Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Wed, 9 Dec 2009 02:29:58 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091130/1828537141.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091130/1828537141.shtml a case brought by a woman named Julie Riggs against MySpace. The complaint itself is somewhat of an amusing read ("At this point Plaintiff was literally seething with anger to the point that she was now consumed by it"). The main issue was that Riggs had created a website that tried to determine which celebrity profiles on MySpace were real and which were fake. She was upset (among other things) because (1) there were fake profiles on MySpace (2) MySpace later did something similar itself and (3) MySpace deleted her profile. After we wrote about the case, we received an angry email from Ms. Riggs telling us we "missed the point" and that MySpace "stole" her idea -- and that we needed to get our story straight. She never explains how coming up with the same idea is illegal, of course. Also, my favorite: "What can you expect from site such as yours though." Indeed.

Unfortunately, it appears that the district court also "missed the point" and did not get the story straight, because as Eric Goldman points out, it has dismissed the lawsuit. However, in this case, it may actually be true that the court missed the point. As Goldman notes in his discussion of the ruling, the court seems a bit confused about how Section 230 of the CDA works, and may have dismissed parts of the case for rather confused reasons. Riggs has appealed, so hopefully the Appeals Court fixes the problems (but still dismisses it). However, again as Goldman notes, this is taking place in the notoriously nutty Ninth Circuit, which often has a problem with reading Section 230 the way everyone else reads Section 230. Hopefully, they get this one right.

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]]> nice-try http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20091130/1828537141 Fri, 4 Dec 2009 00:36:43 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091203/0908017180.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091203/0908017180.shtml ethorad writes "In the UK, in an attempt to promote the work the police do, some forces name and shame criminals that they catch and prosecute. All good so far as it helps the community see that crimes are being tackled (assuming they are ...)

However the Ministry of Justice has now said that police forces who do that must remove the details from their website after one month. Yeah, good luck with that. Place your bets now on how many third party websites (especially local community ones) will start scraping the details from police websites for long term storage?"

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]]> yeah,-that'll-work http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20091203/0908017180