Amid unrest, a hard new look at online anonymity

Some people have undoubtedly forgotten that in the years before Facebook's fast ascent, social media was dominated by anonymity: handles worthy of CB radio, vintage AOL screen names trailed by strings of numbers, LiveJournal IDs bookended with the x's and o's of emo-kid culture. And there was a sense that in this odd and very public new medium, it wasn't safe to use your real, full name.

Thanks to Facebook, and founder Mark Zuckerberg's personal philosophy, that's changed. What Facebook did, with a policy that requires proper names and the initial restriction of access based on proven university or company affiliation, was bring the idea of "real identity" to the mainstream Internet. In general, that's been considered a good thing; but in the wake of widespread antigovernment protests across a number of Middle East and North African countries, the Facebook philosophy is facing a sharp challenge as critics suggest that a real-names-only policy could see pro-democracy activists targeted individually by autocratic governments.

A "digital freedom" nonprofit called Access Now is leading the charge, launching an online petition this week called "Unfriend the Dictators" to encourage Facebook to rethink its policy. An explanation on Access Now's site reads: "Facebook should be congratulated and condemned in one go: They've built a revolutionary platform that's catalyzed the political change sweeping the Middle East and beyond, but Facebook has also become a treasure trove of information for dictators, allowing them to identify and track down those who oppose them."

As the protests in the Middle East move beyond Egypt and Tunisia to the brutal reign of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, who has made threats of serious violence should opposition continue, the question becomes more pressing: Should Facebook bend the rules if it might save lives?

Can Cable Block the Google TV Revolution?

Behind the scenes at the Federal Communications Commission, a quiet war is being waged over the future of television. It isn’t getting as many headlines as net neutrality or the Comcast/NBCU merger, but the debate is nearly as important. It’s about how far Google, Sony, and their allies can take their Google TV system.

Big Cable is trying to set limits on how easy it will be for devices like Google TV to access pay TV content and reassemble it into something that will reconfigure both television and the internet.
In their bid to get the FCC to help Google TV and similar devices, “Sony/Google are asking the Commission to ignore copyright, patent, trademark, contract privity, licensing, and other legal rights and limitations that have been thoroughly documented,” the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) warned last Wednesday.

What is NCTA talking about? The trade association is trying to set limits on how easy it will be for devices like Google TV to access pay TV content and reassemble it into something that will reconfigure both television and the internet.

That’s at the heart of the FCC’s proposal for an AllVid system, which Google very loudly supports. AllVid doesn’t exist yet, but the idea is to mandate an industry-wide gadget that you could plug into your broadband router and connect to your cable TV provider, then watch online video and pay channels through a variety of AllVid-friendly devices. Not surprisingly, Google and Sony love this idea, because it could transform the Google TV from just a neat product into a revolution.

Big cable hates the proposal, because that revolution could leave multi-video program distributors (MVPDs), if not in the dust, at least working in a far more competitive video environment. But the AllVid proposal faces real technical challenges that have yet to be worked out.

MPAA sues Hotfile, battle for cloud begins

According to the MPAA, Hotfile is operated by Florida resident Anton Titov, who was not immediately available for comment.

A growing number of digital-locker services have come under fire lately by copyright owners. Liberty Media Holdings, an adult-film studio, last month also filed a copyright suit against Hotfile. On the music side, EMI, the smallest of the four record labels, is suing MP3tunes.com, a digital locker specializing in the storage of songs.

The cyberlockers are an alternative to BitTorrent file-sharing services and are growing in popularity. With these services, there's no need to download any software. A user logs on to a locker service and watches whatever films or TV shows are stored there.

The MPAA was careful to make the distinction that not all cyberlockers are unlawful. That's important because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor protects Internet service providers as long as they obey some rules. The trade group for the top film studios said Hotfile doesn't come close to qualifying for safe harbor protection.

The service "openly discourages use of its system for personal storage," the MPAA wrote. "Hotfile's business model encourages...users to upload files containing illegal copies of motion pictures and TV shows to its servers and to third-party sites."
According to the MPAA's suit, Hotfile is no free-information advocate. This is straight-up piracy for profit, the trade group said. Hotfile collects revenues by charging a monthly fee.

White House will propose new digital copyright laws

he Obama administration has drafted new proposals to curb Internet piracy and other forms of intellectual property infringement that it says it will send to the U.S. Congress "in the very near future."

It's also applauding a controversial copyright treaty known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, saying it will "aid right-holders and the U.S. government to combat infringement" once it enters into effect.

Those disclosures came from a report released today by Victoria Espinel, whom President Obama selected as the first intellectual property enforcement coordinator and was confirmed by the Senate in December 2009. There's no detail about what the proposed law would include, except that it will be based on a white paper of "legislative proposals to improve intellectual property enforcement," and it's expected to encompass online piracy.

The 92-page report (PDF) reads a lot like a report that could have been prepared by lobbyists for the recording or movie industry: it boasts the combined number of FBI and Homeland Security infringement investigations jumped by a remarkable 40 percent from 2009 to 2010.

Nowhere does the right to make fair use of copyrighted material appear to be mentioned, although in an aside on one page Espinel mentions that the administration wants to protect "legitimate uses of the Internet and... principles of free speech and fair process."