Facebook, Twitter, eBay & Other Big Internet Companies Come Out Against SOPA

from the good-for-them dept

While Google has been pretty vocal about its complaints concerning PROTECT IP and SOPA, and Yahoo, LinkedIn and Zynga have expressed concerns elsewhere, the silence of large companies like Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Mozilla and AOL had been unfortunate. That appears to be changing. As a group, they have now all sent a letter to the key sponsors of both bills, arguing that the approach here is the exact wrong approach, and will do significant damage to the parts of the economy that are innovating and creating jobs today:

We are very concerned that the bills as written would seriously undermine the effective mechanism Congress enacted in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to provide a safe harbor for Internet companies that act in good faith to remove infringing content from their sites. Since their enactment in 1998, the DMCA's safe harbor provisions for online service providers have been a cornerstone of the U.S. Internet and technology industry's growth and success. While we work together to find additional ways to target foreign "rogue" sites, we should not jeopardize a foundational structure that has worked for content owners and Internet companies alike and provides certainty to innovators with new ideas for how people create, find, discuss, and share information lawfully online.

We are proud to be a part of an industry that has been crucial to U.S. economic growth and job creation. A recent McKinsey Global Institute report found that the Internet accounts for 3.4% of GDP in the 13 countries that McKinsey studied, and, in the U.S., the Internet's contribution to GDP is even larger. If Internet consumption and expenditure were a sector, its contribution to GDP would be greater than energy, agriculture, communication, mining, or utilities. In addition, the Internet industry has increased productivity for small and medium-sized businesses by 10%. We urge you not to risk either this success or the tremendous benefits the Internet has brought to hundreds of millions of Americans and people around the world.

Can't wait to see the usual commenters stop by to insist that basically every big company on the internet is only saying this because they're dedicated to infringement. But the real question is: at what point does Congress realize that there's real opposition to this bill from one of the few industries out there that's actually doing well these days?

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, innovation, internet, sopa, tech
Companies: ebay, facebook, google, linkedin, mozilla, twitter, yahoo, zynga

Company Sues Ex-Employee Because He Kept His Personal Twitter Account & Followers

from the tweet-tweet dept

Well, well, well. Look at this. Just about a year ago, we wrote a blog post questioning who "owned" a Twitter account when someone was an employee of a company and had built up a big "personal" Twitter following in that role... but then left the company. The example we used was CNN's Rick Sanchez. That one never hit a legal conflict, but it really was only a matter of time. Venkat Balasubramani alerts us to a case in which the company PhoneDog sued a former employee because he kept his Twitter account. A couple of important points right upfront. This was not "the" PhoneDog Twitter account. The company had its own specific Twitter account. The employee in question, Noah Kravitz, simply named his account "@PhoneDog_Noah", which has become a fairly standard naming pattern among employees of certain companies -- using both the company name and their own name as part of the handle. Also, once Kravitz left PhoneDog, he switched the account to @noahkravitz. PhoneDog still sued, claiming (1) misappropriation of trade secrets, (2) interference with economic advantage; and (3) conversion.

The court ruled on Kravitz' motion to dismiss by rejecting the "interference with economic advantage" claim, but left the other claims to stand for the time being. I have trouble seeing how either the trade secret or the conversion claim stands up at all. What's the trade secret here? Hell, what's "secret" at all? The Twitter account is public. The follower list is public. The only thing not public is the password, and there is some argument over whether or not the password was "adequately safeguarded" as a trade secret. Even if it wasn't, though, is that really a "trade secret?" It's a password! But the court thought that was enough:

PhoneDog has sufficiently described the subject matter of the trade secret with sufficient particularity and has alleged that, despite its demand that Mr. Kravitz relinquish use of the password and Account, he has refused to do so. At this stage, these allegations are sufficient to state a claim. Further, to the extent that Mr. Kravitz has challenged whether the password and Account followers are trade secrets and whether Mr. Kravitz's conduct constitutes misappropriation requires consideration of evidence beyond the scope of the pleading.

The whole thing seems pretty crazy. If you want him to Tweet as the company, give him the company account. If you want to him to Tweet as himself, let him do so. Suing for the account just seems silly and petty.

Filed Under: noah kravitz, ownership, passwords, trade secrets, twitter accounts
Companies: phonedog, twitter

Twitter Beats Patent Troll Who Patented Letting Famous People Interact Online

from the nicely-done dept

Earlier this year, we covered how an operation called VS Technologies -- really a patent lawyer by the name of Dinesh Agarwal, held patent 6,408,309 on a "Method and system for creating an interactive virtual community of famous people." He then sued Twitter over this patent, though we couldn't figure out how Twitter actually infringed on the claims in the patent itself. While we were disappointed, a few weeks back, that the judge didn't dismiss the case pre-trial, it looks like the trial itself was pretty speedy, and the jury wasted little time in agreeing with Twitter that it did not infringe at all. Of course, it might not be over yet, as VS might still try to appeal, but the patent claim here is so weak that it really can't be in his best interests to push forward (not that that's stopped some patent trolls before). Either way, it's good to see Twitter at least stick it out and agree not to settle, as I'm sure there were opportunities to do along the way.

Filed Under: communicating, dinesh ararwal, famous people, patent troll, patents, social networks
Companies: twitter

Judge Refuses To Dismiss Twitter From Patent Lawsuit Concerning Patent On Interacting With Famous People Online

from the bang-head-slowly dept

One of the absolute worst parts of the patent system is that, unlike many other legal issues, it's nearly impossible to easily get a patent claim dismissed. Thanks to rather arcane rules in how fights over patents work out, it almost always has to go trial if the parties don't settle. The patent lawyers love this, of course. It makes them plenty of money. But you would hope that in extremely ridiculous cases, courts would be quick to dump such lawsuits. Earlier this year we wrote about how patent lawyer Dinesh Agarwal had a patent 6,408,309 on a "Method and system for creating an interactive virtual community of famous people." That's not a joke. Even worse, he claimed that Twitter infringed on the patent. Yes, for daring to have a community which some famous people have decided to use... suddenly, that's patent infringement.

Of course, as we noted at the time, the patent didn't seem to cover what Twitter does at all. But why let that stop you from suing? And while Twitter did try to play some games over jurisdictional issues to get the case moved (which failed), this seemed like the type of case that should lead to an early dismissal. Instead, as pointed out by Richard Gailey, the court has rejected Twitter's attempt to get the case dismissed, and now it's moving on towards trial. Of course, the judge is also pressuring Twitter to settle with (read: pay off) the patent holder, which only perpetuates this kind of ridiculousness. Here's hoping that Twitter is willing to fight this.

Filed Under: interaction, patents
Companies: twitter

UK Prime Minister Wants To Ban Suspected Rioters From Facebook & Twitter

from the oh-come-on dept

After initially blaming the Blackberry and suggesting that Blackberry's messaging service be shut down to try to quell the UK riots, it seems that UK politicians are trying to up the level of "bad ideas in reaction to riots" with Prime Minister David Cameron suggesting that those who are suspected of rioting be banned from social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

David Cameron has told parliament that in the wake of this week's riots the government is looking at banning people from using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook if they are thought to be plotting criminal activity.

The prime minister said the government will review whether it is possible to stop suspected rioters spreading online messages, in his opening statement during a Commons debate on Thursday on the widespread civil disorder for which MPs were recalled from their summer recess.

I'm at a loss to see how anyone believes that cutting off communication for people who feel disenfranchised will suddenly make them less interested in rioting. There's this rush by people in charge to think that "if only we could stop them from spreading messages, that will calm them down." That seems likely to be a giant miscalculation. It's not hard to get around any such ban, and instituting such a ban is just likely to piss off the very people they're trying to calm down.

Filed Under: david cameron, free speech, london, pre-crime, riots, social networks, uk
Companies: facebook, rim, twitter

Let Them Tweet Cake

from the the-baroness-does-not-approve dept

Butcherer79 points us to the latest voice in the Twitter-is-poisoning-our-children-or-something chorus: the eminent neurophysiologist Baroness Susan Greenfield, who has come out with a firm yeah-it-totally-is-I-bet stance. If there's a more suitable name for an arrogant Luddite than "Baroness Greenfield" I haven't heard it, and that combined with her overly condescending proclamations makes it hard to take her thoughts on Twitter seriously:

"What concerns me is the banality of so much that goes out on Twitter. Why should someone be interested in what someone else has had for breakfast? ... It reminds me of a small child (saying): 'Look at me Mummy, I'm doing this', 'Look at me Mummy I'm doing that' ... It's almost as if they're in some kind of identity crisis. In a sense it’s keeping the brain in a sort of time warp."

It seems like every time we think the "what you had for breakfast" hydra is slain, it rears another head. Anyone who still thinks such "banality" defines Twitter is clearly making their assessment based on bitter third-hand descriptions passed around the water cooler or, in this case, the House of Lords. The statement is reminiscent of one she made last year after noting that video games and "fast-paced TV shows" were also a factor:

'We know how small babies need constant reassurance that they exist,' she told the Mail yesterday. 'My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.'

That's what the Baroness really takes issue with: the way modern technology is "rewiring" our brains and altering fundamental cognitive patterns. She's not alone, of course: Techdirt recently covered another set of claims about our "rewired" brains, and the media love these stories.

While it is undoubtedly true that our brains adapt to the way we communicate (use of the word "rewire" is misleading at best), the flaw in all these arguments is the assumption that this is somehow bad or even unusual. The entire history of progress has involved changing emphases on various skills. The Baroness made this point extremely well herself, though she seemed to think she was supporting her own position:

'I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf.'

I think from this we can begin to understand her a little better. In her world, digital communication is a distraction from real life—you know, just like supermarkets. One wonders if she avoids working by electric light and shits out the window, too. And you know what? There may well be a valid psychological or perhaps even neurological argument for humans getting back in touch with their roots—but while I'm sure it's lots of fun to entertain those arguments, most of us don't have that luxury.

Of course, Baroness Greenfield is no stranger to exaggeration. She made headlines last September when, in a stunning display of ironically wrongheaded hyperbole, she compared Stephen Hawking to the Taliban for denying the existence of God (don't bother trying to figure out how that makes sense). Meanwhile, her crusade against the-kids-these-days has been going on for years—in 2006 she signed an open letter to the Telegraph on the subject penned by fellow techno-panicker Sue Palmer, and also decided to examine the issue with an all-party group in the House of Lords. It consisted of herself and "three former education secretaries, Baroness Williams, Baroness Shephard and Baroness Morris"—a roster that would sound more encouraging for a fetish party than for a group dedicated to exploring new technologies.

The Baroness is no doubt a skilled neurophysiologist, but she seems to be drawing bold and broad sociological conclusions based more on instinct than evidence. Worse still, she apparently takes it as granted that any changes are bad, as if the dynamic nature of our identity and our relationship with our environment is not the very essence of being alive. I'm getting philosophical, I know, but perhaps a little fresh philosophy is exactly what Baroness Greenfield needs—she seems to be stuck in the past.

Filed Under: baroness susan greenfield, communications, twitter
Companies: twitter

Social Networking Wars 2011: Everyone Cutting Off Everyone Else

from the and-who-loses? dept

It seems that, with the launch of Google+, we may have seen the kickoff of the great social networking war of 2011 -- with the various services trying to hold back and block data.

First off, over the weekend, some folks noticed that Google's real-time search suddenly went dead. At first people thought it was just an error, but it later came out that it was due to the fact that Google's deal with Twitter, wherein Twitter provided Google with a real-time firehose of Twitter data, had ended and had not been renewed. Neither side seems to be explaining much. Both gave vague statements. First Twitter (oddly, many press sources are saying the following statement is from Google, but it's not):

Since October 2009, Twitter has provided Google with the stream of public tweets for incorporation into their real-time search product and other uses. That agreement has now expired. We continue to provide this type of access to Microsoft, Yahoo!, NTT Docomo, Yahoo! Japan and dozens of other smaller developers. And, we work with Google in many other ways.

Then Google's first statement:

Twitter has been a valuable partner for nearly two years, and we remain open to exploring other collaborations in the future.

And then a further statement:

Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2.

While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.

Of course, Google had many other sources in realtime search... and they're all wiped out too. Google has suggested that it will be relaunching it... but with Google+ as the central piece:

Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other realtime data from a variety of sources.

In other words, this looks like a bit of a standoff between two social networks.

And that's not the only one. Another report has come out saying that Facebook is actively blocking methods that let you export your Facebook social graph into Google+. This might not be a huge deal (frankly, I don't want to export my Facebook setup to Google+), but it does suggest another standoff.

None of this is a huge surprise, but it does highlight yet another problem of relying on any proprietary, centralized services. They can change things around, block off data, and limit what people can do. A truly open, distributed solution wouldn't even be able to cut off anyone else or require special deals for data feeds. The real tragedy is that in blocking off access to data in both of these cases, everyone loses by having fewer options and less ability to make use of data. Who knows who's at fault in the first one (or perhaps it's both parties), but all these skirmishes may also call more attention to Google's market power. If it comes out that Google was the one who decided not to re-up, and that it's planning to use Google+ instead of Twitter, you can see how the "Google is a monopoly!" brigade will go nuts.

Filed Under: data, export, google plus, import, realtime search, social networks
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

Twitter Tries To Move Patent Trial By Saying All Twitter Users Agree To Settle Legal Disputes On Twitter's Home Turf

from the nice-try,-but-no dept

It's no secret that patent holders suing for infringement prefer certain venues. And, many tech companies based in the Bay Area like to try to get those cases moved to a local court instead. There's been some efforts to move cases to better locations, but thanks to some tricky games, lawyers can frequently keep the cases where they were filed.

Apparently Twitter thought that it might try some tricky lawyers' games of its own to get one case transferred. The company tried arguing that because the patent holder, Dinesh Agarwal, who was suing them was also a Twitter user, it meant he'd agreed to Twitter's terms of service... which state that all lawsuits against the company must be brought in San Francisco. That's pretty clearly a tortured reading of the Terms of Service, because this lawsuit had nothing, whatsoever, to do with Agarwal's use of the service... and the judge didn't buy it, allowing the case to continue in Virginia, where it was filed. As the judge noted, agreeing to this "would potentially foster satellite litigation in every patent case involving a social networking market participant," basically guaranteeing that such lawsuits could only be brought where social networking companies wanted them to be brought.

Filed Under: jurisdiction, location, patents, terms of service
Companies: twitter

Julie Taymor Blames Twitter For Bad Reviews Of 'Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark'

from the denial-runs-deep dept

If you haven't been following the massive disaster that is the Broadway production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, you've been missing a massive train wreck in slow motion. Julie Taymor, who was the original person behind the effort was fired in March and has finally spoken out about the scathing reviews the show has received all along (apparently, the only reason to go see the show is in the hopes of catching someone get injured). Apparently it's not her fault, the fault of any of the other writers, actors, musicians, etc. No, no. You see, it's all Twitter's fault. Apparently, with people writing bad reviews on Twitter, the producers overreacted:

Breaking her silence about “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the Broadway musical from which she was fired in March, Julie Taymor tacitly criticized her former producers on Saturday afternoon for relying on audience focus groups and said that the rise of Twitter and blogs for instant theater criticism was damaging to shows...

“It’s very scary if people are going more towards that, to have audiences tell you how to make a show,” she said. “Shakespeare would have been appalled. Forget about it. It would be impossible to have these works come out because there’s always something that people don’t like.”

[...]

“Twitter and Facebook and blogging just trump you,” Ms. Taymor said during a moderated discussion at the annual meeting of the Theater Communications Group, an umbrella organization of regional and nonprofit theaters. “It’s very hard to create. It’s incredibly difficult to be under a shot glass and a microscope like that.”

Well, well. It turns out that not only is Taymor not very good at judging the quality of this particular play, but she seems rather ignorant on history as well. Clive Thompson reminds us that the audience in Shakespeare time didn't quietly type their opinion of the plays they were seeing into the internet, they spoke up about it immediately:

Shakespeare's audience was far more boisterous than are patrons of the theatre today. They were loud and hot-tempered and as interested in the happenings off stage as on. One of Shakespeare's contemporaries noted that "you will see such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by the women, such care for their garments that they be not trod on . . . such toying, such smiling, such winking, such manning them home ... that it is a right comedy to mark their behaviour" (Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse, 1579). The nasty hecklers and gangs of riffraff would come from seedy parts in and around London like Tower-hill and Limehouse and Shakespeare made sure to point them out:

These are the youths that thunder at a playhouse,
and fight for bitten apples; that no audience, but
the Tribulation of Tower-hill, or the Limbs of
Limehouse, their dear brothers, are able to endure.
(Henry VIII, 5.4.65-8)

On top of that, Thompson also points out that even audiences for plays in New York City haven't always been so nice, pointing to the famed Astor Place riots that happened as anti-England sentiment in New York City at the time caused audience members to start "loudly voicing their disapproval with booing and hissing" during Shakespeare's plays, leading to the eventual riot:

The most brutal of these eruptions occurred as a result of two rival actors, each of whom was starring in a competing production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Celebrated American actor Edwin Forrest, who patriotically extolled the virtues of the American Dream of self-actualization, employed a performing style that was passionate and visceral. English actor William Charles Macready, on the other hand, had an elitist attitude, a poised stature, and an approach to acting that was more subtle and cerebral. When Macready and Forrest both presented the play on May 7, audience members booed and heckled Macready, then started throwing objects at the stage, and the performance had to stop with almost half of the play unperformed. Macready was ready to go back to England; but as Lawrence W. Levine notes, a letter from individuals including authors Herman Melville and Washington Irving—insisting that Americans would be civilized enough to allow him to perform—convinced him to stay. The result was disastrous: although Macready was able to make it through the full performance at the Astor Place Opera House on May 10, a crowd of working-class men attacked the theatre with the intention of causing severe damage. The rioters backed down only after militia opened fire into the crowd, killing at least 22 and as many as 31 people. As Nigel Cliff notes in The Shakespeare Riots, “Never in the nation’s history had soldiers fired volley after volley at point-blank range into a civilian crowd.” And this infamous event is a disturbing milestone in the lore of the Macbeth curse. Perhaps it is only fitting that the riot resulted from a play that mentions the word "blood" and its variants a whopping 41 times.

It seems like having some fans bitch about a crappy stage production that seemed like a bad idea from the very beginning seems rather tame in comparison, Julie.

Filed Under: julie taymor, reviews, shakespeare, spiderman, theater
Companies: twitter

Twitter Wishes 4.5 Million Osama Bin Laden-Related Tweets Into Their API Cornfield

from the tweets-or-it-didn't-happen dept

Considering Twitter was instrumental in breaking the story of Osama Bin Laden's death, it seems somewhat strange that they would also be instrumental in limiting access to one of the biggest stories of 2011, if not the decade. (Of course, we're barely into this decade so we probably shouldn't be building these "best of" lists quite yet...) At the center of this unfortunate situation is a dataset constructed from public tweets using either "osama" or "bin laden," which was compiled using Twitter's own API.

Shortly after hearing of Bin Laden's unexpected mortal coil shuffling, Rob Domanski, who blogs as The Nerfherder, was informed of an archive of Osama Bin Laden-related tweets, all packaged up in handy XML format for use with DiscoverText software:

The datafiles were samples taken from live feed Twitter imports starting shortly after the announcement that Osama bin Laden’s death.

• Twitter searches for "bin laden" (647,585 documents, 505 MB)
• Twitter searches for "osama" (586,665 documents, 451 MB)

This was all for research purposes, however Twitter quickly shut down the project citing their Terms of Service (TOS) Agreement.

Stuart Shulman of DiscoverText had compiled the documents "using an authorized connection to Twitter via their API" which is apparently a violation of Twitter's API Terms of Service. He received an email from Twitter asking him to remove the datasets:

I'm writing about Twitter data being offered for sale on DiscoverText. Scraping the Twitter service is prohibited by our site Terms of Service, and furthermore, resyndicating data obtained through the Twitter API is prohibited by section I.4.a of our API Terms of Service (http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms).

As such, we request you remove the datasets listed at http://discovertext.com/osamabinladen.aspx and any other datasets containing Tweets offered on your site.

Shulman responded:

Let’s be clear. We have never sold a Tweet. The data collected through the Twitter API and shared through our system is the same publicly available data other users capture with screenshots and share on blogs, Facebook or Twitter itself. Nonetheless, the datasets we have assembled and similar samples are being taken temporarily off the Web site pending a resolution of this issue with Twitter.

Well, "temporarily" has turned into "indefinitely." As of June 1st, Shulman's dataset contained 4.5 million Osama Bin Laden-related tweets, all of which can only be marveled at as a REALLY BIG NUMBER but not shared in any usable fashion thanks to Twitter's complaint.

If it's just a "policy first" decision on Twitter's part, it seems a little short-sighted. This information was (and is) of great interest to people worldwide. Perhaps some sort of warning could have been issued instead of a full takedown, thus allowing Twitter to assert its position on API usage without locking up the dataset. Once the dataset already exists, why block it? It's disheartening to see something with as much potential as Shulman's project getting thrown under the TOS bus.

Filed Under: api, data, information
Companies: twitter