For you, my network can only grow in one direction: bigger. We don’t meet fewer people as we get older. We meet more people! And if we know more people, our “Friends” list should grow accordingly. We don’t forget people do we? If we’ve met them, they belong in our Facebook network.

You seem to think that Facebook is the only network I’ll ever need; that instead of adding and removing people as your features and my real world networks evolve, I should just move them into smaller groups and manage a massive number of impossible-to-understand privacy settings. Because for you, my identity and how I interact with the people that make up my life are as straightforward and comprehendable as the blue in my profile.

via Jake Levine.

Here are his reported words: “Last year I was rehabbing my foot in Costa Rica, watching the game on an illegal Super Bowl Web site. And now I’m actually playing in the game. So, it’s pretty cool.”

Cool, Tom? Is it really cool to steal from the livelihood of hard-working NFL players like Eli Manning, winner of two Super Bowl rings? Is it really cool to steal a broadcast just because there’s no good legal option? Probably. But read the rest of the earth-shattering confession of Tom Brady: I watched last year’s Super Bowl on illegal site on CNET.

When you complain that opponents didn’t “come to the table to find solutions”, do you mean that we didn’t give NINETY-FOUR MILLION DOLLARS to congress like the MPAA? Or do you mean that we didn’t come to the one hearing that Lamar Smith held, where opponents of SOPA were refused an opportunity to comment? Help me out, here, Chris Dodd, because I’m really trying hard to understand you.

Read the rest of the vaguely-titled post Today the US Senate is considering legislation that would destroy the free and open Internet, and have a good laugh. Or cry. Laughcrying is the best medicine.

On January 18, 2012, in an unprecedented decision, the Wikipedia community has chosen to blackout the English version of Wikipedia for 24 hours, in protest against proposed legislation in the United States — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and PROTECTIP (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States.

For a site with roughly 80 hojillion unique visitors, this will cause some disruption tomorrow. And it’s actually already caused a commotion! For instance, the MPAA is mighty butthurt (PDF link).

“Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging.

It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.

A so-called “blackout” is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals. It is our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this “blackout” to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy.”

Translation: we spent millions of dollars lobbying for a draconian copyright policy, and now that we’ve been even vaguely rebuked, we’re very sad that you nerds keep rubbing it in.

The best part is where the MPAA complains that Wikipedia has a responsibility to its users to provide its service free from the influence of corporate interests. That would almost sting if the MPAA didn’t spend so much energy coming up with inventive new ways to treat its customers like criminals. I mean, at least Wikipedia talks to its users; the MPAA just throws money at Congress and makes the ads on DVDs unskippable.

I’ll take the ones that talk to me like adults, please.

According to the MPAA blog on Tuesday, “Arts Technica” is a “tech blog with a long history of challenging efforts to curb content theft.” (If so, we’re the only such tech blog that actually encouraged a now-current MPAA lawyer to do copyright coverage for our site and that recommended the pro-rightsholder book Free Ride in this year’s holiday guide.)

One can see why MPAA staffers might think this way. “Ars Technica opposes our attempt to gain ‘broadcast flag’ control over people’s digital devices,” they might say. “And it doesn’t appreciate our plan to censor the Internet. And for some reason they’d like to rip copies of their DVDs to watch on the airplane, even though we managed to write anti-DRM cracking provisions into law. Man, these guys really love piracy!”

‘Curse those handsome devils over at Arts Technica! How dare they point out our inept copyright maximalist policies? Our customers might not miss freedom!’

According to this report by CBC News out of British Columbia, a woman named Saliha Alnoor is suing the Colgate-Palmolive Company for injuries she sustained when her toothbrush allegedly broke in two places in her mouth, slicing her gums and causing her to lose consciousness.

Alnoor apparently hired an engineer, who has done extensive testing on the toothbrush and determined that it contains a design defect that caused the brush to break.

She called Colgate to complain, and they sent her a $20 coupon. What, for more toothbrushes? So she can stab her gums over and over again?

Ms. Alnoor did the only sensible thing. She moved on with her life like a well-adjusted adult filed a lawsuit. No, really. Thankfully, she couldn’t find a lawyer willing to take this case, so no one can use this as ammo in their “I hate lawyers so much argh” Facebook posts. She’s pro se, baby: doing all her own lawyering.

I would conjecture that she couldn’t find a lawyer willing to take this case, because it’s stupid. How exactly does she plan to convince a jury that she was brushing her teeth like a normal human being when the brush just exploded in her mouth?

Frankly, my gums hurt just imagining how much torque she must have been applying in her brushstrokes to achieve such catastrophic failure that she needed $6,000 of dental work to repair the damage. Whether the damage came from the broken brush, or her “scrub away all the enamel” technique, is an exercise left to the reader. And also a jury, I guess.

“Years ago, you’d see a man in a pub selling CDs,” says Eric Phelps, a detective in London’s Metropolitan Police. “Not any more.” Indeed, thefts of entertainment products like CDs and DVDs have collapsed in England and Wales, to the point that they are now taken in just 7% of all burglaries in which something is stolen (see chart). They are now targeted no more frequently than are toiletries and cigarettes.

Read the rest at The Economist. The story is a funny and odd footnote in the saga of Media in the Digital Age. Music is legitimately on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, Rdio, and about a billion other places. So I guess I can see why CDs don’t get stolen very much anymore.

As for movies, well, they’re on Netflix… eventually. Seriously, if you can’t even sell stolen DVDs, I wonder why Hollywood thinks you can still sell them for $20 in a store. It’s okay. Ultraviolet is totally gaining momentum, guys. Any day now. Aaaaaany day.

Wednesday night, WhatDoTheyKnow.com made its 100,000th request under the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Act. The site, a product of MySociety.org and one of its democracy and transparency websites for the citizens of the UK, has been sending out requests on behalf of its users to various government agencies since February, 2008.

Read the rest of “Annoying” British Officials Since 2008 at TechPresident. This is a fun sort of hack, in the absence of a government web site that does this for its users.

I’ve never understood why governments don’t do this on their own: put every request online and let users search it themselves. Say goodbye to ever having to hunt down the same document twice, for starters. Or redacting it twice. You’d probably get fewer FOIA requests overall if you made it easy to search past FOIA requests.

Apparently, our federal government is doing just that. A US Government-wide, intra-agenc FOIA site is planned to go live in October. The EPA is building it for some reason, but I’m glad it’s getting built period. Nerdcelsior!

For the past year, studios have been flirting with stretching out the delays on when Netflix, Redbox and Blockbuster can rent new releases, but it looks like Warner Bros. is going to be the first to take the plunge. The studio plans to make the home entertainment companies wait 56 days from when new releases go on sale to offer DVDs and Blu-rays, according to a report from AllThingsD.

The move is seen as part of an ongoing effort by the industry to prop up a DVD market that has struggled to keep pace with plunging disc sales and a shift among many consumers to digital streaming.

I find it hard to believe that anyone at Warner Brothers thinks that an extra month’s wait is going to be the tipping point here. If making me wait for a few weeks didn’t work, and I haven’t purchased the DVD, how many more weeks do you think will make me buy the DVD? Months? Years?

Actually, here’s a fun story. I went back home to visit my friends and family between Christmas and New Year’s. During that time, we all watched a lot of Netflix together. Here’s a summary of our conversation after finding out that a movie we were looking for wasn’t on Netflix yet:

 Me: "Oh, man, it's not on Netflix yet."
 John: "Yeah, I think it's only been on DVD for a couple weeks."
 Me: "Well, let's watch something else."
 John: "Cool."

Do you notice how, at no point, either of us suggested that we put on our jackets, go out to the cars, drive to the store, and buy the movie? We were in no danger of doing any of that. I know sales of DVDs are way down, but keeping your movies off Netflix isn’t going to help. That article from All Things D has some fun statistics:

Spending on rentals, primarily via Netflix and Redbox, is up 10.9 percent. But that’s not enough to counter a 17.2 percent drop in movie and TV show purchases.

Market demand has shifted from a historically profitable sector to a new one. Do you attempt to sandbag the new market, or do you come up with a new product to meet consumer demand? You don’t have to choose one or the other, but Netflix and Redbox have been around for a long time. What have you guys been doing since then?

Don’t give me that Ultraviolet stuff. When I buy a movie, it comes with a voucher that I can redeem to watch the movie? Awesome! You know what else in the box lets me watch the movie? The damn movie. That I bought. How do you guys look at Netflix and think the killer feature is streaming, and not the “watch frillions of hours of TV and movies” for $8 a month?

Consider some scenarios: Viacom sees a clip of South Park on a video sharing site: completely hypothetically, let’s say YouTube. Pre-DMCA and pre-SOPA, YouTube might have been liable for contributory copyright infringement. They’d end up having to fight a “substantial noninfringing uses” battle like Sony v. Universal, the Betamax case. I’m not going to cover that again, but just know that that’s expensive and worrisome, and they could lose and go bankrupt. That’d be bad.

Enter The DMCA

The DMCA gives Viacom a private remedy: they don’t need to call the attorney general. It’s like trespassing. Sure, you can call the police and try to get someone arrested, but you can also just call your lawyer and start a private lawsuit. Under the DMCA YouTube is actually completely immune to copyright infringement suits for the infringing videos its users upload. Viacom has to go after YouTube’s users. But like I said, there’s a private remedy.

Specifically, there’s a DMCA takedown notice. Viacom sends a letter to YouTube, swears that the clip at whatever URL is infringing on their copyright, and orders YouTube to remove it. Viacom’s letter must list specific files at specific addresses, or YouTube can ignore it. For valid takedown notices, YouTube either removes the clip immediately, or they lose that immunity I mentioned. But if YouTube complies with the notice, they’re completely immune to the copyright violations of their users.

Enter SOPA

SOPA takes that general regime, which is unfair to both sides (a conundrum that the civilized among us know as a “compromise”), and makes it much worse for one side. Given that Big Copyright has spent $57 million lobbying for it to pass, you get no points for guessing that SOPA is worse for “everyone who is not an international media conglomerate.”

It takes that DMCA takedown notice thing, and makes it a fire-breathing monster. Now, in our scenario above, Viacom would simply send a letter to a court, swearing that YouTube contains an infringing video. The court, without contacting YouTube, would find the video infringing or not; if it’s infringing, the judge would then order YouTube removed from the DNS record. DNS is the system that lets human beings type “Google.com” into a web browser, instead of 72.14.204.91.

When a judge decides that there is an infringing video on YouTube, she can deactivate YouTube.com. The site just disappears off the internet. Poof. Not the video; the whole site. The Stanford Law Review has a good overview of the law as a whole.

SOPA sucks

So where the DMCA lets a copyright owner nuke any file on the internet, SOPA lets the copyright owner nuke any site on the internet. To say this moves the goalposts a bit is an understatement.

So the collective internet has been rather up in arms about the whole affair. I can’t say I’m surprised. Google, Apple, and Yahoo have gotten in on the act, too.

But not GoDaddy. There’s a giant thread on Reddit calling out GoDaddy for supporting SOPA. Why does GoDaddy support SOPA? Specifically, why does GoDaddy support SOPA when its customers hate it so much? They say:

“Go Daddy has a long history of supporting federal legislation directed toward combating illegal conduct on the Internet. For example, our company strongly supported the Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act of 2008, the Protect Our Children Act of 2008, and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PROTECT IP).

Go Daddy has always supported both government and private industry efforts to identify and disable all types of illegal activity on the Internet. It is for these reasons that I’m still struggling with why some Internet companies oppose PROTECT IP and SOPA. There is no question that we need these added tools to counteract illegal foreign sites that are falling outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law enforcement. And there is clearly more that we could all be doing to adequately address the problems that exist.”

Yeah, the Hooters of registrars is really concerned about their image as an upstanding internet company.

Whatever, guys. My domains are registered through secureserver.net, a GoDaddy affiliate; I’m moving them all on December 29th.