Peter Black's Freedom to Differ

Levi's viral hit

Wired reviews an effective viral marketing from Levi Strauss:

The hottest video on YouTube right now showcases a handful of agile hipsters effortlessly hopping, leaping and even back-flipping into their jeans.

Amateur videos of friends performing such stunts are common enough on YouTube, but this video is the work of professionals.

"We didn't want to overtly brand it as Levi's," said Erica Archambault, head of public relations at Levi Strauss, who confirmed Friday that the company is behind the viral video. "We wanted people to discover it on their own."

The acrobatic "Guys backflip into jeans" video ... was created to promote Levi's line of zipperless, button-fly jeans.

First uploaded Monday, the video has clocked a staggering 1.4 million views this week, garnering it YouTube's coveted "most viewed" spot. It's the kind of viral hit that ad agencies and their clients have been cooking up ever since Burger King scratched out an internet hit with its subservient chicken website in 2004.

Levi Strauss worked with San Francisco-based advertising company Cutwater to produce the video, which was shot in March.

Read more here.  And here is the video:

Another clever use of Twitter

Lost Remote highlights another very effective use of Twitter:

WCNC just used Twitter to cover the North Carolina primary. “It was incredibly successful,” says WCNC’s Kayla Castille, who said reporters and anchors “really got into it.” Of course, Twitter has been gaining popularity in media circles, from the New York Times to CNN to the Seattle PI. But there’s a difference between using Twitter as another distribution path for news updates and actually leveraging it as a distributed coverage tool. WCNC created different Twitter accounts for the station’s reporters and anchors covering the story, then it aggregated all their Twitter messages on a single page on WCNC.com. The end result was real-time, unmoderated updates delivered from multiple mobile devices covering the same story. Plus, it doesn’t force you to sign up to Twitter to follow the coverage. Pretty smart.

Read more here.

Why Twitter?

At Media Post's Online Spin blog Max Kalehoff offers a great explanation of why we Twitter:

I use Twitter, the micro-blogging platform. Each post is limited to 140 characters, so it instills succinct, efficient expression. And you only receive regular posts from those people you choose to follow, so you can eliminate attention polluters. While Twitter is significant in its own right, most significant is what it represents: the arrival of short-form communications, specially tailored for our growing attention deficit and love for instant gratification.

So someone recently asked me what value I get out of Twitter. Here’s the deal:

First, it fulfills basic human needs of self-expression, and I’m not afraid to admit that. Sometimes I spontaneously express how I’m feeling, while others times what I’m doing. Sometimes I document events, while at other times I express deep thoughts or analysis. Sometimes I’m too preoccupied for Twitter, but most times it works itself regularly into my workflow of life.

Second, it has become an important means of one-to-one and one-to-group communications. I estimate that 10% of my one-to-one communications take place on Twitter now. While it’s contributed to my problem of socialnetworkitis, sometimes it’s just the most convenient way to reach someone directly with a private message. This is especially true if you want to respond directly to something someone said on Twitter, and even more so if you know someone is more apt to respond on Twitter versus some other digital platform, like email. For one to many communications, it’s simple, straightforward and selective.

Third, Twitter’s a great platform to cultivate trusted members in a customized community — to solicit feedback and spark interaction on real questions and issues of everyday life and business. I can pose a question to my community and almost always expect numerous responses back — whether a request for a restaurant recommendation, a proposal to meet spontaneously for a social meeting, or to secure participants for a mini-brainstorm. This week I even announced the death of a family member and received several thoughtful gestures — both public and private. Your Twitter community tends to reward you in proportion to how much time you spend nurturing and pruning it.

Finally, Twitter posts are published quickly and, usually, publicly. While there are risks and obligations with that, there’re also huge benefits and opportunities associated with being spontaneous and visible. It’s part of being in the conversation, and managing your digital reputation. Twitter has critical mass — at least with several of my personal and business circles.

If I’ve convinced you there’s value in Twitter, the next question is: How do you grow and prune your Twitter community?

Read it here.

Sad Kermit

A very sad Kermit re-enacts the suicide attempt scene from the Royal Tennenbaums:

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

Global IP Index

Taylor Wessing has launched the results of its Global Intellectual Property (IP) Index:       

The Global IP Index presents a comprehensive statistical comparison of IP protection and enforcement in 22 of the world's leading economies, rating each jurisdiction for protecting and enforcing patents, trade marks and copyrights.
         
Based on an innovative analysis of surveys of senior industry figures globally and an array of published empirical data, the index provides an assessment of the best and worst jurisdictions to obtain, exploit, enforce and attack particular types of IP. Where once anecdotes, conjecture and even some prejudice may have informed our view of a particular jurisdiction, we are now able to rely on statistical analysis.

The Results

Based on the analysis, all 22 jurisdictions have been ranked in order of IP competitiveness, however it is perhaps more useful to consider the Global IP Index in terms of five groups or 'tiers' of IP competitiveness. The resulting groups are listed below:

                        

To see a detailed breakdown of the IP Index including rankings for each of the 22 jurisdictions in regard to specific Trade mark, Patent and Copyright Indices, country analysis and commentary on the findings, rationale and implications, download the full Global IP Index report here.

Interestingly, this is the copyright top ten:

1. U.S.
2. U.K.
3. Germany
4. Netherlands
5. Canada
6. New Zealand
7. Australia
8. Singapore
9. France
10. Israel

Reflections ...

This week Duncan Riley announced his new blogging venture, The Inquisitr (see my post here).  However in my mind an equally significant announcement was that  Skepticlawyer (Helen Dale) from Catallaxy and Legal Eagle from The Legal Soapbox are teaming up at in a joint blog venture, Skepticlawyer.  Although they are both lawyers, they have different interests and politics, they are always thoughtful and intelligent, and I enjoy immensely reading their perspectives on law, politics and life.  I wish them both all the best in their new collaboration.

This announcement, coupled with reading one of Kim Weatherall's now rare posts at Lawfont (see here), has made me think about possibly changing the tone of this blog, or perhaps launching a new blog.  I enjoy writing this blog and I like to think it presents an eclectic mix of tech news, videos, politics and occasionally a little law.  It certainly reflects what I read and watch each day on the internet.  However, this mix has occurred by accident.  When I began blogging I envisioned creating a more traditional law blog (or blawg) - one that you might expect a (semi-serious) legal academic to write.  Instead it has become something quite different.  Perhaps if I spent less time reblogging and posting links and videos I would have more time to write the sort of quality, original posts you see from Helen, Legal Eagle and Kim.  I spend so much time "reporting" and covering what others are saying that I find that I'm not putting my own thoughts and arguments on the law and policy issues that I find significant and interesting out to the public to be tested, challenged and improved.   To do this would mean fewer posts, but longer, more thoughtful posts.  And although it may well be more time consuming, it would also likely tie in with my teaching and research more closely.  That said, I like my blog now and I enjoy putting it together. 

Anyway, these are just some thoughts I've been having over the last few days.  I'd be interested to know what you think ...

Jon Stewart is like Bill O'Reilly?

The Associated Press reports on an interesting finding:

A journalism think tank studying "The Daily Show" doesn't believe many people get their news from Jon Stewart — because otherwise they wouldn't get the jokes.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism also said it was surprised at how much the Comedy Central late-night program resembles "The O'Reilly Factor," "Hardball" and other cable news shows in content.

The Washington-based organization asked its researchers to study a year's worth of "The Daily Show" tapes — hardly a grim assignment — after hearing the frequent claim that many young people learn about the world from Stewart instead of more traditional news sources.

Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director, said he doubts this is the case. He considers "The Daily Show" more of a political satire in the tradition of newspapermen like Art Buchwald, H.L. Mencken and Russell Baker.

...

The show is actually making some very serious political commentary, "but they use humor to do it," Rosenstiel said.

...

While Stewart aims most of his firepower at Republicans, the show is actually pretty balanced in its bookings, the study noted. Of the clearly partisan, 15 guests were conservative and 18 were liberal. Presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain was a guest on Wednesday's show.

"The fact that the lineup of guests is actually even surprised me," Rosenstiel said. "I thought going in that there weren't that many Republicans who would be willing to go on the show."

Read more here (from Yahoo! News).  Still, I don't think you'll see a riff like this from Bill O'Reilly:

Nine Network Australia Pty Limited v IceTV Pty Limited

Yesterday the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia handed down its decision in Nine Network Australia Pty Limited v IceTV Pty Limited, a very interesting copyright case relating to electronic TV programming guides.  The opening paragraph of the Court's decision neatly summarises the issue:

The main issue in this appeal is whether the primary Judge correctly rejected the claim by the appellant (‘Nine’) that the respondents (‘Ice’) had infringed Nine’s copyright in its television program schedules.  There is no dispute that the schedules are compilations and constitute original literary works in which Nine holds copyright.  Specifically, there is no dispute that Nine holds copyright in the ‘Weekly Schedules’ it distributes selectively to so-called ‘Aggregators’ approximately two weeks before the commencement of the relevant broadcast week.  However, her Honour held that Nine had not established that Ice, which provides a subscription-based ‘electronic program guide’ (‘EPG’) for television called ‘IceGuide’, has reproduced a substantial part of Nine’s copyright works.

The Court upheld the appeal, finding that IceTV had infringed Nine's copyright in its TV programming schedules.  I've followed this case for some (see, for example, here) and I hope to have something to say about it in the next week or so.  In the meantime, check out Kim Weatherall's excellent post on the case here (even if you're not a lawyer you'll be able to understand Kim's summary of the case).  And of course you can read the decision on AustLII here.

2008 Press Freedom Report

The 2008 Press Freedom Report of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance,  Breaking the shackles: the continuing fight against censorship and spin 2008 was launched at the Alliance's annual Press Freedom Dinner last Friday night in Sydney.  Read the full report here.

An internet mystery

Wired presents an internet mystery, how much of the internet's traffic really is file sharing?

How much of the traffic on the internet is peer-to-peer file trading?

Everyone seems to agree it represents a lot of the traffic, but the truth is no one knows (with the possible exception of the ISPs and backbone providers in the middle, and they aren't telling or sharing raw data).

One of the most recent reports on P2P traffic came from a traffic optimization firm called Ellacoya in June 2007. Their report said that http-based web traffic had overtaken peer-to-peer traffic on the net, thanks to streaming media sites like YouTube.

Ellacoya, since acquired by Arbor Networks for its traffic-shaping technology, pegged http traffic at 46 percent of the net's volume, with P2P traffic close by at 37 percent.The company says the data was based on about 1 million North American broadband subscribers.

But little is known about when, how and where the company collected the data, or how it analyzed the packets.

Read more here.

Wikipedia seeks CDA immunity ... and should get it

Wikipedia seeks immunity under the Communications Decency Act:

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia is asking a court to dismiss a libel lawsuit brought by literary agent Barbara Bauer, who alleges that she was described as "The Dumbest of the 20 Worst" in an article.

In papers filed in a New Jersey state court last week, Wikipedia argues that it is immune from liability under the federal Communications Decency Act. That law generally provides that Web sites can't be sued for comments posted by users.

"It's clearly the case that we have a statutory immunity and I expect that we will demonstrate that to the court," said Mike Godwin, general counsel at Wikipedia's parent company, the Wikimedia Foundation.

The case stems from a 2006 article about Bauer's company, the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency. She alleged in her lawsuit that the Wikipedia article libeled her by calling her "The Dumbest of the Twenty Worst" literary agents and asserting that she has "no documented sales at all."

..

There are few, if any, other instances where Wikipedia has been sued for libel in the U.S.--despite the fact that all content on the site is submitted by users and edited by volunteers. But even without a clear track record of lawsuits against Wikipedia, other court decisions interpreting the Communications Decency Act give the site solid cause for optimism that the case will be dismissed, according to Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. "There is no doubt that Wikimedia qualifies for (immunity) for any claims based on user submissions or edits to Wikipedia, and I would expect any associated lawsuit against Wikimedia alleging libel to be tossed quickly," he said.

Wikipedia also argues that the case should be dismissed because some of the alleged comments complained about are opinions, which courts have said can't be considered defamatory. "Calling people 'dumb' is not libelous," said Matt Zimmerman, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is part of Wikimedia's legal team.

Read more here (from Media Post).

Identity impersonation on Facebook

The Winnipeg Sun reports an on unusual prosecution for impersonation on Facebook:

Posed as a teacher?
Police charge 15-year-old alleged Facebook faker

He's facing the music for allegedly using Facebook illegally.

And at age 15, the Brandon boy is a rare kind of suspect for the relatively rare criminal offence of personation.

The suspect -- who can't be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act -- will appear in court June 24 to face a charge of personation after allegedly posing as a school teacher on Facebook, a social networking website.

"It's probably the first time I've heard of it," University of Manitoba law professor Bruce MacFarlane said of such a charge against someone so young.

"It's a fairly uncommon charge, and certainly more than just uncommon when it comes to youth. It's extremely rare when it comes to youth."

INTENDED TO GAIN

The boy was recently charged by Brandon police after allegedly creating a Facebook profile in the teacher's name, posting information as well as a photo. The incident occurred April 21.

...

An adult convicted of personation could spend up to 10 years in prison.

'MAKE THE LINK'

The burgeoning popularity of Facebook and other networking websites means it's possible that personation charges will arise "with increasing frequency," MacFarlane said.

"Just how many will depend on whether it can be proven, and that's sometimes quite tough to do," he said. "You have to make the link between the person and the computer, and those are all difficult."

Websites of this kind, said Deutscher, don't do enough to ensure users are who they claim they are.

"They don't know who, in fact, is posting what on their sites -- which could affect other people's privacy rights," he said. "In terms of an individual's privacy or in terms of individual reputation, that could be a dangerous thing."

Read more here.

Webby winners announced

The full list of the  Webby Awards winners, nominees and honorees are now available here.  Comedian Stephen Colbert received a Webby for being the Internet's "Person of the Year".  Mashable has a good summary here:

Given the amazing amount of social media and blogosphere award winners announced (not to mention the sheer volume of nominees and categories in general), it’ll probably be 2009 by the time I’m done with this post, but I’m going to take a crack at summarizing all the award winners you’ll be interested as an ardent and frequent reader of Mashable.

The Regulars
All the sites, services and software you’re already familiar with made appearances.  Facebook, Digg, Flock and Flickr and Apple all made appearances.  Conspicuously absent?  Business centric old-schoolers like LinkedIn and Plaxo and Facebook predecessors Friendster and MySpace (not to mention most popular browser evar Firefox).

...

The New Guys
There were a number of startups that we’ve covered here at Mashable, but if you’re not one to closely follow every story we write you may not yet be aware of to bring home various awards.

...

The New Media
Whether it’s the blogs you love, or the conferences you wish you were rich enough to get into, a lot of the blogs you visit regularly made their appearances in the awards listings. One particularly curious category (to me, at any rate, seemed to be the political blog category.  There didn’t seem to be any other categories of blogs nominated, and the selection of blogs in the political category were almost entirely liberal in nature.  We’ve talked about the left-leanings of the tech blogosphere here before, but it does seem to be an interesting quirk meant to provide an award for, well, the Huffinton Post.

Again, read more here.

The state of the Facebook platform

20bits looks at the state of the Facebook platform ... and it's not exactly strong:

Something is wrong in the Facebook developer community.  Starting in March I began noticing that the level of activity in the Facebook developers forum was dropping sharply.

But it's numbers that matter, not vague impressions, so does the data back me up? Is the Facebook developer community retreating from the public space of the forums? The answer is yes, on both accounts.

Looking at five key metrics we'll see that the activity level of the Facebook forums is a fraction of what it was at the beginning of 2008. The number of active users has declined 27% since January, for example.  And this is the best-performing metric discussed.

Furthermore, this decline in forum activity correlates to an overall decline in activity on the Facebook platform. Applications launched in early January were on average 1.5 times more successful than applications launched at the end of March.

The turning point occurred in early February where several interlocking factors came into play. First, Facebook finally saw real competition in the form of other social networking platforms, particularly Hi5.

Second, Facebook started instituting increasingly demanding and arbitrary rules on platform developers, which they then enforced selectively and for their own benefit.

Third, a trend of application consolidation began and accelerated through March, locking up developer resources inside private companies.

Read more here.

The Nuclear Option

Mark Pesce has presented his thoughts on hyperconnectivity, hyperempowerment and Twitter at the Walkley Public Affairs Conference on Social Media in Sydney today:

You can read his thoughts here.

Duncan Riley's new project

Australian blogging celebrity Duncan Riley is leaving TechCrunch to start a new project,  The Inquisitr.  Read what TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has to say about Duncan's sad departure here.  You can also read Duncan describe his new project here (and watch him on a video), or listen to him on a podcast with his old blog, The Blog Herald, here. 

As an avid reader of Duncan's blogging for several years now, I am looking forward to following his new project and I wish him all the best.

Chlamydia spreads virally on Facebook

TechCrunch's Duncan Riley highlights an unusual Facebook application:

A new app from the American Social Health Association aims to spread Chlamydia on Facebook to raise awareness of the disease.

The Morph Monkey Facebook app looks fairly benign at the start. Users can select pictures of their friends to see what their combined child will look like. As the user goes to morph the images, a pop up box informs them that they’ve given their friend Chlamydia (video demo above).

It’s a clever way of spreading the message on Facebook, but I’m not sure how many people will be impressed by being tricked into running an app that is just a marketing tool with a health message. You can try it out here.

Read it here.

Murdering the internet

Newsweek has a fascinating interview with Professor Jonathan Zittrain:

If you say that the iPhone is the greatest invention of your lifetime, few would bat an eye. If you stay up all night playing Halo 3 like some deranged supermarathoner bent on blasting strangers a continent away on your Xbox Live, few would question your sanity. But dare to claim that devices like the iPhone and the Xbox are killing the Internet as we know it, you'd be laughed out of town.

But this is the central argument of a new book, "The Future of the Internet--and How to Stop It." Jonathan Zittrain claims that the very thing that makes the Internet great--its "generative" or innovative nature--is being locked down in a new wave of closed devices like the iPhone, Xbox, TiVo and the OnStar system. Zittrain, cofounder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, claims the Internet's ability to serve as an open platform for innovation is being undermined by these "tethered" toys that can't be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners.

"The Internet has been a collective hallucination," says Zittrain, who is also a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University. Zittrain spoke recently with NEWSWEEK's Brian Braiker about his qualms with Apple, Facebook applications, spam and government filtering.

Read the interview here.

More and more downloaded music

More and more people are downloading their music rather than buying CDs:

Digital sales of music represented 10 percent of the total worldwide music market in 2007, up from six percent in 2006, according to In-Stat.

By 2012, digital music sales will represent an impressive 40 percent of all music purchased worldwide, the research firm forecast.

Factors contributing to this growth include the global expansion of broadband, continued demand for single-track downloads, and expanding music catalogues. Another key driver is the potential for market growth in full-track downloads to mobile handsets in markets other than Japan.

"Digital piracy continues to represent the primary challenge to online music service providers," said Stephanie Ethier, In-Stat analyst.

"Other obstacles still include the lack of interoperability between services and devices due to differing digital rights management (DRM) technologies, and weak consumer demand for subscription-based services. Another potential market inhibitor is the fact that content owners, cellular service providers, and handset manufacturers are increasing the amount of marketing and promotion for mobile music."

Read more here (from PC World).

Google diminishing domain names

At WebProNews, Barry Welford asks is Google driving down the value of domain names?

Robin Cannon in Search Engine Journal asks the somewhat puzzling question, ‘Is Google Trumping The URL?‘ Apparently more and more people use Google to find websites than type in the URL in the address bar of their browser. As he says:

When there’s a simple box to fill in with your search term, and you know exactly what you’re looking, why bother to use the address bar? If statistics on popular searches are anything to go by, it looks like many people aren’t bothering with that inconvenient “www” and “.com” and are just going straight through Google.

Hitwise UK just published its most searched for brands 2007 statistics, and the fastest rising US search terms are widely available. Both suggest that Google users know exactly where they want to browse to, and just use the search box to give them the link to click.

It’s certainly an intriguing finding. It brings with it a very important downgrading of the value of a dot-com domain name ...

Using the Google search box instead of the address bar opens up a whole new world. Typing in only the domain name without the dot-com may or may not bring you to the dot-com website. It all depends what Google feels is the most relevant result for the word you have typed in. If you can get your dot-net, dot-org or dot-ca website to be #1 in Google, then you’ll win the searcher’s click. Dot-com domains are no longer invincible on the web. As so often happens, the Internet with Google’s help is levelling the playing field

Read more here.

The Empire Strikes Barack

The latest viral video hit focused on Barack Obama: