The background is this, if you haven't seen it already. An organization called Fight For the Future is trying to draw attention to Senate Bill 978, commonly known as the "illegal streaming bill." Because trying to draw attention to intellectual property legislation is usually difficult, the group tried a different approach: FreeBieber.org.

According to Bieber's lawyers, the site violates Bieber's publicity rights and intellectual property rights. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), however, says it's well within the Fight For the Future's First Amendment rights:

The right of publicity usually prohibits the unauthorized use of a person's name, likeness, voice, or other identifiable characteristic for a commercial purposes. However, the law is clear that an individual's right to control uses of his or her name and likeness must be weighed against important free speech rights. The First Amendment protects transformative uses (like the ones at freebieber.org), especially those that do not intrude on a celebrity's market for her own identifiable characteristics. So it's hard to believe that Bieber's lawyers really think he can prohibit this lawful (and effective) use of his image. More likely they, like so many others, were just hoping to scare Fight for the Future out of exercising its free speech rights.

It seems pretty absurd that Bieber's lawyers would even bother with a cease and desist here, but maybe they think that they'll get lucky. More than likely, all they'll do is trigger the Streisand effect. In trying to have the site taken down, they're probably just going to draw more attention to it.

Which might not be a bad thing. I'd really hate to see the "illegal streaming bill" make it to law, even if it might get Justin Bieber off the streets.

How much do ordinary consumers know about their digital rights and privacy?

"Hopefully lots of tech-inclined folks will get something out of the PSAs, of course, but they're particularly angled at the "tech-liking public" - folks that know and like technology, but may not be in the practice of thinking critically about the rights and freedoms implicated by new developments and trends," said Richard Esguerra of the EFF.

The spot with the endless license agreement in the bookstore is a reference to the fact that e-book and e-reader users must sign these endless, inscrutable agreements that frequently include provisions intended to allow some kind of recording of users' reading habits, or intended to keep users from moving the digital content, or modifying the device.

"A lot of these restrictions controvert the kinds of protections and liberties we've had with physical books for years," Esguerra said. The EFF website has more information about privacy issues regarding e-books.

The spot with the shopping couple raises awareness of how users are tracked by advertisers on the Web, building profiles about their behavior and interests.

"Advertising is a core aspect of business on the Internet, but there are important discussions to be had about putting meaningful limits on that kind of tracking. Again, in concert with the theme: the digital equivalent of a passing conversation between a couple on the street may result in the kind of eerie or invasive interaction depicted in the PSA," Esguerra said.

Highly granular version numbers of installed plug-ins and seemingly random orders in lists of installed fonts were the primary offenders. The EFF has concluded that the most viable remedy may be consumer pressure applied to software vendors to change these practices. Even if you're not particularly concerned about privacy on this level, the findings are quite interesting.

Reasonable Expectations?

Readers will need to decide for themselves whether the understanding of privacy found in the report is reasonable by their standards. The report notes that cookies, for example, are valuable as a way to deliver certain features, but suggests that users somehow balance that with privacy concerns. The EFF's stance on cookies can seem downright antiquated at times, though. "There is growing awareness among web users that HTTP cookies are a serious threat to privacy," the organization writes, "and many people now block, limit or periodically delete them."

While the ability to visit websites anonymously remains an important part of democratic communication and the preservation of liberty, more contemporary privacy debates tend to focus on sites sharing user data with third parties without consent. None the less, the fact that individual users' browsers have nearly unique fingerprints is disconcerting.

The EFF's call for software developers to stop using such granular version numbers might be reasonable, or it might be contrary to the core of software development culture. Likewise, the random ordering of installed font lists seems like an indication of the futility of expecting privacy as a casual user of such complex software with so many variables in play.

What do you think? Should users demand that browser and plugin software providers account for this dilemma or is the EFF barking up the wrong tree on privacy?

Traditionally the champions of Creative Commons and other, more open methods of IP protection and creative sharing of content online, EFF is now calling out a bevy of big-name media corporations to make examples of them for takedown abuse. According to the EFF blog, "Some of the web's most interesting content has been yanked from popular websites with bogus copyright claims or other spurious legal threats." Read on to see who made the list and why.

"But that hasn't stopped thin-skinned corporations and others from abusing the legal system to get these new works removed from the Internet. We wanted to document this censorship for all to see."

Some of the entities that have made EFF's roundup are as follows:

• NPR, for attempting to stifle a video criticizing same-sex marriage
• DeBeers, for its humorless response to an online parody
• NBC, for issuing a takedown for a satirical Obama video that went viral
• And a personal favorite, Ralph Lauren, who shot out a few takedowns after our good friends at Photoshop Disasters pointed out that, even in already thin models, a woman's head is not likely to be wider than her pelvis

Other honorees include Warner Music Group, CBS News, Universal Music Publishing Group, and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.

Is the EFF conducting a witchhunt here, dear readers? Are some of these copyright claims warranted? Or do you, in fact, have an egregious takedown of your own to report? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Nevertheless, in the case of this wedding video, Sony (copyright owners of Forever) chose to capitalize on the clip's success rather than blocking the file. They added a simple pop-up overlay that offers users a chance to purchase the song from iTunes or Amazon. According to YouTube, in the last week, the year-old song has risen to #4 on the iTunes charts and #3 on Amazon.

To Google's glee, Sony's success in working with users is likely to inspire other copyright owners to rethink their past actions with DMCA take-down notices. And this would be a welcome change for many. Take downs have shown a history of hurting user morale, reducing valuable community content and decreasing channels of monetization for content hosts. In the case of the wedding video, while it's obvious that Sony made money, YouTube has likely earned profit from AdWords as well as referral revenue from Amazon and iTunes.

Because Sony left the wedding video up, the community continues to receive free hosting and feedback, the copyright owners profit from their licensed goods, YouTube earns new revenue, and the remix community continues to proliferate. Since last week, some of the remixes and re-creations include the Divorce Entrance Dance, a WIS-TV anchor version and the couple's own appearance on the Today Show.

For example, former AT&T technician Mark Klein received an EFF Pioneer Award for blowing the whistle on the government's illegal phone wiretapping and surveillance program. Klein leaked news of AT&T employing splitters to send duplicates of fiber optic signals to a security-restricted company room controlled by the US National Security Agency at San Francisco's Folsom Street facilities. Klein's testimony is the proof that the phone company gave the US government access to private phone calls, emails and text messages. Despite the fact that those surveyed had never been connected to terrorist actions. The EFF continues to celebrate Klein's actions in it's work to end NSA domestic spy programs.

While the EFF has given its Pioneer Award to a number of CEOs and technologists, it's clear to see that Klein's testimony has had a major impact on the fate of the American people. If you'd like to nominate your own hero, check out the EFF's blog.

EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann says, ""Some changes to terms of service are good for consumers, and some are bad...but Internet users are increasingly trusting websites with everything from their photos to their 'friends lists' to their calendar -- and sometimes even their medical information. TOSBack will help consumers flag changes in the websites they use every day and trust with their personal information".

We applaud the Electronic Frontier Foundation for providing a tool to keep us aware of these changes. We will certainly give this new product a try and will report on any TOS policy changes that we think are important for you to know about.

Even though Joost does not rely on its P2P architecture anymore, the video quality is still high, especially in full-screen mode, but it does not rival that of the 'HD' offering of ABC or Vimeo.

More Social

Joost has also added a wealth of social features to its site. You can now easily share videos with your friends on Joost and join one of the newly established Joost groups. Also, everything you watch is stored in your 'JoostFeed,' which you can choose to make public. If you really do not want your friends to know that you have been watching Brittany Spears videos all night again, you can also turn on a 'Stealth Mode.'

Because of its reliance on a plugin, however, Joost does not offer the ability to embed videos yet. We assume that this feature will be available once Joost has moved over to using Flash.

Too Little, Too Late?

Overall, we think it was about time for Joost to move to the browser. However, a lot of what Joost set out to do in 2006 has already been done on the web. Its biggest competitor is probably Hulu, which has content deals with almost every large TV network and is slowly adding more HD content. Joost will have a hard time competing, unless it can sign up a similarly large number of quality content producers.

What Does Infovell Do?

The engine scours through open-access repositories of information like PubMed Central and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Claims, but it also allows access to scholarly journals such as those from Oxford University Press, SAGE, Taylor & Francis, Annual Reviews, Mary Ann Liebert Publications, and more. The culmination of these billions of pages currently unindexed by other engines, gives you access to content in the areas of Life Sciences, Medicines, Patents, Industry News, and other reference content from expert sources. In addition to just functioning as a search engine, Infovell can also deliver breaking news alerts which are automatically sent to your email, PDA, or any other device you choose.

It May Look Boring, But It's Not

In the demo (see video below), the team from Infovell showed how their engine could be used for researching a medical condition - something that many people try to do today using Google, but with little success. Generally, web searches only return results to sources of general information like the Mayo Clinic results, WebMD, or online support groups. To be able to research something by reading through the actual journal articles that the doctors have access to would be a huge step towards democratizing the world's knowledge.

Why Can't Information Be Free?

Unfortunately, that knowledge is not being set free with Infovell. Instead, the service will exist behind a pay wall, which once again puts the power of information into the hands of those that can afford its access. Although expected, it's disappointing to see that this service will be yet another source of critical information which most people won't have the time or financial resources to use it. Case in point, if someone needs to research a medicinal condition in that much detail, it's a sure bet that they have doctors' bills that are a bigger priority than a subscription fee to a search engine.

Why isn't anyone building a Google for the Deep Web? If Infovell is offering a collection of scholarly information and putting a price tag on its access, why can't someone else build a similar collection and wrap ads around the service to monetize it? We love the idea of this type of service, but would would rather see a bigger effort to open up the unindexed web and deliver it to the public for free.

Infovell will be available for a 30-day free trial, starting September 22nd.