York Times (NYT) business columnist who penned that scathing piece on former SAP chief and incoming Hewlett-Packard (HP) CEO Léo Apotheker for his involvement in a lawsuit over intellectual property theft between SAP (SAP) and Oracle (ORCL)–has a conflict of interest.

Nocera’s fiancée, Dawn Schneider, is director of communications for Boies, Schiller & Flexner, the law firm that just so happens to represent Oracle in its very same suit against SAP.

Here’s the editor’s note the Times just appended to Nocera’s story.

In the Talking Business column in Business Day on Saturday, Joe Nocera wrote about a lawsuit by Oracle against a division of SAP, claiming theft of intellectual property. Mr. Nocera learned after the column was published  that Oracle was represented by the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, where his fiancée works as director of communications. To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, Mr. Nocera would not have written about the case if he had known of the law firm’s involvement.

Odd to learn that Nocera, the Times’ star business columnist, was unaware that his own fiancée was a flack for the law firm repping Oracle in the suit (see screenshot above, with Boies named as counsel) that provided so much of the subject matter for his column.

But it seems he was not, up to today, when he made a CNBC appearance on the subject.

It’s not clear when Nocera found out about his conflict of interest. His column on the Oracle-HP spat, however, has been the talk of Silicon Valley over the last several days, including a smack back at it by incoming HP Chairman Ray Lane in a letter to the Times’ editor.

Here’s a video of Nocera talking about his HP column on CNBC:

[Nocera photo credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times]