Wikipedia enters to the U.S. top 10 site list

Posted by multippt

Of course, it is no doubt that the most widely used/recommended encyclopedia online would eventually get itself into the one of the top 10 most popular sites (so much so that it struggles with limited financial resources) in the United States (it was and is the one of the top 10 popular sites outside of the U.S.).

Of course, it is expected that Wikipedia would end up to be one of the most popular sites around, given that it is free to use Wikipedia, and its founders have a lot of wonderful sister projects that provide wonderful service for free.

In case if you are wondering, Wikipedia ranks 9th in the United States top 10 list, and 6th in the worldwide top 10 list.

Via Yahoo! News

Just An Online Minute… Judge Dismisses Case Against MySpace

Posted by signup

MySpace this week scored its first major victory in a civil lawsuit, when a federal judge in Texas tossed a case brought by the family of a teen, “Julie Doe,” who alleged she was sexually abused by someone she met on the site.

“If anyone had a duty to protect Julie Doe, it was her parents, not MySpace,” wrote judge Sam Sparks as he dismissed the case.

Sparks found that the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 immunizes MySpace from liability based on material posted by users. He also held that Texas law doesn’t oblige MySpace to protect users from crimes committed by other members.

“To impose a duty under these circumstances for MySpace to confirm or determine the age of each applicant, with liability resulting from negligence in performing or not performing duty, would of course stop MySpace’s business in its tracks and close this avenue of communication, which Congress in its wisdom has decided to protect.”

But that lawsuit is only the beginning for MySpace, which faces suits from at least five other angry families, not to mention the wrath of more than 30 state attorneys general, who are demanding the site change its policies.

Currently, MySpace won’t allow users younger than 14 to create profiles, and also has restrictions for users younger than 16. The attorneys general want MySpace to ban users under 16 from the site and also implement some sort of age verification procedures - even though, as a practical matter, it’s impossible to confirm someone’s age online.

Yes, if people have credit cards it might signal they’re over 18 - but it might also mean they’ve borrowed someone else’s credit card. Besides not everyone over 18 has a credit card; and users between the ages of 16 and 18 rarely do.

Additionally, while MySpace has obvious incentives to try to cooperate with the authorities — if nothing else, parent company News Corp. surely wants to avoid the bad publicity that would come from appearing indifferent to abuse of its members - it’s not at all clear that the attorneys general requests are constitutional. In fact, MySpace could easily argue that any proposed laws regulating the site would constitute an impermissible restriction on free speech. After all, even teens have First Amendment rights.

Digg blocked in schools across USA

Posted by multippt

Its amazing that even one of the world’s largest sites gets blocked across schools. Digg, is a special social portal where users get a chance to rate (or “digg”) other user’s news stories. Of course, while looking at the comments sections in some digg stories might display some unforeseen vulgarities, Digg remains as one of the most updated sites in the Internet (not to mention, a fantastic source of latest information).

Digg has been marked under the blacklist across schools using a widely used filtering system, known as the BESS filtering system. While, schools have the authority to unblock Digg, how many teachers in the world know about Digg (they probably knew about Wikipedia and Google alot more than Digg)?

Digg users are of course, unhappy about the “ban-nage”, since they think that it is unfair to ban digg. Since Digg is a social site, it might be possible that the company who created the filters may have associated it with other social sites. Of course, it is not like you see stuff that you are not supposed to seen anyway on Digg, it is deemed as unfair to ban Digg just because it is a social site.

Via Digg (of course!)

Google suffers setback in copyright case

Posted by signup

A Belgian court on Tuesday ordered the search giant to refrain from showing excerpts of articles from French- and German-language Belgian newspapers on Google News and Google’s Web search site for Belgium, reaffirming an earlier ruling by the same court against the search giant. However, in a nod to Google, the court reduced the daily fine Google faces if it fails to heed the order, from $1.3 million to $32,500.

This is the company’s second go-round with the case. Google lost in a ruling in September and the case was reheard. Late last year, Google settled with Belgian journalists and photographers, but not with the organization Copiepresse, which represents the newspaper publishers. The search giant has been complying with the order while the case was pending.

Google will appeal the ruling, a company spokesman said.

“Google is disappointed and we intend to appeal the ruling because we believe that Google.be and Google News are entirely legal and provide great value and critical information to Internet users. However, we are very pleased that the judge agreed Google should be given notice of articles and other material that content owners want removed. As we have in the past, we will honor all requests to remove such materials,” said Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes.

“It is important to remember that both Google Web Search and Google News only ever show a few snippets of text. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the Web publisher’s site where the information resides. We believe search engines are of real benefit to publishers because they drive valuable traffic to their Web sites,” Reyes added.

The ruling sends a strong message to Google, said copyright lawyers.

“Score one for the content providers with the Belgian ruling saying Google had gone too far,” said Lee Bromberg, a copyright and trademark attorney at the Boston firm of Bromberg & Sunstein. “Google has a very aggressive approach toward copyright law…The ruling should be a serious message to Google to rethink that approach.”

Specifically, the court rejected Google’s defense that storing of cached copies of the articles and use of excerpts was fair use of the material and thus not a violation of copyright. The court also did not agree with Google that newspapers should have the burden of opting out if they don’t want their articles included on Google.

Will other European countries follow?
“There is a good chance that other European countries will think that the ruling made sense,” Bromberg said. “The folks in Europe, at least my perception is that they are perhaps less enamored of whiz-bang technology than we are over here.”

Google is likely to fight hard to prevent the ruling from serving as a precedent for other countries to follow, said John P. Ward, an attorney in the Palo Alto, Calif., office of Greenberg Traurig. “This would have a resounding impact on Google’s business if each court in each country (there) took the same position,” he said.

The decision is not expected to affect any court cases in the United States, the experts generally agreed. However, it is likely to be noted by lawyers for Agence France-Presse, which also has sued Google over copyright concerns with Google News, said Eric Goldman, an assistant professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and director of the High Tech Law Institute. “But it’s unlikely that judge would consider it heavily,” he said.

Caching of articles is permitted under U.S. copyright law, said Ralph Oman, former register of copyrights for the United States and now a lawyer with the Dechert law firm in Washington, D.C. “Those cached links offered by Google give free access to the archived articles that some papers would otherwise sell,” he said.

If Google appeals and loses, the company could end up creating a localized version of Google News for Belgium that complies with the ruling, according to Goldman. Or Google could decide to go further and change the site for everyone to avoid further litigation, Goldman said. “For instance, Yahoo with the Nazi memorabilia case, they had a worldwide standard based on their liability in France,” he said, referring to Yahoo being prohibited from selling Nazi-related items on its portal.

“Google treads a lot closer to the borders in copyright law than they publicly admit,” Goldman said.

Chris Ruhland, a litigation and intellectual property lawyer with the Los Angeles office of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, said the ruling wasn’t that dire for Google.

“I’m not sure a lot can be read into it since it is one court in Belgium and it is subject to an appeal,” Ruhland said. While courts in continental Europe tend to apply fairly strict copyright protections, each court will decide for itself, he said.

The newspapers were doing themselves a disservice, Ruhland added. “They won a legal victory for now but maybe not in the long term,” he said. “In 2007, if you are not findable in Google you might as well not exist for practical purposes.”

Wikipedia may shut down within the next 4 months

Posted by multippt

I’m sure  you may have used Wikipedia before. Whether you liked it or not, that is a different story. Wikipedia, known as being a “perfect” source of information, has hints that it is running out of funds, and may eventually “disappear” in the next few months. Given that most users want a clean interface (and Wikipedia respects that), you won’t see alot of ads (if any) plastered around Wikipedia (thus, most of the money comes from donations). Although Wikipedia receives alot of donations, it alone is not enough to fuel the ever-growing expenses of maintaining multiple servers ($5 million anyone?).

Hopefully, Wikipedia won’t shut down too soon. Well… given that Wikipedia is worth millions (if not billions) worth of dollars, since it contains hundreds of thousands of highly informative pages, maybe Google might be interested…

EDIT: It looks like Wikipedia isn’t going to shut down any soon (phew…), as Sandy Ordonez (Wikipedia staff member) commented that “Wikipedia will not be closing any time soon.”. The emphasis on the shortage of cash was probably to express the pressing needs for funds, that Wikipedia badly need.

Via RoughType (original news article)

DNS Attack: Only a Warning Shot?

Posted by signup

FEBRUARY 7, 2007 | An attack on the Internet infrastructure yesterday may signal a hint of bigger things to come. The distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that temporarily crippled — but didn’t take down — two of the Internet’s 13 Domain Name System (DNS) root servers was likely a test-run for a potentially larger and more disruptive attack, researchers say.

Fox Subpoenas YouTube Over ‘24′ Episodes

Posted by signup

20th Century Fox has served YouTube and another video-sharing site, LiveDigital, with subpoenas to hand over information about the user who uploaded episodes of the hit TV series “24″ before they aired this month. The user also uploaded recent episodes of “The Simpsons.”

It is not known how YouTube will handle the request. Last year, the firm complied with a similar request from a movie studio; however, that was before it was acquired for US$1.65 billion by Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) ,which has often challenged such subpoenas.

Additionally, this subpoena has the potential to test previously unexplored provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), according to attorneys contacted for this article.

What the DMCA Does

More than likely, Google will comply for a few reasons, starting with provisions in the DMCA

The DMCA provides sites like YouTube protection against lawsuits, Adam Kessel, a partner with Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, told the E-Commerce Times.

“Once the copyright holder notifies the Web site, it has a chance to take it down,” he stated.

The DMCA also declares that these sites must identify a user who has uploaded copyrighted material. Previous challenges to the DMCA have been against ISPs that merely provide connectivity to the infringers.

However, YouTube will be obligated to hand over the information because it stores content on its site, Kessel noted, predicting, “It will come down to a business decision for Google.”

Privacy Policy May Help

YouTube’s privacy policy also likely provides Google some cover that would allow it to hand over the information, Randy Broberg, partner at Allen Matkins, told the E-Commerce Times.

“Most privacy policies state that the Web site owner will hand over information in response to legal actions or if they receive a subpoena,” he noted.

Nevertheless, other attorneys believe a dispute might lie ahead.

“YouTube may try to fight the subpoena to disclose the identity of the poster on privacy or other grounds, but ultimately it is likely that they will have to disclose the identity of the infringer,” Eduardo Carreras, of counsel at Woodcock Washburn, told the E-Commerce Times.

The Larger Issues

Despite what Google decides, the larger issue remains: whether YouTube should be held liable for the copyright infringement of those who use its Web site, David A. Furlow, First Amendement attorney for Thompson & Knight, told the E-Commerce Times.

“The issue is uncertain because of controversies surrounding the interpretation of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster,” he noted.

Not many courts have had opportunities to interpret and apply that ruling’s intentional-inducement theory of provider-liability, Furlow stated.

Additionally, in Perfect 10 v. Google, which is on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a court upheld the safe harbor provision for product manufacturers established in Sony v. University City Studios. This 1984 case found that manufacturers of VCRs could not be held liable if their products were also used for non-infringing purposes.

Perfect 10 v. Google applied the concept to ordinary search engines that direct viewers and customers to Web sites that infringe copyright with thumbnail-size images, Furlow added.

“YouTube may be in more trouble than Google, however, because ordinary people routinely post potentially infringing or actually infringing films — including episodes of movies, political news and campaign speeches — to YouTube directly, so YouTube is not acting merely as a search engine, the way Google does,” he said.

Important Issues

“A court will have to determine whether YouTube has to disclose the identity of the person who posted the offending episode. There is likely to be a short, fierce court battle, but I expect that a court will order YouTube to disclose the identity of the person who posts,” Furlow added.

Such litigation would raise profoundly important issues of First Amendment, copyright and federal statutory law, he continued.

“The impact on YouTube will depend on what the court orders — a takedown of the video, disclosure of the poster or nothing because of the political significance of recent episodes of ‘24,’ especially the last one, with the mushroom cloud rising over L.A., which has been circulated widely on the e-mail,” Furlow declared.

More Subpoenas to Come?

Nevertheless, one thing is clear. YouTube and other viral video sites will continue to receive such subpoenas as more copyrighted content is posted and content owners start to realize significant losses.

For starters, revenue from DVD rentals or sales from the Fox series could be seriously impacted by the uploaded episodes, Paul Bangor, a partner with Thorp Reed & Armstrong, told the E-Commerce Times.