Eolas Is Baaaaaaaaack; And It's Suing Everyone Over Embeddable Web Widgets

from the because-otherwise... dept

Well, here we go again. As you may recall, Eolas is a company that claimed to hold a patent (5,838,906) on browser plugins. The company sued Microsoft, and a long drawn-out battle ensued. Even though web inventor Tim Berners-Lee presented prior art and asked the USPTO to invalidate Eolas' ridiculously broad and obvious patent, the USPTO eventually upheld the patent (after initially rejecting claims). Even as Microsoft began presenting evidence that it actually had made use of the technology in question before Eolas applied for its patent, losses in the courts and the Supreme Court's refusal to hear the case eventually resulted in Microsoft agreeing to settle rather than continue to fight.

Since then (two years ago), plenty of people have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, concerning Eolas' plans to sue others. Now we know why it waited. It's now received a new patent -- a continuation patent, which is often used to abuse the patent system by putting forth a broad patent, then filing for continuations to make changes that let an earlier "invention" cover technologies that later become popular. In this case, the new patent (7,599,985), which basically just extends the earlier patent on browser plugins, and extends it to javascript widgets. Yes, those embeddable widgets used all over the web? It appears that Eolas thinks that those are infringing and everyone should pay up.

The new lawsuit has been filed against Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, Go Daddy, Google, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises, Staples, Sun, Texas Instruments, Yahoo, and YouTube. Apparently, starting small isn't part of the plan. Not surprisingly, Eolas filed in Eastern Texas using McKool Smith -- one of the most popular law firms representing patent holding firms in East Texas.

I am honestly curious how patent system defenders, who are also programmers, can defend this. I'm sure non-programmers will claim that the patent is valid, but I can't imagine how anyone who has any knowledge of basic programming principles can claim that such a patent is valid. In the meantime, tons of companies doing an incredibly basic thing on the web will now have to waste millions of dollars fighting a ridiculous patent lawsuit. How is this promoting innovation in any way shape or form?

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Creative Web Destruction: Sites Go Away

from the remember-that dept

As we await the official shutdown of Geocities at the end of the month, Ivor Tossell is reminding everyone that today's internet hotspot -- Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. -- may be completely gone in a decade's time. And, while it's good that sites come and go as the next big thing comes along, it does raise questions for those who are relying on these sites as some sort of archive of a life lived online. It's a good reminder of the importance of either being able to back up certain information -- or control it directly yourself.

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Israeli Claims Patent Over Adding .com To The End Of The Address Bar

from the yup,-that-patent-system-functions-just-great dept

TechCrunch points us to a story about an Israeli company by the name of Netex who is claiming a patent over "www.addressing." What's that? Well, apparently it's the process of simply adding a ".com" to the end of a word you put in a browser address bar. There are all sorts of questions raised by this, and the reporting at the Israeli site Ynetnews leaves a lot to be desired. First, neither Ynetnews nor TechCrunch point to the actual patent. I've been searching on both the supposed inventor's name (Aviv Refuah) and his company's name and I can't find it. If anyone out there can find the actual patent, please post a link in the comments.

The next problem with the article is the claim that this patent is "worth millions" and that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo "will have to pay royalties." It remains to be seen if that's true (and given what's stated, it seems quite doubtful).

Next problem? The article claims that this patent is about the address bar in the browser -- not a search engine box -- though, the reporter doesn't seem to understand the difference between the two. Admittedly, Google now offers a browser in Chrome, but the article keeps referring to the patent as a "search option." Yahoo doesn't offer a browser.

Then there's the issue of claiming that Google and Yahoo "use" this technology:

Refuah says various internet giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have been using the program for years, and now they will have to pay royalties to Netex.

That implies -- falsely -- that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have somehow been using some technology that they got from Netex. It's a common trick used in reporting about patents, but its highly misleading. Much, much, much more likely is that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo simply added a useful and obvious feature, that Netex is now showing up and claiming ownership years later.

Finally, it's tough to say much about the actual patent claims in question -- seeing as we haven't seen them -- but from the Ynetnews description, it's difficult to see how such a thing could possibly be considered patentable (and one would think that Netscape would have some prior art, though I can't remember exactly when Netscape added the ability to add .com to the end of something put in the browser bar). But, honestly, can anyone with a straight face explain why such a thing should be patentable?

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Court Dismisses Case Against Yahoo From Woman Upset How She Appeared In Results

from the not-yahoo's-liability dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about a woman named Beverly Stayart, who had sued Yahoo over what she found when she did a search on her name. Her complaint was that some of the links advertised porn sites and possibly contained malware, and that this was a violation of her trademark and privacy rights. After the posting, we received a number of comments on that post, and more recently, received a legal letter from the woman's lawyer, demanding that we remove many of the comments or get sued. With the help of Paul Alan Levy at Public Citizen, we replied to the letter, refusing to remove the comments, and detailing our reasons why. To date, we have not been sued over this, but you may want to take our reporting on the subject with whatever caveats, given these facts.

Earlier this week, the court dismissed the lawsuit against Yahoo and denied Stayart's request to refile. The court had trouble with the idea that this was a trademark claim, noting that just because she does not like how her name is shown, it does not create a trademark violation. There are two major problems: (1) she doesn't appear to be using her name in commerce in this particular field and (2) there is little to no likelihood of confusion. From the ruling:

Similarly, Stayart is not engaged in the commercial marketing of her identity, and she does not allege an intent to commercialize. Stayart alleges that her name has commercial value, but it is clear that Stayart's complaint arises from the distasteful association of her name with pornographic images, advertisements for sexual dysfunction drugs, and a sexually-oriented dating service..... Stayart cannot satisfy this requirement [likelihood of confusion] as a matter of law because her complaint explicitly disavows any association with pornographic materials, sexual dysfunction drugs, or sexually-oriented dating services (i.e., Various' website AdultFriendFinder.com). As noted above, Stayart alleges that "in no way has [she] ever engaged in a promiscuous lifestyle, or other overt sexual activities, which she and a large portion of her community and social circle consider perverse and abhorrent." Complaint, ¶ 20. This allegation contravenes the likelihood of confusion, and Stayart pleaded herself out of court on her Lanham Act claim. No one who accessed these links could reasonably conclude that Bev Stayart endorsed the products at issue.

From this, it would certainly appear that the court is not at all persuaded that you can bring a trademark infringement lawsuit against a search engine based on how your name appears.

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Flickr Obama/Joker Takedown Story Gets... Odd

from the so-what-happened? dept

We were a bit confused over the claim recently that Flickr (Yahoo) had taken down a Photoshopped image of Obama as "the Joker" superimposed on a Time Magazine cover. It didn't make much sense, because it wasn't clear who's copyright was even at issue. It didn't seem likely that Time Magazine would have any claim, even though that's what many assumed. So, some folks started asking around -- and all of the "obvious" candidates said no. Time Magazine, DC Comics and the original photographer who took the image on which the photo was based all insisted they didn't send the takedown. That resulted in some fingerpointing at Flickr, but some more digging by Thomas Hawk turned up a guy named Edward Przydzial (though Yahoo's takedown notification called him Przydzia, which resulted in even more confusion initially. But, no one seems to know who he is and what copyright he might hold in the matter, making the whole story quite bizarre. Hawk contacted Przydzial, who responded claiming that he created the image... but also that he doesn't own the image, and refused to say whether or not he filed the DMCA notice (and some bizarre stuff about needing a court order to find out who filed the DMCA notice). Once again, this highlights some of the inanities of the whole DMCA takedown process.

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RIAA Loses To Yahoo Over Webcasting Rates

from the finally dept

Well, finally. The RIAA has lost its case against Yahoo over what royalties the Launchcast service needed to pay. As per usual, the RIAA kept trying to add on additional fees. Rather than just webcasting fees, it also wanted an additional royalty for being an interactive service. This is a neat trick that the RIAA has been pulling a lot lately. In the past, every time some new technology comes along, the recording industry runs screaming and crying to Congress about how unfair it is, and how it needs a special new royalty for that new technology/service. But here, because Launchcast was online and combined elements of different services, the RIAA simply figured it could lump all the different royalties together and get Launchcast/Yahoo to pay multiple times for each use of a song. The entertainment industry sure does love trying to get everyone to pay multiple times for the same thing.

But, it appears the court was having none of that, saying that the service didn't provide enough user control to make it an interactive service that would require a different license (though, it still has to pay the basic webcasting fees). The ruling here did not take kindly to the RIAA's argument that being able to choose which station you wanted to listen to (or that you could skip songs) made it somehow interactive beyond regular radio:

"Launchcast listeners do not even enjoy the limited predictability that once graced the AM airwaves on weekends in America when 'special requests' represented love-struck adolescents' attempts to communicate their feelings to 'that special friend'."

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Did Flickr Takedown Obama Joker Time Cover Over Copyright Infringement?

from the what-was-copied? dept

A bunch of folks have been sending in this story about Flickr supposedly taking down the "Obama Joker" Time Magazine cover that's been in the news lately, but I have to admit that I'm confused about the reasoning behind the takedown. There are questions of whether it's just "censorship," but I'm trying to figure out what's the actual copyright claim. The suggestion is that the concern is from Time Magazine, which doesn't like its brand associated with the falsified cover -- but wouldn't that be a trademark issue, rather than a copyright one? If there's any copyright issue at all, it would potentially (and then, weakly) be from whoever owns the rights to the original photo that was changed. But seeing as there's still an ongoing battle in the Shepard Fairey case to determine if that sort of thing is fair use and I haven't seen anyone identify the original Obama photo that was used here, it's not even clear who would be crying copyright infringement. So... where exactly is the copyright infringement here?

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Google, Yahoo Fined In Argentina Because Searches On Band Name Leads To Porn Sites

from the liability-screwup dept

Reader Osno points us to the latest in misplaced liability rulings... this time in Argentina. Apparently both Google and Yahoo have been fined (Google translation) approximately $15,000 (US) after a lawsuit from a member of a popular reality show band accused both search engines of leading people to pornographic websites when people searched on her name. This reminds me of a similar lawsuit in the US, that is still ongoing and seems unlikely to get very far. It's difficult to see how a search engine can be responsible for what others put up on a porn site, or the fact that a search on someone's name leads people to a porn site. But... apparently that's what the judge in Argentina decided. There's a separate jurisdiction issue here as well, since neither Google nor Yahoo have operations in Argentina. Either way, it's expected that the companies will appeal, and hopefully the higher level courts will recognize that this shouldn't be a search engine's liability.

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The Next Battle: Enabling Information To Find You -- Or Why Yahoo/Microsoft Is A Distraction

from the helping-information-find-you dept

I have to admit, I wasn't going to write anything at all about the Yahoo/Microsoft search deal. It honestly seemed pretty pointless -- much bluster about nothing at all of importance. After talking it over with an editor at Forbes, however, I agreed to write up an op-ed for them about why the deal is misguided, and I wanted to expand on one part of that here. I just don't think there's very much interesting in fighting the last battle over "search" rather than looking at where things are headed. And, on that front, I noted:

People are discovering that information finds them, rather than them going in search of information. Search already works. The next interesting challenge is in improving the way information finds you, rather than the way you find information.

That is the key point that innovators in the internet space are starting to figure out. Information is much more powerful when it finds you (for example, when it's passed along by someone you trust). But that information doesn't just find you by itself. The internet helps, in making it easy to pass along a link or some text -- or to share/embed/etc. some content. But the tools for sharing information need to improve drastically, and that's where the next excitement will come from. It's in enabling relevant information to find you rather than the other way around. And, Yahoo/Microsoft has nothing to do with that at all.

Separately, this is also why I think sites that are trying to lock up content behind paywalls or limited access are making things worse. They're doing the opposite of where the internet is moving. They're making it harder for their information to find you, and they'll discover that this will lock them out of much of the opportunity.

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Belgium Fines Yahoo For Protecting User Privacy On Its US Servers

from the this-is-bad... dept

For many years, we've discussed the many challenges faced by countries in trying to recognize that "jurisdiction" on the internet isn't what they probably think it is. Many countries want to interpret internet jurisdiction as "if it's accessible here via the internet, it's covered by our laws." But it doesn't take much scenario planning to recognizing what a disaster would result from such an interpretation. Effectively that means that the most restrictive legislation anywhere in the world (think: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.) would apply everywhere else.

That's why it's quite worrisome to find out that Belgium is trying to fine Yahoo for protecting its users' privacy and refusing to hand over user data to Belgian officials. Yahoo noted, accurately, that it does not have any operation in Belgium, and the data in question was held on US servers, not subject to Belgian law. On top of that, the US and Belgium have a good diplomatic relationship, such that such a data request could have gone through established diplomatic channels to make sure that US laws were properly obeyed as well. But, instead, Belgian officials just demanded the info from Yahoo's US headquarters directly, and then took the company to criminal court where the judge issued the fine. The Center for Democracy & Technology highlights the problems of not pushing back against this ruling:

The implications of this ruling are profound and far-reaching. Following the court's logic would subject user data associated with any service generally available online to the jurisdiction of all countries. It would also subject all companies that offer services generally available on the global Internet to the laws of all jurisdictions, potentially exposing individual employees to a variety of criminal sanctions.

The U.S. government should be paying close attention here: To understand how problematic this ruling is, we need only imagine how the governments of China, Iran, Vietnam or other repressive regime of your choice may decide that the precedent set here is one well worth following. Such actions undermine Belgium's moral authority since, after all, it would only be hypocritical for Western democracies to criticize such radically overbroad assertions of jurisdiction by other nations.

CDT suggests the US government should get involved and protest the Belgian court ruling:

In the present case, Yahoo! has done right by its users. The company asked law enforcement officials to follow established diplomatic and legal processes in order to gain access to user information. It also enlisted the support of its home government to facilitate the process. In return, Belgian authorities have flouted an existing MLAT agreement, slapped Yahoo! with a fine, and set a dangerous precedent that potentially imperils the privacy of all Internet users and invites abuse by bad actors.

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Mary Kay Sues Yahoo For Inserting Ad Links In Emails

from the trademark-fun dept

We've seen way too many lawsuits involving companies suing search engines for trademark infringement due to paid search adveritisng, but the latest lawsuit is a bit different. It appears that Mary Kay (who has a long history of being an aggressive enforcer of trademark) has sued Yahoo because of the way it inserts ads in email. Apparently Yahoo employs that incredibly annoying process of hotlinking certain text words to pop up advertisements. I've seen this on various websites (now blocked thanks to No Script) but I didn't realize Yahoo used the same annoying process in email as well. Mary Kay claims that this is confusing, and this actually does raise some interesting legal questions. First of all, I could see how some people might actually be confused by these sorts of ad links. While they usually look a little different than a real hyperlink, unless you're paying attention, you might get confused and think it's a normal link, rather than an ad. But that just speaks to confusion over what the link is. Once you hover over it, it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that it's an ad. I have a lot more trouble believing that it would then confuse many users. That said, even if it is confusing, there's a question as to whether or not Yahoo should actually be liable for any confusion. After all, it's just using an automated system to insert these ads. I might argue that it's obnoxious, annoying and unnecessarily intrusive, but it's not clear that it should be illegal.

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Yahoo Drops Fantasy Sports Lawsuit Against NFL Players Association; Reasoning Not Clear

from the what-happened-here? dept

Last month, we wrote about Yahoo going to court to make sure it didn't need to pay any royalties to the NFL's Player Association in order to offer up fantasy football data. This would be consistent with recent rulings that have noted that services offering fantasy sports offerings don't need to pay up for the use of data (factual information) such as player names and stats. Oddly, however, Yahoo has now dropped the case, though no one seems quite sure why. It's possible that the NFLPA has said that it won't seek money, but if that's the case, why was the lawsuit filed in the first place?

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Microsoft, Yahoo And Real Sued For Failing To Get All Necessary Licenses For Music Stores

from the oops dept

Want to know just how incredibly confusing and impossible copyright law has become? Just take a look at this lawsuit, filed yesterday by some music publishing companies against Microsoft, Yahoo and Real Networks, claiming that the online music stores each of them runs (the Zune store, Yahoo Music and Rhapsody) infringe their copyrights (thanks Eric Goldman for sending this over). How can that be, you ask? Surely these companies properly licensed the music they offer in their streaming/download offerings, right? Well, the lawsuit doesn't provide that much in the way of detail (and I've spoken to a few copyright lawyers -- none of whom seem to agree with each other!), it sure looks like the claim is that Microsoft, Yahoo and Real may have licensed the copyrights on the recordings, but did not license the copyright on the compositions. It sounds like (though, again, the details are fuzzy) that the record labels did licensing deals with these music services, but publishers and labels are separate entities (even if the labels own many publishers), and the rights are separate.

It's pure speculation until more details come out, but one imagines that the licensing deals with the record labels included some sort of assurances that the publishing rights were covered as well -- and for songs whose publishing rights were covered by the major record labels, that's probably the case. But for songs where the publishing rights were owned by independent companies -- such as MCS Music America, the claim appears to be that the publishing rights were never cleared -- and thus, Microsoft, Yahoo and Real were streaming/downloading music to which they only held some of the rights. Yikes.

Most of the complaint details which songs were offered without (allegedly) having secured all the rights. And, of course, the publishers are claiming that every time a song was streamed or downloaded, it counts as a separate act of infringement. If the court agrees, this could represent a massive liability for Microsoft, Yahoo and Real, given the fines we all know can be issued over a single instance of infringement.

That said, this is yet another example of the convoluted house of cards that copyright has become. The idea that you can license a recording, but then need to get a separate license from a totally different party for the rights to the "underlying composition" (and don't get us started on the need to make sure you're covered for reproduction, distribution and performance rights -- three separate issues under copyright law), and you begin to get a sense of the problem. Basically, every time some new technology or innovation comes along, the copyright holders run to Congress to slap on another right, rather than actually innovating on the business model side. And on top of it, when new technologies like the internet come along, it's not at all clear which rights really apply and who controls/owns what rights. Suddenly, you have a massive mess for a company trying to do something as simple as let people listen to music. Just for that, you get a massive lawsuit like the following:

It's the sort of system only a greedy copyright lawyer could love: it's designed not to incentivize creation (copyright's stated purpose) or to facilitate the distribution of content -- but instead designed for the exact opposite: to confuse and hinder (but to keep copyright lawyers quite busy and gainfully employed).

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Yahoo Gets Aggressive: Wants Court To Make It Clear That It Doesn't Need To Pay To Use Player Names/Stats

from the this-again? dept

Recent court rulings have made it clear that sports leagues have overreached (by a long shot) in trying to force online fantasy sports sites to license player info. The courts have pointed out that player names and stats are factual information, not subject to copyright. Now, this has resulted in many fantasy sports sites to skip renewing any licensing deals. The NFL Players Assocation, despite already having lost such a case, still went to Yahoo and threatened it with a lawsuit over this issue. It appears Yahoo decided to be proactive and sued for a declaratory judgment that its uses of player info was not in violation. It's an aggressive move by Yahoo -- but it also shows (reasonably) that the company believes that it's likely to win (and, perhaps, that it was worried about whatever district the NFL PA would have filed its own lawsuit in). Either way, it's yet another chance to remind sports leagues that they don't get to copyright factual information.

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Is It An Antitrust Violation To Agree Not To Poach Employees From Competitors?

from the not-entirely-clear dept

The news broke this week that a bunch of big name Silicon Valley companies are under investigation by the Justice Department for their hiring practices and potential antitrust concerns. The specific issue appears to be that the companies may have agreed to not try to poach top execs from certain companies. Apparently there was nothing stopping the employee from getting a job at one of these companies, if they took the initiative -- but the companies wouldn't initiate the attempt. In most cases, the idea was not to poach from partners -- which might just be good business sense (pissing off partners generally isn't a good idea). Where it gets tricky is the accusation that some companies had written agreements not to poach, which could lead to some charges of collusion. Oddly, the NY Times article's title claims that the issue is "unwritten rules" when the details of the article suggest it's not the unwritten, but the written rules that are the problem. There have been studies that suggest that root of Silicon Valley's success was the easy movement of people from job to job -- so if it's true that companies are holding back trying to get the best employees to move around, they may actually be doing a lot more harm to themselves anyway. And, on the whole, it does seem like there's an awful lot of movement between big name companies. Just this week at the Conversational Marketing Summit, one of the speakers had a musical chairs presentation that went on for a long time showing a bunch of execs and how they played musical chairs between Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL, News Corp. and Facebook.

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Public Citizen, EFF, CDT And CMLP Team Up To Question Recent Ruling On Section 230 Safe Harbor

from the this-is-important dept

A few weeks back, we wrote about a court ruling that said that Yahoo was protected against actions by users, thanks to Section 230 safeharbors, but that the company had effectively given up some of that protection by promising to remove some content. While the bigger issues in the case seemed to have been decided reasonably, some noticed that many of the finer points in the ruling were both sloppy and troubling. Eric Goldman ran down the details of the problems with the ruling. Now it appears that Yahoo is appealing not the major point of the case, but those specific troubling points made in the ruling, which could severely limit the effectiveness of using Section 230 to protect against frivolous lawsuits.

The issue may certainly sound like inside baseball, but it's important to anyone who runs an online service of any kind. Traditionally, when receiving a mistargeted lawsuit that tries to pin liability on a service provider, rather than the actual user, it's common to file a motion to dismiss based on section 230 safe harbors. However, in this ruling, the court said that you couldn't raise section 230 in a motion to dismiss, and that it could only be used as an "answer" and thus required a more involved (and potentially much more costly) procedure of asking the court for a ruling in the case, rather than just a dismissal. That would significantly raise the cost to many site owners in trying to dismiss these sorts of mistargeted lawsuits. It's nice to see a long list of defenders of the public and the internet sign on to explain to the court why this dicta is incorrect. Public Citizen, EFF, CDT and the Citizen Media Law Project all joined in with an amicus brief. Hopefully the court realizes the earlier sloppy ruling was a mistake, and the ability to dismiss using Section 230 safe harbors remains.

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Court Ruling: Section 230 Protects Sites... But Not Necessarily If They Promise To Remove Content

from the giving-up-your-safe-harbor dept

An interesting court ruling has added a wrinkle to section 230 safe harbors that protect a website from being liable for actions of its users. In this case, Yahoo was given immunity due to section 230, but may still be in trouble because a Yahoo employee promised to remove the content in question. The case involved a guy who posted profiles of his ex-girlfriend on Yahoo sites. The profiles in question included nude photos the ex-boyfriend had taken and her (real) contact info. He then posed as her in chat rooms and pointed men to her profile leading to numerous unwanted phone calls. Yahoo was apparently quite slow in responding to her complaints, but eventually someone promised to "take care of" the issue. However, two more months went by and nothing happened, so the woman sued (at which point the profiles were finally removed).

Now, it's pretty bad that Yahoo was slow to remove the profiles, but it still seems like the woman's case should have been against the ex-boyfriend who posted the profiles. That, of course, is the whole point of Section 230, so that the service/tool provider is not blamed for the actions of an individual, even though that individual is still responsible. There was some question over whether or not Section 230 still applied since this wasn't a defamation case, but the court (correctly) ruled that section 230 applies to much more than just defamation.

However, the more interesting part is that the court noted that since a Yahoo rep indicated she would "take care of" things, she may have established a separate "contract" outside of section 230 safe harbors, which was then violated. So... the lesson is, if you want to keep your safe harbors, don't promise stuff and fail to live up to it...

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End Of An Era: Yahoo Finally Killing Off Geocities

from the bye-bye dept

Just last night, I got into a conversation with someone about the rise and fall of various social networking sites. The key point was that they all seem to come and go -- and we were noting how MySpace and Facebook were following that trend. I brought up that it was the same thing that had happened in the past with SixDegrees and Friendster as well... when the guy I was talking to pointed out that I shouldn't forget GeoCities. In many ways, GeoCities was the original social network. It's where I got my very first website way back in 1996 or so (when the company was still called Beverly Hills Internet, and the service was GeoPages, not GeoCities). I learned HTML in order to figure out how to set up and manage my site on GeoPages (now long gone, of course). In 1999, Yahoo bought GeoCities for a bit less than $3 billion -- and, as big companies are known to do with hot startups -- did pretty much nothing with it (other than quickly laying off most of the employees and pissing off users).

I actually knew the site was still operating, because just a month or so ago, I came across the GeoCities site of a friend of mine who had first convinced me to use GeoCities -- and his page was still up, looking pretty much the same as it did in 1996. However, Yahoo has now announced that it will be shutting down GeoCities as part of its ongoing effort to consolidate and concentrate. Still, as Rich Skrenta points out, it's rather ridiculous to just shut down a property that gets 11 million unique visitors per month. Rich is offering to simply take over the site for Yahoo, promising to give them back 50% of any revenue. I wonder if others would want the same. Could you imagine a bidding war for GeoCities in 2009?

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Yahoo Removing Your Stock Board Comments Is Not A Violation Of Your First Amendment Rights

from the freedom-to-post? dept

Eric Goldman points us to the latest silly lawsuit against Yahoo. This time, it's a guy who posted a bunch of comments on various stock forums, and when Yahoo appears to have canceled his account, he sued the company for violating his First Amendment rights. You can read the full lawsuit below:

Of course, the First Amendment has nothing to do with this whatsoever. It is entirely focused on what Congress can do, not what some company can do. Congress can't make a law preventing this guy from sharing his thoughts -- but Yahoo has every right to remove his comments. The guy's other complaints are that in removing his posts, Yahoo is "aiding and abetting" stock pumpers, but he provides little evidence to back that up (and, again, simply removing his posts hardly seems like aiding and abetting.) Oh, right, and then there's the claim that this somehow violates the guy's civil rights. At some point people might realize that companies have no obligation to let you say whatever you want...

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Detailed Investigative Report On College Sports Recruiting Violations Dismissed As 'Blog' Story

from the sorta-missing-the-point... dept

We've been pointing out that just because journalism is moving away from print newspapers, it doesn't take away from investigative journalism, at all. In fact, we've seen how there are a number of new online investigative journalism operations that are moving in to pick up the slack. In fact, in the sports realm, it's been pointed out before that the best sports journalists are getting snapped up left and right (for much higher salaries) by the various online entities, and they're still doing tremendous investigative reporting work. Just last week, Dan Wetzel and Adrian Wojnarowski, both well-respected sports writers with pretty long resumes in the field, broke a story about how UConn had violated recruiting rules.

It had everything that a typical investigative report should include. It involved a six-month investigation, and the amount of background and detail is quite impressive. It's exactly what an investigative report should be, even if it was published only online and there were no subscribers who had to "pay" to make it happen. It seems to pretty clearly disprove the idea that the only way to fund investigative journalism is to have it paid for by subscribers. That's never actually been true in the past, but it's even clearer with this story.

Still, perhaps the most ridiculous part of the story, as pointed out by one of our readers, Dave, is that the basketball coach who was implicated for recruiting violations in the story, Jim Calhoun, decided that, rather than respond to the allegations, he could dismiss them entirely because they appeared online only:

It was a newspaper story that ... it wasn't a newspaper, I'm sorry. It was a blog story that appeared, I guess, in something I probably can't get a hold of, which is Yahoo! And very simply my comments are what I said.

So, this guy thinks that since the publishing of an in-depth investigative report happened in an online only source (a) it's obviously "a blog story" (even though it wasn't) and (b) it can be waved off. Of course, now that the story isn't just appearing on "a blog" -- it's appearing in the NY Times and the NY Daily News and the Boston Globe, among many other print newspapers -- maybe he'll admit that perhaps it's an issue?

Investigative reporting is investigative reporting, whether it happens online or in a newspaper. Journalists (and investigation subjects) who ignore that do so at their own peril.

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