Court decision on Righthaven/Stephens Media assault on Fair Use...

Just for the sake of clarity in case the following news release didn't get any coverage in several local newspapers owned by the Stephens family. From the EFFector newsletter of 3/19/12:

Court Declares Newspaper Excerpt on Online Forum is a Non-Infringing Fair Use

The federal district court in Nevada has issued a declaratory judgment that makes is harder for copyright holders to file lawsuits over excerpts of material and burden online forums and their users with nuisance lawsuits. The judgment -- part of the lawsuit avalanche started by copyright troll Righthaven -- found that Democratic Underground did not infringe the copyright in a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper article when a user of the online political forum posted a five-sentence excerpt with a link back to the newspaper's website.

Please click the underlined headline link (above) if you'd like to read the entire article.

What I really hate about this is the overall climate and those portions of existing laws that almost encourages publishers of all forms of media and attorneys to work together in similar efforts to threaten ordinary consumers in blatant attempts to recover outrageous fees for minor violations or in some cases, no violation at all. I guess the prospect of "money for nothin'" lured the Stephen Media folks into this mess, but such cases of deliberate fraud can only increase the disrespect for the law and give consumers a false sense of justification to disregard copyright law entirely.

This is another case where the press and other media companies have failed their readers or viewers and the public at large. Such copyright (and patent) trolls are another reason I renew my EFF membership each and every year!

Beware of Facebook's privacy policy

Just got an email from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) expressing concerns about Facebook's decision to make all online activity on Facebook "social by default." What that means is, "All of your personal information, and all of your online activity, automatically shared by Facebook with anyone, anytime it wants to, without your permission."

EFF has published analyses of how the various Facebook changes affected your private information, including a video teaching you how to make your data private again, a translation of Facebook's jargon, and a guide to Facebook "Connections." The following four articles are recommended if you have any concerns or questions about Facebook's most recent changes: 

Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline: How Facebook's privacy polices have changed from 2005 to April 2010.  

How to Opt Out of Facebook’s Instant Personalization: Step-by-step directions (and new video) on how to navigate Facebook's more complicated privacy settings to protect yourself from all the various "Instant Personalizations."

A Handy Facebook-to-English Translator: In a world where "the default is social," plain English terms like "public information," "visibility," or "connections" do not always mean the same thing this week that they meant two weeks ago. Do you really want your "Likes" and so much of your other personal information on Facebook to be public?

Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections: "Connections" is such an innocent-sounding word. The blog post explains how connections allows your personal information to be shared with far more people than ever before, including people you don't know, regardless of whether you want them to.

Leave it to free enterprise. I'm not sure the FBI, CIA or NSA could have build a better system for sharing your newly "public information." I dropped out of Facebook months ago and while I deleted my Facebook account, nothing on Facebook really disappears.  I've had two well-meaning individuals want to share information from a YouTube account that I've never intentionally made public because it has NO video stored there. I haven't used it yet!. How did they find out I had a YouTube account? They're both on Facebook and apparently YouTube and Facebook now are "plugins" exchanging info with all the other corporate and government plugins. How many more reciprocal plugin accounts are being shared without my knowledge? How many of your other accounts are being shared? 

Anyway, that's why I've always paid my dues to EFF every year. To find out more about the Electronic Frontier Foundation and all the things they do, visit: http://www.eff.org/

Update: As I was writing this post, I discovered that Today@PCWorld has added a post, "New Facebook Social Features Secretly Add Apps to Your Profile," which reports that Facebook is now adding Facebook apps to user profiles without the user's knowledge or permission. 

If you visit certain sites while logged in to Facebook, an app for those sites will be quietly added to your Facebook profile. You don't have to  have a Facebook window open, you don't need to signed in to these sites for the apps to appear, and there doesn't appear to be an option to opt-out anywhere in Facebook's byzantine privacy settings.

Software added to our computers without our permission used to be called spyware or malware. Facebook now says that secretly adding the stealth apps is a bug, and apps are no longer being added, "however any unwanted applications that were previously added will still need to be removed manually."

Apparently EFF and 14 other consumer protection groups have launched a formal complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission. If Facebook's management cannot grow up and clean up their act, it may be time for the FTC or other adults to intervene. There's a reason that more corporate and government networks are already blocking Facebook and as a result of Facebook's lack of discipline, poor record on user privacy and now lack of rigorous software testing. It's about time!