Take Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, who said yesterday,

“Technology, and Twitter in particular, is making a mockery of the privacy laws that we have and we do need to think about the regulatory environment that we have.”

The mainstream media, of course, never miss an opportunity to tell their readers that the Internet is the modern-day equivalent of the Wild West, as the Indy ably demonstrates in “Media freedoms in the balance”:

“Mr Hunt raised for the first time the possibility of a new watchdog to ensure that social media such as Twitter and Facebook were subject to controls similar to those faced by the press and broadcasters, saying there may be a case for converging the regulation of traditional and new media.”

And, from this article in the Telegraph:

“Media outlets are supposed to be prevented from disclosing their names by a series of super-injunctions, which prevent them from being identified. Both Twitter and Facebook, however, are based in the US and outside the jurisdiction of British courts.”

The thing is, the politicians and the media seem to be forgetting that this isn’t a problem caused by social media. In fact, this “problem” has existed in one form or another for years. Go back to Jeremy Hunt’s quote and substitute “The foreign newspapers” for “Technology, and Twitter” and you’ll see what I mean.

Over the years, there have been countless examples where injunctions issued in England have no bearing on what gets published by the rest of the world (and rightly so). Here are two such examples – one fairly recent, and one from 2003:

• Irish Times publishes details of Tiger Wood’s injunction against the UK press.
• Prince Charles secures an injunction against the press in England and Wales, but the allegations appear in Italian newspapers.

Sure, the internet means more people in the UK have easier access to that censored information, but is that the only reason to act on this now?  I smell a rat – the Govt seems to be worryingly open to censoring websites at the behest of wealthy groups with Big Media interests; from there, is it such a big leap to include censorship of overseas websites that host injunction-breaking information, too?

The thing I don’t get is, why would Viacom bother? One of the podcasts I listen to is Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. On each episode, he plays (at least) a couple of podsafe music tracks – independently produced music, which often puts “mainstream” artists to shame – and pretty consistently, the artists who have had their tracks played send some feedback to Adam along the lines that after being played they’ve seen an increase in sales of their music.

Robert Scoble recently reported:

To watch my videos you used to have to go to PodTech. Then in January we let go a little bit of our controlling attitude and made a player that you can embed on your own site. What happened?

Traffic tripled.

Read that last bit again – “Traffic tripled“.

A paradoxical, golfing maxim goes something like, “to gain control, you have to give up control”. Which brings me back to my opening question: why would Viacom bother suing YouTube?

If I hear a great tune on the Daily Source Code, I’m driven to go and buy it; if I hear enough good stuff from that artist, I might buy/purchase/spend my hard-earned cash on more material. If I’m browsing YouTube and see one clip that makes me laugh, I might look for another clip featuring that same comedian; and then another. If I see enough funny material from one show, guess what? I might actually tune in to the entire show on TV week after week.

YouTube gets a lot of eyeballs. Somewhere along the line, that must translate into increased viewing figures of the full-length versions of the very clips that Viacom is looking to have removed. I don’t work in the media business so this might be stupid question; increased viewing figures is a good thing, right?

So, why strangle a potential revenue stream?

[tags]Google, YouTube, Viacom, copyright, lawsuit[/tags]

With IE7 having been available in Beta form for a long time, there will inevitably be a trickle of new vulnerabilities over the coming weeks, while the people who research these things for “fun and profit” take advantage of the fact that IE7 is being pushed out via WIndows Update.

As always, while most corporate IT users will have the rollout of IE7 managed for them, it’s the unsuspecting home user who will be the target of these weaknesses.

Update @13:47: The IE Team at Microsoft have now been alerted to this, and posted some guidance, which you can read here. It mentions that the built-in Phishing Filter should warn against this technique, but because the Phishing Filter works against a list of known phishing sites rather than behaviour, I think this will still catch some people out. My advice would be change browsers or trust no-one.

[tags]internet explorer, IE7, vulnerability, weakness, phishing, Secunia, Microsoft[/tags]

Credit card giants Visa and Mastercard have stopped accepting transactions from allofmp3.com, both saying that they don’t want their payment networks used for “illegal activity”. I wonder how much pressure the Recording Industry Ass. of America had to apply to get this result?

Am I alone in thinking that allofmp3.com are appearing in the news as often as Google and YouTube at the moment? I’m sure they must see an increase in business every time – perhaps on the basis of the old addage, “all publicity is good publicity” – but I wonder how long it will be before all electronic payment providers shy away from allowing allofmp3.com to make transactions across their networks?

[tags]mp3, allofmp3, allofmp3.com, downloads, payments[/tags]

We’ve seen bloggers making posts about presentations and keynotes as they happen before, but the interesting slant on this is that Keiren McCarthy from The Register will be there, trawling the blogosphere for blog posts about the meeting, tagged with “igf”, as they occur and feed the interesting ones back into the meeting in real time. I haven’t heard of this technique being used before, and certainly not being used at such a forum.

The output from the meeting will feed into the Internet Governance Fourm being held in Athens at the end of the month, so this represents a great opportunity for bloggers passionate about the future of the net to make their voices heard during a meeting of academics, business people and politicians as if they themselves were in the audience.

Of course, it depends on Kieren’s editorial control in making sure that the “right” blog posts are bought to the attention of the panel, but it’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.