So it was that the local newspaper "exposed" my mother as a fraud, a counterfeiter. It ran a story with the painting next to the Life magazine photograph itself. Thus began a lifelong dialog that became one of the threads of my life: a case study in fair use that fueled endless debates in the Socratic method between Mom and her art students for the next four decades. It began with the delicious irony of the newspaper having reprinted the Life photograph without Time-Life's permission, and embraced the lovely fact Mom eventually sold the painting for many times the original price.

Whose polar bear is this?

Döring is not one of these Luddites afraid of any typewriter that has a TV screen attached; he's relatively active with social media, including regular posts to Twitter (@senadoring). It's there where one of his readers, a lady named Ophelia Pastrana (@mpastrana), whose profile describes her as "anti-print," noticed something familiar about Döring's background wallpaper. It's a beautiful shot of a polar bear stretched out on a rocky, snowy terrain enjoying the sunset, with a face not unlike the Senator's own. It's something my mother would likely have considered painting sometime. But indeed, it would appear to be a screen grab directly from the Mangelsen stock photo agency, whose Web page clearly licenses the photo for royalties.

And so it was that Sen. Döring was called out as a fraud, a counterfeiter. Never mind for a moment the delicious irony that the act of demonstrating Döring's most grievous fault effectively copies the exact same photograph. Supposedly such demonstrations in the act of journalism constitute "fair use."

In other words, it's all right for a journalist to do it, but not for a senator. Evidently fairness may differ depending on whom you're being fair to.

Who needs one big brother when a billion little ones will do?

This is the very type of topic my mother relished. In her ingenious, professorial style, which often resembled Justice John Marshall as rendered by Buffy Sainte-Marie, she'd compel her students to adopt one position ("Every photograph qualifies as art, so copying it without permission is forgery") and then throw a live grenade at them that challenged their newfound position. At such a moment, like Perry Mason closing an argument, she'd extract from behind a cabinet some hidden photo of a painting by Andy Warhol (whom she loathed, by the way), one produced by way of the manipulation of copyrighted photos, and watch her students backtrack ("Oh, that's different, Andy Warhol's famous").

Sen. Döring has suggested that the act of policing each other, of ensuring that we don't step on each other's intellectual property rights, can be crowdsourced. Since the Internet is essentially a cooperative, a kind of digital society, then infringement is something we can all make efforts to help each other avoid. Never mind for a moment the eerie resemblance to Chinese families helping each other to refrain from bearing siblings. The suggestion Döring makes is that we all know infringement when we see it.

Do we? A Spain-based blog post (English-language Google translation here) called Döring out for being two-faced, for having the gall to promote a system of registering intellectual property violations, and for having spoken out against the SOPA bill in the U.S., while at the same time using a copyrighted polar bear as his wallpaper. Evidently the mark of a career politician.

In an adjacent paragraph, the blogger suggests that a polar bear belongs to everyone. Exactly what right did the photographer have to claim the bear's repose as his own? Shouldn't the bear have a say in this? And elsewhere, the same post states (translating from Spanish), "copying is the most common process in the digital environment," something which folks do every day, perhaps inadvertently. Or put another way, it's fair for a blogger to do it, and maybe for a bear, but not a senator.

Theft Is Theft (void where prohibited)

At one level, the SOPA debate brought thousands, and perhaps millions, of people together to collectively agree on something, perhaps "Censorship Bad," perhaps something greater. But the true problem we face as a people and as a society, as we continue to take what truly are the first steps in the age of digital communication, is that we don't know what we're talking about. It's impossible to legislate a principle that we have not yet defined in the public mind. To a member of the MPAA, it may seem clear-cut enough: You steal a movie, that's piracy. But a principle is deeper than a campaign slogan; it's something definitive that applies to the future as much as to the present.

"Fair use" is a concept we believe to be well-defined in U.S. law. There are reasons we need to copy things, for example, in research, in journalism, in exercising our own freedom of expression by borrowing an idea, in art. Fair use would say it's okay to slap a picture of a polar bear on your notebook. It would be wrong to broadcast that picture without proper attribution to the photographer.

But Twitter turns that distinction entirely upside down. Every little thing you do is a broadcast; every polar bear you slap on your cover is a little act of infringement. While it seems altruistic enough that we should help each other to not step on one another's toes, where do we stop? Most of the tweets that will be generated as a result of this article are copies of each other. The Internet is, by its very nature, a giant replication factory. While it may have been easy for each of us to take a side for or against SOPA, Viacom CEO Phillipe Dauman was right in telling AllThingsD's Peter Kafka yesterday that the polarization created through the debate may be blinding us to the underlying issue of what kind of copying is fair and what kind wrong.

Here, you can read about what Dauman told Kafka on stage in this blog post. It's been conveniently copied, in its entirety, without permission, from something first published by Mashable.

Google's users stream an average of 101.2 videos per viewer, while Hulu comes in second with 27 streams per viewer, followed by Microsoft (16.3 videos per user) and Viacom (10 videos per user).

Facebook Enters the Top 10

Overall, the numbers for the top online video properties didn't change much since last month. One interesting change, however, is that with 245 million video streams, Facebook is now the tenth most popular video service in the United States. AOL, on the other hand, fell out of the top 10 this month. It is worth noting that Facebook itself argues that its users watch over 2 billion videos per month.

Viacom Plans to Appeal

According to CNET, Viacom intents to appeal this judgement as soon as possible:

"We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court as expressed in its most recent decisions. We intend to seek to have these issues before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as soon as possible.

Viacom Didn't Help Its Own Case

It is worth noting that - in the end - Viacom probably did not help its own case by secretly uploading its own videos to YouTube while still complaining about the face that YouTube hosted these videos. Often, Viacom even "roughed up" these videos to make them look stolen, which YouTube's chief counsel Zahavah Levine noted earlier this year.

In this lawsuit, Viacom is seeking more than $1 billion in damages because of alleged copyright violations on YouTube.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that this ruling is in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 (VPAA), which forbids the disclosure of personally identifiable rental data without a consumer's consent. The EFF argues that because some users on YouTube used the full names as login names, the VPAA applies to YouTube.

Mark Cuban also has an interesting take on this story. He argues that the data Google now has to release might show that Google actively removes pornographic content from YouTube, which would then lead Google to lose its DMCA protection.

For a lot of users, the question is going to be what Viacom will do with all this data . Are they planning to sue individual users as well as Google? To substantiate its claims against Google, Viacom doesn't really need to be able to identify individual users.

Update: For now, it seems that Viacom is restricted to using the data solely to prove its copyright claims.

Viacom, Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate announced a joint venture to create a new premium TV channel and VOD service, which will be rolled out in the fall of 2009. The project will include a strong online component, according to Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman: “It will also meet the needs of varying distributors and take advantage of online distribution…innovative both in presenting the content and in distributing it.”

A new report surfaced this week on Sony's forthcoming movie download service for the PlayStation 3. Not much is yet known, except that negotiations with Hollywood studios are taking place — no word on pricing or if the movies and TV shows are for rent or purchase. One tantalizing tidbit, however, is being floated about: “Unlike closed networks such as Apple’s, Sony plans to embrace open standards that would make its offering compatible with a range of computers and hand-held devices, including the PlayStation Portable,” according to the LA Times.

Lastly, Motorola is rumored to be planning movie download service for its mobile devices. This is from a company that reported a $1.2 billion operating loss last year, and is considering splitting off or selling its handset division. Our advice: Worry about getting cool new phones on the market to compete with Nokia, Apple, Samsung, LG, and the highly-anticipated Google-powered Android phones. Otherwise, Motorola has bigger problems than the latest Hollywood releases.