We've noted for a while that just like every other DRM scheme, the AACS copy protection scheme at the heart of both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats accomplishes little more than irritating paying customers. The system got cracked within months of its release, and the studios have been playing a losing game of cat and mouse with hackers ever since. The AACS system is more ambitious than previous copy protection systems in that it attempts to control not just players but also any device connected with the player. If you try to play an AACS-protected disc on an unapproved TV, the player is required to reduce the quality of the video, or refuse to play the video altogether. As a consequence, there are a lot of customers out there who would like to play their legally-purchased movies on their legally-purchased TVs, but whose legally-purchased HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players refuse to cooperate.

Ed Felten notes that the limited functionality of the official players has created a market for software that will allow them to play their movies on "unapproved" hardware. And thanks to the DMCA, such players cannot be legally developed in the United States. So not surprisingly, overseas firms are taking up the slack. One of the leaders is Antigua-based Slysoft, which makes the AnyDVD HD software. It advertises that its software will allow users to "watch movies over a digital display connection, without HDCP compliant graphics card and HDCP compliant display." There's a basic lesson here about the economics of prohibition. As Hollywood develops ever-more-elaborate and restrictive copy protection schemes, those copy-protection schemes come to inconvenience more and more customers. That, in turn, creates a larger market for circumvention software, prompting software companies to invest more in developing more powerful and user-friendly tools for removing copy protection. All Hollywood has accomplished, in other words, is providing a small boost to the overseas software industry.

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Earlier this month, we noted the growing trend of patent holders to sue a ton of companies at once, rather than suing a few at a time. There are probably two major reasons for this. First, is that companies that sense they're about to get sued for infringement have been a lot more aggressive in filing for declaratory judgments saying they don't infringe. This matters because then the lawsuit is more likely to take place in a court that the company is comfortable with, rather than where the patent holder wants to file (which is Marshall, Texas). The second, and probably much bigger, reason is that patent holders are scared of both the pending patent reform bill in Congress and all the efforts by the Supreme Court to reel in many of the egregious abuses of the patent system. And, of course, since the latest case on that subject that the Supreme Court is checking out involves whether or not patent holders can shake down companies up and down the supply chain (meaning that it gets licenses for the same item many times over), it's no surprise to see many patent holders filing massive lawsuits of just that nature quickly.

The anonymous Troll Tracker lawyer notes that this past Tuesday alone 126 companies were sued for patent infringement, 113 of those in Marshall. However, as he notes, much of that is due to one patent holder, who sued a massive 91 or 92 companies (Troll Tracker says 91, the Inquirer says 92 and has the list if you want to count). And, of course, the patent holder in question is suing up and down the supply chain to get all of those companies included. As the Troll Tracker notes: "He sued the allegedly infringing manufacturer. And he sued every single one of the manufacturer's customers. And he sued every single one of the manufacturer's customers' retailers." Expect to see more cases along these lines in the coming months, so perhaps we should start keeping a tally to see who wins for the largest single number of companies sued for infringement in a single lawsuit.

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Brad Templeton notes a problem with Facebook that I have also observed: third party applications on the site are often quite annoying. I pretty regularly get messages from friends asking me to sign up for some random Facebook application that says (as Templeton puts it) "Fred Smith wrote something on your pixie wall!" and I have to sign up for the application to find out what Smith said. Most of the time neither Fred Smith's message or the app is that great, and so I end up quickly deleting it and am annoyed at both Fred Smith and the pixie wall application for wasting my time. I'm now at the point where I mostly ignore application requests. It's a bit of a sticky situation for Facebook. On the one hand, the company doesn't want to stifle experimentation by micromanaging the way applications are deployed. On the other hand, if applications make themselves too much of a nuisance, they might degrade the entire Facebook experience.

At a minimum, Facebook should revise its guidelines to make it clear that applications should, as much as possible, allow users to interact with them without formally signing up with the application themselves. Of course, applications have a strong incentive to ignore this advice in the interest of viral growth. One way to help enforce the guidelines would be for Facebook to put a complaint button right next to all application installation requests. The applications that received the most complaints could be investigated by Facebook staff and asked to clean up their act. One problem is that, as Templeton points out, Facebook itself hardly has clean hands on this issue. When you get a message on Facebook, you receive an email without the body of the message in it. Facebook ought to set a good example by switching this default.

It's true that in the short run that would moderately reduce website traffic. But that's a short-sighted way of looking at it. As I pointed out on Wednesday, one of the reasons Google has been so successful is that they almost never degrade the user experience in pursuit of other objectives like revenue maximization. That enhances their brand and increases user loyalty. By the same token, we at Techdirt provide full-text feeds despite the fact that partial feeds would generate more traffic in the short term. In both cases, the focus is on building the long-term value of the product, and sometimes that means giving up some short-term benefits in order to enhance the user experience. If Facebook doesn't learn this lesson, they are vulnerable to a competitor that offers similar functionality and a better user experience.

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TheFunded.com is a popular website here in Silicon Valley for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs alike. The site allows entrepreneurs to post comments and ratings about various VC firms and their partners. Considering how big a role a venture capitalist takes in the life of a startup having more information from those who have dealt with them in the past is tremendously valuable. At the same time, venture capitalists rarely get much feedback on how entrepreneurs feel about them, meaning that some can go on treating entrepreneurs terribly for years -- perhaps without realizing it. TheFunded has helped change that dynamic somewhat, both giving entrepreneurs a way to get more information (and share more information) about the VCs they've dealt with and for VCs themselves to get more feedback. Of course, some of the VCs who are criticized aren't happy about it. Most, however, seem to grudgingly accept the constructive feedback (while also begging their portfolio CEOs to write nice things about them). Earlier this month, the sites previously anonymous founder outed himself in a Wired article, making some wonder what the reaction from the VC community would be.

In at least one case, it appears that the reaction is to reach for the lawyers. As VentureBeat notes, Hercules Technology Growth Capital, which is actually a pretty large venture debt firm (more than venture capital), has sent a cease and desist letter to theFunded after a negative review of Hercules appeared on the site. This seems like a bad idea for a huge number of reasons -- all of which Hercules and its lawyers probably should have realized before sending the C&D. First off, as it seems we have to repeat almost weekly around here, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act very, very clearly states that a site is not liable for content its users post, and any law firm should know that. Second, and more importantly, as you would expect, the Streisand Effect kicks in. Prior to this, not a whole lot of people would see the review of Hercules. Now, however, many, many, many more entrepreneurs will not only see and remember the negative review, they'll see how Hercules responded to it, which may be even more damaging to the firm's reputation.

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Slashdot reports that a pair of computer scientists have figured out how to de-anonymize the "anonymous" data set that Netflix released as part of its million-dollar contest to improve its recommendation algorithm. The researchers found that the set of less-popular movies a user has rated tends to uniquely identify that user. By comparing movie ratings on IMDB with the ratings in the Netflix data set, the researchers were often able to uniquely pair a particular IMDB user with a corresponding Netflix user. And that meant the researcher would instantly have access to all of the user's Netflix ratings, which Netflix users presumably expected to remain private. While movie ratings might seem innocuous at first glance, the authors point out that one's movie ratings can often reveal potentially embarrassing personal details, including a user's views on politics, religion, and homosexuality. This isn't the first time a company has released "anonymous" data regarding its users that turned out not to be so anonymous. Last year, AOL got in a lot of hot water when it released a data set of search queries that turned out to be quite easy to link back to the users conducting the searches. The lesson here is that companies should be very reluctant to release private customer data, even if they believe they have "anonymized" it. Anonymization is surprisingly difficult, and you can never be sure you've done it successfully; it's always possible that someone will find a way to link records back to the people they represent. Wherever possible, companies needing to release data should either aggregate it in a way that avoids revealing information about individuals, or they should carefully limit who has access to the data sets, to avoid having the data sets become publicly available. Simply stripping out the "username" field doesn't cut it.

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I thought we had gone through this a few years ago when Hormel lost a trademark lawsuit against an anti-spam company. Hormel, of course, is the maker of SPAM, the meat-like substance. It's had something of a love-hate affair with the use of the word "spam" for email, originally hating it, but later growing to kind of accept it. However, every once in a while it throws up a random trademark lawsuit. Once again, though, a judge has ruled that Hormel's trademark "does not extend to computer software for filtering spam." One would have thought that was obvious from way back when, and especially after it started losing cases on that point -- but, apparently it just couldn't resist the salty taste of yet another failed lawsuit.

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It's really not all that surprising that when people first discover The Pirate Bay they think that it's responsible for the unauthorized content that people can find through it. However, at some point you would think they would take the time to understand what's really going on and how it's more of a search engine than anything else. Unfortunately, too many people seem to jump right to the "sue them!" stage. That's apparently what's happened with Fred Goldman, the father of Ronald Goldman, the guy who was killed along with O.J. Simpson's ex-wife years ago. Goldman won a civil lawsuit against Simpson, for which Simpson owes him millions of dollars. Since Simpson isn't paying, the court has been turning over various assets to Goldman, including the royalties from the bizarre "If I Did It," book that Simpson wrote. It's that book that's the problem. Apparently (and not surprisingly, for a best seller), someone scanned in the book and put up a torrent of it which can be found via The Pirate Bay. Goldman, of course, is blaming the site rather than whoever actually made it available and suing the Pirate Bay, claiming he's "lost" at least $150,000. That, of course, incorrectly assumes that the people who downloaded the book would have bought it in the first place (most of them wouldn't have) and that none of the people who downloaded it later bought the book to read it in the more convenient book form. No matter. It's more fun to just sue. Goldman tries to bolster his argument by pointing out that The Pirate Bay has big name advertisers on the site, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not the one who offered up the infringing content. Besides, if that's Goldman's criteria, why doesn't Goldman sue Google as well? After all, a simple search on Google shows that you can find the book there as well -- and there are advertisements right next to it as well.

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Three years ago, Google announced an ambitious effort to scan millions of book in order to create a search engine that would do for books what the original Google search engine did for the web. The debate quickly ran into criticism from publishers who claimed the program was an infringement of Google's copyright. Others pointed out that Google's activities were well within the bounds of fair use. The debate has continued on and off ever since. Ars Technica points us to the latest round of this debate. On one side is economist Paul Courant, who was the provost of the University of Michigan when the University became one of Google's first library partners and is now the University's librarian. In his newly created blog, he vigorously defends Michigan's participation in the Google project, pointing out that Google will have the entire seven-million-volume collection digitized within six years, for free, while the competing Open Content Alliance charges "thousands of dollars to digitize books at a rate of tens of thousands of volumes a year." The University of Virginia's Siva Vaidhyanathan responds with a number of criticisms of the deal. In addition to copyright concerns, he's got a number of concerns about what Google will do with the digitized books. He worries about whether Google's search results will be fair, whether Google will promptly correct scanning quality problems, and whether Google will do a good enough job of preserving the files over the long term, and so forth.

These are somewhat puzzling concerns to raise at all given that Google has historically been absolutely obsessive about improving the quality of its search results and archiving useful data. But it also ignores a more fundamental point: Michigan, and Google's other library projects, aren't granting Google exclusive access to anything. Under the terms of the Google-Michigan agreement, Google returns each book after scanning it, and Michigan is free to sign up with other scanning projects, including Google's competitors. It's true that Michigan has agreed not to share the Google-created digital files with others. But the important point here is that those files wouldn't exist at all if not for the agreement. It would hardly be reasonable to expect Google to spend tens of millions of dollars to create digital files that would immediately be available to Google's competitors.

In short, Google is anything but a monopoly. There are already competing book-scanning efforts under way, and if Google's project is a success we can expect more such efforts to be launched in the future. And because Google isn't a monopoly, it doesn't make sense for universities to treat it like one by trying to micromanage every aspect of the service it ultimately offers. In the unlikely event that Google Book Search turns out to be a lousy product, consumers will punish Google by switching to the competing offerings of Microsoft, Yahoo, or others. It's pointless to try to force Google to produce a high-quality product when its competitors already give it plenty of reasons to do so.

Vaidhyanathan also characterizes the Michigan scanning program as "massive corporate welfare," but this, again, doesn't make a lot of sense. The vast majority of the books Google is scanning spend most of their time sitting on shelves unread. In principle, Google is no different from any other library patron: it checks out books, reads them, and returns them. The only difference is that it's doing it on a much larger scale than a normal library patron would. But there's no evidence that Michigan has been playing favorites. If another company approaches Michigan seeking to scan its books on the same terms, and is turned down, then people would have strong grounds for criticism. But that doesn't appear to have happened. Google's just made the best offer so far. The "corporate welfare" label just doesn't fit.

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If you look into the history of innovation, you realize that it's all built on the works of those who came before. The single biggest key to innovation is to try to do something better than what's already been done. There's a great book by Robert Friedel that highlights this called A Culture of Improvement. This is seen quite a lot in the software world, certainly. In fact, it's quite common for people to try to improve someone else's software, just to make it better. Take, for example, the massive success of Greasemonkey scripts to allow people to improve on others' websites. However, in this age of pervasive misunderstandings about the purpose of intellectual property laws, many people take offense to the idea that someone wants to improve their work, as we've seen in cases where people have tried to build better front-ends for confusingly designed websites. It gets even trickier when it comes to "improvements" that conflict with business models. There are still some people who think that Firefox's AdBlock extension is "stealing," for example. And, remember, that the folks behind Kazaa flipped out about Kazaa Lite, a version of their software, which stripped out all the spyware included with Kazaa. These all seem to fall under the heading of "felony interference with a business model" which is the concept formerly called "competition."

Now a similar case has appeared in China, but with more dire results. There's apparently a very popular instant messaging client called QQ, from a company named Tencent, that has a few annoying characteristics. A computer scientist in China created a modified version called Coral QQ that got rid of some of those problems, including adding some features that Tencent charges for. For doing so, the guy was recently arrested for intellectual property violations. The company has been fighting with him for years, previously having filed and won a copyright infringement case against him (for which he paid the fine). However, as his software kept getting more and more popular, rather than taking it as a message that perhaps the company should improve QQ and get rid of annoying features, Tencent instead filed charges with the police, who arrested the programmer. As the folks at Against Monopoly point out, this is yet another situation where the concept of intellectual property is being used to hold back innovation (and put someone in jail for improving a product).

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Following on the speech given earlier this month by the head of the Associated Press, where it was made clear that the AP and news organizations still think that they can be gatekeepers of news, a bunch of publishers along with the AP are now trying to revise robots.txt so that they can hide content on a more selective level. Now, it is true that robots.txt can be rather broad in its sweep. But it's rather telling that it's the publishers who banded together and are telling search engines what changes are needed, rather than working with the search engines to come up with a reasonable solution. In the meantime, there really are some simple solutions if you don't want content indexed by search engines -- but we've yet to fully understand why publishers are so upset that Google, Yahoo and others are sending them so much traffic in the first place.

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Thanks to a court ruling issued Wednesday [PDF], the Director of National Intelligence now has less than two weeks to turn over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation some 300 pages worth of documents concerning the lobbying efforts of the telecom industry, which is seeking immunity from suits related to its role in extralegal surveillance. (EFF has itself brought just such a lawsuit.) The ruling found that the government has not provided any compelling explanation for its foot-dragging response to EFF's Freedom of Information Act request for the documents, and that "the public interest will be served by expedited release of the requested records" before the passage of legislation that could provide retroactive immunity. Since an industry lobbying to protect itself from potentially costly lawsuits is hardly surprising, the attempt to delay disclosure here actually leaves me more curious than I otherwise might be about the contents of the documents. Less interesting than the mere facts about who spoke with whom may be the rationale for amnesty offered by the telecoms: Since they should prevail on the merits if they acted within the law, it may be instructive to see precisely what they are worried about.

Julian Sanchez is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Julian Sanchez and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Over the summer, we wrote about a lawsuit someone had filed against the RIAA in Oregon, claiming that the RIAA's investigation tactics were illegal, since the firm it used to sniff out unauthorized users, MediaSentry, was not a licensed investigator in Oregon. This seemed like a relatively weak claim (or at least one focused on the letter of the law more than the spirit). However, it appears that argument has caught the attention of Oregon's Attorney General who already is unhappy with the RIAA. You may recall that earlier this month, the Attorney General stood up to the RIAA after it tried to get the University of Oregon to identify students. It was surprising to see the AG get involved in such an issue, but clearly, he believes the RIAA is going to far. The RIAA responded to his filing, opposing the motion, of course. And now the Attorney General has responded, not just about this particular issue, but slamming the RIAA on a number of fronts, suggesting that the RIAA may be in a bit more hot water than it believed. He repeats the argument that the RIAA's investigation techniques are illegal and then goes on to slam the evidence the RIAA has, how it's gathered, how it uses these cases to squeeze money out of unsophisticated people and many other points about these RIAA cases. The response then points out why this is an important matter for the Attorney General to take a stand on and how it would like to get some answers from the RIAA:

"Because Plaintiffs routinely obtain ex parte discovery in their John Doe infringement suits, as they themselves have pointed out, their factual assertions supporting their good cause argument are never challenged by an adverse party and their investigative methods remain free of scrutiny. They often settle their cases quickly before defendants obtain legal representation and begin to conduct discovery.... While the University is not a party to the case, Plaintiffs' subpoena affects the university's rights and obligations. Plaintiffs may be spying on students who use the University's computer system and may be accessing much more than IP addresses. The University seeks the Court's permission to serve the attached interrogatories on Plaintiffs and conduct telephonic depositions of the individuals who investigated the seventeen John Does named in this lawsuit to determine 1) what their investigative practices are and 2) whether they have any additional information with which to identify the John Does."

It looks like the RIAA may have messed with the wrong university in the wrong state.

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It's been an interesting week in the wireless arena. First Verizon Wireless promised to tear down some of its walled garden, then it announced plans to use LTE as its next generation wireless technology... and now the news comes out that Sprint has turned down an offer of a $5 billion offer from SK Telecom and Providence Equity Partners. There were some strings attached, including bringing back Tim Donahue to run Sprint. Donahue was the head of Nextel when Sprint and Nextel merged, but left soon after the merger was done. Personality-wise, people have often noted how Donahue was different than the folks at Sprint, so perhaps it's no surprise that Sprint isn't interested, even as the company is desperately seeking a CEO following the ouster of Gary Forsee.

What's more interesting than the CEO job or the money, however, is the question of what SK Telecom is playing at here. The company has invested heavily in its US MVNO joint venture Helio, which was announced nearly three years ago to great fanfare, but hasn't lived up to the hype (though, it has managed to survive where many MVNOs have collapsed). SK Telecom, like Japan's NTT DoCoMo before it, keeps looking for investment opportunities outside their home countries, but never seem to be able to repeat the successes they've had back home. DoCoMo, you may recall, had a deal with AT&T Wireless that turned into something of a disaster for everyone, so having SK Telecom assisting Sprint is hardly a slam dunk, despite its success back in Korea. SK Telecom seemed to pitch part of the benefit of working with Sprint being its experience with WiMax in South Korea, but so far, that experience is anything but encouraging. It's also worth wondering if such an investment would eventually lead to Sprint taking over Helio to consolidate SK Telecom's focus (alternatively, some might point out that since Helio uses Sprint's network, SK Telecom's investment offer could even be seen as a way to protect Helio's network).

What is clear is that Sprint needs some leadership and some direction, and it needs it quickly. With Verizon Wireless' LTE announcement, the race for next generation wireless technologies got a lot more interesting. While Sprint may have had a pretty big head start, the more it staggers around trying to find a CEO and a plan, the more it cedes to the other players who at least have the appearance of having a comprehensive strategy in place (the reality may not match the PR spin, of course). The SK Telecom deal may have have provided both a leader and some direction, but clearly the company's current board didn't appear thrilled with either. Don't expect this to end here, though. There may be additional attempts by SKT, and it may cause others to wake up and pay attention as well. Sprint may end up with a leader and a strategy thrust upon it, whether it wants it or not.

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For years, Microsoft's software has had the (in some cases, well-deserved) reputation for being rather insecure -- leading many who were concerned about security to look for alternatives. However, a few years back, Bill Gates made it a focus within the company to change that and to make Microsoft's products much more secure, knowing that it was important to buyers. While some may question how successful Microsoft has been, how ironic is it that some are now claiming that Microsoft's focus on security in Vista is what's hurting adoption of the company's new operating system? It turns out that, while security is important to users, it's not so important that it comes at the expense of other things -- like stability and compatibility. In other words, while focusing on security, Microsoft may have dropped the ball on other features that actually are more important in the buying and upgrading decisions. On top of that, it appears that some people (again, reasonably so) are a bit annoyed that Microsoft is now touting "security" as a major feature of Vista -- as the company is basically admitting that it screwed up in previous products, and you should now pay Microsoft to upgrade away from its own crappy security. Not exactly a strong selling point.

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As Slate's Dahlia Lithwick aptly observes, the largely neglected "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007," which passed by an overwhelming margin in the House and will now be taken up by the Senate, seems to have provoked two types of reactions among those who've noticed it: Half think it's a pointless, redundant boondoggle, the other half think it's a first step toward an Orwellian War on Thoughtcrime. The stated purpose of the bill is to try to come up with ways to stop "radicalized thought" from turning into terrorist action -- but that's pretty open ended.

After a cursory read of the bill itself, I tend toward the former interpretation: The law, which would establish a commission to study the causes of "ideologically based violence," evokes MiniLuv less readily than it does Tom Chapin's satirical folk song "A Study's About to Begin." And, indeed, the government has already conducted ample research [PDF] on the psychology and sociology of terrorism. Still, it's not hard to see why civil libertarians get uneasy when the bill's sponsor, California Democrat Jane Harman, is prone to talk about formulating plans "to intervene before a person crosses that line separating radical views from violent behavior," which, presumably, means "intervening" while the person is still only holding radical views. Nor is it especially comforting to reflect on the bill's "finding" that "The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States," which suggests a mandate to focus on offensive online speech. Precisely because the bill is redundant, it seems more useful to worry about the actual steps law enforcement agencies take in service of "prevention." Depending on the composition of any commission convened under the law, there's a fair chance it will produce, if not a boot stamping on a human face forever, then at least a generous helping of national security FUD.

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Hearing stories about cybersquatters taking domains that are confusingly similar to corporate names is nothing new, but a new lawsuit from Dell shows just how far some firms are taking the practice. Dell has sued a group of registrars claiming that they're really a series of shell companies designed to sit on various squatted domains for free. It's no secret that a common practice among domain squatters is to register a domain and put ads on it for a few days to see if it drives any revenue -- and if it doesn't to return the domain within the grace period. We had always heard of this practice as being called "domain kiting," but Dell refers to it (more aptly) as "domain tasting" in its lawsuit. However, what's interesting here is that they're accusing one company of setting up a long series of shell corporations to keep registering the same domain name over and over again -- getting the benefit of the traffic without ever having to pay for the domain name. For example, Dell notes that one company registered "dellfinacncialservices.com" and used it for 5 days (the limit you can go without paying) before abandoning it. However, as soon as it was abandoned, another firm picked up, used it for 5 days and then abandoned it again, only to see another firm immediately pick it up. Basically, they trace a pretty compelling pattern to suggest that this was a coordinated effort, potentially by a single company.

The other interesting part about the lawsuit is that rather than focusing on standard laws having to do with cybersquatting, Dell has gone a step further and is claiming that registering domain names with the Dell name in them is akin to "counterfeiting." That seems like quite a stretch -- and even the legal expert quoted in the article seems to think it's a long shot for Dell to make that argument. It they win on this argument, then it could spell a lot of trouble for people who happen to own domain names that are similar to the names of large corporations. For many years, we've covered the fight between Nissan (the automaker) and Uzi Nissan, the guy who owns Nissan.com (this story is getting some more attention this week, thanks to a Freakonomics post, but the story itself has dragged on for years). Presumably, if Dell wins their case, then Nissan could turn around and accuse Nissan.com of "counterfeiting" and have a pretty strong precedent to back it up.

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It's almost become a cliche to note the decline of Microsoft as a competitive force in the software industry. True, it's still a large and profitable company, but it's been consistently unsuccessful in its attempts to dominate new markets the way it did in the 1990s. The XBox and Zune are fine products, but they're not market leaders. Neither are its software offerings. Microsoft's mobile OS is getting clobbered by Symbian and faces more stiff competition from Blackberries, iPhones, and soon Google phones. Its online offerings often run in third place behind Google and Yahoo. Internet Explorer is still the leading browser, but competition from Firefox and Safari have brought its market share down from 95 percent in 2004 to 82 percent today. This sure looks to me like a vigorously competitive market.

However, in recent filings, ten states and the District of Columbia argued that Microsoft is still a monopoly facing no serious competition from Google, Mozilla, or other firms. They're seeking to have federal monitoring of Microsoft's business practices under antitrust law extended until 2012. To make their case, they've stuck to the narrow definition of the relevant market they adopted in the 1990s, arguing that Microsoft has a monopoly for "Intel-compatible PC operating systems." I'm not sure that definition made sense in the 1990s, but it certainly doesn't make sense now. Microsoft's smartest competitors haven't attempted to launch a frontal assault on the company's operating system business. Instead, they've focused on beating Microsoft in related markets, including search engines, mobile phones, music players, and consoles. Companies like Apple and Google now enjoy commanding market shares in those markets, and their dominant position in those markets gives them considerable leverage and customer loyalty. If Microsoft forced its customers to choose between Windows or iTunes, or between Windows or Google, a lot of them would choose the latter. There's no longer any serious reason to worry that Microsoft's large Windows market share will allow it to squelch innovation in the technology industry, because Microsoft now faces a lot more competition on a lot more fronts than it did in 1998. The rise of web-based applications has made it far easier for companies to get their products into consumers hands, and the rapidly-growing mobile market gives companies some new platforms to target that aren't controlled by Microsoft. Most of this competition is outside of the "Intel-compatible PC operating system" market, but that definition of the market was always somewhat arbitrary, and it looks ludicrously narrow now.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Kevin Stapp writes in to let us know that Viacom has decided to put every episode of South Park online. The article quotes MTV Networks Chairman and Chief Executive Judy McGrath talking about having TV shows online doesn't hurt their viewership and could actually help: "One does not diminish the other by any stretch of the imagination." This is something that plenty of folks have noticed before, but perhaps something McGrath shouldn't be saying it as her parent company is trying to convince a court that YouTube is costing it money. McGrath's quote probably won't play very well in court.

However, what's even odder is that no one (in the article, at least) seems to recognize that this is simply a case of South Park coming full circle. The only reason that South Park even is a TV show is because of the video short created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone got passed widely around the internet back in 1995 and 1996. Also, once the show launched, it was one of the first TV shows that fans quickly put online and shared, helping promote the popularity of the show. I still remember people passing around links to the first few episodes in order to round up people to get together to watch the newest episodes on TV. And, what happened? You guessed it... Comedy Central flipped out and started threatening all of the sites that were hosting the episodes. Yet here we are, a decade later and its big news that the company has finally (partially) come to its senses?

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We've seen way too many cases where people blame service providers for the actions of their users, despite clear safe harbors found in section 230 of the CDA. The courts have been pretty consistent in throwing these lawsuits out, but it appears the message still hasn't reached some lawyers. Up in Brattleboro, New Hampshire, someone is suing a local citizen journalism site for comments posted by a user that were potentially defamatory. The woman is suing the person who made the comments -- which makes sense -- but also the site that hosted them. This, despite the fact that the comments on the site are unmoderated. This would seem like a clear situation where the site, iBrattleboro, is protected by section 230, but the lawyer handling the case doesn't seem to think so: "I think their defense will be that they don't read prior to publishing, but I'm not sure that will be enough to avoid some degree of liability." That seems like an odd statement as the law is pretty clear: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Plus, there's a wide assortment of precedent cases that all seem to back up very similar situations as being protected.

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YouTube is catching a lot of flack for suspending the account of an Egyptian activist who had captured evidence of police brutality on video and uploaded it to the site. YouTube's "community guidelines" state that "graphic or gratuitous violence is not allowed" on YouTube. Apparently, that includes graphic or gratuitous violence perpetrated by governments against innocent civilians. I have to say I don't understand why YouTube goes to so much trouble to censor "objectionable" content. If the goal is to keep such materials away from children, there are effective ways to do that without censoring the material altogether. Flickr, for example, permits pornographic photographs to be uploaded to its site, but it restricts access to them in various ways that helps prevent children from inadvertently stumbling across them. YouTube should be able to implement a similar system. Instead of deleting objectionable content, it should flag it as objectionable. Objectionable content might not show up on the home page or in the default search results. It might also require clicking through a warning page before viewing it. But it's hard to see what purpose is served by deleting the content entirely. The content will be posted somewhere else, where someone else will derive advertising revenue from it. And in the process, YouTube is inadvertently giving the impression that it is helping oppressive governments squelch criticism of their regimes.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Kevin Stapp writes in to point to the rumor making the rounds that EMI is considering scaling back how much it supports the RIAA and IFPI financially. While this is positioned mainly as a cost-savings move, it could have much larger ramifications. EMI, of course, has actually been shifting slowly away from some of the more troubling positions of the RIAA. It was the first major label to sell DRM-free tracks on iTunes. More importantly, it was recently taken private by a private equity firm, whose bosses don't seem beholden to the old way of doing business, and are willing to rethink the business. For example, when Radiohead began its experiment with "name your own pricing," the CEO of that private equity firm used it as a call to action for the company to start thinking creatively about new ways to distribute music -- rather than trying to diminish its importance as the other record labels did.

If EMI lowers its funding of the RIAA and the IFPI it's basically an (all too late) admission, that the strategies of those two organizations are not helping EMI achieve its long term goals. This shouldn't be surprising, as it's been obvious for nearly a decade now that the RIAA's focus was solely on short-term goals at the expense of any long-term vision. Many people have pointed this out over the years, and people would respond that the RIAA was simply doing what the labels wanted it to do (even if those actions, like pissing off a huge number of fans) was incredibly damaging to the labels' own long-term prospects. EMI pulling back funding shows that even it no longer thinks the RIAA's actions are in its best interests.

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