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If the "illegal streaming bill" becomes law, kids like Justin Bieber could be convicted of a felony just for singing copyrighted songs and posting them to YouTube. So why does Justin Bieber want to take down FreeBieber.org?

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.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hoping that its two new public service announcement spots will shine light on privacy in the information age for ordinary consumers as well as the techies who fly Virgin Airlines, where the spots will be shown as part of the in-flight entertainment. One spot showcases license agreements that come with digital books; the other talks about online behavioral tracking.

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

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published results from a study of nearly half a million website visitors' browsers and concluded that the settings configurations exposed to sites we visit are close enough to unique to identify repeat visitors with a high degree of accuracy even if cookies are deleted.

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.

Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched a "Takedown Hall of Shame" for what it sees as egregious abuses of digital copyright regulations.

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.

An unconventional wedding march in Saint Paul, Minnesota, sent sparks across the web. Not only was it a celebration of couple
Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz's eternal union, but it was a shift in how copyright owners can interact with unlicensed content users. After being uploaded to YouTube only 12 days ago, an elaborate wedding dance routine to Chris Brown's "Forever" has already garnered more than 12 million views. And according to the YouTube blog, rather than blocking usage of their unlicensed property, Sony instead used Google's tracking tools to monetize.

The Electronic Frontiers Foundation is calling for nominations for their EFF 2009 Pioneer Awards. Nominees are celebrated for their technical, social, economic, or cultural contribution to the "health, growth, accessibility, or freedom of computer-based communications." Past recipients of the award have included World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, Linux creator Linus Torvalds and Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker.

For Web users who pay little attention to a site's terms of service (TOS) policies when they sign up for a service, or even realize that they constantly change, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has your back. The San Francisco based non-profit advocacy and legal organization announced that it is launching TOSBack, a terms of service tracker for Facebook, Google, eBay, and other major websites "to help consumers monitor terms of service for the websites they use everyday, and show how the terms change over time".

Today, Joost announced that all of its content is now available directly on its website and not just through its desktop client. Joost was one of the most hyped-up companies on the web when the peer-to-peer streaming video service was still in stealth mode in 2006 and beta invites were rare and coveted. However, once users actually got a look at Joost, disillusion quickly set in. Joost's video quality was very high and it had signed up a wide range of content producers, but its downfall was its reliance on a desktop client. Users were already switching to viewing video on the web and having to start up a client just to watch video was simply too inconvenient.