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?).

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.

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…

The Death of Garfield

See also: Garfield As Real Cat

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.

For all the bluster, Barack Obama and Virginia Democrats couldn’t quite round up the expected 50,000 people for Obama’s event at Nissan Pavilion last night, pulling 8,000 to 10,000 instead.  That’s some big nomentum for the Audacity of Hype.

You can smell the North Carolina wildfires up here in Richmond.  The haze is from it too.  I was wondering what I was smelling all the way from Bryan Park to WoB.

Jeff Frederick is the Chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia

Jim Gilmore is the Republican nominee for Senate.

RetroRichmond.com - A new blog from a simply awesome woman who loves retro things!  This site is going to be awesome, I can just feel it!

According to the Guardian, 46% of web users think bloggers should sign on with a code that reflects laws on defamation and intellectual property, while only 32% of bloggers supported it.  More interestingly, only 4% of users opposed while 36% of bloggers thought the idea was bad, bad, bad.