Tweet Coca-Cola’s superbowl ad plans include social media. Is Bloomberg gearing up a new dashboard site initiative that will take on Washington, D.C.-based dailies such as Politico and The Hill? Brad Smith, General Counsel of Microsoft, is advocating for privacy legislation for cloud computing, while Chinese media prominently displays Bill Gates’s recent statement, responding to …
Monthly Archive: January 2010
Jan 28
More Bad News for Big Online Music Publishers
Tweet In addition to the other problems music publishers have faced in the past few years, we can now add the possibility of civil liability for violations of US and state antitrust laws. That was the holding in a recent Second Circuit case reinstating a lawsuit that had been dismissed in 2008. In Starr v. Sony BMG Music Entertainment, a group of online music buyers sued …
Jan 27
A New Tag for Online Ads?
Tweet Stephanie Clifford reports in today’s The New York Times on an interesting development in the online privacy wars. According to the article, several major advertisers are considering appending a stylized ”i” icon to their online ads that rely on consumer online behavioral data. The initiative would begin this summer. The icon was developed by the Future of Privacy Forum. A consumer …
Jan 25
News Bits
Tweet The Washington Post reports that some independent film players at the Sundance Film Festival are backing alternative distribution methods (such as video on demand via cable or Internet) as an alternative to traditional, theater-based distribution. Brook Barnes of the New York Times weighed in on this topic too, noting that YouTube debuted its long-awaited film rental option ($3.99 …
Jan 21
The e-Book Revolution Begins Now
Tweet Amazon.com announced yesterday that it will pay authors and publishers who use Amazon’s Kindle Digital Text Platform up to 70% of the revenue from each Kindle book Amazon sells, net of delivery costs. For authors and publishers accustomed to royalties in the range of 7 to 15 percent for physical books, this is an …
Jan 21
New Details on the FTC’s Upcoming Privacy Roundtables
Tweet We previously mentioned that the FTC will explore online privacy issues at its next privacy roundtable on January 28th at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. The FTC unveiled the agenda for the roundtable today. The Commission also released more information on its third and final privacy roundtable – in Washington, DC on March 17, 2010. This roundtable will …
Jan 20
Gripe Site Did Not Have to Remove Defamatory Post
Tweet A recent federal court case in Illinois demonstrates just how hard it is for people who are defamed online to remove offending posts. When two individuals posted on four Web sites a variety of unflattering statements about David, Mary, and Lisa Blockowicz, the Blockowicz’s sued the posters for a preliminary injunction on the ground they had been defamed. When the defendants …
Jan 15
FTC to Redouble Online Privacy Efforts
Tweet FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz and David Vladeck, chief of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, recently spoke with editors and reporters of the New York Times about online privacy. In their discussion, available here, both signaled again that they expect the commission to take a more active role in protecting consumer privacy online. Specifically, …
Jan 14
Helping Haiti
Tweet The US State Department Web site says that if you text “HAITI” to “90999″ a donation of $10 will go to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts and your donation will be charged to your cell phone bill. For more on how text message services are being utilized to collect donations for the relief efforts, click here.
Jan 13
Quote of the Day
Tweet “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean …
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