Two Years in Jail for File Sharing
The National Center for State Courts has distributed 50,000 comic books and teachers’ guides to explain how courts work to America’s youth. As the Threat Level blog notes, the plot “reads like the Recording Industry Association of America’s public relations playbook: Download some songs, go to jail and lose your scholarship. Along the way, musicians will file onto the bread lines.”

The educational guide is factually wrong about the application of the law in its own text. Megan, the story’s impoverished orphan protagonist, is visited by the a policeman with a summons to criminal court for downloading songs. This would, in fact, be a civil action, and likely start with a notice delivered by a postman giving her the chance to pay off the RIAA. Her sentence is probation, and community service is where she explains how fortunate she was to have been caught before her actions really hurt others.

Donald Duck Sends Artists to Breadlines
In the Netherlands, downloading music for your personal use is totally legal. But Disney’s Donald Duck magazine warns Dutch youth about the evils of bootlegging tunes and selling them on the street. Huey, Dewey and Louie tell their uncle this would be fair, as “If nobody buys CDs anymore, the record labels and artists will become beggars.”

Fortunately, Donald is caught by his uncle Scrooge McDuck, who is the boss of recording label (how’s that for casting)? Scrooge warns Donald that he’ll have to pay lots of money unless he stops bootlegging. So that’s Disney’s entertaining message for Dutch children: “obey or pay.”

Both Disney and this association of courts have talent and good intent, yet their products are pretty poor. They had a chance to enrich, educate or entertain, and instead they told scary stories that promote a skewed view of our world. The lessons passed on to children shouldn’t be half-thought-through melodramas, or worse, commercial propaganda posing as entertainment. Both organizations could do better, and perhaps communicate a more positive message about intellectual property.

The USPTO has granted Microsoft a patent for a “method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments.” That would be the page up function. Specifically, it’s for a function that moves your view exactly one page, rather than one screen.

Of late, Microsoft has been more prolific in producing press releases and security fixes than real innovation. Its answers to Craigslist, Google search, Flash, and SalesForce are “me too” products that fail to measure up to their competitors. Microsoft’s efforts to convince the market that the Vista operating system isn’t a complete train wreck show just how much the market leader has weakened.

This is part of a larger $300 million effort to rebrand Microsoft as cool, or at least hip. The problem, of course, is that when nine out of ten kids in the class use the same operating system, it’s more likely that the one hold-out is cool or hip, rather than the vast majority.

Leading this new charge for brand invigoration is Jerry Seinfeld. One critic asked, “What, was Michael Bolton not available?” Ad Week agrees that Seinfeld, the funnyman from the ’90s, was a funny choice. Doubts about Seinfeld aside, what ails Microsoft isn’t that it has a brand problem or, as Ad Week suggests, that they’ve changed agencies too frequently.

Microsoft is slowly losing its central position in communications and information technology. There’s only so much more value Microsoft can create at the OS level, and search companies, social networks, media, Adobe, Apple, and service carriers are all more expert and nimble at innovating in their niches. And most of these competitors are not restrained by regulators from making acquisitions which would substantially increase their capacities.

Though Microsoft can innovate at its edges, its core is increasingly hemmed in and distrusted by customers who are eager for real options to its operating system. Microsoft is crossing a new kind of chasm in tech marketing as it moves from “hip” to “venerable.”

In tech years, Jerry Seinfeld is venerable. He may be just the right choice after all.

Public Servant….Or Satan?
The idea that Obama is the devil has been kicking around among talk-radio callers for a few months. Saturday Night Live performer Victoria Jackson voiced her concern that Obama is the Anti-Christ on her blog:

“I don’t want a political label, but Obama bears traits that resemble the anti-Christ and I’m scared to death that uneducated people will ignorantly vote him into office. My mom likes him because his children are well dressed!” Though she’s funny, the post was serious.

This Obama-as-Satan idea has caught on; the seventh most popular search term paired with “Obama” is in fact “anti-Christ.” Bill Tancer of Hitwise posts analysis of this trend and CNN has aired a segment on how this idea may have been promoted by the McCain campaign using the Internet.

Is the McCain Campaign Literally Demonizing Obama?
The McCain campaign produced a web-only ad called “The One” which sure seems designed to nurture these concerns. CNN devoted three-and-a-half minutes to the ad, and how it draws on fundamentalist imagery from the “Left Behind” series. The McCain campaign says the ad was just in fun, just as the Obama “O” with devil horns coffee mug is here.

I asked a notoriously snarky conservative friend if he’s ever worried about the junior Senator from Illinois being, well, evil incarnate. He laughed it off saying “Obama might wear Prada, but that doesn’t make him the devil; at worst he’s an empty suit.” And so the side show that passes for politics continues.

As state real estate and income tax collections head downward, tax collectors have turned their gaze toward online commerce. At the same time, a few states are emerging as havens from taxation.

New York Goes After Affiliate Marketers with the Amazon Tax
New York implemented the so-called Amazon tax. It seeks to change the common interpretation of online tax law, which holds that states don’t have jurisdiction to force sites to collect taxes unless the site has a sufficient presence, or nexus, such as offices or employees, in the taxing jurisdiction.

The New York legislature voted that companies running affiliate marketing programs should be considered as doing business in the jurisdications affiliate websites are operated from. This idea of affiliate liability stretches though issues such as online tax and liablity for trademark infringement by affiliates. Amazon and others are in court fighting this, but New York’s actions have forced many e-commerce sites to start collecting taxes.

Taxing Music Downloads: The iTax
Five states have already levied iTaxes to tax downloads: Nebraska, Tennessee, Indiana, South Dakota, and Utah. Eight states in all have proposed such taxes this year, while others, such as my home state, Massachusetts, are considering this as one way to overcome revenue shortfalls. This failed in California, but expect a second attempt at taxing iTunes later this year.

Of course, like New York’s online taxes, the problem lies in compelling out-of-state websites to collect taxes for the state or municipality.

Continued

Early this year I described how President Bush gutted the committee responsible for protecting citizens’ civil rights and privacy within the administration’s anti-terrorism programs. The congressionally mandated committee had become an “open joke,” amending its reports at the request of the administration it was supposed to supervise. So, hearing such criticism, the President simply didn’t appoint new members to the committee. It ceased operations; even its website went away.

This week, the White House announced that James X. Dempsey, the Vice President for Public Policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, will be part of a reconstituted committee. While CDT is not yet a core player in the online policy issue space, his appointment is a significant improvement over the committee’s political appointments, which included Senator Ted “Tubes” Stevens. Its nice to see the President thinks enough of privacy that he’ll make sure the next administration gets credible oversight.

Is there any magazine cover Barak Obama isn’t on? Time has had him on its cover seven times this year alone. Perhaps a bigger accomplishment, though, is the candidate making the September/October cover of MIT’s Tech Review. Politics is increasingly driven by online technology, and as this blog often notes, the Web is increasingly defined by law and policy.

The article features Obama’s online strategy dream team, which includes Howard Dean’s online guru Joe Trippi; Stanford Law Professor and political change agent Lawrence Lessig; and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes. The article provides a glimpse of how social networkers are converted into volunteers with a mission.

The technical acumen of Obama’s campaign extends into its policies. His technology policy agenda includes ambitious goals, such as establishing a federal CTO, increased privacy, data security and access to government deliberations through rich media. In fact, another of his dream team, spreadsheet inventor and Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor, provides Tech Review with an article on the need for a federal CTO.

Meanwhile, Senator McCain’s technology plan has been viewed as long on non-technical economic doctrine, and has been described as so thin on specifics as to seem to have received only back-of-the-hand treatment.

Valuing brands is the alchemy of advanced financial theory, but now one company is valuing domains—and you can take it to the bank.

Thirty-three-year-old Rick Latona and his partner, attorney Matt Collins, may be the first ever digital pawnbrokers. Latona, in fact, was a real-world pawnbroker who now owns 11,000 domains.

The guys loan up to $100,000 for domains, for which they become the registrant of record while clients keep their DNS records, so their site is unaffected. Even cooler, they have partnered with domain appraisers to automatically extend the full value of appraisals as pawn loans.

Considering the tightness of capital markets, this novel venture really does stand out in its boldness and ingenuity. Perhaps your next new domain will be from a pawn shop. Lets just hope its not UsefulArts.

A 23-year-old man who worked at a church in Wabash, Indiana, has been charged with felony stalking and misdemeanor harrassment.

MSNBC all but convicts him in its coverage, and complains that because he hasn’t been charged with a sexual crime, his Internet use will not be restricted. Bad journalism aside, when he appears in court to answer these charges on August 20th, there’s a good chance the charges will be tossed from court.

The man, who will undoubetedly soon to be named, used the identities of two women from his church to set up fake Facebook profiles and have online sex with other men while pretending to be the women. This went on for several years, and interestingly was discovered by the women’s pastor, who was researching his parishoners online.  OK, so bad journalism and icky church dynamics aside, there’s still more.

Law professor Susan Brenner notes in her blog CYB3RCRIM3 that this offense really doesn’t seem to be stalking. He impersonated people; he didn’t stalk them. Nor did he harrass, tresspass, or attempt to violate their privacy in any conventional sense. He infact wanted to escape their notice. Brenner wisely suggests that impersonation should be criminalized. Unfortunately, not everything icky is stalking. 

Forecast: lots of state and local anti-impersonation legislation most likely named after the young women involved in this case.

Most of the time, students who go to court are objecting to punishment for stunts such as making fake Facebook profiles about their principal. In this case it is the principal, Anna Draker, who went after offensive students in court.

Benjamin Schreiber and Ryan Todd, two 16-year-old Clark High School students, posted a false MySpace page about her in March 2006. The page was online for about a month before Draker learned of it. She contacted MySpace, who removed the page.

Besides disciplining the students and filing a criminal complaint, she also sought cash and accountability from the students and their parents due to defamation and emotional distress. The court of first hearing ruled that the exaggerated statements were not false assertions of fact, and so were not legally defamation.

The Texas appeals court upheld both the dismissal of the negligence and distress charges. The school’s punishment of the students was never challenged, and the principal’s claims for damages was entirely unsuccessful.

Perhaps because I’d likely have lampooned my high school faculty if the Internet were available to me then, I’m glad that faculty won’t be seeking civil damages for bad behavior. And, for any faculty from Moline High School who may be reading this entry, I’m still sorry for my past transgressions, which really did seem funny at the time.

Judge George O’Toole Jr has lifted the gag order preventing three MIT students from publicly discussing MTBA security flaws. As noted here, the MBTA made the student’s report public in their petition to gain the restraining order in question.

The MBTA, which had earlier denied that security flaws existed, had asked the judge to prevent the students from discussing their findings for five additional months. They also today said that the assessment by MIT students Alessandro Chiesa, R.J. Ryan, and Zack Anderson has persuaded them that the Charlie Card security system is flawed.

This of particular concern since the contract for Charlie Cards was awarded through a no-bid process to a former government employee. Janice Loux, a member of the MBTA’s board of director is on record as having lost confidence in MBTA General Manager, Dan Grabauskas.

The MBTA board is set to discuss an audit in light of security breaches, which included unlocked turnstile controls, unattended control rooms, and keys left in view which could be photographed and copied.