RIAA and Universal accused of extortion

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow: A Florida victim of RIAA lawsuits is striking back, accusing Universal Music Group of being extortionists:

In a new Tampa, Florida, case, UMG v. Del Cid, the defendant has filed the following five (5) counterclaims against the RIAA, under Florida, federal, and California law:

1. Trespass

2. Computer Fraud and Abuse (18 USC 1030)

3. Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices (Fla. Stat. 501.201)

4. Civil Extortion (CA Penal Code 519 & 523)

5. Civil Conspiracy involving (a) use of private investigators without license in violation of Fla. Stat. Chapter 493; (b) unauthorized access to a protected computer system, in interstate commerce, for the purpose of obtaining information in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030 (a)(2)(C); (c) extortion in violation of Ca. Penal Code §§ 519 and 523; and (d) knowingly collecting an unlawful consumer debt, and using abus[ive] means to do so, in violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1692a et seq. and Fla. Stat. § 559.72 et seq.

About time.

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Flextronics purchasing Solectron for $3.6 billion

from Engadget by Paul Miller

Don't feel bad if you've never heard of Flextronics, Solectron or both -- we polled our mom on the subject, and she asked when we were going to give up this "blogging nonsense" for a real job -- but these two fairly low-profile contract electronics manufacturers churn out massive amounts of product for other little companies you might have heard of: like HP, Dell, Sony, Ericsson, Cisco, Motorola and Microsoft. Now Flextronics is ending this bitter rivalry in a Coke buys Pepsi-type shocker, forking over $3.6 billion in cash and stock for Solectron. Flextronics will operate Solectron as a subsidiary, and claims the purchase will help it expand scale and market reach, while saving on costs, with the deal to add about 15 percent to earnings, claims the manufacturer.

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Sproose: Human Powered Search Meets Digg

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

Asking how many ways you can make a search engine is like asking how many ways you can scramble an egg, there are a number of different ways and although it’s not rocket science you can still end up with something inedible.

People powered search is the trendiest of egg scrambling search engine recipes at the moment. Service such as ChaCha have contractual employees answering search queries in real time. The Jason Calacanis vehicle Mahalo launched in alpha this week with a Wikipedia meets Google model which aims to provide pre-written results for 10,000 search queries.

Danville, CA based Sproose marries human powered search to Digg.

Sproose is a personalized search engine that combines social networking with peer-moderated rankings giving users the ability to prioritize, customize and fine-tune searches to produce relevant web search results.

Sproose users can effectively categorize and index relevant sites and tailor those for personal or group use. Through collective moderation and scoring users can sort through existing sites to assemble only the most appropriate results.

The results aren’t bad. It isn’t clear where the search results are originally pulled from (I’d guess Google) and the social voting feature on link priority creates a different search experience. Video results come from Blinkx and Sproose indexes over 25,000 sources for news. Whether it will take is another matter; everyone wants to be the next Google and there is no shortage of competitors. I can honestly say though that I’ve seen many worse than Sproose.

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T-Shirts Meet SMS: Reactee

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

Reactee has announced the launch of a line of interactive t-shirts that combine fashion, SMS and activism through “shirts that text back”.

Reactee allows users to create t-shirts that include a personalized message such “Stop Global Whaling” or “Andrew Keen is a Luddite” that is then complimented by a unique keyword such as SUSHI or MORON on the shirt. People who see the shirt can then respond to it by sending the keyword via SMS to 41411. In return senders receive a custom text message response created by the T-Shirt creator.

Example Reactee customers given include individuals such as DJs who want to share their playlists, political activists promoting a candidate, people who just want to get something off their chest, or entire organizations, which can make many shirts with the same keyword and use them to promote their unique cause.

Users can create text alert lists to communicate with those interested in their causes. Additionally, users can make their designs public and include them in the Reactee gallery of shirts that have received the most text messages.

Existing users include the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas and YouthNoise.

TechCrunch readers can use the code TECHCRUNCH to get 20% of any T-Shirt purchased until the end of June.

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Photo Tagging as a Privacy Problem?

from Slashdot by Zonk

An anonymous reader writes "The Harvard Law Review, a journal for legal scholarship, recently published a short piece on the privacy implications of online photo-tagging (pdf). The anonymously penned piece dourly concludes that 'privacy law, in its current form, is of no help to those unwillingly tagged.' Focusing on the privacy threat from newly emergent automatic facial recognition search engines', like Polar Rose but not Flickr or Facebook, the article states that 'for several reasons, existing privacy law is simply ill-suited for this new invasion.' The article suggests that Congress create a photo-tagging opt-out system, similar to what they did with telemarketing calls and the Do-Not-Call Registry." How would you enforce such a registry, though?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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