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For those Web companies that comply by it, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is turning out to be their best friend. Last week, Universal Music Group (UMG) was denied a summary judgment by a Los Angeles court in its copyright infringement case against Veoh. (Court order embedded below). UMG wanted a summary judgment against Veoh, arguing that it could not hide behind the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, which state that Web services are not liable for the copyright infringement of its users if it takes certain steps to prevent it.

This is the second time a summary judgment has been denied to a company trying to sue Veoh for copyright infringement. (The last time it was a porn company). These orders are setting important legal precedents not just for Veoh, but for YouTube and others also facing DMCA lawsuits.

The safe harbor of the DMCA states that Web services are not liable for copyright infringement if the content is stored “at the direction of a user.” UMG tried to argue that Veoh should not be covered by the safe harbor because it did a bunch of things with the music and video content after it was stored on its servers, including converting it into Flash, breaking it up into chunks for peer-to-peer distribution, and allowing other users to stream it or download it.

The judge, A Howartd Matz, didn’t buy the argument. He found Veoh’s position to be “more persuasive,” noting that user’s must agree to Veoh’s Terms of Service before uploading a video, and that the terms of service clearly prohibit uploading copyrighted material. In other words, the initial act of uploading is considered to be user-directed storage under the DMCA, and whatever Veoh does to process the video after that cannot be used to get around the letter of the law.

If you live by the DMCA, be prepared to die by the DMCA.

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Jubilant environmentalists trade high fives, carbon permits

We tend to see a lot of handwringing over the fact that Europe has a carbon cap in place, yet they’re still adding coal to the mix. But stories like this never seem to get reported the other way. Did you hear the good news? Dynergy scuttled six coal plants because of the U.S. carbon cap:

“The development landscape has changed significantly since we agreed to enter into the development joint venture with LS Power in the fall of 2006,” said Bruce A. Williamson, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Dynegy Inc. “Today, the development of new generation is increasingly marked by barriers to entry including external credit and regulatory factors that make development much more uncertain. In light of these market circumstances, Dynegy has elected to focus development activities and investments around our own portfolio where we control the option to develop and can manage the costs being incurred more closely.”

“Regulatory factors” refer to a host of potential legal obstacles, but the chief among them is the anticipated passage of a federal cap-and-trade bill sometime in the next several years. Unlike some market observers, energy developers aren’t watching for the price of carbon to pass the magical point at which clean coal or solar or whatever becomes cost-competitive. Rather, they’re looking ahead many years, performing scenario analysis, comparing cash flows, and making investments accordingly.

“External credit factors” refer, in part, to the ongoing financial crisis. But the credit squeeze affects other forms of energy development much as it does coal-fired plants, so Dynergy may also be referring to the fact that banks were tightening lending for projects with massive carbon exposure long before the crisis hit. And again, this tightened credit is a direct result of (as-yet-unwritten) federal cap-and-trade legislation.

Needless to say, many factors may have played into the decision to shut down those coal plants: grassroots pressure, lawsuits (real or threatened), disastrous publicity from the sludge spill, the imminent changing of the guard at the EPA, state-level permitting difficulties, etc. But as long as we’re handing out credit, let’s not forget the most obvious and compelling factor. In a carbon-constrained economy, no one wants to double down on coal.

Adam Stein is a co-founder of TerraPass. He writes on issues related to carbon, climate change, policy, and conservation.

Image by Flickr user DanieVDM.

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Picasa, the popular free photo management software made by Google, has finally made its way to the Mac. The application has long been noticeably absent on the Macintosh - especially given the fact that it has been available for Linux (which typically lags behind Macs and Windows) since 2006. It’s also a direct competitor to Apple’s long running iPhoto product, which has come with all new Macs for years. So how does it stack up?

In my brief testing the application seems to be very snappy (much faster than iPhoto), though it lacks the sleek look of Apple’s products. Photos import quickly, effects are easy to find and apply, and most things are intuitive, though the folder browsing can be a little confusing. It might not be as pretty as iPhoto, but I won’t be surprised if power-users make the switch (or at least consider it).

One of the biggest differences between Picasa and iPhoto is that Picasa doesn’t move or reorganize images, but instead keeps track of where your images are scattered across your hard drive and allows you to view them in one place. For users that manually manage their photos by sorting them into folders, this is a very welcome change. In contrast, iPhoto has long transfered your photos to its own library, and encouraged users to sort their photos through the app itself.

Given that iPhoto has come preinstalled on every Mac for years, Google is doing doing everything it can to make Picasa play nice with your existing library. While users can typically modify any image on their hard drive directly from Picasa, all images in iPhoto’s library are treated differently: the application will copy these images to a new location, and only then apply edits. The application also allows users to revert back to previous versions.

Picasa is a welcome alternative to iPhoto, but it’s still premature to drop iPhoto entirely. It’s highly likely that Apple will unveil a new version of iPhoto at tomorrow’s Macworld keynote, and you can be sure that it will include some significant enhancements.

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Hugh Pickens writes "BBC has an interesting article on the long-standing issue of how to power the 'climber' that would ascend a space elevator into space. Previous ideas have included delivering microwave or laser power to the climber beamed from the Earth's surface, but now European Space Agency ground station engineer Age-Raymond Riise has demonstrated a device that could provide a "lift into space" for cheaper space missions along a 100,000-km long tether anchored to the Earth. Riise demonstrated sending power mechanically by providing carefully timed jerks of the cable at its base with a broomstick to represent the cable held in tension, an electric sander to provide a rhythmic vibration to the bottom of the stick, and three brushes representing the climber with their bristles pointing downwards allowing the climber assembly to slide upward along the broomstick as it moved slightly downward, but grip it as it moved slightly upward. 'It would be possible to make a suspension system that completely decouples the cabin where the passengers are,' says Riise. 'For them it would be a linear movement with very little disturbance.' Riise says that he has been approached by commercial elevator companies, who are researching new ideas for elevators in superscrapers where the simplicity of the approach makes it attractive when compared to other ideas for powering lifts, such as compressed air."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The famously frumpy former CEO of eBay, Meg Whitman, is veering closer to entering California's governor 2010 race, quitting the boards of Procter & Gamble, eBay, and Dreamworks Animation SKG....

Al Franken declares victory:...

David Kurtz http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

Four thought-provoking links from the worlds of disaster tech, multicore, bioengineering, and 17th century French nobility.

1. Techies: Volunteering to Save the World - article on NGO work being the new black for technology. In particular, this caught my eye: "Earlier this year, IBM launched a program called Corporate Service Corps to send 100 employees to Romania, Turkey, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ghana and Tanzania to work on projects that combine economic development and IT. And the response was impressive: More than 5,000 employees applied to participate."
2. Laurence Livermore Lab releases Stack Trace Analysis Tool - debugging tool for code running over 20k processors. We need new tools like this to handle the complexity thrown up by a multicore world.
3. Spinning Silkworm Cocoons into Biosensors - interesting article in MIT Technology Review about bioengineer Fiorenzo Omenetto who is using silk to build optical devices that can be used as sensors in the body. "In the devices that ­Omenetto and Kaplan are developing, proteins embedded in the optical material efficiently bind to a target such as oxygen or a bacterial protein; when they do, the light transmitted by the sensor changes color."
4. La Rochefoucauld Quotes - lots of thought-provoking quotes. For example, on the freemium business model: "What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one." On Twitter: "As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing." On social network sites: "However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship." On Google/Microsoft/Apple/[insert big company here]: "There are heroes in evil as well as in good."

The NYT, WSJ, and Paul Krugman take a look at the emerging details surrounding President-elect Obama's stimulus package, particularly the roughly $300 billion in proposed tax cuts.

Overall, the package will cover a two-year period with a price-tag of $675 billion to $775 billion, $270 billion to $310 billion of which would be spent on tax cuts. The balance -- $405 billion to $465 billion -- would be spent on infrastracture, health care, and other programs.

One thing to keep in mind is that in early 2008 Congress passed a $131 billion tax cut stimulus plan covering one year. Therefore, while $300 billion over two years might seem like a lot, it's actually the same level of spending as we saw in 2008.

The problem, of course, was that the 2008 tax cut stimulus didn't do much, if any, good.

Since the tax cut portion of the stimulus will more or less be a continuation of the 2008 tax cut stimulus, the real change from 2008 will be the $405 to $465 billion in spending on infrastructure, health care, and other projects.

On an annual basis, this is about $203 to $233 billion dollars in actual stimulus spending.

In 2007, the U.S. GDP was roughly $13.8 trillion, so that means the "new" part of the stimulus package will be about 1.5% of GDP.

From TPM Reader RW ... In regards to Obama's strategy re: tax cuts, the proper move is to offer a concession so as to split the GOP. If he is able to do that at the get-go, he'll log-roll them...

Josh Marshall http://talkingpointsmemo.com/joshmarshall.php

A nice confluence of Clarkian techno-positivism and 21st century orbital solar power in this post on Short Sharp Science:

There’s another slight problem: the elevator doesn’t exist.

And neither do the supermaterials that could make it a reality. The elevator community’s oft-quoted carbon nanotube fibres languish in labs unable to stretch more than a few tens of centimetres without breaking.

All the more reason, says Swan, to get serious research into elevator technology underway. “We should initiate the space elevator project now and have the space solar power people buy into the concept that we’ll have one by 2030 and start planning for it. Instead of a 50-year horizon, let’s have a 20-year one.”

Stirring stuff. The space elevator is in the class of things I definitely hope to see within my lifetime.

[from Short Sharp Science][image from tanakawho on flickr]

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Tags: Arthur-C-Clarke • photovoltaics • solar • space exploration • space-elevator

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Ben Craw http://tpmtv.talkingpointsmemo.com/

by Jay Walljasper

During the holidays, people gather together with their families (parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, close friends) for food and kinship. These gatherings, especially in the United States, can be a rare chance to witness domesticity expand beyond the narrow circle of the nuclear family: mom, dad and the kids.

It’s interesting to note that this familiar nuclear family has been the organizing principle of Western society only since the Industrial Revolution, and that in many parts of the world today a broader network of extended family and fellow villagers are still the primary social glue. I remember a Brazilian friend, who grew up middle-class in cosmopolitan Sao Paulo, telling me that he was a teenager before he was completely sure which people living in his house were blood relatives.

Margaret Mead, the most famous anthropologist of the 20th Century, once commented that, “Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we’ve lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people. Only during times of war, or what we have now, which is the psychological equivalent of war, does the nuclear family prevail, because it’s the most mobile unit that can ensure the survival of the species. But for the full flowering of the human spirit we need groups, tribes.”

The evolution of society into these smaller family units offers a freedom and flexibility unknown to our ancestors. Few of us today would want the details of our lives (from the time we awake in the morning to the person we marry) to be managed by a chief, priest or patriarch. Even the extended families that dominated the world of our grandparents or great-grandparents would seem stultifying.

Yet, if we looked deeply into our souls, many of us today might admit there is also something attractive about being an intimate part of a wider tribe. Even with our cherished freedom, there is something a bit lonely about our modern existence of tight little families living isolated in their privatized homes. Few of us know our neighbors in any meaningful way, and the rest of our family usually lives far away. When we encounter problems or simply are in a mood to celebrate, there are surprisingly few people to turn to.

Huge industries or government agencies have arisen to meet the needs once take care of by grandma or the “uncle” next door who was not really related but you’d known him your entire life.

Many people today worry that this institutionalization of many basic human activities, from raising kids and caring for the sick to baking birthday cakes, carry a heavy price. This dependence on professionals cuts us off from the rich web of personal relationships that have long sustained human culture. Indeed, it can be argued that as a species we have been shaped through evolution to live as part of these sort of emotional ecosystems, and that the atomized patterns of modern society is one cause of today’s unprecedented levels of mental illness and senseless crime.

Few of us, however, are in any position to move back in with our grandparents. But a growing number of social pioneers are looking for other ways to enjoy both the stimulating possibilities of the modern world and the comfort of our communal heritage. This can be something as simple as neighbors sharing a potluck meal and an in-depth conversation on a weekly or monthly basis. Many groups, such as home-school families and single-parent or gay and lesbian families, are banding together in new kinds of family networks, sharing time and tasks on a regular basis, and being there for one another in a way that goes beyond the usual parameters of friendship.

Co-housing communities, a clear-eyed updating of the commune movement of the 1960s, represents an even bigger step in forging a new kind of extended family not based on blood. Well-established in Northern Europe and now taking roots in North America, these are communities of people who have chosen to live together and share some elements of their daily lives, recreating in a conscious way what happens naturally in traditional villages as means of survival. There are more than 100 co-housing developments built or under development in 34 states and three Canadian provinces, part of a growing world-wide phenomenon in Europe, England, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

There’s great latitude in how communal these communities want to be, with some that share meals every evening while others that simply have a common space like a clubhouse where neighbors can interact both spontaneously and in regularly scheduled events that offer a satisfying sense of belonging.

All these experiments in creating a new kind of family are important steps toward bringing a greater sense of “we” into modern life. And given the stormy economic forecast, they are also very important for helping people remain healthy, happy and hopeful in the days ahead.

Jay Walljasper, co-editor of OnTheCommons.org and senior fellow of Project for Public Spaces, is author of the Great Neighborhood Book.

This piece originally appeared on the Ode Editor's Blog

Image credit: Ode

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Prosecutors say Bernie Madoff should be sent to the slammer without any chance of bail after they caught him trying to mail about $1 million worth of jewelry and other assets to relatives in violation of his bail....

Josh Marshall http://talkingpointsmemo.com/joshmarshall.php

Seems that company tied up in the Richardson grand jury investigation doesn't exactly have a squeaky clean record....

Josh Marshall http://talkingpointsmemo.com/joshmarshall.php

After picking the wrong horse in the Presidential Election (where she might have become Secretary of the Treasury if John McCain had won), former eBay CEO Meg Whitman now looks to be laying the groundwork for a run at the governorship in California in 2010. (The current Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, cannot run for another term under existing laws). Whitman today resigned from all the corporate boards she serves on—eBay, Procter & Gamble, and Dreamworks Animation. While she hasn’t formally declared that she is even exploring the possibility of becoming a candidate, that is the scuttlebutt.

If she wins the Republican nomination, candidates she could face on the Democratic side include former California Governor Jerry Brown (who is thinking of running again) and two popular mayors (Gavin Newsom of San Francisco and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles). If she hopes to stand a chance, she needs to cultivate more of a populist streak. Expect to see her on a lot more talk shows.

Even though she left eBay a year ago, much of her appeal will be tied to the public’s perception of the company, which has seen better days. If eBay turns itself around and is once again seen as a success in two years, that will help her campaign. But if eBay sellers and buyers continue to flee from the service, that will hurt her. She cannot escape the eBay association.

Would you vote for her?

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surely_you_cant_be_serious writes "A nationwide survey finds that most companies consider their systems vulnerable to attack. Historically, crime rates increase during recessions — and some believe that cybercrime may well follow suit, especially given massive layoffs and the dim prospects many laid-off employees face in finding a new job. 'One thing companies can start doing is monitoring their networks on an ongoing basis so that they understand the normal pattern of data flow and usage, Brill said. In many cases, companies may not have the internal capability to do this, but outsourcing options are available. Kroll Ontrack, for instance, will be rolling out a 24/7 monitoring service for its global clients manned from a US location by professionals in early 2009.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So Steny Hoyer goes on FOX News Sunday, and here's the headline he's rewarded with:

Hoyer Says Don’t Expect Stimulus Package Soon

Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, expressed doubt on Sunday that the Jan. 20 goal set by some for getting a stimulus package before the new president could be met.

"It’s going to be difficult to get the package together that early," he said. Instead, he told "Fox News Sunday," lawmakers hoped to have it to the new president by mid-February. [Like the others appearing on the day's talk shows, Mr. Hoyer made his comments before it was known that New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson had withdrawn as the Commerce nominee.]

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, was more cautious about any deadline, saying simply, "We will work this just as quickly as we can." As to the amount of a stimulus package, he said only, "It’s whatever it takes to bring this country back on a fiscal footing that’s decent."

But Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, agreed with Hoyer that the Jan. 20 goal was impractical.

Put aside the question of whether Hoyer should have gone on FOX for a second. The issue here is that on the first major legislative agenda item for the Obama Administration, the second-ranking Democrat in the House is already unilaterally declaring that it won't be ready on time.

Whether Hoyer intended to or not, the message he sent is that Democrats don't think the legislation is all that important. Instead of talking about delay, Hoyer should have focused on the urgency of getting something done quickly rather than his estimation that it will take longer than we originally thought.

(He should have been more like Harry Reid, who was actually reasonably good on the stimulus package.)

Aside from the fact that Hoyer undercut the sense of urgency surrounding the stimulus bill, he failed to adequately explain the most likely source of the delay: Senate Republicans. In fact, if Hoyer would have just kept his mouth shut, it's quite possible that the headlines would have focused instead on Mitch McConnell, who signaled his intent to drag out the process as much as possible:

Throughout the full interview, McConnell spoke in very partisan terms, and consistently called the stimulus plan a $1 trillion plan.

That should be a wakeup call to Democratic strategists.

First, no matter how much Democrats talk about bipartisanship, they are never going to get it from Mitch McConnell. Instead of playing an inside game for McConnell's support, it's much smarter to play an outside game and to try to steal 6-10 moderate Republicans like the Maine senators by delivering a popular bill that they can't refuse.

Second, the only reason to cap the stimulus plan at $775 billion is if that is the amount of money they believe will do the job. If they are trying to avoid having Republicans call this a $1 trillion stimulus plan, that boat has sailed.

Returning to Steny Hoyer, the problem here isn't so much the substance of what he said, but rather the fact that he blew the opportunity to advance the narrative that the stimulus plan is the top priority in Congress, and that the only thing slowing it down is the GOP.

The fact that yesterday Mitch McConnell, through his vows of partisan roadblocking, was probably a better spokesman for the Democratic Party yesterday than was Steny Hoyer tells you all you need to know.

::::

Update (2:32PM): Today, President-elect Obama sounded a far more urgent note than either Hoyer or McConnell:

Obama predicts quick OK on economic rescue plan

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama declared the national economy was "bad and getting worse" Monday as he began crisis talks with congressional leaders on emergency action. He predicted lawmakers would approve hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending and tax cuts within two weeks of his taking office.

"The economy is very sick," Obama said before meeting with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. "The situation is getting worse. ... We have to act and act now to break the momentum of this recession."

Obama, whose inauguration is two weeks from Tuesday on Jan. 20, said he expected quick approval of rescue legislation by the new Congress.

"I expect to be able to sign a bill shortly after taking office," he said. Pressed on the timing, he said, "By the end of January or the first of February."

The iPhone is the hottest platform around, leading some small-time developers to overnight riches and spawning over ten thousand apps in only a few months. But without knowledge of Objective-C or the intricacies of the iPhone SDK, many talented designers have no way of getting their wares onto the App Store. Today, Viximo has released a landmark new development platform called VixML that allows talented designers to create basic applications with a minimal amount of programming knowledge. The new development platform could easily turn into one of the most important tools for novice iPhone developers, and with the the tagline “this way to iPhone awesomeness”, it’s clear that Viximo has high expectations.

VixML is based on the XML markup language, which may still be intimidating enough to scare off some prospective designers but is nowhere near as complex as an actual programming language. Using a number of pre-designated tags, the VixML WYSIWYG SDK and emulator, designers can create rich, multimedia mini-apps in a matter of days that would have previously taken weeks or months of programing. Basic tags allow developers to make their applications sensitive to a number of common iPhone user inputs, including shaking, blowing into the microphone, swiping and tapping with fingers, and tilting the phone. The platform also includes support for an integrated 3D graphics engine for nifty particle effects.

Once you’ve developed your VixML project, there’s the matter of actually getting it onto the App Store. For now, all projects will be part of Viximo’s upcoming True Flirt application, which allows users to send these mini-apps to each other as virtual greetings. To send a “Flirt”, you’ll need the premium version of the app, which is $5.99. If the recipient of a flirt doesn’t have the app installed, they’ll be sent an SMS message inviting them to download a free version that allows them to view and interact with Flirts, but doesn’t allow them to send them.

Developers will be able to submit their projects to be included as part of the main True Flirt application, or as standalone ‘Flirt Packs’ that will be sold as separate apps. Ideally users would simply be able to buy these flirts through the main application instead of having to deal with separate Flirt Packs, but the App Store doesn’t currently support micro-transactions so we’re left with this inelegant solution. Still, for the time and money saved in development costs, the hassle may well be worth it for many designers.

However, there are a few major caveats. All projects designed in VixML must go through Viximo for deployment on the App Store, which means that you’ll need to go through two gatekeepers for approval (both Viximo and the standard Apple approval process), and you won’t be able to release yours apps outside of the True Flirt brand for some time. Viximo says that there will be a revenue sharing arrangement for each app that gets deployed, but is unwilling to discuss exactly how much will be going back to the developers. It sounds like this will be determined on a per-developer basis (and you’ll be told how much you’re getting once you’ve submitted an app), but the lack of even a ballpark figure is disconcerting (why build something when you have no idea how much you’re going to get paid?).

These issues aside, VixML seems like a powerful platform that could open up the iPhone to countless new developers, provided the developer restrictions aren’t too extreme. Granted, you won’t be able to build anything as complex as Tap Tap Revenge or Shazam, but the App Store has proven that even the most basic applications can do extremely well.

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Roland Burris heads to Washington today, hoping to be sworn in tomorrow as the newest Senator from Illinois. He'll do it without a certificate of election signed by the Illinois Secretary of State, without the approval of the Illinois Senate, and in the face of overwhelming opposition from the Democratic leadership, but according to Burris, he does have one powerful ally on his side:

"They can't deny what the Lord has ordained."

Hallelujah.

An anonymous reader writes "Wired has the inside story of Max Butler, a former white hat hacker who joined the underground following a jail stint for hacking the Pentagon. His most ambitious hack was a hostile takeover of the major underground carding boards where stolen credit card and identity data are bought and sold. The attack made his own site, CardersMarket, the largest crime forum in the world, with 6,000 users. But it also made the feds determined to catch him, since one of the sites he hacked, DarkMarket.ws, was secretly a sting operation run by the FBI."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.