On Tuesday, we wrote about how a group of grandstanding state attorneys general had moved on from blaming Craigslist for the actions of its users, now that they had successfully censored that site, and began demanding similar censorship for Backpage.com, the online classifieds from Village Voice Media. As a few people have sent in, Backpage does not seem interested in backing down, posting a public response and pointing out that they are operating perfectly in accordance with the law, that even the AGs admit that Backpage cooperates with law enforcement, and that the AGs would be better served going after those actually involved in the activities, rather than blaming third parties:

While no system is perfect, even the AGs acknowledge Backpage.com's good-faith cooperation with law enforcement.

In the last two years, Backpage.com users have posted 58 million ads and only 6 million in the adult services section. Federal and state authorities have called on Backpage.com to testify in just five cases involving alleged abuse of underage persons. Backpage.com continues to respond to valid subpoenas from law enforcement officials whose job it is to investigate, apprehend and prosecute criminals who wrongfully post illegal ads and victimize others.

Backpage.com is disappointed that the AGs have determined to shift blame from criminal predators to a legal business operator in an apparent attempt to capitalize on political opportunity during the election season.

They also note: "Censorship will not create public safety nor will it rid the world of exploitation."

Of course, rather than recognizing any of this and maybe backing down, Connecticut Attorney General (and Senate candidate) Richard Blumenthal responded in typically misleading fashion:

"I am deeply disappointed by this unfortunate and unfounded resistance to taking common-sense steps toward protecting women and children. I am hopeful that the company will reconsider its resistance and do the right thing. I will consult with my fellow attorneys general and consider possible next steps."

Notice that he does not respond to any of the actual points raised. He does not respond to the fact that shutting down these services won't do anything to help protect women and children and will almost certainly make the problem worse. He just pretends that the world is the exact opposite of what it is. It's as if Richard Blumenthal thinks that everyone out there is incredibly dumb and believes the world works as he says it does, rather than how it actually works.

There's been this a lot of talk about "aggregators" recently -- often in the context of traditional newspapers claiming that such aggregators are somehow damaging their business. As we've discussed in the past, if you look at the details, there's little evidence that aggregators are really the issue. Instead, many of the complaints appear to be confusing a correlation of their own business declines with the rise of aggregators, and falsely believing there's a causal relationship when there's little, if any, evidence to support that.

However, that's not going to stop ongoing legal actions from those publishers against the aggregators they believe are a problem. One reason for this is that the specific legal situation at times can be a bit vague, as internet aggregators are quite different than past businesses. If you're interested in this subject, you should absolutely read Kimberly Isbell's very thorough look at the legal issues related to online aggregators. She very carefully breaks out the different types of aggregators (though, I'm a bit surprised that people seriously consider commentary blogs to be "aggregators") as well as the specific legal issues facing each of the different aggregators. The problem, which becomes clear, is that the law is not anywhere close to settled on the key issues, and leave an awful lot of key questions up to the interpretation of whatever judge gets the cases in question. We've discussed in the past the idea that it's often possible to take the "fair use" factors and interpret them in either direction (something is or is not fair use), and the same may be true with "hot news" in some cases as well. That's a problem, and makes both concepts somewhat useless and dangerous as well. If you have a law where the boundaries are incredibly vague, unclear, and up to the whims of a randomly selected judge, it leads to potentially damaging situations, where people avoid liability by not even trying to do certain things for fear of getting sued.

The concept of hot news is now being tested in a few different courts, so we can be hopeful that within a few years, perhaps, the courts will dump the concept entirely as a violation of the First Amendment (an analysis that hasn't been done yet), but with that question still up in the air, there's still a chance that a confused court could rule otherwise, creating a massively damaging situation for value added content services online.

This comes as no surprise, but is still somewhat disturbing. A lawsuit the EFF was involved in over the federal government's warrantless wiretapping program has been dismissed by the court because it "was not a 'particularized injury' but instead a 'generalized grievance.'" This same issue has been raised before. If the government illegally spies on people, how can you prove it? You can't go to court unless you prove that you were harmed by the action, but as long as the government keeps it secret then you can't know. That's why the one case where the gov't accidentally revealed some info is so important. But, still, in this other case, the EFF plans to appeal noting the ridiculousness of the situation:

"The alarming upshot of the court's decision is that so long as the government spies on all Americans, the courts have no power to review or halt such mass surveillance even when it is flatly illegal and unconstitutional," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston

Facebook is known for not looking kindly (and for going legal) on sites that attempt to do pass through logins to do something with a Facebook account. I can understand why they don't like these other services, but it's difficult to see what's illegal about them. The next potential legal battle apparently may be between Facebook and Seppukoo, a fun site that offers users an amusing way to close and delete their Facebook account by having it commit a virtual suicide:

The site, Seppukoo.com, offers ritual suicide for Facebook users' virtual profiles by deactivating your account. And it doesn't stop there. If you're willing to end it all, the site will feature a RIP memorial page on its site and sends the page to all your Facebook friends.

Fun stuff. Except, of course, Facebook doesn't want people deleting their accounts, and so it blocked Seppukoo. Now, the battle of words is heating up and lawyers are getting involved. Facebook has issued a cease and desist, insinuating that it will take Seppukoo to court for violating Facebook's "rights and responsibilities" if it doesn't stop offering the service. I'm still quite confused as to what legal leg Facebook has to stand on here. I can understand why it doesn't like what Seppukoo is doing... but that doesn't mean it's illegal.

There are many people out there who are greatly troubled by the way the FCC "enforces" efforts against broadcast indecency -- with some even questioning whether or not it's even constitutional for the FCC to act as a public arbiter of indecency. It looks like the FCC has just hired one such person, in the form of Duke telco law professor Stuart Benjamin. Since I consider myself among those who question how indecency fines can fit with a First Amendment, this seems like a good thing -- but the reporting on it, at the link above, only focuses on the complaints about this hire. But the complaint comes from the Parents Television Council, whose main claim to fame is flooding the FCC with bogus complaints about "indecent" programming from people who didn't even see whatever it is they're complaining about. So you can understand why they might complain. If they lose the ability to create moral panics, it's harder to keep going.

There have been plenty of legal questions over the activities of a small group of companies in Europe, including law firm Davenport Lyons, ACS:Law, Logistep and Digiprotect among others -- who all seem to work together to purposely put files online that they have licensed, and then send threat letters to the owner of any IP address that connects to them. This leads to a fair number of totally bogus demands for people to pay up to avoid getting sued. Apparently, the business is quite profitable, even as no actual lawsuits have been filed.

Yet, now reader Dan alerts us to the news that, at least in Germany, the pre-settlement letters and relationships between these companies may be entirely illegal. This was discovered due to a recently leaked document -- the one that showed how profitable all this was -- which also noted that the relationships between the various companies were not based on any direct monetary exchange:

The document states that "the whole project is kind of a joint venture where no party charges the other party with any costs." The problem with such a set-up is that the pre-settlement offers are usually based on costs incurred by retaining a law office to pursue the claim. File sharers are asked to pay 450 bucks for a porn movie because it costs money to investigate their IP address and send them the cease and desist letter.

However, German law specifically states that these costs can't be based on the success of the claim. In other words: In order to invoice file sharers for lawyer fees, these fees have to occur and be paid by someone no matter whether a file sharer pays up or not. Invoicing someone for costs that haven't actually occurred could be seen as fraud.

Oops. After a German lawyer, Thomas Stadler, reviewed all this and posted his analysis saying that the efforts in Germany were clearly illegal under German law (Google translation from the original) , the German lawyer who had sent the original document (the leaked one, detailing how these operations worked), Udo Kornmeier sent him a cease-and-desist letter (again, Google translation from the original), demanding he take down his blog post that showed the whole operation was illegal. Apparently, lawyers who may be breaking the law in Germany don't like other lawyers exposing them...

The NY Times has an article about how LifeStyle Lift, a company that does cosmetic surgery (facelifts) has reached a settlement with NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo over posting fake reviews on its site. It wasn't just a case of some "rogue" employees posting some fake positive reviews, either. The company apparently sent out emails to employees telling them to "devote the day to doing more postings on the Web as a satisfied client." It also created its own fake facelift review websites that (of course) reflected positively on themselves. The company has apologized and agreed to pay $300,000.

Now, it's clear that the company was doing a bad thing here, but there are some questions raised about this. Eric Goldman, who also notes that the company previously had sued a review site that had many negative reviews for trademark infringement (a clear misuse of trademark law to stifle free speech), points out that it's unclear what law was actually broken here. Andrew Cuomo claims that what the company did was illegal, but doesn't point to any specific law that says so. We've seen this before from Cuomo, who has publicly accused companies of breaking the law, without ever naming the law in question.

That said, it's clear in this case that LifeStyle Lift was a bad actor. The question is how to deal with it. Goldman suggests that review sites and consumers should deal with this themselves:

Ultimately, I believe the burden should largely rest on review websites to provide a forum that is sufficiently game-resistant that consumers can trust the information on the website.... In my opinion, the only real "solution" to fake consumer reviews is to teach consumers proper techniques for searching for information and evaluating the credibility of the information they consume. This is one of those crucial life-coping skills that everyone needs to learn at an early age, right up there with the three Rs and how to manage money. Education is the only scalable answer to the problems of information credibility in our complex information society.

For the most part, I agree... though I do wonder if there's potential to make a claim that the practices violate truth in advertising type laws or other consumer protection laws on deceptive practices. Of course, I would assume that it would then be an issue for the FTC, rather than the NY Atotorney General's office.

For years, the federal government has insisted that online poker in the US is illegal, and reinforced it by tacking on punishment for payment processors who process gambling payments onto a totally unrelated bill about harbor safety. Poker players, on the other hand, have insisted for years that there are no laws against online poker -- in part because the laws are all against games of chance, whereas poker is a game of skill. This position received a small boost recently when a judge agreed that poker was a game of skill rather than chance. On top of this, there's been an ongoing effort underway (led by Barney Frank) to specifically make it clear that online poker is legal. However, until that bill goes anywhere, the feds apparently still believe it's very much illegal and have now started going after the payment processors, freezing the funds of payment processors who work with a variety of online poker sites. Expect quite a legal battle to follow.

While the entertainment industry has been working over time to try to stop file sharing in Spain, court ruling after court ruling has found that personal file sharing is perfectly reasonable and legal -- and that sites that merely link to content rather than host it (i.e., search engines and trackers) aren't breaking copyright law either. In the latest such case, a judge found that a guy who downloaded and shared over 3,000 movies wasn't violating copyright law, because it was all for personal use with no intent to profit.

Many educators are having trouble figuring out how to handle electronic devices in the classroom. Some have been educating students on the negative effects, encouraging them to regulate their own use. Others have even highlighted possible applications for mobile devices in the classroom. Though, many just try to ban everything. A principal in British Columbia took his school's ban to a new level by setting up a cellphone jammer. There was just one problem -- the device is illegal in Canada. The principal had ordered the Chinese device online, but some angry students were quick to find out and inform him that he was breaking the law. So much for that idea. Now, he's left looking pretty bad while cellphone use in school now seems like some kind of civil rights issue to some students.

It seems like this is less about the cellphone ban and more about maintaining authority in the school. On that front... this completely backfired. Plenty of schools have effective cellphone bans without resorting to technological blocks (I attended such a high school). Maybe the principal should explain to students and teachers why cellphones are a problem, set some reasonable guidelines for use and some reasonable consequences for violations of the policy. That would probably go a lot further to establish the principal's authority and gain his students' respect than installing an illegal device and being forced to backtrack ever could.