Still, today’s news is a decisive, clear-cut victory for the giant video site. So you can understand why YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley wanted to perform a little victory dance this evening, via Twitter:

If you’ve spent any time at all on YouTube–or on the Internet, for that matter–you can probably guess where that link brought you:

Equal time! Here’s a less ebullient response from Viacom (VIA), via chief lawyer Michael Fricklas:

We are disappointed with the judge’s ruling, but confident we will win on appeal.

Copyright protection is essential to the survival of creative industries. It is and should be illegal for companies to build their businesses with creative material they have stolen from others. Without this protection, investment in the development of art and entertainment would be discouraged, and the many artists and producers who devote their lives to creating it would be hurt. Copyright protection is also critical to the web–because consumers love professional content and because legitimate websites shouldn’t have to compete with pirates.

YouTube and Google demonstrated that required tools to limit piracy aren’t impossible to find or even that difficult to implement–they fixed the problem of rampant piracy on YouTube after Viacom filed this lawsuit.

Before that, however, YouTube and Google stole hundreds of thousands of video clips from artists and content creators, including Viacom, building a substantial business that was sold for billions of dollars. We believe that should not be allowed by law or common sense.

This case has always been about whether intentional theft of copyrighted works is permitted under existing law and we always knew that the critical underlying issue would need to be addressed by courts at the appellate levels. Today’s decision accelerates our opportunity to do so.

As a point release, it’s a nice little update, with a new password-protection feature that locks the device when it’s in sleep mode and social networking integration that allows for the sharing of book excerpts via Facebook and Twitter. But as an effort to make the Kindle more competitive with some newly arrived and formidable rivals, it falls a bit short.

[Image credit: Ars Technica]

With its admission last week that its Street View cars unwittingly captured data sent over unsecured wireless Wi-Fi networks, Google (GOOG) appears to have run afoul of regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.

Sources familiar with the matter tell the Financial Times that the Federal Trade Commission is considering an inquiry into the matter, and the panel of European privacy regulators that advises the European Commission is calling for a full investigation to determine exactly what information was collected and whether the manner of its collection was a violation of privacy law.

The Europeans seem particularly miffed over the cock-up and Google’s explanation for it, which they find a bit suspect. Over the weekend, Peter Schaar, Germany’s federal commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, fired off a caustic blog post questioning the credibility of the company’s claim that personal data were collected accidentally.

“So everything was a simple oversight, a software error!” Schaar wrote. “The data was collected and stored against the will of the project’s managers and other managers at Google. If we follow this logic further, this means: The software was installed and used without being properly tested beforehand. Billions of bits of data were mistakenly collected, without anyone in Google noticing it, including Google’s own internal data protection managers, who two weeks ago were defending to us the company’s internal data protection practices.”

Have to admit, he does have a point. How does a company with Google’s smarts and technological acumen collect and store Wi-Fi network payload data in more than 30 countries for three years without being aware of it?

Mistakes are made, I suppose. But the breadth of this one is pretty incredible. As Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Financial Times, “This may be one of the most massive surveillance incidents by a private corporation that has ever occurred. It is unprecedented vacuuming of WiFi data by a private company. Can you imagine what would happen if a German corporation was sending cars through Washington sucking up all this information?”

Yes, but to err is human…

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.

Little more than a month after the bungled launch of Buzz and the company has already accumulated quite a pile of complaints over breaches in consumer privacy that went along with it.

In February, the Electronic Privacy Information Center asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Buzz, claiming it violates federal consumer protection law.

A few weeks later, outgoing FTC commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour publicly decried Buzz’s rollout as “irresponsible” and accused Google of attempting to “stretch the privacy envelope.”

Now, a group of eleven U.S. lawmakers from the House Energy and Commerce Committee is calling upon the FTC to investigate Buzz as well.

“We are writing to express our concern over claims that Google’s ‘Google Buzz’ social networking tool breaches online consumer privacy and trust,” the group said in a letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. “Due to the high number of individuals whose online privacy is affected by tools like this–either directly or indirectly–we feel that these claims warrant the commission’s review of Google’s public disclosure of personal information of consumers through Google Buzz.”

The letter continues by suggesting the FTC ask the following four questions to Google:

1. How will Google revise the Gmail privacy policy, notify consumers, and obtain consent for this change in the company’s privacy practices?
2. Since Google Buzz was launched on Feb. 9, 2010, how many consumers are deactivated or opted out of the Google Buzz services?
3. To what extent does Google use the consumer information collected through Buzz and other Google services for the purposes of delivering online advertising?
4. If the Commission approves Google’s acquisition of AdMob, to what extent will the combined entity use the consumer information collected through other Google products and services for the purposes of delivering advertising?

The answers to these questions would, I’m sure, be quite telling. Not that Google (GOOG) is particularly interested in answering them. Why would the company when it seems so confident that it has already resolved the issues in question?

Said a Google spokesperson: “User choice and transparency are top of mind for us. When we realized that we had unintentionally made users unhappy, we worked quickly to make immediate changes.”

[Image credit: Asaf Hanuka, Tropical Toxic]

This sounds alarming, but you can think of it as an amicable divorce: Spark gets back all of its bubble-era investment and Eqal gets to keep going, with fresh money from new and existing investors.

Spark led a $5 million series A round in the company in April 2008. Eqal co-founder Miles Beckett wouldn’t tell me how much of the round Spark accounted for, but did say that the VCs were made whole in a transaction that closed at the beginning of this year.

So what happened? As far as I can tell, it’s a straightforward story: Eqal changed directions and Spark didn’t want to stay on board.

Eqal began life as a video-production house spawned by the surprise success of “lonelygirl,” the supercheap, superpopular Web series that crested on YouTube in 2006, just as that site was acquired by Google (GOOG). But by 2009, as the market for Web video ads was slow to develop, Eqal was shifting from developing its own Web video to helping other people make and distribute stuff.

If you want to paint that in a positive light, you can say that Eqal had become a Web video-platform company. A less attractive way to describe Eqal is as a Web video-services company. The difference is meaningful if you’re an investor because “platform” is a scalable business while a service company requires more money and effort and offers less lucrative returns.

Any way you slice it, Spark wanted out. “They wanted to zig and we wanted to zag,” Beckett says. He notes that current management and some original investors, including Ron Conway, helped finance the buyout; Eqal also rounded up new money from investors like Scott and Cyan Banister.

The deal is a much better outcome for Spark than Veoh, another Web video bet, was. That one collapsed in a bankruptcy-protection filing earlier this year. The firm still has money in two other Web video investments: Next New Networks and 5Min.

Meanwhile, I’m still looking for examples of companies that can say they’re doing a booming business by concentrating solely on making original Web video. Anyone?

Here’s a clip of “lonelygirl,” the series that put Eqal on the map. Below it is an example of the company’s new work, a promotional campaign for Kraft’s (KFT) Philadelphia Cream Cheese, starring food celebrity  Paula Deen.

The law, called the Free Flow of Information Act, is intended to prevent journalists from being forced to divulge confidential sources, except in cases such as witnessing crimes or acts of terrorism. The amendment, introduced by Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) last week, limits the definition of a journalist to one who “obtains the information sought while working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, an entity…”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

But after making an initial concession earlier this year, Google (GOOG) and the White House are going further. The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains: “Ordinarily, YouTube maintains a record of every YouTube video you’ve ever viewed, associated with your YouTube account, through use of the YouTube cookie. Now, they’ve agreed to exempt videos embedded on Whitehouse.gov from this logging.”

Will that be good enough to satisfy hard-to-please critics like the EFF? Amazingly, it does! Though of course, they’d like to see more. Here’s Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s legal director:

This is a good step and we commend YouTube and the Government for taking it. It shows that they recognize that tracking the government videos that Americans view is creepy and wrong. It also shows that Google/YouTube technologists can build and offer clever, useful privacy-protective modifications to their standard software.

Now we’d like to see them turn that cleverness to other places, not just the White House. Google/YouTube should offer this same “tracking-free” viewing to others. Human rights videos, politically sensitive videos, or even ordinary videos where viewers may want privacy should all be available without tracking…

In addition, the government should adopt “tracking-free” videos across the board for all government websites. Viewers of videos from the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, your member of Congress and other governmental entities deserve the same privacy protection that viewers of the President’s speeches.

The IRS has videos? Who knew? In the meantime, feel free to watch clips like this one, of Obama’s April victory over the UConn women’s basketball team in a game of “P-I-G” without worrying that the government is watching you watch.

“Lately Silicon Graphics Inc. has had the kind of upward momentum associated with the hit movies produced with its whizzy high-powered work stations, like ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ and ‘Jurassic Park.’ After the company outperformed Wall Street’s earnings estimates last week and the stock jumped 15 percent, analysts scrambled to upgrade ratings and future earnings forecasts.”

– Silicon Graphics’ Hot Run Goes On, New York Times, 1994

Time was, there was a Silicon Graphics (SGIC) workstation on every desk in computationally-intense industries like chemistry and film production. No longer. Cheap Linux boxes have rendered them obsolete and SGI, the company, along with them. This morning, SGI, which recently endured a brace of layoffs, filed for bankruptcy protection for a second time and sold itself to Rackable Systems, which makes server and storage products for midsize and large data centers, for $25 million in cash.

“We have been working very hard to strengthen our company, and today, we’ve taken another big step in that direction,” SGI CEO Robert Ewald said in a statement that would make even the most exuberant of SGI-optimists wince. “This transaction represents a compelling opportunity for Silicon Graphics’ customers, partners and employees, who can all benefit from the emerging stronger company with better technologies, products and markets [sic] reach.”

A sad ending for SGI, which really reinvented computer graphics and made quite a name for itself in the high-performance computing space back in the day.

Much of that debt belongs to big banks, of course–J.P. Morgan (JPM) has more than $1 billion by itself. But Tribune (TXA) owes lots (though much smaller amounts) of money to lots of media companies, too–mostly dollars that the company’s TV stations owe various studios.

Here’s who’s on the hook:

• Time Warner’s (TWX) Warner Bros. Television: $23.7 million
• News Corp.’s (NWS) Twentieth Television: $8.1 million
• Disney’s (DIS) Buena Vista Entertainment: $6.2 million
• GE’s (GE) NBCU Domestic TV: $4.9 million
• Sony’s (SNE) Sony Pictures Television: $2.2 million
• Nielsen Media Research: $1.9 million
• Viacom’s (VIA) Paramount Pictures: $1.69 million

Here’s the complete filing (click button on top right to enlarge):
Tribune’s Bankruptcy Filing

Too often, security programs significantly slow down the computer, causing lags in booting up the machine, launching programs and receiving email. Not only that, they can be incredibly annoying, popping up frequent messages or asking questions in techie lingo.

The main screen of the 2009 version of Norton Internet Security is streamlined and even includes a gauge to show much drain the security program is placing on the computer.

Now, Symantec (SYMC) has decided to radically rewrite its main security suite for Windows to directly address these problems. And in my tests, this new product, Norton Internet Security 2009, largely succeeded. It isn’t perfect, but it is the fastest, simplest and least obtrusive security suite I have ever used.

Being quick and quiet is great, but, of course, a security product also has to be effective against the vast number of viruses, spyware programs and other malicious attacks aimed at Windows. I don’t have a security lab in which to test such effectiveness. But PC Magazine does, and the magazine called the new Norton suite’s spyware and virus protection “extremely effective.” The magazine’s tests are described at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2330024,00.asp.

However, I wasn’t impressed with Norton’s optional antispam feature, which caused the only significant problem I ran into in my testing.

The new suite costs $70, and can be purchased at symantec.com and elsewhere. For that price, you get to install it on three PCs and you get a one-year subscription to its updates, which cost $60 thereafter.

Symantec is now including free support, even over the phone, though in my tests this support proved lousy. Norton Internet Security 2009 works only on Windows XP and Windows Vista.

I tested the new security suite on a Dell (DELL) desktop running Vista and on a Macintosh laptop running Windows XP as a “virtual machine,” meaning Windows and Windows programs ran simultaneously with the Mac operating system. Symantec assured me the program would run properly in this latter setup, and I had run the previous version of Norton successfully in the same environment.

The first thing you notice about NIS 2009 is the fast and simple installation. The process took under two minutes on each of my test machines.

File scanning is also much faster, partly because the new suite has a feature called Insight that allows it to skip the scanning and rescanning of many of your files. Insight gathers information about your installed programs and compares them against a list of programs Symantec knows are “trusted,” through either its own research or through scanning results voluntarily submitted by other users. These trusted programs are then exempted from future scans, saving a ton of time.

The new Norton suite has a feature called Insight which calculates how many of your programs it knows are trusted, and therefore needn’t be scanned repeatedly, saving time.

For instance, on my Dell running Vista, an immediate complete scan done before Insight analyzed the computer took more than an hour. But after Insight determined that over 70% of my programs were trusted, complete scans took 10 minutes or less. Of course, your data files, like Word documents and emails, still must be scanned, because they are typically unique.

To minimize the impact on users, the new Norton does scanning and other tasks only when it detects that the computer has been idle for at least 10 minutes. And new virus definitions trickle into your computer invisibly, in the background, rather than all at once in a major process.

Symantec is so certain that its product has a low impact on PC performance that it built a gauge into its new streamlined main screen that shows its drain on the main processor, or CPU.

NIS 2009 is also far less annoying than other suites I’ve used. In normal operation, it notifies you only when it has completed a background task or if there’s a threat or a repair that requires a user action, such as a reboot. And there’s an even quieter optional “silent mode” that can turn off nearly every nonurgent activity of Norton for up to six hours. Silent Mode is automatically activated during full-screen activities, such as playing games or watching movies.

The new suite has a bunch of other features, including a browser toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox that warns against fake and malicious Web pages, and that can securely enter your passwords and other information on Web sites. It also has an antispam feature for Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook and Outlook Express.

This antispam feature, which is off by default, was rated as weak by PC Magazine and, in my tests, it caused both Norton and Outlook Express to crash repeatedly in Windows XP running on my Mac. Symantec suspects this is a problem particular to running Windows the way I was on the Mac. After I reinstalled Norton and turned off the feature, all was well again.

But Symantec’s free tech-support service was not only unable to diagnose the problem, it didn’t even know the difference between Outlook and Outlook Express.

Despite this one glitch, I can recommend Norton Internet Security 2009 as a good way to protect your Windows computer with minimal impact on your time and attention.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.