As Google points out in the announcement, finding these legal opinions has typically been difficult. Now, the company makes it very easy to find any legal opinion about Napster, for example. Google notes that it hopes that access to this information will allow regular citizens to "learn more about the laws that govern us all."

It's interesting to see that Google continues to add more and more public data to its repositories. Just last week, Google added data from the World Bank to its search results. Earlier this year, Google also started to include data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division. Google didn't go as far as integrating these legal opinions on its search results page yet - though for searches for Roe v. Wade or Miranda v. Arizona, these results could really enhance the current search results.

This GPS app is built to work on the cheapest cell phones available. It brings to mind every petty-but-illegal transgression the casual user could commit and stretches the boundaries of the permissibility of tech's uses for plausibly illegal means. The next time you use P2P or bit torrent clients to download media or use an iPhone app to detect police radars, think about this mobile application and how it reflects on American law and the Internet.

On startup, the app finds GPS satellites. Once the user begins moving, the app acts as a compass that shows the direction the user is heading and also shows the direction a user must travel to reach a "safety site."

The app seems to originate from a hacktivist group out of UCSD - hardly a historical hotbed of technological innovation, but close enough to the US-Mexican border to have a significant impact on the politics of technology in that area. The group also advocates DDoS-like digital sit-ins to bog down the resources of websites it deems offensive.

In an interview with Vice Magazine, the app's creator, Ricardo Dominguez, said, "We looked at the Motorola i455 cell phone, which is under $30, available even cheaper on eBay, and includes a free GPS applet. We were able to crack it and create a simple compass-like navigation system. We were also able to add other information, like where to find water left by the Border Angels, where to find Quaker help centers that will wrap your feet, how far you are from the highway - things to make the application really benefit individuals who are crossing the border."

Hundreds of would-be immigrants are killed each year while trying to enter the United States.

Check out this Border Patrol YouTube video on the newly installed double-layered fencing between the U.S. and Mexico, a fence that stretches between 700 and 800 miles along the Rio Grande.

The application is currently in an alpha state of development. Dominguez hopes that, through working with Mexican communities, churches, and other organizations, the app will be ready to use soon.

So, what do our readers think? Is this Dominguez a political dissident or a legitimate academic researcher - or both? And is a mobile app enabling illegal Mexican immigration to the U.S. a live-saving tool for those who seek better opportunities, or is it simply another law-breaking tool developed by tech hackers for life hackers, a workaround to cheat the system?

This case had been in litigation for years, having been originally filed back in 2007. The problem stemmed from the fact that internet sites such as AutoAdmit are essentially able to operate under different rules than those that apply to TV and newspapers when it comes to libel. This is due to a law called "Section 230," which immunizes internet publishers from legal harm. At the time of its establishment in the 90's, however, those "publishers" were the ISPs themselves - the AOLs and CompuServes that delivered Internet access to consumers. The idea of bloggers, social media publishers, and anonymous blog and forum commenters didn't really exist yet and therefore wasn't taken into consideration. That meant the women weren't able to sue the operators of the discussion board website itself, but had to go after the anonymous posters instead. That, of course, was quite the challenge.

In the end, the women's attorneys were able to identify some eight or nine of the anonymous posters, according to the Hartford Courant and they settled with some of them.

Because the terms of the settlement were confidential, the lawyers representing the former students, Heide Iravani and Brittan Heller, would not discuss them. However, San Francisco attorney Ashok Ramani, whose firm, Keker & Van Nest took the case pro-bono said that their clients were "very pleased with how the case went." The women had sued for monetary damages so a settlement means they were likely awarded at least some of the amount they had hoped for.

Was the Settlement a Win or a Loss? Depends on Who You Ask

Marc Randazza, the attorney for one of the defendants scoffed that if the women's intention were to have the negative comments removed, their interests were very poorly served. "Now there's even an Encyclopedia Dramatica page for them," he told the Yale Daily News.

However, David Rosen, one of the women's attorneys and a Yale Law professor, countered that unmasking some of these anonymous posters who were hiding behind pseudonyms and then holding them accountable for what they said had accomplished "the fundamental goals of the case." He thinks the suit may even have some internet commenters thinking twice before posting. The possibility of a lawsuit "may make some people pause before posting comments that are malicious and completely indefensible," Rosen was quoted as saying.

Will This Really Change Things?

While obviously a major case, this suit isn't the first time a defamation case like this has been brought to court. In fact, only months ago, an anonymous blogger using Google's Blogger.com service was sued for rants she made about a fellow model, one Liskula Cohen, on her site "Skanks in NYC." The victim sued to reveal the identity of the malicious blogger. Thanks to a judge's ruling that Google must hand over to Cohen any identifying information they had on the site's creator, the blogger in question was revealed to be Rosemary Port. (She's now suing Google for not protecting her).

Although a slightly different case, the womens' suit involving the forum commenters also succeeded - at least in part - in revealing the identities of those posting the defamatory messages. Combined with the prior example, it will be interesting to see what impact these cases have on the online world. Will this lead to more lawsuits where alleged victims seek to out the identities of their internet foes? Will it lead to more self-policing among the commenting community? Will internet trolls actually think before they type?

It's too soon to say, but it's possible that a kinder, gentler - and possibly more boring - internet may be in our future.

If you haven't been following the story (see our initial coverage here and here), the short summary goes like this: Chicago resident Firas Alkhateeb created an image that showed President Obama wearing the makeup of the Joker. He used an image of the President snagged from TIME magazine's October 23rd, 2006 cover. After uploading his photo to Flickr, an unknown third party doctored the image some more adding the word "socialism" beneath the picture. This doctored image started showing up plastered across cities nationwide as well as on numerous political bloggers' websites.

Flickr, after having received a DMCA take-down notice, removed the photo from Firas' account. They did this despite the fact that the image could easily be argued to fall into the grey area of "political parody" and the copyright infringement claim itself comes from a character with a questionable background himself and not, as it turns out, from TIME magazine, DC Comics, nor the photographer who took the original photo. Instead, the supposedly infringed-upon party, a Mr. Edward Przydzial, is a freelance photographer whose only proof of his claim comes from a LiveJournal post dated Oct. 9th. Blog posts are easy to backdate which makes the claim questionable in the eyes of the law.

To make matters worse, the case highlighted a problem with Flickr's takedown policy which appears to be "delete first, ask questions later."

Flickr User Suggests a Policy Change, Flickr Agrees

While for the most part Flickr is standing behind their actions, saying that the law leaves them no choice but to remove images upon receipt of a takedown notice, they have been open to discussion about better ways to comply with the letter of the law without impacting the Flickr community so much as before.

In a forum posting on the photo-sharing site, a Flickr user by the name of "The Searcher" debating the company's DCMA policy, offered the company a suggestion. Instead of simply deleting the photo page in its entirety, the company should just replace the image itself with a blank that reads "this image has been removed for copyright issues," wrote the user. Flickr's director of community Heather Champ replied saying she liked the idea and would push it up the food chain. And that she did.

According to her follow up post, Flickr decided to make a change to the way they handle takedown notices and, going forward, they will no longer delete the entire photo page, just the image itself. A screenshot of how this will look is posted here and, as suggested, it will feature text that reads: "This image has been removed due to a claim of copyright infringement."

As Champ explains, this notable change will preserve the photo's metadata while still complying with the law. Other policies remain the same. For example, members will still be warned, by way a private message, who is making the claim against them. Flickr will remove the image from the site and will store it so that it can be replaced in the event that the U.S. Copyright Team gives them the go-ahead to do so. Now, however, the existing title, description, comments, tags, notes, etc. on the original photo page will remain available and the photo can still be added to sets and groups. Champ says Flickr will also be reaching out to the copyright teams in other parts of the world to see if they're interested in enacting the same policy. (The current policy is specific to the U.S. where the DMCA law is enforced.)

Overall, the community received the news positively, even though it still allows Flickr to eschew any responsibility of investigating the validity of DMCA copyright claims themselves. The company will continue to delete away no matter who asks, it seems - a move that drew ire from Techcrunch's Michael Arrington who said they should have checked with their lawyers first before yanking the image. Photographer and rival service Zooomr exec Thomas Hawk also questioned whether the removal was simply sheer incompetence on Flickr's part.

Ultimately, the change is a good one. It's better for the online community and the photographer whose image is removed, while still respecting the rights of the supposed copyright victim. However, the real problem here may not be how Flickr deals with copyright claims, but the DMCA law itself.

This being the Pirate Bay, however, we don't really expect the site to be down for too long. Chances are that the group will simply relocate to another ISP (the service is already somewhat decentralized) or move its operations to an offshore location. Just a few weeks ago, somebody actually created an archive of the Pirate Bay as a torrent file. With this, a third party could possibly recreate the Pirate Bay.

The sale of the Pirate Bay to GGF, however, will remain uncertain, even if the site comes back online. Currently, Swedish stock market regulators are looking into this deal to determine if GGF actually has enough money to complete the deal or if the announcement was just a scam to boost GGF's stock price.

PatentSim was presented as a game in which the goal is to make as much money as possible. In each environment, subjects combined objects in a "Creation Box" to simulate an invention. Whenever a subject created an invention and clicked on the "Make" button, money would appear in their virtual bank. In the pure patent and mixed patent environments, subjects could also click on a "Patent" button to increase their profit. Each patent was priced at $20 and each use of a lawyer also cost $20. At the end of the study, students had produced significantly more inventions and profit in the commons environment when they were not being penalized for patent infringement or were busy enforcing their patents.

The study suggests that innovation not only thrives in a competitive environment, but that more profit can be generated by inventors in a commons system. Because PatentSim is just a simulation, readers need to take findings with a grain of salt. While the rate of inventions would likely increase without patents, it's tough to tell if inventors would really see unlimited profit potential in an environment free of patents. After all, how many different zipper pulls does the market demand?

Nevertheless, in some cases, the demand for a product or process is all too evident. Imagine the competitive market for hearing aids and prosthetics, or the success rate of farmers who are free to use the best possible processes. And honestly, does HIV really care if it's being treated by Glaxo, Pfizer or a tested generic knockoff?

This study is important in that it might spur policy makers to question how we look at innovation. Are inventions just disparate exclusively-owned products, or should we be sharing them out of necessity to solve our bigger-picture problems?

Or perhaps that's just what they want you to believe, say critics. The Korea Times, for example, notes that it's more likely that the government is simply continuing its crackdown on free speech. Already they have been "repeatedly attacked by bloggers," the paper reports, "first over the controversial decision to resume U.S. beef imports, and more recently for its ineptitude in economic policies. The watershed moment came in January when police arrested Park Dae-sung, a blogger known more widely as 'Minerva' and a frequent critic of the government's economic polices, on charges of 'deliberately' undermining public interest by distributing fraudulent information."

Google Provides an Alternative Method for Uploads

In response to the new legislation, Google has decided they would rather prevent uploads and comments instead of requiring YouTube users to submit their real names and national ID number - a number similar to the United State's Social Security Number and yet another requirement of the new law.

"We have a bias in favor of freedom of expression and are committed to openness," said Lucinda Barlow, a spokeswoman for YouTube in Asia. "It's very important that if users want to be anonymous that they have that chance."

Another Google spokesperson, Rachel Whetstone, vice president of Global Communications & Public Affairs at Google, was quoted in The Hankyoreh newspaper as saying  "we concluded in the end that it is impossible to provide benefits to internet users while observing this country's law because the law does not fall in line with Google's principles."

In addition to blocking uploads and comments, Google informed Korean YouTube users via their Korean Google blog that they can change their preference setting to a country other than Korea if they want to continue to upload and comment on videos.

An Easy Way for Google to Look Good?

If Google had complied with the law, it would have represented the first time that the company had ever collected the actual names of internet users.

Still, while many are congratulating Google on taking a stand and protecting freedom of expression on the internet, in this case the company wasn't really risking that much. That's because in Korea, Google has a much smaller presence than its domestic counterparts like www.naver.com and www.daum.net. Let's see how the company behaves in countries where they have a much larger market share.

Image credit: Asiajin

According to Hasbro, this agreement also "provides people in the U.S. and Canada with a choice of different games and also avoids potentially lengthy and costly litigation."

However, most users really liked the old Scrabulous and preferred it over Hasbro's own alternative, though according to AllFacebook, Hasbro's version is slowly picking up more users now. Hasbro's Scrabble app is currently rated 1.3 out of 5 on Facebook.

Thanks to this agreement, neither Hasbro nor Scrabulous' developers, RJ Software, have to face a long and expensive legal battle, and RJ Software can still offer Wordscraper and Lexulous.

We've covered his latest move in greater depth over at Jobwire, our site tracking hires in tech, new media and related industries. Join us there for more details on Lessig's latest career change.

In order to make an iPod work with an alternative software program - like gtkpod, Winamp, and Songbird, for example - developers need to understand a file called iTunesDB. To prevent people from writing to this file, Apple protects it with a checksum hash which has to be reverse-engineered. Usually that process only takes a couple of days.

With the latest iTunes update, Apple has once again changed the hash, meaning it needs to be reverse-engineered again. The developers doing so collaborate together and share their thoughts on iPodhash, an open-source project hosted on Bluwiki, a free web site that lets users create wiki pages.

Now Apple has asked for that site to come down, a request that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says is out of line. Earlier this month, a lawyer from Apple's legal firm O'Melveny & Myers sent out a takedown notice to the site stating the content was illegal under the terms of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). According to the cease-and-desist email, the site is "disseminating information designed to circumvent Apple's FairPlay digital rights management system." It continued, "FairPlay is considered anti-circumvention technology under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA explicitly prohibits the dissemination of information that can be used to circumvent such technology."

The EFF has jumped on this case, saying that Apple "doesn't have a DMCA leg to stand on." According to EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann, this move is effectively bending the law in order to stifle free speech. "Apple is essentially saying here that people can't even talk about the mechanisms that Apple uses to lock in its music to the iTunes software," he said.

The EFF web site goes into more details as to why the EFF believes Apple to be in the wrong, listing the numerous reasons why there's no DMCA violation on the site.

Where Does This Leave The Linux Community?

Since the Bluwiki site has complied with the takedown notice, the question is where does this leave the Linux community now? The main reason for the iPodhash project's existence is due to the fact that Apple does not provide a version of iTunes that runs on Linux. The project is an important community effort that helps Linux users create software programs that work with their iPods and iPhones.

Bluwiki's founder, Sam Odio, had said he was unsure if putting the site back online would be possible. Says Odio of his compliance with the takedown notice, "I regret having to do this. I may be able to put the site back online, but quite honestly it's unlikely because I can't afford a legal battle with Apple." Luckily for him, the EFF is now involved, so he will not have to worry with the legal fees.

Apple may only be protecting their very profitable iTunes business, but in this case, they're suggesting that the DMCA covers people merely talking about technical protection measures. If that's so, then as EFF says, "they've got a serious First Amendment problem."

You can follow this case's progress on the EFF's web site, Odio's blog, and on the iPodhash project's homepage.

This new law creates a high-level office in the White House (the 'Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator'), raises the limits on possible damages in copyright cases substantially, and increases the number of things that can be confiscated.

Better Than it Could Have Been

The only positive aspect of this bill as it was signed by President Bush this week is that it does not include the per-song piracy penalty of the original bill which was introduced earlier this year. Under this provision, an accused pirate could have been charged separately for each copyright infringement, including once for every song featured in a pirated movie, for example.

Remix Culture

Copyright lawyer and activist Lawrence Lessig argues that these kind of draconian laws and the obsession with prosecuting copyright violations stifles our culture and that the law should be relaxed in order to create for a thriving 'remix culture.' The ProIP act, however, takes the law into the opposite direction.

The new legislation, which was cosponsored by numerous Democratic and Republican senators, including Hilary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, Gordon Smith, and Lindsey Graham, was unanimously adopted by the U.S. Senate and passed the House with a wide margin.

Auto-Extracting Data

To use this new feature, you begin by uploading documents into Mumboe as usual, a process that involves nothing more than browsing for the file on your PC and uploading it to Mumboe. The OCR software in the system will scan the document's text and make the text searchable. Once complete, you can then select the new "Auto Extract" button which lets you automatically extract the key details from the document such as the parties involved and the agreement term. Those details are displayed for your reference along with the exact place in the document where they were found. You'll also be able to see an excerpt of the text contains those key words and phrases. You can choose to save the data as is or edit it as you see fit. If the system extracts terms you don't need to track, you can simply discard those items and keep the rest. When you're finished, just click "Done."

Pulling out the details:

Why This Matters

For consumers and every one else outside the target audience, Mumboe and other similar types of applications seem dry and boring. But for those in need of better tools, mainly those working in the legal profession, they will see this auto-extract capability as one sexy new feature. Why? Because according to the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management (IACCM), poorly managed contracts result in over $153 billion in missed savings and revenue per year. Give our current economic conditions, those numbers cannot be ignored.

The only hurdle Mumboe has to overcome is the lawyers' (a typically conservative bunch) fear of moving to an online application. Their, in our opinion, misguided fear and mistrust of any sort of cloud app keeps them doing business the old-fashioned way - reading through pages and pages of documents themselves instead of enlisting the aid of some "new fangled" system to help them out. But for those who do take the leap, their efficiency will increase dramatically. If there's any occupation that understands the concept of "time is money," law would be it, and that's why Mumboe has a shot.

How To Join the Beta

The Mumboe auto-extract features are in private beta at the moment, but you can sign up to join here: https://app.mumboe.com/registration/beta_promotion_index. Mumboe will give out invites to RWW readers exclusively.

More About Mumboe:

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/law_20_news_mumboe_uses_semantics_to_pull_data_from_contracts.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/law_20_news_mumboe_uses_semantics_to_pull_data_from_contracts.php Enterprise Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:40:00 -0800 Sarah Perez Most cases in which the RIAA accuses somebody of illegally sharing files never make it to court. Instead, the RIAA usually offers the defendant a deal. Jammie Thomas, however, who was accused of sharing 1,702 songs on Kazaa in 2007, decided to fight the RIAA, went to court, and was found guilty of illegally sharing 24 copyrighted songs. The jury awarded $220,000 in damages to the RIAA. Now, however, the judge who heard the case has reversed this decision because he gave incorrect instructions to the jury.

In the original trial, the jury was instructed by U.S. District Judge Michael Davis that evidence for the fact that the music on Thomas' computer was actual distributed to anybody was not necessary. Instead, for the jury to find Thomas guilty, all it needed was evidence that she was "making copyrighted sound recordings available." The judge has now decided that this instruction was wrong and has granted Thomas a new trial.

This new trial will most likely put a stronger burden on the RIAA to prove that Thomas not only made files accessible, but that those files were actually downloaded from her computer. The judge also makes it clear that downloads by the RIAA or MediaSentry (the investigative arm of the RIAA) can constitute infringement. However, because it is impossible to know if the jury used the erroneous instruction as the basis for its verdict instead of the fact that the RIAA provided evidence for possible distribution, the judge has granted Thomas a new trial.

Still Guilty?

During Thomas' original trial, her lawyer argued that she never actually shared any songs. Her hard drive, which was presented as evidence, was clean because Best Buy replaced it two weeks after she received her first notice from the RIAA (though she originally told her lawyer that it was replaced one or two months before she received the notice). It is also noteworthy that Thomas' Kazaa login, which was linked to her IP address by the RIAA, was the same as the username she used for her email and MySpace accounts.

Based on this, and the fact that the RIAA can use its own downloads as evidence, we still assume that a new jury will find Thomas guilty of copyright infringement. Hopefully, though, this new jury will take a closer look at the ridiculously high fines per song the first jury awarded to the RIAA.

These four patents were filed between July 1998 and May 2004. The earliest, 6,324,538, covers self-publishing on a database driven website and almost reads like a description of a modern blog, though it is more concerned with publishing directories. The later three patents (6,850,940, 7,028,034, and 7,269,591) build upon this and mostly include methods for paying for these services. We are no patent lawyers here, but looking over these patents, a lot of it seems to be material that has been covered in database textbooks since the early days of the net.

Stock Is Up

GraphOn's stock is currently up 16% for the day and is now trading at a near record high for 2008 of $0.29. At the height of the first Internet bubble, Graph on was trading for more than $22.

Not the First Time

This lawsuit against Google is part of GraphOn's typical modus operandi. Within the last few years, the company has filed lawsuits against AutoTrader.com (also for the 6,324,538 patent), Match.com, Yahoo, eHarmony, and CareerBuilder. We have been trying to get more information about these other lawsuits, but it doesn't seem like any of these suits were either settled or have gone to court yet, except for the AutoTrader.com suit, which was settled through a licensing agreement in January of 2008.

The fact that the company proudly reports this in the press-release helps to put this suit against Google into perspective: this is exactly what GraphOn does. It is interesting that GraphOn waited for five days before issuing this press release. It would almost seem like the company was hoping to drive some publicity by just filing the suit on the 13th, but when that didn't happen, they were more or less forced to announce the suit themselves.

We have embedded the actual complaint below, courtesy of Justia.com:

Google's Reaction: Don't be Evil, Just Talk to Us

YouTube issued a statement to Bloomberg, arguing that there was simply no need for legal action, as it already prohibits all its users from uploading infringing material and cooperates "with all copyright holders to identify and promptly remove infringing content as soon as we are officially notified." From the reports we have seen so far, it was not immediately clear if MediaSet has ever approached YouTube about removing its clips before filing this lawsuit. Based on our own tests today, finding MediaSet owned videos on YouTube was a trivial exercise and we did not come across any videos with takedown notices.

Other Lawsuits

This lawsuit is quite similar to the Google/Viacom lawsuit that made a lot of headlines earlier this month when a judge ordered Google to hand over its YouTube user data to Viacom. In this lawsuit, Viacom is looking for more than $1 billion in damages because of alleged copyright violations.

This also marks the second time in two weeks that Google has run into trouble with the Italian law. Just last week, prosecutors in Italy charged Google with failing to monitor its content in the context of a video where a group of students were taunting an autistic classmate.

One Video on YouTube = One Lost TV Viewer?

Over the years, Google has always promised that it was working on a better way to recognize and remove copyrighted content from YouTube - so far, however, it has not been able to do so effectively.

For the MediaSet lawsuit, it would also seems like it would be hard to argue that every video seen on YouTube would automatically translate into lost revenue for a media company (or if it is not, in the end, also mostly advertising for at least some of the media producers).

In this case, it would actually be interesting to get a look at the raw usage data for the copyrighted videos to see how many of them were viewed outside of Italy, where user couldn't have watched the actual TV show anyway.