(photo: Evil Erin)

Matt Yglesias analyzes the failure of the progressive block strategy, and chalks it up to progressives not picking issues that centrists care about.

He doesn't note his own role in that failure, vilifying the leader of the progressive block Raul Grijalva as the world's greatest monster unless he backs down. (Our own whip effort started to back Grijalva's efforts, which were already underway in the House when we started in June of 2009.)

I've said many times that it's impossible to expect progressive members of Congress to hold together if they don't have the backing of their natural fiscal constituencies the liberal interest groups and the unions. Without that support, they're left to raise money from PACS and other corporate sources to sufficiently fund their campaigns. That's why they take turns championing progressive bills that ultimately fail so they can pretend they do something, and then vote for bad bills that ultimately pass so someone else can be the failed hero. When Tammy Baldwin votes for one PhRMA-friendly bill after another, progressives can say hey, but she's so good on LGBT issues! Which never actually pass either, but the kabuki keeps activists sufficiently docile and donating to large organizations who fundraise off amping up outrage.

But it's also worthy to note that it's hard for them to withstand the assault of liberal pundits who sneeringly derided their efforts as naive, futile and purist. They should be proudly taking credit for their role in delegitimizing progressive opposition to the bill in liberal intellectual circles, much the same role that the same people played during the Iraq war. After all, it's TNR's stock in trade.

I'll leave it to others to analyze how corporate cash was laundered through foundations to underwrite the efforts of various opinion leaders in the health care debate, but it definitely deserves more scrutiny. . .

Monday, June 1, 2009

Kaiser Family Foundation Launches New Non-Profit Health Policy News Service

Menlo Park, CA In the midst of a major federal health reform debate and the ongoing financial turmoil in the media industry, the Kaiser Family Foundation officially launched Kaiser Health News (KHN) today to provide a new source of in-depth reporting on major health issues. KHN is staffed by experienced health policy journalists and editors, and will feature contributions from a wide array of leading health policy commentators and independent journalists.

[]

At the heart of KHN will be in-depth, explanatory stories about complex health policy issues and major developments in Washington, D.C., and around the country in the health care marketplace and health care delivery system. The news service will cover policy stories like health care reform, developments in major public health coverage programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and complicated ongoing policy challenges like the financing of long-term care, and it will examine the nation's health care system from a consumer perspective. KHN will also provide a synthesis of health policy news coverage through a daily health policy report, original programming from Kaiser's broadcast studio, and regular columns from contributing writers and experts. Jonathan Cohn, senior editor of The New Republic, and Howard Gleckman, senior research associate at the Urban Institute and former senior correspondent at Business Week, will be writing bi-weekly columns. Among others who will contribute occasional columns are: Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Judy Feder of the Center for American Progress, and Mark Pauly of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

The development of Jonathan Gruber's much-vaunted model, which formed the justification for econo-wonks and politicians alike to support the Senate bill's voodoo claims about the excise tax, was originally paid for by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 1999 according to Gruber. It was given a facelift this year courtesy of the Small Business Majority, whose money comes from foundations including the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation. (h/t spanishinquisition)

And recall that Kaiser Permanente was the original sponsor of the Washington Post pay-to-play salons.

You have to wonder if any of that Kaiser cash underwrote other efforts at the Post after the parties fell through.

HCAN's efforts were funded by Atlantic Philanthropies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and George Soros foundations, among others.

So, come on, pundits. Don't let the lameness of progressives in Congress get all the credit for shooting down the public option, rolling back choice, and teeing up constitutional amendments to overturn the health care bill around the country.

Stand proud.

Tags: Blogosphere, Jonathan Gruber, Kaiser Family Foundation, Matt Yglesias, Media, new media, Raul Grijalva, Robert Wood Johnson, The New Republic, TNR, veal pen

I will do a more comprehensive year in review for Cyberlaw generally, but I thought it would be fun to take a close look at how 47 USC 230 fared in 2009. This is the first full calendar year following the Ninth Circuit's en banc Roommates.com opinion, and many of us initially feared that the case would create a huge hole in 230's otherwise solid immunity. As it turns out, those concerns have not come to pass. If anything, 2009 shows us just how strong the immunity remains.

I blogged on a total of 22 cases issued in 2009 that discussed the statute. (I blog on every case I see that substantively discusses 47 USC 230). I blogged on other cases in 2009 that were decided before 2009, such as the Woodhull v. Meinel case from October 2008 and DC v. Harvard-Westlake, a 2007 arbitrator's dismissal that came to light in 2009.

Of the 22 calendar year 2009 cases, I would classify 14 of them (63%) as easy defense wins, frequently on a 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss or state law equivalent. Even many of the remaining 8 cases contained good news for defendants. For example, in Shiamili, the defense inexplicably lost at the district court level but got an easy reversal on appeal. The Stayart court granted Yahoo an easy defense win, although co-defendant Various didn't get the 230 ruling. Similarly, the Barnes case granted the defense an easy 230 win on one theory (negligent undertaking) but denied 230 for a different one (promissory estoppel). The Certain Approval Process case said 230 did not prevent the plaintiff from amending the complaint to add a cause of action, but once added, the court instantly zapped the claim on other grounds.

This leaves four unambiguous 230 defense losses in 2009. The leading 230 defense loss was the Tenth Circuit FTC v. Accusearch case, which held a retailer liable for reselling illicit phone records. The other major 230 defense loss was the NPS v. StubHub case, which held that 230 may not apply to a lawsuit over the alleged illegal ticket scalping by StubHub's sellers. Both of these cases involve the retailing of illegal items, suggesting that 230's boundaries may not reach that far.

The other two defense losses are less consequential. The Project Playlist held that 230 does not preempt state IP law claims, a conclusion that deserves note only because the Ninth Circuit held otherwise in the 2007 ccBill case. I believe that no other courts will follow the Ninth Circuit's rule that 230 preempts state IP laws, making the Project Playlist ruling unsurprising.

In People v. Gourlay, a web host was denied a 230 defense to a criminal prosecution for child molestation- and child pornography-related claims. This case turns mostly on the web host's active role creating the child pornography (as well as the host's molestation of the child actor); with that context, this case may have little influence on other cases. Indeed, the court made clear that web hosts providing standard web hosting services could fully qualify for 230 protection against a state criminal prosecution of child pornography dissemination.

In reverse chronological order, a brief overview of the 230 cases from 2009:

Nemet Chevrolet v. ConsumerAffairs.com (4th Cir. Dec. 29, 2009). One of three federal appellate court 230(c)(1) rulings in 2009 (Barnes and Accusearch are the others). A solid defense win for a consumer review website. The plaintiff's claims that the website contributed to the reviews' development and fabricated reviews were tossed on a 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss.

Shiamili v. Real Estate Group (N.Y. App. Div. Dec. 17, 2009). In an unpublicized January 2009 decision, the trial court denied a website's 230 dismissal request for claims based on user-supplied comments. In December, this error was fixed on appeal despite allegations that the website chooses and administers the user content.

Dart v. Craigslist (N.D. Ill. Oct. 20, 2009). Craigslist got a big win in its ongoing battles with various government agencies over prostitution ads on Craigslist when the court held it wasn't liable for those ads.

Riggs v. MySpace (C.D. Cal. Sept. 17, 2009). A goofy case. The court holds that MySpace's deletion of Riggs' account was protected by 230(c)(1) on the apparent theory that Riggs (the plaintiff) was the third party supplier of the deleted content. This case would make more sense as a 230(c)(2) case.

Finkel v. Facebook (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Sept. 15, 2009). Facebook wasn't liable for the contents of a user's private group even though Facebook placed a copyright notice on the page.

Intellect Art v. Milewski (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Sept. 15, 2009). Ripoff Report wins again.

Stayart v. Yahoo (E.D. Wis. Aug. 28, 2009). An convoluted, and possibly confused, ruling that Yahoo wasn't liable for search results snippets. However, Various was denied 230 because it may have originated the content in question.

Cornelius v. DeLuca (E.D. Mo. Aug. 18, 2009). An online retailer wasn't liable for user-supplied comments despite a conspiracy allegation.

Goddard v. Google (N.D. Cal. July 30, 2009). This is a follow-on ruling to an important December 2008 ruling in this case, which dismissed the plaintiff's complaints but gave the plaintiffs another chance. The December 2008 ruling is one of the most interesting and important decisions interpreting Roommates.com. In the July ruling, the judge again found that 230 insulates Google from liability due to allegedly fraudulent ads run through its network and granted a final dismissal.

Doe II v. MySpace (Cal. App. Ct. June 30, 2009). MySpace isn't liable for users' sexual assaults on other users.

FTC v. Accusearch (10th Cir. June 29, 2009). The second of three federal appellate court rulings on 230(c)(1). The defendant was an online retailer of illegal phone records. The retailer claimed that the phone records came from third party suppliers and therefore 230 immunized the retailer from liability associated with the records. The court echoed the Ninth Circuit's Roommates.com decision, effectively extending that case to the Tenth Circuit, and said that the retailer was responsible for selling the illicit phone records despite 230.

Zango v. Kaspersky (9th Cir. June 25, 2009). This is the only 2009 ruling addressing 47 USC 230(c)(2), the overshadowed and frequently overlooked sibling of 230(c)(1). Despite the rarity of 230(c)(2) cases, this case could be fairly influential. The Ninth Circuit held that 230(c)(2) protected an anti-spyware software vendor's decision to classify software as a threat. If you missed it, you might want to take a look at my presentation slides on 230(c)(2), which distill my deep look at 230(c)(2) this summer.

Gibson v. Craigslist (S.D.N.Y. June 15, 2009). Craigslist isn't liable for physical injury caused by a gun purchased via a Craigslist ad.

Doe IX v. MySpace (E.D. Tex. May 22, 2009). MySpace isn't liable for users' sexual assaults on other users.

Barnes v. Yahoo (9th Cir. May 7, 2009; amended opinion June 22, 2009). The third of three federal appellate court opinions on 230(c)(1). The Ninth Circuit held that 230 preempted a claim against a service provider for negligently delaying the removal of user content (essentially, Zeran redux), but 230 did not preempt a promissory estoppel claim based on promises the service provider made to the person requesting takedown. The initial Ninth Circuit opinion had two other unfortunate digressions: (1) it said that 230 was an affirmative defense that did not support a 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss, and (2) the opinion had ambiguous language implying that 230 preempted only state claims, not federal claims. The amended opinion helpfully eliminated both digressions.

Atlantic Records v. Project Playlist (S.D.N.Y. March 25, 2009). 230 does not preempt a state IP claimin this case, a violation of state copyright law for pre-1972 sound recordings.

Joyner v. Lazzareschi (Cal. App. Ct. March 18, 2009). A message board operator wasn't liable for user posts.

Raggi v. Las Vegas Police (D. Nev. March 10, 2009). A union wasn't liable for messages that union members posted on the union-operated message board.

Certain Approval Programs v. Xcentric Ventures (D. Ariz. March 9, 2009). 230 did not bar amending a complaint to add a new cause of action when the plaintiff also adequately alleged that the Ripoff Report contributed to the creation and development of the content at issue.

People v. Gourlay (Mich. App. Ct. March 3, 2009). This case involves the prosecution of a pornographic web host who also molested the child actor. The web host asserted a 230 defense in trying to overturn the conviction for the charges related to pornography dissemination. Although 230 can preempt state criminal prosecutions, and web hosts are protected by 230 for their ordinary web hosting activities, this web host actively participated in the site's development and therefore lost 230's protection.

NPS v. StubHub (Mass. Super. Ct. Jan. 26, 2009). In a long-running battle between the New England Patriots and season ticketholders who want to resell their tickets via StubHub, StubHub was denied summary judgment on 230 grounds. The court cites Roommates.com in saying that StubHub may have contributed to illegal ticket scalping sufficient to potentially disqualify it for 230 protection.

GW Equity v. Xcentric Ventures (N.D. Tex. Jan. 9, 2009). Ripoff Report is protected by 230 even though it offers pull-down menus and manipulates user-submitted reports.

Nemet Chevrolet Ltd. v. ConsumerAffairs.com, Inc., No. 08-2097 (4th Cir. Dec. 29, 2009)

Introduction

Citing 47 USC 230, today the Fourth Circuit upheld a 12(b)(6) dismissal of defamation and related claims against a consumer review website. This case is noteworthy because the court rejected some common allegations that plaintiffs make to evade 230, so this case may help defendants get 12(b)(6) motions to dismiss more easily.

ConsumerAffairs.com is a consumer review website with a twist: it works in conjunction with a law firm that mines the submitted complaints for potential class action lawsuits. In June 2008, I blogged about the district court's 12(b)(6) dismissal of the case.

Development of the Reviews

Nemet tried two tactics in its complaint to draft around 230. First, it alleged that ConsumerAffairs.com partially developed 20 reviews. Nemet pled:

Upon information and belief, Defendant participated in the preparation of this complaint by soliciting the complaint, steering the complaint into a specific category designed to attract attention by consumer class action lawyers, contacting the consumer to ask questions about the complaint and to help her draft or revise her complaint, and promising the consumer that she could obtain some financial recovery by joining a class action lawsuit. Defendant is therefore responsible, in whole or in part, for developing the substance and content of the false complaint . . . about the Plaintiffs.

These allegations do not survive a 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss.

* the website "structure and design" argument fails, despite Nemet's attempt to invoke Roommates.com, because ConsumerAffairs' structure was not illegal. To me, the court's discussion reinforces that Roommates.com' real holding is If you don't encourage illegal content, or design your website to require users to input illegal content, you will be immune. Chalk this case up as yet another citation of Roommates.com for the defense.

* Asking users questions about their posts does not qualify as development.

* The unsupported assertion that ConsumerAffairs edited posts did not pass the Iqbal standard. Plus, as Zeran indicated, 230 protects editorial decisions, so the allegations needed to assert some editing beyond this protected zone.

Review Fabrication

Second, Nemet alleged that ConsumerAffairs fabricated 8 reviews. Nemet pled:

Because Plaintiffs cannot confirm that the [customer] complaint . . . was even created by a Nemet Motors Customer based on the date, model of car, and first name, Plaintiffs believe that the complaint. . . was fabricated by the Defendant for the purpose of attracting other consumer complaints. By authoring the complaint . . . the Defendant was therefore responsible for the substance and content of the complaint.

This allegation has an obvious (and IMO embarrassing) logic flaw. Even if Nemet can't use its records to validate the facts in a consumer review, ConsumerAffairs.com's fabrication of the post is only one of many possible explanations. The court notes some other possible explanations: "the post could be anonymous, falsified by the consumer, or simply missed by Nemet." (I would also add the possibility of weak recordkeeping by Nemet). To try to get around this logical deficiency, Nemet marshals up some additional allegations:

(1) that Nemet has an excellent professional reputation, (2) none of the consumer complaints at issue have been reported to or acted upon by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, (3) Consumeraffairs.com's sole source of income is advertising and this advertising is tied to its webpage content, and (4) some of the posts on Consumeraffairs.com's website appeared online after their listed creation date

But all of these facts are non-sequiturs; none of them show that ConsumerAffairs fabricated the posts, and post-Iqbal these allegations are not enough to state a claim. The dissent disagreed with this conclusion (about the alleged fabrication) and would have allowed those claims to proceed.

230 as an Immunity Redux

In FN 4, the court notes that the Seventh Circuit questioned if 230(c)(1) was just a definitional section. Citing Zeran, which addressed this issue explicitly, the court says "Of whatever academic interest that distinction may be, our Circuit clearly views the 230 provision as an immunity:" As a result, the court "aim[s] to resolve the question of 230 immunity at the earliest possible stage of the case because that immunity protects websites not only from 'ultimate liability,' but also from 'having to fight costly and protracted legal battles.'" It looks like there could be a brewing catfight between circuits over whether 230(c)(1) is an immunity, an affirmative defense, a definitional section or something else.

Conclusion

Given that this court was bound by the Zeran precedent, it's perhaps not surprising that the court found 230 protection for a consumer review website. Nevertheless, by rejecting another plaintiff's attempt to make hay from Roommates.com and rejecting weakly supported allegations of fabrication, this court gave defendants even more support to fend off claims that are, at their core, based on third party content.

The updated census of Roommates.com citations:

Roommates.com Cited for Defense (11 cases): GW Equity v. Xcentric, Best Western v. Furber, Goddard v. Google (and second ruling) Joyner v. Lazzareschi, Atlantic Records v. Project Playlist, Barnes v. Yahoo (note: although the case was a partial loss for the defendant, the Roommates.com discussion came in the defense-favorable part), Doe IX v. MySpace, Doe II v. MySpace, Dart v. Craigslist, Shiamili v. Real Estate Group, Nemet v. ConsumerAffairs

Roommates.com Cited for Plaintiff (2 cases): NPS v. StubHub, FTC v. Accusearch

This is a blind faith endorsement of the June Fabrics PdaNet for the Motorola Droid on the Verizon network.

PdaNet isn't just for Droid, it will work for most Android phones, but it sure felt good to type since the Verizon Droid has only been out for a couple of days.

I have used PdaNet for over three years on three different devices to tether my phone with laptops and desktop computers. The first phone that I used PdaNet with was a Palm Treo 650 on Verizon's network back in 2006. It was able to connect to my laptop via BlueTooth and USB.

It delivered excellent speeds across their EVDO network as I sat in coffee shops or was speeding down the highway. Yes, I was in the passenger's seat. If you met my wife you would understand my co-pilot lifestyle.

Next was a Treo 700, as the 650 wouldn't stop freezing and rebooting itself. I had even better performance with PdaNet on the 700 but chalk that up to better hardware. I most often chose to the use the USB over BlueTooth for better speeds on the 700.

Most recently, the PdaNet I've been using is on an iPhone. It has worked flawlessly via ad-hoc network with my Mac Book Pro. PdaNet will also work on the iPhone with a Windows computer but only via USB. PdaNet also is available for Windows Mobile and Blackberry phones.

If I had an Android phone in my current stable of mobiles, especially the Verizon Droid, I would be downloading and putting up the 29 bucks to continue the great experience of using a tethering application that is easy to use and reliable. I guess I'm saying that I would stick with the horse that helped me become and even geek while on the go.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Motorola Droid Tethering on Verizon is a post from: TechStartups.com

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

While many people stereotype geeks as only being interested in using the computer all day, the truth is that a geek is actually a person who often contemplates many of the deeper questions of the universe while busy installing the coolest new add-ons to Firefox or tweaking their mobile phone so that they can control it from their desktop. One of the universal debates many geeks have centers around an important question that involves neurobiology and the science of artificial intelligence, and that question is Does a human think faster than a computer?

What a question. Just think of the necessary evidence that one would need to produce in order to prove, or disprove, that statement. In fact, what is the question about really? Is it whether a human brain or a computer is faster, or is it which form of information processing is better? Is it even a fair comparison? Today, I'd like to engage MakeUseOf readers into a debate on this subject by first providing my own take and then asking for yours.

The Question: Does a Human Think Faster Than a Computer?

The question itself represents the fallacy of how people think about computers. When a person uses a computer, if it's slow then it's junk. But there are certainly other factors to consider when examining intelligence what about image recognition, language recognition, multi-tasking capabilities or self-learning and self-healing features?

First, to partially answer the speed question we need to examine data transmission. In the Hartford Examiner, writer Joy Casad answers the question, How fast is a thought by describing the chemical/biological propagation of thinking neurons before getting to the point in the final paragraph these neurons transmit signals at 0.5 milliseconds. That's pretty fast!

In 2006, the fastest reported fiber optic transmission rate was 2.56 terabits a second. Okay, but a bit is nothing more than a zero and a one. Well the current state of the art is the cutting edge subatomic technology created by Stanford researchers representing one bit with 35 electrons, or 35,000,000,000 electrons a millisecond. Due to the fact that axon/neuron electrical transmission depends on the chemical and biological environment it is in, data transmission of one neuron is actually millions of times slower than the fastest electrical transmission rates over copper electrical wire, and even slower compared to fiber optics. Score one for computers.

What About Processing Power?

The question of processing is a tricky one. According to the Top500 list of super computers, the fastest one as of 2009 is the RoadRunner BladeCenter at 12.8 GFlops (floating point operations per second).

A GFlop represents a billion operations per second. Now, you're thinking of that Monday morning in class when your professor asked you to perform a simple calculation and your mind went blank. You're ready to chalk up another point to computers, right? Wrong.

While the transmission of electrical impulses may be slower in the brain than over wire, the processing power of the brain is represented by not one, but thousands of processors backed into one major super computer. One example is the retina, which is sort of like your computer web cam, in that it transmits light (images) to the brain for processing. Except the retina itself has its own processing power, sort of like a subprocessor 100 million neurons packed into a one centimeter by one millimeter space.

This stunning little processor is capable of processing ten images, each of about a million light points, every single second. Not only that, the data isn't transmitted over a single fiber of nerve cells, but over a cable to the brain made up of a million of these fibers, all transmitting bits of data at the same time in parallel. If you multiply the processing power of this volume of neurons by the overall size of the average 1,500 cubic cm human brain, the overall processing power of the brain is about 100 million, million operations per second. For those of you who are trying to do the math with your super computer brain that's over 100,000 times more processing power than today's cutting-edge super computer.

Image and Language Recognition, Learning and Common Sense

If our brains are such super computers, then why do we feel so dense and so slow sometimes? I don't know about you, but I'm horrible at doing calculations in my head. The problem is that people think of computers only in terms of how many calculations it can do per second. The truth is, when it comes to intelligence there's so much more to process than calculations alone. How do you calculate what the tone of someone's voice implies they are really saying? How do you calculate the irony of a joke that, when taken literally, makes no sense at all? This is where the true power of the human brain makes itself known.

Have you ever had a friend who was such a genius that they could perform the most astounding calculations in their head, or they could fathom the most complex equations or problems imaginable yet when faced with the simplest common-sense joke, they just didn't get it? This is the major difference between a human brain and a computer.

Author Gary Marcus writes, in his book on the human mind that, The fundamental difference between computers and the human mind is in the basic organization of memory.

What he means is that a computer organizes information in a logical way. To retrieve data, the computer uses logical storage locations. A human brain, on the other hand, remembers where information is stored based on cues. Those cues are other pieces of information or memories connected to the information you need to retrieve. This means that the human mind can connect an almost unlimited number of concepts in a variety of ways, and then sometimes disconnect or recreate connections based on new information. This allows the human to step outside the boundaries of what has already been learned leading to new art and new inventions that are the trademark of the human race.

There are a lot of other ways the human mind blows computers away it can self repair itself, it can produce chemical reactions within its host body to induce instinctive reactions and protect itself from danger, it can handle every last function required to operate the machine of the human body while simultaneously processing information from outside that body, and most importantly it can continue learning and building new connections within that contextual storage array in ways that seem infinite.

In short, the answer to the question Does a human think faster than a computer? is yes. And it can also do a whole lot more than that.

Geeks out there weigh in with your opinion in the comments section below!

Image Credits: cbowns

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Jammie Thomas-Rasset

Much of Jammie Thomas-Rasset's legal arguments following this summer's $1.92 million Recording Industry Association of America file sharing jury verdict against her don't have much weight or precedent.

Clearly, that a jury in June ordered her to pay $80,000 for each of the 24 music tracks she infringed on Kazaa is outrageous and shocks the conscience and there's no rational relationship between the amount of harm suffered by the recording industry and the award granted.

Thomas-Rasset wass the nation's first sharing defendant to go before a jury. The RIAA has filed more than 30,000 lawsuits targeting individuals, and most have settled out of court.

That said, in their latest court papers, (.pdf) Thomas-Rasset's legal team again is sticking to the argument that the whopping jury award is a due process violation all in a bid perhaps to secure a third trial. (The first ended in a $222,000 judgment against the Minnesota woman, but a mistrial was declared after the judge conceded he gave faulty jury instructions)

Still, it is true that the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower courts have repeatedly reduced lofty jury awards based on so-called due process breached. But those were punitive damages awards, not statutory damages awards.

Those punitive damage reductions, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster, do not apply to Thomas-Rasset's case although Thomas-Rasset's defense team suggests there's always a first.

Punitive damages are the amount a jury awards to punish conduct of an offender. Up until recently, there generally has been no limit. But the Supreme Court has suggested that punitive damages should be limited to about no more than 10 times the amount of actual damages a jury awards.

Higher ratios, the courts have said, are due process breaches because defendants have no notice ahead of time about the lofty financial consequences of their actions.

But the law is crystal clear when it comes to the Copyright Act, the law under which the RIAA sued Thomas-Rasset. Juries can award up to $150,000 per violation. Punitive damages do not fall under the Copyright Act.

One of the only points in Thomas-Rasset's brief that makes a compelling argument is that the Copyright Act, when amended in 1999, didn't conceive of non-commercial cases the RIAA has been bringing the past six years.

The notion that Congress decided that the award of statutory damages in this case was somehow appropriate or tailored to ensure deterrence is a fiction that the plaintiffs would have this court adopt. The Congress that enacted the statutory-damages provision of the Copyright Act could not have had the kinds of illegal but non-commercial music downloading here at issue in mind, defense attorney K.A.D. Camara argues in recent briefs.

It's true: There's no doubt that a $1.92 judgment over $24 worth of music provides the clearest example yet of the abuses made possible by the 1976 Copyright Act, which Congress modified in 1999, at the behest of Hollywood and the recording industry, to carry a maximum penalty for a single infringement of up to $150,000.

That statutory penalty was intended to bankrupt large-scale commercial pirating operations, like organized DVD and CD bootleggers not to put individuals like Thomas-Rasset in debt for the rest of their lives.

Still, the RIAA is crying foul.

After Thomas-Rasset refused to settle out of court, the industry is now demanding that Thomas-Rasset pay up. The RIAA is also seeking U.S. District Judge Michael Davis to issue an injunction barring her from future file sharing.

Plaintiffs' evidence showed that defendant knew what she was doing was wrong, that she did it anyway, and then lied about it for years. Through two trials, defendant still shows no remorse whatsoever for her actions and has made it clear that she has no intention of ever satisfying any portion of the judgment against her, Timothy Reynolds, the RIAA's attorney, wrote (.pdf) Davis.

Judge Davis of Minnesota could rule on the retrial and injunction issue any time.

See Also:

• Jury in RIAA Trial Slaps $2 Million Fine on Jammie Thomas
• Feds Support $1.92 Million RIAA File Sharing Verdict
• Will File-Sharing Case Spawn a Copyright Reform Movement?
• Thomas Seeks New RIAA Trial; Says $1.92 Million Verdict Monstrous
• File Sharing Lawsuits at a Crossroads, After 5 Years of RIAA
• Jury Dings File Sharer $675000, RIAA Prevails Update

It's been a long road to get here. Schoemaker originally filed suit against Farrell last April, when Farrell used Schoemaker's trademarked term Shoemoney in his ad copy a breach of Google's terms of service. The case was interesting not just because of Schoemaker's notoriety, but because Farrell is an employee working out of Google's New York office. Given his position, it was feasible that Farrell had used his access at Google to somehow bypass the system's trademark filters (among other things), though Google denied this and attributed the fault to human error.

Farrell subsequently filed an affadavit stating he didn't know that the term was trademarked and blamed a failure of Google's text filters. In June, Farrell then went on to counter-sue Schoemaker for defamation. Farrell dropped half of the counter-suit a month ago, and soon thereafter approached Schoemaker about a settlement.

Yesterday, Schoemaker posted the following to his blog:

For those that have been following my lawsuit against the Farrells, there have been several developments. A few weeks ago, after originally withdrawing half of their defamation lawsuit against me, the Farrells withdrew the other half and completely abandoned their counter-suit against me. I was then approached about the possibility of accepting a settlement offer in exchange for me dismissing my trademark infringement case against the Farrells. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to write about the nature of the settlement talks or the amount of money that was offered because the settlement offers that were made required confidentiality.
I can say that my lawsuit against the Farrells was settled. This has been a real educational experience for me. I was looking forward to getting my day in court, but I can also say that I am very happy with the final result. There is not a whole lot more I am allowed to discuss.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Daniel Boyd and half-dozen of his alleged recruits in the Raleigh, N.C. area were charged with providing material support to terrorism.

The Justice Department in Washington said Boyd, who is a U.S. citizen, trained in Afghanistan and fought there between 1989 and 1992 before returning to the United States.

Boyd and the other defendants were scheduled to appear in federal court in Raleigh.

A newly unsealed indictment charged that Boyd, also known as 'Saifullah,' encouraged others to engage in jihad.

Boyd allegedly traveled to Israel in 2007 with several of the defendants, hoping to engage in "violent jihad," according to the indictment. The attempt was unsuccessful, though, and the men returned home, officials said.

Boyd was also accused of trying to raise money last year to fund others' travel overseas to fight.

One of the men, Hysen Sharifi, allegedly went to Kosovo to engage in violent jihad, according to the indictment, but it's unclear if he did any actual fighting.

Several of the defendants, including Boyd, were also charged with practicing military tactics on a private property in Caswell, County, N.C. in June and July of this year.

Here's why: Apple has sold 21.17 million iPhones as of the end of Q2 2009 (that doesn't include millions of additional iPhone 3GSs which were launched in June). Launching the AWT on another carrier would make Apple compete against itself. This would immediately cause consumers to have to pick between the AWT and the iPhone which is as bad for Apple's business as it sounds. Consumers are highly unlikely to sign up for two carriers. Launching the AWT on another carrier would also weaken Apple's relationship with AT&T, which isn't something that you want to do when AT&T is home to an estimated 6.4 million iPhones here in the US (as of the end of April 2009). Apple has already tied 6.4+ million people into AT&T at some point for a two-year contract. How likely is it that people will terminate their contracts early and give up their iPhones to go to Verizon for the AWT? Highly unlikely I say. If the AWT launched with Verizon, you bet it wouldn't sell well early on because many of the users (6.4+ million of them!) who love the iPhone are already locked into AT&T; Apple wouldn't sacrifice the opportunity to sell to that huge number of people by launching on another carrier.

What if Apple launched the AWT with cellular data on AT&T? Well I'm sure a few of you out there cringe at that idea, knowing that AT&T's networked is already being stretched to its limits and they haven't even turned on the iPhone 3GS's speedier 7.2Mbps HSDPA. But let's say that the network could handle a bunch of AWTs; it still doesn't make any sense for them to launch with AT&T. Why? Because users are unlikely to pay for two separate data plans (one for the AWT and one for the iPhone), it would be seem redundant and not even remotely cost-effective in this slow economic time.

Of course we need to consider the size of the device. One of the most frequently cited rumors is that Apple has been buying a bunch of 9-10 touchscreens, and these will be used in the AWT. Since Apple doesn't provide any form of cellular data connection to its existing computer line, I don't think it is likely that they will to a device that large any time in the near future. The 13 MacBook is just 3 larger than the AWT is rumored to be. I doubt Apple sees users carrying these devices around in their pockets. It makes a lot of sense to give the iPhone cellular data because it can be easily pocketed and carried on your person. But the AWT certainly doesn't seem to be targeted to that sort of usage.

(continue reading on page 2)

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Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Portable Video

PSP video downloads direct from PSN go live in Japan originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

AdvertisingAge got more details from the company about its research, which pegs the total free media coverage given to Twitter the past month to be worth $48 million. As AdAge points out, that's about half of what Microsoft plans to spend marketing Bing.

Online, Twitter received 2.73 billion impressions, undoubtedly some of them thanks to TechCrunch. Television contributed to 57% of the PR value, newspapers 37% and magazines 5%, according to VMS. As the monitoring company's CEO Peter Wengryn explains, the total coverage may be much higher than what the firm could possibly monitor, since it doesn't take into account mentions in smaller newspapers in the United States and media coverage in the rest of the world.

Either way, it's a LOT of coverage, acknowledges Gary Getto, VP-integrated media intelligence at VMS:

This is huge. It's very, very high. In fact, we looked at online coverage of Twitter vs. Google. Twitter is running significantly higher than Google and I didn't think anything was more popular than Google.

How long will Twitter continue to be the social media darling in the media? Long enough to eventually reach 1 billion users and become the pulse of the planet?

And more importantly, when will it start turning the mountains of attention, traffic and users it is getting into cold, hard cash?

(Image via MaximumPC)

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A recent article by Tim Berners-Lee, Putting Government Data online, has attracted significant interest to the datasets published at the US data.gov website. As Berners-Lee discusses the Semantic Web techniques that can be used to get those data into RDF space (something we are now working on), we would like to share our initial investigation of the contents of these government datasets.

I. Translate dataset into RDF

The catalog of the datasets in data.gov,http://www.data.gov/details/92, is published in CSV format as part of data.gov. We converted it into RDF using simple CSV parsing. We kept the translation minimal: (i) the properties are directly created from thecolumn names; (ii) each table row is mapped to an instance of pmlp:Dataset; (iii) all non-header cells are mapped to a literal - we don't create new URIs at this point. The output of our work is published on Tetherless World website at:

http://data-gov.tw.rpi.edu/raw/92/catalog.rdf

(We are now starting to do more integration work, extracting multiple objects from single tables, linking into the linked open data cloud, etc. and will publish new version when that is done - the purpose of this first work was simply to make the catalog more available to the RDF community)

II. Browse and query the RDF graph

As an example, we can browse the dataset in tabulator, and then use a SPARQL webservice to query the dataset. For example, we use a sparql queryto list datasets published in CSV format:

http://onto.rpi.edu/sw4j/sparql?queryURL=http://data-gov.tw.rpi.edu/sparql/select-csv-dataset.sparql

III. Observations on the RDF graph

Using this service we can answer some basic questions about the data.gov datatsets:

1. How many datasets are published, and how many among them can be easily converted into RDF?

There are 332 datasets which can be partitioned by type: raw data catalog(301); tool catalog (31).

Not all of the datasets have a link to downloadable data because some offer only browseable data via their own websites, Others publish datasets in multiple formats. As of today, the online static files associated with the datasets are distributed as follows: 204 datasets offer a CSV format dump, 10 datasets offer an XML format dump, and 21 datasets offer an XLS format dump.

2. How are the datasets categorized?

3. What are some of the key items in the dataset?

4. What are the sources of the datasets?

The majority of the datasets are published by the EPA, and they contain environmental data partitioned by the states of the US in three individual years. Others come from other govt agencies - the distribution is as follows:

IV. Getting Datasets linked

Although the datasets are not explicily linked, we see a number of opportunities for connecting these datasets to others (and into the Linked Open Data datasets):

• A large percentage of files have some sort of geo-tagging, thus they can be linked to DBpedia or Geo-names (and then presented via Map services).
• Some datasets are subsets of other datasets, e.g. EPA data 2005 Toxics Release Inventory data for the state of Georgia is a subset of 2005 Toxics Release Inventory National data file of all US States and Territories making for easier internal linking of the datasets.
• A number of the datasets contain temporal information, e.g. IRS's Tax Year 1992 Private Foundations Study,Tax Year 2005 Private Foundations Study which provides an opportunity for mashups using timelines and such.

V. Conclusions

We are committed to getting more of the data.gov data online soon (in RDF), and then investigating data integration and knowledge discovery. In order to get our datasets linked to the linked data cloud, we will use SPARQL for extracting entities and our Semantic Mediawiki as a platform to capture the owl:sameAs mappings. Scalable dataset publishing is also challenging as some of these are very large datasets, e.g. 2005-2007 American Community Survey Three-Year PUMS Population File has a 1.1 g zipped csv file. Moreover, some datasets are not directly available in one file but via a web service. Our current plan is to produce RDF documents available for download soon, and to work on bringing more of these datasets into live, SPARQLable forms as we can.

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I have two DirectTV HR21 DVR's. DirecTV, reacting to the new trend of app stores decided to add this to the OS on this device. The feature is in beta, and has been since an update in June. The problem is, the HR21 is not suited to running apps. The screen resolution of its on-screen display is too low, the device is way way too slow and this feature is unusable and I suspect slowing the box down for other things.

It is a sad state of affairs that the device that is driving a 1080P HD display can display moving video in full 1080P, but can't render on-screen displays that look any better than they did 5 years ago.

I love DirectTV, but every day the HR21 and their ilk (the high end of their equipment I may add) gets more and more long in the tooth. I wish DirectTV would focus on new set-top boxes rather than adding an app-store to a device that is not capable of driving any apps that are worth anything.

Stay's main beef with the changes is that no one was notified of these changes (to verify_credentials(), incidentally). Stay further reported that an email response from a Twitter rep stated that the company "assumed (apparently incorrectly) that people were only using this method occasionally."

Sponsor

The change in the API limits the number of username/password verifications to 15 per hour. According to the afore-linked developer wiki, "Because this method can be a vector for a brute force dictionary attack to determine a user's password, it is limited to 15 requests per 60 minute period (starting from your first request)." The wiki language was changed June 29.

Granted, Twitter has had a bit of a media tsunami on its hands lately, but we still must note that no official announcement has been made about the API changes. This seems to be the case with other API changes, as well. For example, earlier this month, API request limits were increased from 100 to 150, as several blogs and end users noted at that time. No official announcement was made; the information was confirmed, as with this most recent change, through an update to the API wiki.

Although the company is usually tight-lipped, do you think developers whose apps and livelihoods rely on the service and the API deserve a dedicated blog? Google Code is a great resource that acknowledges the ecosystem of apps built around that company's APIs.

Even if Twitter can't afford to support developers with resources of a Googlesque stature, we do tend to feel that developers who rely on the API deserve advance warning of certain changes, even ones the company might consider minor. As it stands, app developers are subjected to a string of pleasant surprises followed by sucker punches.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in June 2008, I wrote Hey AP! How About Running A Real News Web Site?, which in the wake of AP making noise about fair use guidelines examined how the organization failed to provide any central article that anyone could point at. A key part of my article:

To get back to the bloggers, let me point out a key problem you have. Your stories appear everywhere, like weeds. Then they die, unlike weeds. Like they disappear after roughly 30 days. This was an issue I pointed out when the Google deal was struck.

Now skip ahead to this past May. In writing Do Newspapers Owe Google Fair Share Fees For Researching Stories?, I said:

Let's consider last week's wonderful story from the AP about how old Japanese maps on Google Earth are causing problems with some in that country. Given that news stories have a tendency to disappear, I'm going to link to the story using its entire headline: Old Japanese maps on Google Earth unveil secrets. Now if the story should move for some reason, as least with the headline, there's a chance of locating it in some new location.

Try to go to that story today, where I linked to it at, and you get a 404 error:

The page you've requested does not exist at this address.

Nice. As Jean commented, you can still find the article over at the Huffington Post. Perhaps HuffPo's deal with the AP allows stories to be up longer than 30 days. Certainly the Seattle Times still has it, also. But the copy over at Yahoo is dead, meaning all that Digg love it had generated is now going to waste.

If people wonder why I might seem so hostile to newspapers screaming about how badly they're being done by Google, bloggers and aggregators, it's stuff like this that does it. This is lunacy. It doesn't engender respect or a believe that the AP or other organizations really understand the world they're operating in.

I linked to the article the AP itself had put out on its own web site. They kill it. Links from Digg that would generate thousands of visits are allowed to die. Duplicate content across the web isn't regulated by the AP itself there's no instructions for publications to block that content from search engines; no thought about consolidating links; no thought about how no one can tell what's the authorative piece that they should link to.

And yet the AP and others yap that they don't get credit enough, that people rip them off, that Google should somehow have supernatural abilities to make up for the mess they contribute to. Please.

But hey, it's all going to be better now. AP proposes new article formatting for the Web from the Associated Press itself tells us of a new standard (write that headline down, so you can find the article in 30 days when it dies). It involves meta tagging articles, which will:

The tag[s] identifying usage rights could allow Web sites that aggregate content to automatically sort articles by copyright terms and let publishers more easily track how their stories are being used, said Srinandan Kasi, AP's general counsel.

If you want to know more about the system, visit the Value Added News site. Don't worry as you're told:

Adding semantic value to your news is not rocket science. It doesn't even require serious plumbing in the depths of your database.

Then scroll down after that intro, and your head will hurt. Like if I use the microformat for Daily News, which Daily News is that? Because there's a number of them out there. The tech specs don't help.

As for the AP already using this, when I looked, I didn't see tags on some selected articles I examined. I certainly didn't see them on AP content being redistributed by AP members. I even wonder if the tags will carry over across the various content management systems out there, once they leap forth from the AP.

But wait, there's more. What about ACAP? That's supposed to be a shining star in the rights management area that AP signed on to ages ago. ACAP, which is being positioned (see also here) to European legislators as part of a solution to protect newspapers and publishers from those evil aggregators.

So now AP is going to use a second system in addition to ACAP? And yet meanwhile fail to follow the most important system, basic SEO?

Sigh. Maybe later I'll ask the AP about it. Maybe they'll even decide that someone from the AP can speak to me, unlike earlier this year. Believe it or not, I'd like to see them succeed. I only wish it were less talk, less smoke-and-mirrors, less we can't unless and more action with what they really can do now, in an action that technically makes sense.

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser.

Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers. That is the combined market share of IE8, IE7, and IE6. Certainly IE8 (the light blue line) has been growing strong since its release last March, capturing 16.7 percent of the market as of July 4. Those strong gains make up for most of the drop in IE7's market share from 49.1 percent in March to 30.1 percent yesterday, indicating that Microsoft is doing a good job of getting existing IE7 users to upgrade at a steady pace. And in mid-June, IE8 finally surpassed IE6, which still stubbornly holds a 7.6 percent share. Add those three up, (IE6+IE7+IE8), however, and IE all together holds only a 54.4 percent market share versus the 65.8 percent combined share in March, 2009.

In just over three months, Internet Explorer has seen its overall market share erode by 11.4 percent. Where did that go? It went to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Nearly 5 percent of that, or about half, went to Firefox 3.0, which currently has 27.6 percent market share. That doesn't count last week's upgrade. See the dotted line just below the light blue IE8 line? That is a combined set of other browsers and appears to include Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome 2.0.

If you look at a 30-day version of that same chart, it shows Safari 4 with 4 percent market share and Chrome with 3 percent market share. It doesn't yet break out Firefox 3.5, but if you assume that makes up the bulk of the remaining dotted line which jumped to nearly pass IE6 in the past week, you can figure out more or less which browsers are taking share from Microsoft. (I've used data from the most recent daily chart in this post, but embedded the monthly chart below which has data as of June 30).

As I said, this is early data from one source. Net Applications, another commonly cited source for browser market share, is currently reviewing its June numbers, but I have a feeling they will show similar trends. (This Wikipedia page shows other browser market share sources, most of them haven't been updated since March). It is difficult to make any firm conclusions at this point, since market share is shifting so rapidly as every major (and minor) browser tries to convince users to upgrade.

But we are in the midst of a major upgrade cycle simultaneously across IE, FireFox, and Safari (with the Chrome wild card thrown in). When all is said and done, we might see a major shake-up in market share and almost definitely will see leadership pass from IE7 to another browser. The question is will that be IE8 or Firefox? Whichever one wins, the good news is that IE6 is finally dying.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Version Market Share

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Gibson v. Craigslist, 2009 WL 1704355 (SDNY June 15, 2009). The CMLP page. The Justia page.

In my lengthy deconstruction of the Barnes v. Yahoo case, I criticized the Ninth Circuit for concluding that 47 USC 230 was an affirmative defense (and thus could not support a 12b6 motion to dismiss) without proper briefing or analysis. First, this was sloppy work by the court. Second, the elimination of a 12b6 possibility for the defendants creates a real risk that defendants will be exposed to expensive and time-consuming discovery to eliminate plainly meritless cases. Yahoo and a group of amici have asked the Ninth Circuit to reconsider this aspect of the ruling, and I hope they do so.

Meanwhile, today's case does a competent job reviewing whether or not 47 USC 230 can support a 12b6 motion to dismiss. Unlike the Ninth Circuit, it actually cites and discusses the numerous cases in the area although, remarkably, it does not cite or address the Barnes v. Yahoo case! The court reaches the sensible positions that (1) 47 USC 230 does support a 12b6 motion, (2) as a result, the plaintiff was not entitled to discovery, and (3) the case should be dismissed. For more discussion on why 47 USC 230 supports a 12b6, see Paul Levy's excellent brief.

Substantively, today's lawsuit is brought by a shooting victim who claims that the shooter bought the gun via Craigslist. The complaint argues that Craigslist had a duty to prevent the sale of guns to future criminals and therefore Craigslist breached the duty. This argument is similar to the Doe v. MySpace cases (1, 2) in which the plaintiffs argued that MySpace had a duty to police its website "premises" to prevent online communications that lead to offline crimes. The plaintiff's argument here fares no better here than it did in the MySpace cases. 47 USC 230 precludes the imposition of liability for any breach of duty by failing to police its users' communications (putting aside the also-relevant inquiry of whether Craigslist could have any duty that would have prevented this offline tragedy). The plaintiff tries to get around 230 by arguing it's just trying to hold Craigslist accountable as a "business" rather than as a speaker or publisher of third party content, but the court rejects this goofy argument as "unpersuasive."

More on the case from Eugene Volokh.

Tonight I managed to get out for my first decent run since racing in the Cabot Trail Relay a few weeks ago. While out pounding the trails for what felt like forever, I was able to catch up on some of my podcast listening. I highly recommend you check out two of the episodes I listened to, from two of my favourite podcasters.

TVO Search Engine

If you're not a regular listener, you may not know that Jesse Brown's excellent podcast recently moved homes - from CBC (their loss) to TVO (their gain). Michael Geist has done a wonderful job recently of drawing attention to plagiarism and bias in a report by the Conference Board of Canada claiming that Canada is a hot-spot for internet piracy (the report has now been recalled by the organization). In his second Search Engine episode in his new TVO home, Jesse interviews Anne Golden, CEO of the Conference Board. It's awkward, it's uncomfortable, and it's fantastic journalism from someone that doesn't let people get away with a template messaged response to questions. Make sure you check it out.

CBC Spark

Nora Young's Spark podcast has long been a favourite of mine. While it has a similar tech focus to other podcasts to which I subscribe, Spark tends to cover stories I might otherwise overlook. In Spark episode 80, Nora interviews Andrea Reimer from Vancouver City Council about Vancouver's plan to open up municipal data (in the same manner also announced by David Miller for the City of Toronto at this year's Mesh Conference). I found the interview immensely refreshing. Coming from a government background, I know that there's often a fear within government of what people will do with information. This often leads to the minimum information necessary being shared with the public. Reimer's take, in contrast to that:

we shouldn't, as policy makers, fear the public knowing what we know when we're making decisions, and in fact by knowing it perhaps we could inform ourselves better maybe they'll think of new creative or throw in more information that we didn't have

I found myself nodding and smiling throughout the interview. Well worth a listen, for a refreshing take on how governments can go about sharing information with the people who are funding its collection. What other podcast episodes have caught your eye (or ear) recently?

Trademark owners with registrations can register their trademarks with Facebook in order to block potentially infringing URLs from being created. Here is a link to the submission page.

We shall see if this actually becomes an issue similar to cybersquatting in domain names, but due to the shortness of time between now and the 13th I'm posting the information here to help get the word out. Please let me know in the comments below what you think of this process and how Facebook has handled it. Personally, it would have been nice for there to have been more notice.

Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Samsung's Pixon 12: a dozen megapixels of cameraphone nonsense in June After failing to show at the Mobile World Congress event in February, Samsung's rumored 12 megapixel cameraphone has finally arrived. Meet the Pixon 12 and its 3.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen with a Sammy promise of fast shutter speeds and quick browsing.

Sometime next week, the company is going to announce that in its first month of inclusion in comScore's measurement system, it has taken the lead over one-stop shop gaming destinations in traffic by a margin. Combined with the company's claim that the so-called extended network' is growing its delivered impressions by 5 to 10% month-over-month, Mochi Media should be attracting over 100 million visitors on a monthly basis right about now.

Looking at worldwide traffic, comScore pegs the Mochi Media network to have received a little over 91 million unique visitors last April, or roughly 8.2 per cent of the total traffic measured in the Online Gaming' category for that month. These are impressive numbers: the second ranked online gaming destination is Spil Games, and the total amount of traffic that network receives on a global scale per month is close to that of Mochi Media Action, a subset of Mochi's network made up of only one genre (adventure games). Familiar brands you'd expect to rank higher, such as Yahoo! Games, MSN Games, EA Online and Nickelodeon, all obtain less than half Mochi Media's reach worldwide.

It's worth noting, however, that most of this traffic is coming from countries outside the U.S.: from those 91+ million visitors per month worldwide, only about 16 million visitors or roughly 17% originates from the Unites States. The company tells me a lot of visitors come from other English speaking nations like Canada and the U.K. but also from China and a good number of European countries.

I also got some numbers regarding its current network size: Mochi Media currently includes more than 14,000 games played across 30,000 websites, which the company claims translates to 1 billion game plays a month worldwide. A company representative declined to share any details about its revenue - the company provides technology for game developers to integrate advertising units powered and distributed by Mochi Media - but did say sales of pre-roll video advertising units are going particularly well, with CPM rates in the low to mid-teens for the U.S. and the UK.

Mochi Media is backed by $14 million in venture capital from Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures. Its most recent financing round was a $10 million Series B round from both investors back in June 2008. Meanwhile, the startup has convinced both a former MySpace (Carol Werner) as a Yahoo exec (Eric Boyd) to join its ranks and spurred small startups like the recently seed-funded HeyZap to do similar things.

Keep your eyes on this one, folks.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

Via Fudzilla

A post from the Asus Eee PC blog.

Shuttle's Embedded Slim nettops to come out with VIA's Nano CPU

Get Started

Our Sandbox environment is available now, for you to build and test your application. Find out more about the opportunity and how to get started at http://developer.ebay.com/products/selling-manager-applications/

You can also see the full program guidelines on the developer site, located at the URL below:
http://www.developer.ebay.com/products/selling-manager-applications/program/

Launch with us this Summer!

The public release of Selling Manager Applications to the eBay seller community will be in August 2009. We are continuing to accept applications for our summer release. If you are interested in launching with us this summer, please contact us to initiate your Business Review. We will be locking in our launch partners by mid-June.

Upcoming Changes

• The eBay Managed Billing Platform will be released in late June. Developers should expect disruption to production access in late June and disruption to sandbox access in early July. All developers will need to integrate with the managed billing platform after the release is complete. The key changes include:
• • Setting up billing plans for applications
  • Updates to the OEPI Interface
• In June, documentation will be provided to assist developers with these changes.
• The public release of Selling Manager Applications to the eBay seller community will be in August 2009.

For more information and latest status on the Selling Manager Applications platform, please see the Selling Manager Applications User Guide at:
http://developer.ebay.com/DevZone/selling-manager-applications/Concepts/SellingManagerApps_APIGuide.html

MOBfest is an annual music festival in Chicago that features local bands. Natiiv Arts & Media, my company, focuses on social media coaching for local bands. It only makes sense that MOBfest and Natiiv would come together in the form of a showcase.

On June 18, 2009, at the Fiesta Cantina on Clark, four bands that work with Natiiv will be performing. The line-up is....

Calvin Marty & The Sunken Ship (headlining... you might remember them from this post.)

Cobalt and The Hired Guns (who were in the Metromix contest with I Fight Dragons)

Incredible Shrinking Boy (from The Real World soundrack)

and Matt Ryd (who has been featured on Scrubs and was an RA in college)

For now I'm saying that the door opens at 7PM.. I don't know what the cover is going to be... (I've never actually been in charge of a show like this before, so Rachel from MOBfest is leading the way.) Why don't you hop on over to Facebook and RSVP?

On Twitter? So are these guys. @cmatss @wil_fleming @cobaltandthehgs @cobaltmatt @incboy @mattryd

One more Natiiv band that I know also have a MOBfest show - that's I Fight Dragons and they'll be at the Elbo Room on June 20.

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Many people pointed out the double taxation issue involved with C corporations. C Corporations pay taxes and then when money is removed from the corporation to the investors or founders, another round of taxes is imposed. On the surface, this is a good argument for an LLC but it turns out to not have much of an impact in reality much of the time.

The other issue that people pointed out is that valuable losses can be passed through to the personal taxes of the investors and founders with an LLC. While this is also true under ideal circumstances, it turns out to not be true at all in most common cases.

Victor Fleischer reached out to me by email with a thorough research paper called The Rational Exuberance of Structuring Venture Capital Startups he had written on this very topic in 2003. I found it to be very educational and I think you will too. It's absolutely worth a full read (10 minutes or so) - and it's not as long as it looks because there are many detailed footnotes and supporting references.

Here's the gist of his paper as I read it. Many observers of the venture capital industry believe that VCs ignore LLCs primarily because C corporations are the devil they know, and secondarily because they're focused on gains only and are not typically major participants in losses (since they are investing other peoples money and not their own, primarily). This paper goes a long way towards showing why professional investors prefer C corporations and includes many potential surprises such as:

• Tax losses are often not as valuable as they seem on paper as tax rules prohibit many investors (and entrepreneurs) from capturing the full benefit of the losses.
• Corporations are less complex than partnerships. Friction costs associated with LLCs may make legal costs substantially higher over time for LLCs.
• Gains are taxed more favorably when companies are organized as C corporations from the beginning (vs converting late, if that is even legally possible).
• Employee compensation issues are much more complex with an LLC than a corporation. This can cost more and can devalue options equivalents coming from LLCs.

In short, at least in my mind, much of the argument for LLCs as being more tax efficient ends up being an illusion and only true on paper.

I hope that this starts another big argument. Blogging is for learning, and your comments and participation are really helping me learn. I thank you for that.

Keep in mind the paper is a little old and some tax laws may have changed in the interim. As always, consult your attorney and accountant as I'm no tax lawyer.

Incidentally, Victor is returning to CU as an Associate Professor at the law school this June! I'm glad to welcome him back to Boulder after he spent the last few years at the University of Illinois College of Law. I'm excited that he'll be an asset to the local entrepreneurial community once again.

Related articles

• Why Don't Venture Capitalists Like Investing in LLC's? (dividendsandpreferences.blogspot.com)
• S Corp's vs LLCs (Feld Thoughts)
• Forming an LLC May Be a Wise Choice For Your Small Business (stepbysteptips.com)

The Los Angeles authorities said John Schiefer, 27, was the nation's first defendant to plead guilty to wiretapping charges (.pdf) in connection to using botnets.

Schiefer, who went by the online handle "acidstorm," faced as many as 60 years in prison and acknowledged using a botnet to remotely control computers across the United States. Once in control of the computers, the authorities said, (.pdf) his spybot malware allowed him to intercept computer communications. He mined usernames and passwords on accounts such as PayPal and made purchases totaling thousands of dollars without consent.

The authorities said he worked by day as an information security consultant with 3G Communications. After his guilty plea, Schiefer was hired at Mahalo, the so-called "human powered search engine." Its founder, Jason Calacanis wrote that the company failed to realize that the Los Angeles company had hired a man who had pleaded guilty to being a hacker.

Calacanis point out that Mahalo users' data was not breached by Schiefer.

Note to Mahalo Users: John's work is well-supervised. Mahalo follows strict security policies and we don't store any sensitive data anyway. (Even if one of our employees did go off the deep end, the most they would have access to would be your questions and answers on Mahalo Answersnot much damage can be done there since they're all public anyway).

The defendant was among eight individuals indicted or successfully prosecuted in a crack down on black hat hackers who use armies of zombie computers to commit financial fraud, attack web sites with floods of traffic and send spam. The crimes at issue involved more than $20 million in losses, according to the FBI.

The FBI dubbed the eight cases "Operation Bot Roast II" -- the second round of its investigations against botnets, one of the most dangerous threats online today. The first FBI crackdown on botnets was announced in June, 2007.

See Also:

• Weak Password Brings 'Happiness' to Twitter Hacker
• Miley Cyrus Hacker Raided by FBI
• Pop Superstar Sting Supports Pentagon Hacker, Condemns U.S. ...
• Palin E-Mail Hacker Says It Was Easy
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Appellee Smith was an operator under two joint operating agreements (JOAs) governing exploration and production on an oil and gas lease known as the Bloomberg lease. Chevron was a non-operating interest owner under the JOAs.

In accordance with the JOAs, in May and June of 2004 Smith notified the non-operating interest owners of its proposal to drill four more wells on the lease. Under the JOAs, the non-operating interest owners then had 30 days to notify Smith whether they wanted to participate in the cost of the proposed operations.

On June 17, 2004, Chevron notified Smith that it didn't want to participate. By then, all the other non-operating interest owners had notified Smith that they wanted to participate. But on June 24, 2004, still less than 30 days after Chevron had received Smith's notice, Chevron attempted to revoke its previous notice. Smith declined to accept Chevron's revocation.

So what was at issue in the litigation was whether the notice period ended once each non-operating interest owner notified Smith of its decision or whether the notice period continued for 30 days, leaving open the possibility of a change of heart on the part of a non-operating interest owner.

The court held that the notice period ended once each non-operating interest owner had notified Smith of its decision; in a dissenting opinion, one judge disagreed. I'll let you read the opinion and dissent (or this ContractsProf Blog post) if you want the gory details, but for our purposes, suffice to say that the JOAs weren't sufficiently clear one way or the other. Here's the main language at issue:

1. Proposed Operations: Should any party hereto desire to drill any well on the Contract Area other than the [initial well], . . . the party desiring to drill . . . such a well shall give the other parties written notice of the proposed operation, specifying the work to be performed, the location, proposed depth, objective formation and the estimated cost of the operation. The parties receiving such a notice shall have thirty (30) days after receipt of the notice within which to notify the party wishing to do the work whether they elect to participate in the cost of the proposed operation. . . . Failure of a party receiving such notice to reply within the period above fixed shall constitute an election by that party not to participate in the cost of the proposed operation.

The moral of this story for the drafter is that when drafting a set of such procedures, ask yourself what might happen at every step and address all reasonable eventualities. That makes such provisions a drag to draft, but not as much of a drag as a lawsuit that arises because you failed to address a given eventuality.

By the way, the dissent said that the JOA language was ambiguous. That's consistent with the tendency of courts to use the word ambiguous too loosely. That's something I discuss in chapter 6 of MSCD and in this March 2008 blog post. To my mind, the language at issue wasn't ambiguousit was just insufficiently specific.

My thanks to the indefatigable Steven Sholk for letting me know about this case.

The case highlights the legal challenges facing courts and school administrators as they grapple with campus civil order and free expression in an online world.

"We're in the very first generation of this and there's nothing ripe for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear," said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Virginia-based Student Press Law Center.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in a Florida federal court, concerns Katherine Evans, now 19, who was suspended as a senior last year after creating a Facebook group devoted to her English teacher. The group was called "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met!," and featured a photograph of the teacher, and an invitation for other students to "express your feelings of hatred."

After people's comments derided Evans for the online stunt, and expressed support for the teacher, she deleted the group. But Pembroke Pines Charter High School, which did not respond for comment, suspended Evans for three days for "disruptive behavior" and for "Bullying / Cyber Bullying Harassment towards a staff member," according to the lawsuit, which is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Evans was removed from her from advanced placement classes "and forced her into the lesser-weighted honors classes." The lawsuit alleges the black mark on Evans' permanent record is "unjustifiably straining her academic reputation and good standing."

The lawsuit(.pdf) is one of about a dozen across the United States that are part of the fallout as schools confront cyberbullying and the explosion of social networking sites. A Texas high school volleyball coach in September went so far as to declare a ban on student Facebook and MySpace profiles, a decision the Northside Independent School District reversed(.pdf). Last month, Tennessee State University blocked the online gossip site JuicyCampus at the school firewall. In June, Missouri enacted a law against "cyberbullying" in the wake of the Megan Meier suicide tragedy, which was triggered by a hoax MySpace account.

Before the internet, student speech cases usually concerned student newspapers and dress codes.

There's no bright-line rule on what constitutes free, student speech in the online world. And as schools start to regulate off-campus student speech on the internet, lawsuits are following.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never addressed the parameters of online student speech, but might soon. So far, lower courts are following a 1969 high court ruling saying student speech is protected unless it is "substantially disruptive," though the road map provided by that decision is leading different judges to varying destinations. In that landmark case, the Supreme Court said students had a First Amendment right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.

Generally, the courts have allowed the suppression of student speech, online or off, when it threatens bodily harm and advocates illegal activity, "none of which we have in Ms. Evans' case," said one of the teen's attorneys, Matthew D. Bavaro, of Plantation, Florida.

"She has the absolute First Amendment right to do this," Bavaro said. "The question is how far does the school's authority go to punish off-campus speech they don't like? If Katie had praised the teacher, would she have been punished? The school is judging what is appropriate speech."

But with the explosion of the internet and social networking sites, "The courts are figuring out where the boundaries end and start when it comes to off-campus speech," LoMonte said.

On Wednesday, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, one court level below the Supreme Court, will hear oral arguments in a lawsuit similar to the Florida case filed Monday.

The appeal concerns Justin Layshock, who, as a senior and honors student at a Pennsylvania high school, was suspended for 10 days after creating a mock MySpace profile of his principal.

The profile said the principal took drugs and kept beer at his desk. A federal judge overturned the suspension, ruling last year that the fake profile was not created at school and did not create a "substantial disruption."

"Public schools are vital institutions, but their reach is not unlimited," U.S. District Judge Terrence McVerry of Pennsylvania ruled last year.

Hickory High School appealed.

According to Monday's lawsuit, Evans used no profanities and stated no threats against the teacher. The suspension notice from the public school alleged only that Evans "had posted an inappropriate site regarding her teacher on Facebook." Evans is demanding that the suspension be removed from her record.

The lawsuit, before the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, claims eBay is liable for contributory trademark infringement because it refuses to police its site for infringing materials. Viacom is making the same argument in a pending copyright lawsuit against Google's YouTube.

A New York federal judge in July ruled against Tiffany, the high-end jeweler. The judge said eBay, the world's largest online auction site, was acting within the law because it removed auctions from the jeweler's counterfeited goods when notified by Tiffany. "The law demands more specific knowledge as to which items are infringing and which seller is listing those items before requiring eBay to take action," U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan wrote in July.

Tiffany, which said eBay "facilitates substantial fraud," appealed.

The latest vocal entrant into the legal debate is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and Public Citizen(.pdf). If Tiffany prevails on appeal, online marketplaces would likely come "to a halt," the groups said in a court filing Wednesday. They urged the appellate court "to reject Tiffany's effort to rewrite trademark law to relieve mark-owners of their traditional obligation to police their own marks, online and off."

Amazon and Google, (.pdf) as well as Yahoo(.pdf) and others have sided with eBay. The Council of Fashion Designers of America(.pdf) and the International Anti-counterfeiting Coalition(.pdf) have urged the court to side with Tiffany.

"Although eBay profits handsomely from a system of its own invention that facilitates substantial fraud, the district court believed that the solution to the counterfeiting problem is to put the burden on the victim," Tiffany wrote the appeals court.

Tiffany added that the lower court's ruling "favors the party that has profited from facilitating the fraud and disfavors the two groups of victims that the trademark law is designed to protect - the consumer who purchases counterfeit goods and the trademark owner, here Tiffany, which has carefully nurtured its brand for more than 170 years."

Adding to international confusion, a French court in June ordered eBay to pay $63 million to Louis Vuitton, the luxury good maker that claimed eBay failed to police adequately its auction site for Louis Vuitton knockoffs.

The appeals court has not scheduled oral arguments in the case, Tiffany v. eBay, 08-3947.

See Also:

• Bush Signs Law Creating Copyright Czar
• Judge: Copyright Owners Must Consider 'Fair Use' Before Sending ...
• Stifled by Copyright, McCain Asks YouTube to Consider Fair Use ...
• MPAA Says No Proof Needed in P2P Copyright Infringement Lawsuits ...
• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998
• Lawsuit Claim: Students' Lecture Notes Infringe on Professor's ...
• 'Orphan Works' Copyright Law Dies Quiet Death
• Google Unveils YouTube Copyright Filter to Mixed Reviews
• AT&T To Police Internet For Copyright Infractions
• Music Label's Copyright Argument is Rubbish
• Meet the Latest Copyright Scofflaw -- Meet the GOP
• Study This: Copyright Law Hurts, Helps Economy
• Egypt Conjuring Copyright Pyramid Scheme
• GOP 'Caving' on Trademark Lawsuit Threats
• Judge Doesn't Give Tiffany a Trademark Silver Spoon in eBay Flap ...
• Judge Throws Wrinkle Into Plastic Surgery Trademark Claim
• GOP Threatens CafePress Over Shirts, Stickers and Logos
• Google Profits From Typo Squatting, Report Charges

Blaise Alleyne is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Blaise Alleyne and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

[Note: I'm back from my vacation. For a short recap of my experience, see my FAQs about my trip to the Hulahula River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.]

Nemet Chevrolet Ltd. v. ConsumerAffairs.com, Inc., 1:08CV254 (E.D. Va. June 18, 2008). The CMLP page with links to source documents.

ConsumerAffairs.com is a consumer review site with a twist. It describes itself as:

a private, non-govermental [sic] entity that empowers consumers by providing a forum for their complaints and a means for them to be contacted by lawyers if their complaints have legal merit. Your complaints and comments may be published, shared with the news media and reviewed by attorneys at no cost to you.

A Legal Times article written when this lawsuit was first initiated raises some questions about ConsumerAffairs.com's architecture. First, it suggests that the domain name capitalizes on consumers who might mistakenly assume that the site is affiliated with a governmental consumer affairs office. Second, the article questions the ties between the site and the Horwitz plaintiff's class action law firm, which mines the consumer-submitted complaints looking for potential class action claims and named plaintiffs. But regardless of these attributes, for my purposes ConsumerAffairs.com is a garden-variety consumer review site. Consumers submits their gripes and ConsumerAffairs.com publishes them. As a natural consequence, some vendors will be unhappy with the things consumers are saying about them.

This lawsuit's unhappy vendor is Nemet Chevrolet, a Jamaica, NY auto dealer who has been the target of several consumer-submitted complaints on ConsumerAffairs.com. See, e.g., this page. Nemet sued ConsumerAffairs.com twice but each time voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit for jurisdictional concerns. Finally, satisfied it found jurisdiction over ConsumerAffairs.com, it brought out the big guns--specifically, DC powerhouse law firm Patton Boggs. As the Legal Times article quotes Nemet, "I knew I had to do something, and I got a very, very powerful law firm." Sadly for Nemet, its very, very powerful law firm's complaint still got quickly crunched by a 12b6 motion to dismiss.

Nemet's claims for defamation and tortious interference were preempted by 47 USC 230. This is really a textbook application of 230--the complaint even specifies that the posts were written by third party consumers. Thus, the only issue on the court's mind is whether 230 supports a 12b6 (it correctly determines that it does). Nemet tries to get around 230 by alleging in its briefs and supporting documents that ConsumerAffairs.com created the content at issue and wrote headlines and other supporting materials, but the court refuses to consider these allegations because they weren't in the complaint. Some courts might have entertained a leave to amend the complaint to let these allegations in, but this court clearly wasn't interested.

The court also dismisses the Lanham Act unfair competition and false advertising claims for lack of standing because Nemet and ConsumerAffairs.com aren't competitors. Alternatively, even if there was standing, the court would dismiss both claims:

* the unfair competition claim [this is ambiguous but I think it actually is treating it as a trademark infringement claim, even though the complaint didn't allege infringement] because an auto dealer and a consumer complaint site are so dissimilar that there is no possibility of likelihood of consumer confusion. The court's discussion is rather garbled here, so I'm not exactly sure what the court was doing or saying. However, if the court was thinking of this as a trademark infingement claim, then its ruling is clearly out of sync with other uncited cases (such as the SMJ case), and trademark infringement claims are not really susceptible to dismissal on a 12b6.

* the false advertising claim because consumer complaints aren't advertising as contemplated by the statute.

I have some questions about the rigor of this court's legal analysis, but I also think the court's message is clear and unmistakable: if a vendor has a problem with a consumer review or complaint online, TAKE IT UP WITH THE CONSUMER AND LEAVE THE INTERMEDIARY OUT OF IT.

The Chicago Reader was also at SEED 3 and published this profile: How to Make Money on the Internet: Do what you love, and other tips from the Web cowboys at the Seed Conference. Includes this great quote from Gary V:

Don't quit your job to become the queen of cheese. But if you're doing something that blows and you hate it, go work at 7-Eleven to pay your bills and spend every other hour building your personal plan. If you work 9 AM to 6 PM and get home at 7, whatever you put in between 7 and 3 AM is what you're gonna get in return. You want to watch Lost? Knock yourself out. I don't watch shit. I don't read shit. I'm all about my community and putting out content. I don't consume. I put out.

Related: Mike Rohde's SEED Conference 2007 sketchbook notes [SvN]

It's also worth noting that Josh did a lot of editing work behind the scenes for our feature writers, such as Alex Iskold and Bernard Lunn. So he really has been a fantastic contributer to ReadWriteWeb, as both a writer and editor, and an absolute pleasure to work with.

Note: there is a new writer coming on board, which I will announce in a separate post on Saturday.

10 Classic Josh Posts

Below I've listed 10 of Josh's posts that I've particularly enjoyed over the past 15 months. This is a completely subjective list. I nearly called it 'Top 10 Josh Posts', as a kind of inside joke that I think he would appreciate :-)

• Internet Killed The Television Star: Reviews of Joost, Babelgum, Zattoo, and More -- Josh's first post on RWW, dated 6 June '07. I believe it was after reading this post, which Josh wrote as a guest writer, that I thought: "I need to hire this guy".
• Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One -- Josh's second post! Crowdsourcing has been one of his favorite topics, see also IdeaScale - Crowdsourcing R&D (more links to his crowdsourcing posts inside that).
• Rolling Your Own Online Office
• Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students
• Top 10 Facebook Apps: Work; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Play; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Media; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Utility; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Extension -- Josh has written a lot of outstanding posts about Facebook, and this 5-part series on top Facebook Apps is still a must-read.
• Is Facebook Worth the Hype?
• The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics? -- online politics has been another strong topic for Josh, as this post demonstrates. I always looked forward to reading his take on how the Web was becoming a part of the political process.
• A Big List of Sites That Teach You How To Do Stuff -- still ranks as one of our most successful posts ever, proving once and for all that the Web loves lists.
• Beacon Saga Comes to an End: Facebook Adds Global Opt-Out, Apologizes -- a great overview of the Beacon saga at Facebook.
• There is No Web 3.0, There is No Web 2.0 - There is Just the Web -- 'nuff said!

All the best Josh in your future endeavours. Stay in touch and we hope to see you regularly in the RWW comments ;-)

New Version Of NewsGators Widget Platform Makes It Even Easier for Brand & Media Companies to Build, Deploy, & Track Widgets

Denver, Colo. June 19, 2008 NewsGator Technologies Inc. today announced the general availability of Editors Desk 2.1, a new version of the companys widget platform that makes it even easier for brand and media companies to build, deploy, and track widgets.

Updates to NewsGators widget platform include a dramatically redesigned user interface, sophisticated new templates, and an easier, more streamlined workflow for widget creation. Editors Desk 2.1 boasts exciting new features including a widget search tool for simple creation of subject-specific content widgets, a duplicating clone capability that allows users to easily create similar widgets, and feed monitoring that provides instant feedback on widget performance and feed errors.

Media and brand companies are embracing widget strategies at a breakneck pace because syndicating content with widgets works, said Jeff Nolan, vice president, NewsGator Software-as-a-Service. By simplifying the creation, deployment, and management of widgets, Editors Desk 2.1 enables companies to quickly and easily realize positive business results from extended brand reach to increased website monetization.

NewsGators widget platform is part of NewsGator Software-as-a-Service, which encompasses the companys syndication and data services offerings and helps media companies, content publishers and advertisers engage audiences through the use of social media and Web 2.0 technologies. NewsGator's Web 2.0 syndication products, including personalized RSS readers, Widget Framework, Community Publisher and Widget Ads, give companies the tools they need to enable their audiences to create, subscribe and interact with the most relevant content while staying within the company's brand. NewsGators widget and data services are in use by some of the world's largest media companies and brands, including CNN, Media General, National Geographic, Newsweek, CBS News, Reuters, USA Today and Discovery Communications. For more information, visit www.NewsGatorWidgets.com.

About NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
NewsGator Technologies helps enterprises and media companies leverage social computing solutions to deliver real business value. The companys enterprise social networking and widget services are in use by hundreds of the worlds most recognized brands, including Bank of America, Biogen Idec, CBS, CNN, Discovery, National Geographic, Procter & Gamble and USA Today. NewsGator Social Sites and Enterprise Server give enterprises better ways to collaborate, share content, expand employee knowledge and improve productivity. NewsGator Widget Services enable media and brand companies to better engage their audiences and extend the value of their brands through viral syndication of content. NewsGator also offers free, award-winning RSS aggregators for the Web, desktop, mobile devices and e-mail clients. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com

Contact Information
Laura Farrelly
NewsGator
303-552-2046
lauraf(at)newsgator(dot)com

Jennifer Gazin or Zoe Vandeveer
LaunchSquad
415.625.8555
newsgator(at)launchsquad(dot)com