There’s a reason superheroes wear masks. Nobody wants to be perpetually liable for saving the world.  Plus, such heroes would be attacked, lobbied, and ultimately reviled when they can’t be everything to everyone.

This week, Craiglist enjoyed the benefits of not being a censorship hero. The 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Craigslist is not liable for discriminatory housing messages posted in its forums. Judge Amy St. Eve ruled the site serves as an intermediary party, not a publisher. It is therefore protected by the Federal Communications Decency Act.

However, this same week, Network Solutions joined a growing list of Internet hosts censoring their customers’ sites. The company took down a website which simply announced it would distribute an anti-Islam film made by Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders. There had been complaints.

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In December, the World Trade Organization settled a complaint that the US blocked online gambling from Antigua while allowing domestic online gambling. The WTO took the unusual step of allowing the nation the right to violate US copyright protections of software, films, and music. 

Now Antigua and Barbuda say they’re ready to start ignoring US copyright law. However, the WTO limited their violations to just 21 million dollars, and set no mechanism for calculating or governing when “enough is enough.”

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The cable company Comcast is experimenting with a new cable set-top box that uses a camera and recognition techniques to see who is in the room, bring up their “viewer profile,” and tailor ads to them. Although Winston Smith would shudder, the Department of Homeland Security is probably giddy with excitement.

Gerard Kunkel, Senior VP of User Experience at Comcast, describes the system in this NewTeeVee article:

The idea being that if you turn on your cable box, it recognizes you and pulls up shows already in your profile or makes recommendations. If parents are watching TV with their children, for example, parental controls could appear to block certain content from appearing on the screen. Kunkel also said this type of monitoring is the “holy grail” because it could help serve up specifically tailored ads. Yikes.

Kunkel said the system wouldn’t be based on facial recognition, so there wouldn’t be a picture of you on file (we hope). Instead, it would distinguish between different members of your household by recognizing body forms. He stressed that the system is still in the experimental phase, that there hasn’t been consumer testing, and that any rollout “must add value” to the viewing experience beyond serving ads.

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Over the last few months I’ve written about the scale of China’s Golden Shield, also known as the Great Firewall of China. I’ve also posted a link to a site for testing which sites are blocked from several large cities in China. As the web is increasingly used to organize protests, Chinese censorship in advance of the Olympic Games seems inevitable. This spring’s protests in Tibet, and the censorship which accompanied them, is like a preview for this summer.

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At this year’s SXSW Music and Media Conference in Austin, an idea was floated that was supposed to “monetize anarchy” found in the music industry vis-à-vis illegal copying. The idea: a five dollar monthly surcharge on broadband internet service as a royalty for downloading music illegally. This is also known as a “utility model.”

But it isn’t really; it’s a private-industry tax on behalf of a failing industry. It’s like a shopping mall that combats shoplifting in one single store by forcing everybody who enters the mall to pay an entrance fee, just in case they might want to steal from that one store. This is insulting to consumers and a presumption of guilt — and it violates any notion of due process.

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Penn Jillette is the taller, louder half of the magic and comedy act Penn and Teller.  He is also a research fellow at the Cato Institute and has lectured at Oxford and MIT. Somewhere along the path of being a magician, writer of best-selling books, and producer of a film about a single dirty joke, he developed an affinity for IP rights.

But Penn gets steamed when RIAA members suggest that ripping a CD to your iPod should be illegal. Why would anyone suggest ripping a single file is illegal? Just think how much easier that is to prove than the whole “making available” requirement in copyright infringement.

Change in Congressional IP legislation is in the air as Hollywood’s Congressman, Howard Berman, prepares to depart his role as Chair of the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property. However, IP Law visionary Larry Lessig won’t be adding to this wave of change by running for Congress.

Instead he will launch a national Change Congress effort at the National Press Club on Thursday at 1:30 PM EST. If you can’t get to the event in Washington D.C. you can join online for a live webcast at this link: http://lessig08.org/lists/lt.php?id=YxoDV1cOTQweVgQB.

I took a brief poll if Larry should run for Congress. To my, surprise a ton of answers arrived, some from his former students. Over half suggested his talents would be stifled by the Congressional culture, its seniority system, and the demands of fundraising.

Here’s a sampling of the responses I received on this topic:

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You rate restaurants with online reviews. Same with contractors, professors, even blogs. Now a new web services allows the public to rate and comment on the work of uniformed law enforcement officers.  Some sites already provide aggregate data for neighborhoods, but let’s face it, sometimes you may want to discuss the work of a particular officer.

That’s where Rate My Cop comes in. Though no personal information is posted on this site, police departments are understandably concerned. Nobody likes the kind of happy slander that anonymous web communities so easily spawn.  Reputations will certainly be maligned, or for that matter falsely inflated, through such posts. However, isn’t that risk part of free speech generally?

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Where have all the protests gone? Many of the most interesting and successful are making creative use of new online environments. 

• IBM workers gained salary increases through a Second Life protest. 
• Over a million Colombians mobilized through a Facebook group.
• American students built a Virtual Guantánamo detention facility in Second Life.
• China repealed Internet limitations after a virtual mass suicide of online game characters.

Come see some noteworthy online protests and services that are popping up to support the virtual life of real movements. Continued

Large scale spammer Robert Soloway, age 28, whose criminal trial was scheduled to start in a week, is facing a possible 26-year jail sentence after pleading guilty in Seattle on Friday to charges of fraud and tax evasion.

Soloway is set to be sentenced on June 20, 2008.

The indictment included an array of charges:

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