The Wall Street Journal apparently set journalistic duties aside today, and simply reprinted the Republican National Committee’s gleeful take on Obama’s reversal on a promise to oppose telecom immunity. The Journal’s Marketwatch literally stated, “here’s was the RNC has distributed” and then apparently quoted verbatim the entirety of an RNC statement.

Marketwatch classified this post “news & commentary.” This begs the question: which would this act of non-journalism be? It doesn’t seem like an editorial statement. But what kind of “commentary” is just reprinting a party statement?

The Senate today voted 69-28 to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, terminate the pending lawsuits against them, and to grant new warrantless eavesdropping authority to the President.  Senators Dodd, Feingold, Leahy, Bingaman and Specter offered amendments to strip the immunity provision, or delay it pending legal reviews or investigations.

Glenn Greenwald notes in Salon:

“What is most striking is that when the Congress was controlled by the GOP — when the Senate was run by Bill Frist and the House by Denny Hastert — the Bush administration attempted to have a bill passed very similar to the one that just passed today. But they were unable to do so. The administration had to wait until Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats took over Congress before being able to put a corrupt end to the scandal that began when, in December of 2005…

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We were describing the need to understand video search as a new arena of legal interest. Gotuit Media Inc., has sued Microsoft, claiming Silverlight infringes on three of its patents that involve making movies searchable.

The Gotuit software allows for the insertion of searchable text data into a movie. Silverlight also allows for the insertion of data for the same purpose, which the refer to simply as metadata.

Gotuit is seeking an injunction preventing Microsoft from using their Silverlight technology on an NBC website dedicated for the upcoming 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

If granted, it could certainly put a lot of web developers into overtime. However, it’s likely to force a settlement in a timely manner: something less than 4 weeks, I’d imagine. Xie xie, Gotuit.

Editor’s note: Copyright and trademark cases are being defined by evolving search and video capabilities. Anyone interested in online law and search should follow the evolving ability of search engines to consume multimedia content.

Flash is a wonderful tool for grabbing attention on the web. It can even be used to construct entire web pages that look and operate as desktop applications and are incredibly interactive in nature. However, its Achilles’ heel has always been the fact that content buit in Flash is virtually invisible to search engines. Until now.

Adobe has built a special type of Flash player, explicitly for search engines, which operates like a user, stepping through the interactivity of the embedded Flash object just like a person would. Think of it as a Flashbot. Did I just coin a term?

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