ReadWriteWeb

California's Reader Privacy Act has been signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown. The bill was authored by California State Senator Leland Yee, and sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The act will become law in 2012, and provides similar privacy protections to those that are enjoyed by library patrons.

That's good news for California residents and businesses, but it's still not enough. The law, which will take effect on January 1, only applies to books and eBooks. It means that government or third parties won't be able to demand access to reading records, without proper justification and transparency about how the records are disclosed.

France's highest court, the Constitutional Council, ruled that access to the internet is a "fundamental human right" this week in striking down a controversial "three strikes" anti-piracy law called Loi Hadopi, according to a report today from the UK Daily Mail. Were such an opinion agreed upon by other governments around the world, the implications would be striking.

The times are changing, Microsoft is losing and Google has won as computing moves to the web - right? That's not necessarily the case. In fact, Microsoft has a clear opportunity to come from behind online and dominate the future, albeit in a radically different way than they dominated the past.

Look to the bank, as metaphor, for one vision of how it could go down. Microsoft could beat Google by embracing services the same way Google has but simultaneously building a strong bond of trust with users around protection and proper use of user data. Like a bank, for user data. I'd call this an emerging theory that not only I hold - what do you think?