Google must turn over to Viacom ALL user histories for YouTube:

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google’s liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007, seeking more than $1 billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of Viacom’s copyright material. Google argues that the law provides a safe harbor for online services so long as they comply with copyright takedown requests.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling (.pdf) described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.

Not only does this involve Google’s liability but users’ liability for posting or possibly even viewing videos (you think Viacom sees it any different than filesharing?).

I’ve found it interesting how Republican’s are more often then not attacked by the other side for how they approach primaries and ideology.  Often the more Conservative wing is decried as being extremists and the party is called out for being too rigid in what it expects of elected officials.

This is quite interesting to hear, especially in light of attempted Democratic purges of its “moderates” through the years (see Lamont/Lieberman or Byrne/Connelly for examples).  It’s also interesting when you look at voting records by party scores.

In the Senate, 33 Democrats and 1 Independent vote along party lines nearly 94% of the time before you even get to the first Republican on the list.  The bottom 10: ALL Republicans.  17 out of the bottom 20 are Republicans.  (Of note: Lieberman votes with the Dems 86.6% of the time, but that’s not enough for the “progressive” wing of the party, I guess.)

In the House, 153 Democrats and 2 Republicans vote along party lines 97% of the time or more.  Again, Republicans make up the majority of those who are more moderate in their votes.

So which party is the party of moderation and which one is the party that demands officials toe the party line?

CSN: Real Change Happens Off-Line:

Internet activism is individualistic. It’s great for a sense of interconnectedness, but the Internet does not bind individuals in shared struggle the same as the face-to-face activism of the 1960s and ’70s did. It allows us to channel our individual power for good, but it stops there.

This is great for signing a petition to Congress or donating to a cause. But the real challenges in our society – the growing gap between rich and poor, the intransigence of racism and discrimination, the abuses from Iraq to Burma (Myanmar) – won’t politely go away with a few clicks of a mouse. Or even a million.

While the article reads a bit more like a call to action/press release for the sake of Sally Kohn’s Generation Change, her points are valid in that the internet, while creating a sense of connectedness and community, is individualistic at its core, especially in America.  We don’t go to internet cafes or sit around with our computers and work together in the same room.  We sit in our own homes, at our own desks, with no one around, and shout into the wind thinking that it’s going to make a difference.

Real change happens when folks step away from the computers and roll up their sleeves to get work done.  It may not be as easy as signing an online petition or posting a blog, but it sure delivers more results for your efforts.

While I’m intrigued by the idea of living with only 100 things, I don’t think I could do it.  Heck, I have more than 100 books I wouldn’t want to do without, let alone the rest of the crap that clutters my life.

“Stuff starts to overwhelm you,” says Dave Bruno, 37, an online entrepreneur who looked around his San Diego home one day last summer and realized how much his family’s belongings were weighing him down. Thus began what he calls the 100 Thing Challenge. (Apparently, Bruno is so averse to excess he can’t refer to 100 things in the plural.) In a country where clutter has given rise not only to professional organizers but also to professional organizers with their own reality series (TLC’s Clean Sweep), Bruno’s online musings about his slow and steady purge have developed something of a cult following online, inspiring others to launch their own countdown to clutter-free living.

Bruno keeps a running tally on his blog, guynameddave.com of what he has decided to hold on to and what he is preparing to sell or donate. For instance, as of early June, he was down to five dress shirts and one necktie but uncertain about parting with one of his three pairs of jeans. “Are two pairs of jeans enough?!,” he asked in a recent posting.

Media Guerrilla: Social Media Marketing Ain’t Always ‘Cheap’:

I think there’s a tendency in ROI conversations to over indulge in hard numbers sans consideration for all the underlying soft costs of social media projects. And by “soft costs” what I’m really getting at are the *absurdly high* time and attention investments that typically come with these projects and what are the unique shared scars among many a social media practitioner. If you’ve ever administered a blog or a community of sorts, you’ll know what I mean, nuff said.

Let’s Get This Right has gone live and, well, maybe it shouldn’t have. I understand the intention, creating a right answer to MoveOn.org, a virtual hub for Republicans, a place to push certain candidates, etc, etc, yeah, that’s great.

But this is what you start with?

Now I understand this is a palce holder and a new, “dynamic” site is on the way, but, c’mon, do you really go live with this and hope to be taken seriously?

This site could be a treasure trove of information, but first impression leaves me unimpressed. Were I just a casual observer or even a grassroots guy hoping, praying for a proper response and THIS is what I first saw, well, I’d be very disappointed and probably not bookmark the site for future reference.

First impressions are key on the internet. Jumping the gun sets you up for a lot of disappointment. I hope these guys can get something better up sooner rather than later.

UPDATE: Tripp finds an interesting typo on the site.

It appears that a slew of Hillary Clinton supporters’ blogs (which are now more anti-Obama) are seeing themselves tagged as spam by Blogspot. Seems the process is pretty simple and requires just a bit of cut and paste. Enough of these and a blogger can be locked from posting onto their own site until a real live person can review the site and clear it as non-spam.

Sneaky.

As a former Blogger user who hosted via Blogspot, I really find that the service is behind the curve these days. WordPress’s features allow site administrators to really do more with their sites, from usability to tracking spam and dirty IPs from abusive commenters. I can’t say that their Terms Of Service would make it harder for such a lockdown to occur, but this certainly doesn’t make Blogspot very appealing for someone looking to enter the blogging arena.

7/1 UPDATE: The NYT chimes in and includes this tidbit from Google, who owns Blogger and BlogSpot:

On its Web page explaining the “flag” feature, Google says that “it can’t be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on.” On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam. We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.”

A SPCA petition says Richmond Fox affiliate WRLH opted to bulldoze feral cats and kittens instead of letting the SPCA come in and clear them out.  If true, that’s just horrible.

Justin said he was “Justine” and he and Antonio were married as husband and husband.  To be honest, I’m not sure what bothers me more: that they were able to pull this off with no one paying attention or the fact that Antonio is 31 and Justin is only 18.  That kind of age difference would bother me were it a dude and gal.  Creepy…

A lot of folks are having a field day with a video from this year’s PDF where it comes out that “John McCain is aware of the Internet” despite not owning a computer.  To hear the former John Edwards advisor say it, McCain’s lack of hands on use of the Internets puts this country in grave danger.

Does the same apply for her or Barack Obama’s lack of hands on military experience?

The Internet is a fantastic tool and has opened up politics and governing in ways one would have had trouble imagining just ten or more years ago.  Yet to expect everyone to have full intimate knowledge of how every facet of it works (Facebook, Twitter, Google - to use her examples) is to fail to understand how not just politics but the world works.  I seriously doubt that John Edwards or Barack Obama personal Twitter or update their Facebook pages or, heck, even have the means to do so.  That’s what they pay staffers to do.

But to assume or demand that people know every bit of every tool at their disposal, whether virtual or physical (does Barack Obama read every mailing that’s sent out on his campaign’s behalf?) shows more naivete on the part of the speaker than it does on John McCain.

The Death of Garfield

See also: Garfield As Real Cat

Warner Todd Huston blogs over at The Next Right that Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania is full of dirty hippies not only because they offer credit for a “gap year” (when one takes a year off between high school and college) but because some of that credit can be gained by volunteering with the Obama campaign:

So, not only are we failing our children in high school, NOW we are teaching them that they deserve a break from the nothing that is their high school “education”! On top of that we are telling them that working for Obama is good for college credit but not bothering with the Republican side of the aisle. Not too partisan there, eh?

His post is erred on all points.

I’ll start on the gap year as it’s one thing that hits closest to home.  Not everyone goes to college off the bat.  Your’s truly took plenty of time off in order to work in the real world a bit.  I finally finished that degree and while having gotten it years ago might have been nice, I don’t regret the experiences I’ve had through the years or the resume I’ve been able to build and am now able to use to back up my degree.

I am not alone in this.  Nor is Franklin & Marshall alone in recognizing that people sometimes need to take time off or can use such time to build character and do things that they can apply to life.  Many a university offers “life credits” that take into consideration your resume when awarding a degree.

Maybe Mr. Huston thinks many of our fine men and women in the armed forces are wasting their time or being lazy when they decide not to go to college right away.  But I digress.

Secondly, just because the Obama campaign has approached universities about offering internships with the campaign for credit does not reveal a bias in that school.  If they deny the same to McCain, then, yes, there’s a clear bias.  But the majority of internships are not proposed by the university but by organizations who approach the school in search of free labor.  That Obama has done this and not McCain says more about Obama than it does about the university in question.

Both of these points, the very basis of the blog post, are easily refuted by basic research consisting of opening one’s window and shouting a couple simple questions to a passer by or two.

Now, maybe there’s a legitimate argument of liberal bias at universities and colleges in America rooted in Mr. Huston’s reasoning.  I could get behind a well reasoned argument that displays that, hey, could make one of my own while I’m at it.  But when you go so far off the reservation in an effort to make a point you really lose a lot of people and turn some would be allies into skeptics.  You’re seeing conspiracies where they don’t exist, man, and you’re just going to go crazy.  Stick to the facts, fight the good fight, that’s how you’ll win.

Doug over at Below the Beltway has a good roundup of what’s really going on with the Associated Press’s “attack” on blogs and fair use.

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