“Is the Colonel’s underwear a matter of national security?”  That is my favorite line from the movie, A Few Good Men.  Tom Cruise’s wittiness in that movie reminds me of the wittiness used by the lawyer for The Pirate Bay during this potentially long and arduous trial.  The third day of the trial ended early just like yesterday’s day of the trial.  Yesterday 50% of the charges were dropped because of the prosecution’s lack of the ability to properly explain what BitTorrent was.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) used an argument that damages caused by The Pirate Bay offering The Beatles’ song “Let It Be” through a torrent should be 10 times the damage since the music is available anywhere else online.  The Pirate Bay doesn’t have the funds and cannot pay the damages for offering that song even though Peter Danowsky stated that The Pirate Bay is “organized crime on a grand scale” and netted “significant revenus” from various sources of advertising.

“If I have all this money they claim, someone has apparently stolen it from me,” stated The Pirate Bay’s co-founder Peter Sunde on Twitter.  Peter Danowsky said that even if The Pirate Bay doesn’t have all that money, they can pay a lot of it anyway.

“EU directive 2000/31/EG says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of The Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. They call themselves names like King Kong,” stated Carl Lundström’s lawyer Per E Samuelsson.  “According to legal procedure, the accusations must be against an individual and there must be a close tie between the perpetrators of a crime and those who are assisting. This tie has not been shown. The prosecutor must show that Carl Lundström personally has interacted with the user King Kong, who may very well be found in the jungles of Cambodia.”  Lundström’s company provides technical services to The Pirate Bay.  After this statement the court adjourned.

Sunde later reported on Twitter that after the court was adjourned, “We had some pizza after todays episode of #spectrial. Met the whole oposing side and asked if they could pick up the check. They refused .”

The Jackass TV show on MTV started in 2000.   The show grew popular and ended up launching a movie series owned by MTV parent company Viacom.  Anyone that has registered domain names before also knows how important it is to secure the .com for their business name right away.  Future Media Architects has made things a lot more difficult for people that want to buy the .com for their business name including the Jackass franchise.

Future Media Architects is known as a cyber-squatter, a company that buys domain names and doesn’t put any content on it… only advertisements.  Future Media Architects (FMA) won’t hand Jackass.com to Viacom because they plan to create a website for it about donkeys and “their contributions to society.”  The World Intellectual Property Organization knew that the FMA was full of it but decided that they cannot hand Jackass.com over to Viacom.

Future Media Architects owns 100,000 domain names, many of which only have ads on them.  FMA is based in the Virgin Islands and has a CEO based in Kuwait.  Viacom filed the complain to the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center saying that FMA was using the domain name in bad faith.  For the last 6 years, Jackass.com only had CPC ads on them, but during the case the FMA even showed future website mockups of donkey websites.

“The Respondent offered no explanation as to why it has taken approximately 4 years to launch the donkey website. The Respondent also made no effort to explain why it suddenly wishes to operate a website promoting donkeys, and what benefit it will receive from pursuing this course of action,” according to the WIPO report.

A three part test was conducted to determine that FMA was the winner of the domain name.  The first test was whether the domain name was identical or confusing to the Viacom trademark.  Yes.  The second test was whether Future Media had any legitimate interests with respond to the domain name.  Yes, but Viacom failed to show that FMA did not have any legitimate interests.  And the last test was whether the domain name was registered and used in bad faith.  FMA made no attempt to sell the domain name to Viacom after purchasing it so they won from that standpoint.

My advice to anyone interested in starting a business is to snap up the domain name right away before the FMA takes it.

Mozilla will be supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation to push for the legalization of iPhone jailbreaking with the U.S. Copyright Office.  Mozilla CEO John Lilly stated that “choice is good for users, and choice shouldn’t be criminalized.”  Jailbreaking an iPhone means that the device can accept software that is external from what is offered on iTunes.  Apple believes that accepting any external software is a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

“This is not us criticizing Apple,” stated Mozilla CEO John Lilly. “But it’s the principle of the thing. Choice is good for users, and choice shouldn’t be criminalized. The Internet is too important for all of us for that.”

Some of the popular applications available on jailbroken iPhone applications include tethering applications.

Mozilla may have a bias against Apple because developing a browser for the iPhone would require them to use the Webkit rendering engine used for Safari.  “Given the choice, would we work on a platform where the sole company controlling it makes us unwelcome, or would we work on a platform, like Linux, where we are welcome? The answer is going to be easy for us,” Lilly stated in an interview with Computerworld.

Even if the U.S. copyright office grants jailbroken iPhones from being legal, Mozilla is still unlikely going to develop a browser for the iPhone.  This is the same case with Opera Software ASA.  It was reported earlier that Apple blocked Opera’s web browsing application from being added to the iTunes App Store.  Other companies supporting the EFF include Skype and Cydia.

This is a bit surprising considering some people consider Google Latitude to be an invasion of privacy.  The service basically reports where you are located on a Google Map by reading your IP address or your mobile phone location.  Vic Gundotra stated that “more than a million” mobile subscribers signed up for the service within the first week of launch.  Google launched Latitude in about 27 markets around the world and supports multiple mobile platforms.  The service launched on February 4.

Using Latitude, you can monitor the status of your friends in real-time, chat with them using Google Talk, or call them through the user interface.  One of the limitations of Google Latitude is that the IP address location isn’t always accurate.  For example, my ISP is based in Detroit so it will report me as being there instead of in Ann Arbor.  Regardless, one million within one week is definetely bragging rights for Google.  If you haven’t signed up for Google Latitude yet, check it out here: http://www.google.com/latitude/.

On February 12, 2009, the Twitter community around the world all came together with a unified cause.  Help raise money to buy clean water and distribute among areas of poverty in developing countries.  The program was announced on January 8, 2009 and within one month 1,000 volunteers hosted events across 200 cities.  Over 10,000 people attended these events.

Here is the distribution break-down for all of the donations:
$83,000 for Uganda (33 projects helping 8,250 people served)
$83,000 for Tigray, Northern Ethiopia (15 projects, 6,700 people served)
$83,000 for Orissa, India (7 water towers with piped water supply, 2,079 people served)

100% of the funds were raised for charity. The organization behind the charity is called charity:water.  Twestival’s biggest goal is to reach $1 million and to keep going.  And the $250,000 figure is based on confirmations from 116 out of 202 cities.

More info at Mashable.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has announced that they have reached a settlement with Research In Motion Limited (USA) (NASDAQ:RIMM).  Four of RIM’s top executives have agreed to pay $2.27 million in penalties, disgorgement, and interest.  This settlement is taking place less than 2 weeks after the RIMM executives settled charges similarly with the Canadian government.  The fines in Canada amounted to about $30 million.  This is the largest penalty levied on individuals by the Ontario Securities Commission.

The four executives illegally gave undisclosed in-the-money stock options to RIM employees backdating millions between 1998 and 2006.  The four executives include RIM co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazardis, VP of Finance Angelo Loberto, and CFO Dennis Kavelman.

“As alleged in our complaint, RIM and its highest-level executives engaged in widespread backdating of options, which provided them and other employees with millions of dollars in undisclosed compensation,” stated SEC enforcement director Linda Chatman Thomsen.

The executives essentially made false claims about how the company prices and accounts for options.

[via Bloomberg]

TradeComet.com is suing Google in a claim that the search engine company is using market dominance to squash competition.  Rick Rule works for TradeComet’s law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.  Rule claims that SourceTool.com and TradeComet.com “had a thriving business before Google decided to eliminate them as a competitor…We believe this complaint has strong merit and represents a serious antitrust violation.”

Rule also represented Microsoft during antitrust cases with the U.S. government.  Rule’s firm also represented Microsoft on the failed bid for Yahoo!

TradeComet stated that they filed the lawsuit “when Google refused to stop engaging in predatory conduct to block search traffic by imposing massive, unjustified price increases. Google’s anti-competitive conduct eliminated TradeComet as a competitor.”

A company whose law firm represented Microsoft is behind the prosecution of Google.  Coincidence?

[via CNET]

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is about to file a complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission.  The complain is about the new Facebook terms of service that reports that user data will be kept by the social network even after deactivation.  Zuckerberg explained that Facebook does this so that data such as sent messages don’t get deleted if a user deactivates their account.  I really see nothing wrong with this.  If people don’t like Facebook’s TOS, don’t share data.

“We think that Facebook should go back to its original terms of service,” stated EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg.  The commotion around the controversy was started by the Consumerist.  Over 38,000 people have joined a group that object to the changes in the TOS.

However, other social media websites like YouTube, MySpace, and Twitter state that content distribution will cease if acconts are deactivated.  Perhaps they haven’t spelled it out in the proper legal terms that Facebook does.  I don’t know how MySpace messaging works, but if anyone has an account can they let me know whether they have messages in their inbox or friend requests pending from users that no longer have an account?  Leave it in the comments.