Christopher Norberg had a car accident in 2006.  So he went to see chiropractor Dr. Steven Biegel. After being treated, Norberg felt that his bill was unfair so he posted a negative review of the Doc on Yelp.com.  Yelp.com is a review website that includes everything from local restaurants to individual professions.

Dr. Biegel claimed that Norberg’s review was libel and caused his business “loss of reputation, shame, mortification, and hurt feelings” and “injury to his business and profession.”  The filing was made in the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco.  Biegel also believes that Yelp invaded his right to privacy.

As soon as I read this article on PC World, I thought about whether The First Amendment would protect Norberg in this case.  The First Amendment states:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

In the case of Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. 418 U.S. 323 (1974), The Supreme Court ruled that opinions could not be considered defamatory.  In the case of Yelp, it is clearly an opinionated website.    Personally I believe that the Doc doesn’t have much of a case here.  Just imagine all the negative comments everyone gets on every single YouTube video.  Sometimes you just have to suck it up and have thicker skin when it comes to what people say about you on the Internet.

[via PC World]

It took Facebook about 4 months to grow about 50 million users.  They went from 100 million active users at the end of August to 150 million users as of today.  Not too shabby!  But I am not surprised by this figure considering Facebook is the #5 website in the world (Alexa).    About half of the 150 million number is using the social network every single day.  Facebook hosts well over 4 billion photos.

Facebook has about $516 million in funding, but is facing the challenge of monetizing their large user base.  This is one thing MySpace has figured out by leveraging advertising on their homepage.  The banners and pay-per-click text ads aren’t as useful on social networks as they are on search engines.

The 150 million active users include “people in every continent—even Antarctica. If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria,” stated Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.  The world population is about 6.7 billion of which 2% of that is on Facebook.  Given the current growth rate of technology, I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook has 10% of the world population in the next 5 years.  Capitalize on that, advertisers!

Now more than ever, employers and professionals are Googling the names of the people that they often associate with.  I’ve heard cases where managers of companies would Google and even check Facebook profile pictures of those that they are about to hire.  Somehow that will affect their decision about the person’s credibility too.

This is what makes the case of Liskula Cohen very interesting.  There is a blog called Skanks in NYC that demeans pictures of people and uses their full names.  All of the pictures on Skanks in NYC of Liskula Cohen are personal pictures.  Cohen will has recently appeared on the cover of Vogue.

Since Skanks in NYC is hosted on blogspot.com (the domain owned by Google’s Blogger subsidiary) with an anonymous name, it makes sueing that individual or group people even harder.  This means Cohen would have to go directly to the owner of the website, Google Inc.

“Essentially, Cohen has to demonstrate defamation twice: once to show that she has a sufficient case that the identity of the blogger should be unmasked. At that point, the case could proceed against the actual author of the blog, at which point the defamation would have to be demonstrated all over again,” wrote John Timmer of Ars Technica regarding the case. “None of this will be easy, as US courts generally set a high standard for defamation of public figures, and Cohen has made a name for herself in ways that go beyond modeling by getting hit in the face with a vodka bottle at a Manhattan club.”

This truly will be an interesting case.  It is very similar to the city of Memphis pushing to find out who the owner of MPD Enforcer 2.0 is.

[via Ars]

Today iTunes has made a major improvement. Now when you download songs from iTunes owned by Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, or EMI they will be DRM-free.  Songs can be downloaded directly over the iPhone 3G over the 3G network for the same price.  And starting in April 2009, songs will have three price points.  DRM-free songs on iTunes will have higher quality at 256 kbps AAC encoding.

The three price points for music will be available at 69 cents, 99 cents, and $1.29.  Most albums will remain at the cost of $9.99.

“We are thrilled to be able to offer our iTunes customers DRM-free iTunes Plus songs in high quality audio and our iPhone 3G customers the ability to download music from iTunes anytime, anywhere over their 3G network at the same price as downloading to your computer or via Wi-Fi,” stated Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “And in April, based on what the music labels charge Apple, songs on iTunes will be available at one of three price points—69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29—with many more songs priced at 69 cents than $1.29.”

For songs that have already been previously downloaded, users can upgrade them to higher quality DRM-free for 30 cents per song.  About 8 out of 10 million of their songs will be available DRM-free starting today.

Here are a few iTunes stats:
-6 billion songs sold
- 10 million songs available on iTunes
- 9.7 million Macs were sold in 2008
- 75 million accounts on iTunes are now linked to credit cards
- Macs have grown twice as fast as the PC market

[via Apple press release and Techcrunch]

Xobni is a San Francisco, Calif. based startup that built a platform around Microsoft Outlook.  Xobni makes it easier to find people, email, and attachments within Outlook.  Bill Gates even called Xobni the next generation of social networking.  Xobni has recently raised $7 million in Series B.  Xobni started as a Y-Combinator company then went on to raise $4.26 million in Series A.

Xobni’s Outlook software has been downloaded over 1.5 million times.  Xobni is currently doing product trials with Fortune 500 companies.  Some of the companies Xobni has partnered with includes LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype, and Yahoo!  Cisco’s investment in Xobni is an indication that they are becoming serious about enterprise email.  In August 2008, Cisco acquired PostPath, an email and calendar company for $215 million.

Prior to the $7 million investment, Xobni raised $4.26 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, Atomico, and First Round Capital.  The individuals that participated in Xobni’s first round of funding was Ariel Poler, Saar Gur, and Tom Pickney.

Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead both put albums out for free on BitTorrent and on other various websites.  The albums were put out under a Creative Commons license.  Fans could easily get free copies of the albums.  But it turns out that fans appreciated this so much that they decided to reciprocate by actually buying the albums on Amazon.com.  The Nine Inch Nails album is called Ghosts I-IV and the Radiohead album is called In Rainbows.

Trent Reznor, lead singer of Nine Inch Nails questioned the idea of giving away music for free, but somehow it ended up working in his band’s favor.  They pulled this off even with album sales going downhill.  Does downloading music mean people will be buying less music?  This the billion dollar question.  The RIAA argues that music downloaders are the cause of album sales dropping, but people that oppose believe that downloaders will compensate in other ways.

“The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here,” stated Fred Benenson, Outreach Manager of Creative Commons.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Its about time Google! Mac users can finally download, install, and use Picasa.  Picasa is Google’s free photo editing software.  However there’s a catch.  It only works for Mac OS X version 10.4 and is made for Intel-powered Macs.  The download is available at http://picasa.google.com/mac.

Picasa is especially useful for those who want to upload their digital camera pictures to the Internet.  Every Picasa user gets 1024MB free.  Per year additional space costs $20 for 10GB, $75 for 40GB, $250 for 150GB, and $500 for 400GB.  Features include image importing, editing, and web syncing.  There is a facial recognition feature and a collage maker.  Picasa for Mac also recognizes the camera on the iPhone.  Privacy features for each individual picture is available.

The release of Picasa for Mac became available now to coincide with the timing of Macworld.  Macworld officially begins tomorrow.  Google’s booth will have some people representing Picasa there.  Google wants people to download the application today and bring them questions and feedback during the conference.

[via Wired and the Google Blog]

Twitter has had a crazy day! Over 33 Twitter accounts have been hacked.  Many of those belonging to prominent celebrities including Rick Sanchez of CNN, Britney Spears, President elect Barack Obama, and FOX News.  This is a separate incident from the phishing scheme that happened over the weekend.

Whoever hacked the accounts has a pretty interesting sense of humor, but is bad at spelling.  From the FOX News Twitter account, a message stated “Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay.”  I’m sure he meant Bill O’Reilly, host of FOX’s The O’Reilly Factor. Britney Spears’ Twitter account had a more explicit message: “HI Yall!  Brit Brit here, just wanted to update you all on the size of my *bleep.*  Its about 4 feet wide with razor sharp teeth.” Rick Sanchez’s Twitter stated “i am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today.”  Rick often times refers to his Twitter account on CNN program.  On Huffpost’s Twitter account there are a bunch of links to digitalgangster.com.

Twitter’s internal admin was affected too.  According to Biz Stone, founder of Twitter, the hacker got into some of the tools that the support team uses in order to reset passwords.  When Twitter’s admins realized this, they took the support tools offline so the hacker couldn’t get any further.

[via TechCrunch and Twitter Blog]