http://arstechnica.com/…

The Pirate Bay “spectrial” has ended in a guilty verdict, prison sentences for the defendants, and a shared 30 million kronor ($3.5 million) fine. According to the Swedish district court, the operators of the site were guilty of assisting copyright infringement even though The Pirate Bay hosted none of the files in question and even though other search engines like Google also provide direct access to illegal .torrent files.

These two points formed the basis of The Pirate Bay’s defense, but the court found them ultimately unpersuasive in its 107 page verdict. “By providing a site with, as the district court found, sophisticated search functions, easy upload and storage, and a website linked to the tracker,” the defendants were guilty of assistant copyright infringement, the court said.

In an Internet press conference this morning, defendant Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi compared the whole trial to (of all things) The Karate Kid, a movie in which the good guy is roughed up by bullies, goes through a long training process, learns to “wax on, wax off,” encounters his bully again in the final round of a karate tournament, and kicks him in the face with his “crane technique.” Kolmisoppi sees parallels. In the end, he insists, “we’ll kick their ass.”

Read More…

http://telegraph.co.uk/…

The unnamed driver was busy mapping a street in the village of Wool in Dorset when a local photographer spotted the controversial Google vehicle.

But the multinational’s driver was outraged by the invasion of his privacy when the snapper started taking pictures of the car.

The freelance photographer, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that with all the privacy issues surrounding Google’s new Street View technology it is ironic that the Google driver should get upset about having his picture taken.

The 58-year-old electrician and part-time photographer said: “When I saw the [Google] car I thought to myself nobody has got any decent pictures of this yet so I hopped out the van and started to take some pictures.

“He was not happy about it. I could tell by his body language and facial expressions.”

The Google driver then proceeded to shout at the photographer and said: “Don’t you take pictures of me, mate.” He then asked the photographer to blur his face out of the pictures as Google does in its Street View images.

The photographer managed to get about six to eight photographers of the car which had a pole-mounted revolving camera protruding from the top.

For months, Google’s Street View vehicle has been roaming the streets of Britain, capturing 360-degree images of streets and the people on them.

Since it launched millions of Britons have gone online to look at their own houses or landmarks.

However, residents in the village of Broughton in Buckinghamshire have remained off the map after blocking the vehicle from entering their area.

There are concerns over peoples privacy and some worry that Street View helps criminal’s scope out targets for burglary or car theft.

Google have said they would remove any image on request, which can be done by clicking a link on the Street View Web site.

So far pictures that have been taken down after they were featured in the press – include one of a man walking out of a sex shop and another throwing up on the sidewalk outside a London pub.

Privacy International, a pressure group, has begun legal action against the company in an effort to bring down the mapping service.

Sure… the driver being upset because he was being photographed is a bit ironic. I think the bigger irony is that the British subjects seem to be getting all bent out of shape over Google’s static image capturing yet they allow their government to install 1 CCTV camera for every 14 of them. Realtime tracking of individuals, cars, habits… no problem. Static photos of the neighborhood that are actually useful… outrage.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/…

The Guardian Media Group has asked the Government to examine Google News and other content aggregators, claiming they contribute nothing to British journalism. In its written response to the preliminary Digital Britain report, The Guardian argues Google reaps the benefit of content from news sites without contributing anything towards their costs.

“We welcome the interim report’s focus on respect for IP and copyright, but believe there is a glaring omission from its examination of such issues: the negative effects of aggregators and search engines on the ability of and incentives for UK content providers to invest in quality content,” The Guardian’s submission states.

“We think the current market dynamic between content creators and search engines/aggregators is skewed heavily in the latter’s favour. This is not conducive to a healthy environment for content creation in the online world.”

The newspaper group argues that traffic generated by search engines doesn’t compensate for the cost involved in producing content: “The argument has traditionally been that search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content, and this is enough to make the relationship symbiotic and equal,” the submission claims.

“However, there is a vast over-supply in the market of advertising inventory, and yields have come under severe downward pressure. As a result, the value of the traffic generated by search engines and aggregators has reduced significantly.”

The Guardian says content providers are faced with a catch-22: they can’t afford to withhold content from search engines, yet can’t feasibly charge consumers for it either, “not least because of the presence of the BBC and the vast quantities of free content it publishes on bbc.co.uk.”

While The Guardian stops short of suggesting Google and others should be forced to pay for content, it does suggest the exploration of new models that “require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site (through advertising) and ‘at the edges’ in the world of search and aggregation.”

I’ve got the solution for The Guardian. Add the following to your Apache .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} google\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

and in robots.txt:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /

Otherwise figure out a way to work with Google to raise revenue. You offer your information for free. Google is a consumer like any other. If you don’t like what they do with the data you have the freedom to not serve them it in the first place.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

Over on the Mises Institute blog, Stephan Kinsella blogs about this miserably inadequate post from a blogger who claims that the breaking-and-entering on the part of the thugs and thieves from ACORN, along with the assistance of their trained parasite squatters, is “libertarian.” He asks everyone to please support ACORN’s efforts to allow freeloaders to live in houses they cannot possibly finance via their own means. Read Stephan’s post for his interesting take on foreclosure resistance, legalese, and Ayn Rand.

I really didn’t want to give him any more attention, but it gets worse than the post Kinsella links to. This post is even more comical. First the blogger says that it is “particularly sad to see Karen DeCoster continually gushing about [Rick] Santelli.” Actually, “continually gushing” = exactly two posts where I mentioned him. Outside of enjoying Rick Santelli’s wild speech on CNBC, I don’t continually gush. Google will prove that well enough. Perhaps Mr. Brad should put away the thesaurus. Second, he says that I “so easily disregard the clear implications of Rothbardian property theory.” He builds in a link to “implications of Rothbardian property theory,” yet the link he builds in points to this post, by him, that does not explain how ACORN antics are “Rothbardian property theory.” He just states “the homes in question are property of the banks have no merit in terms of libertarian theory. Resistance to foreclosures is thus fully libertarian.” That’s it. It is because he says so. The reason he doesn’t support his point with actual links or scholarship from Rothbard is because there is no such thing that exists, from Rothbard, that can support such nonsense.

Of course, those of us who have studied Rothbard, or even those who have known him intimately – like a few people on this site – know that Murray Rothbard would not place himself side-by-side with the ACORN gang of thugs, cheering on their pathetic property grabs at the expense of legitimate owners.

Another important point is that the blogger completely ignores the dismal record of the squatter in question, Donna Hanks, a perpetual ne-er-do-well and professional property plunderer who attempted to live way, way beyond her means at the expense of everyone else, including her creditors. In this post, I linked to the place where you can find the legal records online. The blogger has no quarrel about her refusal to make her mortgage payments even after she refinanced her ATM house and took out $200,000 in cash to blow it on….well, who knows.

The blogger is one of a small group of left-wing (self-described), autarkist, “free-market”-but-anti-capitalist, mutualist, anarcho-syndicalist, agorist, socialist non-libertarians who call their doctrine the real “libertarianism.” They post all kinds of cute, little banners and sayings and signage and logos on their blogs. And for some reason, some of them try to hold up Rothbard as one of their own. To them, Lew Rockwell.com is a brand of “vulgar libertarianism,” meaning people who don’t “correctly apply libertarian principles.”

They are pro-union, favor the proletariat, and hate corporations. They think corporations are illegitimate entities. Perhaps their most farcical claim is that those of us who work wage jobs are wage slaves. (See my post on this.) If you voluntarily contract with a company or individual to produce goods or services for wages, you are a part of the wage-slavery society. This is based on their hatred of formal organization and hierarchy (even if voluntary), as well as envy of careerists and people who earn a high wage. Rothbard spent his entire career fighting these types – he called them the luftmenschen. In fact, Ben O’Neill took apart their “wage-slavery” myth in an article for Mises.org in January 2009.

It’s actually too zany to take seriously, but people should know how this splinter group could possibly come to support the hideous group ACORN and claim that they are acting upon libertarian principles.

bosco… your take?

While I get what Mr. Spangler is getting at it’s very vague and as said above I doubt very much Rothbard (from my readings) would support any such action. Simply because banks are little less than a branch of the government in many respects that does not negate any legitimacy in their property titles. Criminals still have property rights. Rights to those things otherwise legitimately obtained. And in the case at hand where the home had been sold to a new couple it seems they have no case. Even if you subscribe to usage based property rights it was obvious that this property while not being currently lived in was being worked on. Any system which legitimizes that type of usage policy would get very little support in general.

On the back of the seat in front of me on the bus this morning had three things recently written on it in black marker. From left to right:

• Envoy of Chaos
• smoke weed every day
• 1-20-2009 ☮
  YES WE DID!!

“Envoy of Chaos” on Google lead to MySpace and Deviant Art profiles of someone from Sicklerville, NJ.

“smoke weed every day” Well assuming it was all written by the same person it seems that perhaps they need to look into Barack Obama’s policy on marijuana. The word doesn’t even come up in a search of the Whitehouse website. Marijuana relegalization was the number one question asked in a recent “Top 10″ questions list submitted to the new POTUS and he simply said he does not support marijuana decrim.

And no… you didn’t. A peace sign? Barack Obama? I think you missed the whole thing about him wanting to expand the “war” in Afghanistan. And the murdering of children in Pakistan. The continued occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq. His threatening stance toward Iran and support for further trade restrictions. His continued support for the war on drugs… which is nothing more than a war on users and their families. His support for increased police state activity, the general war on terror, the military industrial complex, the economic terrorism the Congress and people like Paul Krugman advocate, and on and on.

The real peace candidates were Ron Paul, Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich. It appears you rejected them.

http://www.latimes.com/…

Reporting from Washington — Another inauguration took place in Washington this week — Google Inc. officially became a political power player.

In October, Google was only hours from being sued by the Justice Department as a Web-search monopolist. Today, less than three years after it made its first Washington hire, the Internet giant is poised to capitalize on its backing of President Obama and pursue its agenda in the nation’s capital.

Google’s executives and employees overwhelmingly supported Obama’s candidacy, contributing more money than all but three companies or universities. And only DreamWorks employees gave more toward inauguration festivities.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt campaigned for Obama and was one of four Googlers on his transition team. He is now as likely as any corporate chieftain to get his calls to the White House returned.

At the top of the company’s policy priorities are two that consumer advocates largely champion. First, it wants to expand high-speed Internet access so people can use its Web services more often. It also is pushing for so-called network neutrality: prohibitions on telecommunications companies charging websites for faster delivery of their content.

“Google is not just a benign corporate entity. It has a variety of special interests,” said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, who has sparred with Google over data-privacy issues. “They’re in a great position to push their agenda through with the support of the president and the Democrats in Congress.”

How predictable. A company thrives due to freedom. Serving their neighbor. Once in a position of success they turn to the guns of government to push out and keep out competition and ease the aspects of the free market that get in their way.

Combine these actions with their pulling of Checkpoint USA’s videos from YouTube because some buearacrats were displeased with being outed. Google is going down an unfortunate path.