penguin_dance writes "A Pennsylvania mom is fighting back, suing Universal Music Publishing Group for having a home movie taken down off of YouTube. The movie, featuring her 18-month old bouncing to Prince's song, 'Let's Go Crazy,' was cited for removal by the Group for copyright infringement. Mom Stephanie Lenz was first afraid they'd come after her — then she got angry. She got YouTube to put the video back up, she's enlisted the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and she's filed a civil lawsuit (pdf). 'I thought even though I didn't do anything wrong that they might want to file some kind of suit against me, take my house, come after me. And I didn't like feeling afraid ... I didn't like feeling that I could get in trouble for something as simple as posting a home video for my friends and family to see.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For most teenagers, getting their driver's license is a rite of passage that marks a newfound freedom. The idea of having their driving monitored using GPS tracking devices would seemingly make a teenager more surly than a NYC Taxi Driver. At least one teen might feel differently if he is successfully able to challenge a speeding ticket using data from the GPS tracking system installed in his car that ostensibly shows the car moving at the speed limit within 100 feet of where he was clocked speeding. Drivers have long been at the mercy of the court when pleading their innocence to charges of a traffic violation. As the article notes, the courts have been for the most part merciless, with the he-said of the ticketing cop and his radar gun being upheld in most cases over the she-said of the driver. Technology used by the police to nab traffic offenders is usually taken at face value, despte cases where it is obviously flawed.

GPS tracking systems in personal vehicles could restore some balance towards drivers falsely accused of speeding, but first the courts will have to both understand how the technology works (nontrivial, perhaps) and also satisfy themselves that the data is true and accurate. The courts will no doubt want a say in how GPS tracking services record, secure, and authenticate their data before weighing them heavily as evidence. Existing service providers may step up to this challenge and offer "traffic court certified" service at a premium. Perhaps those drivers whose GPS tracking systems have earned them a discount on their car insurance will wind up reinvesting a few of those dollars into service that might some day get them off the hook in court.

Dan DiPasquo is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Dan DiPasquo and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

We've written a lot about pharmaceutical patents, since pharma is often area that's a sticking point for fans of the patent system. There are a number of reasons why patents in the pharmaceutical industry don't make sense, despite protests from many. Studies have shown that patents are actually holding back the development of new drugs, making research more difficult and skewing research efforts away from what's most important for helping keep people healthy, to what's patentable. Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, for years has been talking about how patents harm medical innovations. One of his proposed solutions is to set up a bounty system for important cures -- and it appears that at least someone in Congress thinks this is a decent idea. Against Monopoly points us to the news that Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a law in Congress that would set aside $80 billion a year to give to pharmaceutical companies in exchange for putting their patents in the public domain, in order to create competition for developing the drugs.

First of all, there's almost no chance that this proposed bill goes anywhere, so any discussion over the pros and cons isn't likely to make much of a difference. There are some interesting ideas set forth by the bill, but in the long run, it's not a very good idea and would likely fail for a number of easily predicted reasons. What I do like about it is the idea of encouraging competition within the drug space, so that the pills may be more affordable to a wider audience. Competition tends to be a good thing, and it can also create more incentives for real innovation.

Unfortunately, just about everything else about this bill would likely cause problems. It's not entirely clear how this bill gets funded. $80 billion is pretty significant chunk of change. If the plan actually worked, and created new, more affordable drugs that saved many more lives, you could make a compelling argument that the net benefit to the economy would far outweigh the $80 billion (see Murphy and Topel's research for support on that). However, it's still not going to be easy to get people to buy into it. More importantly, it's not entirely clear how you'd allocate this money fairly. Any system like this where the gov't is giving away money is going to be gamed by the pharma companies in one way or another. It'll be so lucrative that it will be nearly impossible not to have the system gamed -- especially when it's going to involve a bunch of bureaucrats trying to determine the value of a specific drug. Finally, the bill seems to be entirely focused on pharmaceuticals -- which is part of the problem today. With so much healthcare policy focused on pharma, people forget that new technologies may start to make pharmaceuticals obsolete. Then we're left with an $80 billion subsidy for an industry that should be going away. I'm all for the economic incentives that come from innovation prizes, but building a huge mis-targeted gov't bureaucracy around them seems risky. Really, it seems to just be replacing one system of gov't subsidies with a different one, and that hardly seems likely to fix the problems currently facing the healthcare space.

ackthpt writes "Ikhana (a NASA drone) is primarily designed for suborbital earth sciences missions, but may be fitted out with a variety of sensors. Wednesday, Ikhana took off from Edwards Air Force Base for a 10 hour mission to observe forest fires in California, scanning the terrain from 23-25,000 feet using a variety of sensors for visible and IR light. Able to remain aloft for up to 30 continuous hours Ikhana serves up information in minutes, a process that takes hours when done by manned aircraft observation. 'The data is processed on the aircraft, up-linked to a satellite and then downloaded to a ground station. From there it's delivered to a computer server at NASA Ames. The imagery is then combined with Google Earth maps. Command center personnel can view the images on their computer screens and then delegate local firefighters accordingly.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Economist Dean Baker thinks that Amazon owes its profits to the fact that it doesn't have to collect sales taxes for customers in states where it doesn't have a physical presence. The absence of sales taxes on Internet purchases, he says, is a "subsidy that Amazon gets from taxpayers." This is silly. Some states don't have sales taxes at all, but no one would consider that a taxpayer subsidy. My local Wal-Mart benefits from a variety of state and local government services here in the St. Louis area, such as police and fire protection, and roads and other infrastructure. At least in part, sales taxes go to cover the costs of providing those services. Amazon uses few if any services from state or local governments in Missouri, so it's hard to see anything unfair about the fact that it doesn't have to collect sales taxes here.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

I'm interested and hopeful about ProPublica, a new non-profit investigative news organization. Paul E. Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, will serve as president and editor-in-chief.

ProPublica, when fully staffed in 2008, will include 24 fulltime reporters and editors, the largest staff in American journalism devoted solely to investigative reporting. ProPublica will be supported entirely by philanthropy and will provide the articles it produces, free of charge, both through its own Web site and to leading news organizations selected with an eye toward maximizing the impact of each article.

Commenting on the new organization Mr. Steiger said, “ProPublica will focus exclusively on journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them. We will be non-partisan and non-ideological, adhering to the strictest standards of journalistic impartiality and fairness.” He continued, “We will look hard at the critical functions of business and of government, the two biggest centers of power. But we will also focus on such institutions as unions, universities, hospitals, foundations and the media when they appear to be exploiting or oppressing those weaker than they, or when there is evidence that they are abusing the public trust.”

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

The Onion sells these funny fake-product "gotcha" boxes -- which you can fill with real presents.

Wrap an otherwise forgettable gift in one of seven Gotcha Boxes from The Onion, and watch their faces fall when they realize there is no such thing as a USB-powered travel toaster or a 28-piece whisk set—just a crappy bric-a-brac inside you waited until the last moment to buy. Or feign enthusiasm for a surge-protected power strip that mounts on a car review mirror and plugs into the cigarette lighter.

Link (Thanks, Dale!)

A month ago, there was a story that made that rounds about Microsoft Windows' auto-update feature automatically installing stuff, even if people had turned off the auto-install option. This pissed off a lot of people, but we didn't write about it at the time, assuming it was a one-off glitch. Apparently not. Now reports are coming out that plenty of folks who had auto-update turned off are discovering that a recent patch automatically installed and began running Windows Desktop Search. Once installed, the app started indexing everything, chewing up resources. On top of that, if you want to uninstall WDS, you need to reboot your computer, which is quite a nuisance for many people. Needless to say plenty of folks are pissed off. The specific problem appears to be that this patch simply looked at whether or not a person had approved an earlier (from February) patch -- and if that had been installed, then this one was automatically installed as a "revision." It just so happens that it also included WDS -- even if it wasn't wanted. While the article notes that the Windows Server group had admitted it made a mistake, it doesn't read much like an admission or an apology. Rather, it's just an explanation, which doesn't seem to be placating pissed off users everywhere.

Esther Schindler writes "Sure, everyone uses technology on the job. But you may not have contemplated the tools used by paranormal investigators (at least, not until you began thinking about Halloween) who look for the truth in ghosts and other things that go Bump in the Night. In Paranormal Investigations and Technology: Where Ghosts and Gadgets Meet, CIO's Al Sacco writes about the most unusual of tool chests, with everything from thermometers to blimp cams." You want spooky? An anonymous reader passed a link to a survey that says a third of Americans believe in ghosts. Who you gonna call?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Imagine the conversations and activities that took place inside Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's limousine.

Mr. Pot killed about two million Cambodians (a quarter of the country's population) in the 1970s in order to live the high life. But you don't need to kill anyone to own this piece of history. You just have to be the high bidder on eBay.

For Sale - one classic 1973 Mercedes Benz Stretch Limousine (short-wheel base stretch) - previously used by one infamous owner - Pol Pot who led the Khmer Rouge during its genocidal regime in Cambodia from 1975 - 1979.

Currently on display at the famous French colonial renakse hotel (Monireth Boulevard) - opposite the Kings' Royal Palace. The car was discovered by a previous editor of the Phnom Penh Post being used to transport water melon's to the Central Market (Psar Thmei). The current owner purchased the car in 2001 and has painstakingly restored it to its current glory.

Link

An anonymous reader writes "Sites like Flikr and YouTube show just the tip of the full potential for media on the Web. An IBM DeveloperWorks article provides some easy implementations of video and image browsing that you can use in your own project. Learn how to combine media with technologies such as PHP and Ajax to create a compelling experience. All Sample code is made available, and if you're into Mashups the site's Mashup resource space should have everything you need to create a Mashup of your own."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First, the big news is that lines are forming at Apple stores. Send links to pictures. Oh the humanity.

Second, the reason those of us who ordered in advance are not getting our Leopards is that Fedex couldn't handle the load.

Even so, when I called Fedex this morning they said I would have my package today, even though the website says otherwise. Their gears are stipped on a good day. Is Fedex the AT&T of package delivery? Will Apple end up leasing their own fleet of trucks to deliver the next version of Mac OS? I guess we still have to make it through this release.

Will we be able to have a Flash Conference on Monday to discuss Leopard? Only time will tell.

Ryan Block has his first review up.

Chuck Shotton found a workaround for an issue that seems likely to bite many Leopard newbies.

You often hear people in copyright debates claim that you "can't compete with free." We've tried to explain why that's wrong: In fact companies find ways to compete with free all the time. The latest example comes via Wired's David Kravets, who points out that Apple's latest OS is all over BitTorrent. People who want to avoid giving Apple its $129 can visit their favorite BitTorrent search engine and download the new operating system free of charge. Yet apparently, some of the same people who were downloading bootleg copies of the OS earlier this week will head to their local Apple Store tonight to pick up a legitimate copy. "If you're going to use a system to run your life, you're less likely to take chances with an illegitimate copy," says BigChampagne's Eric Garland. Being sure your computer isn't running a defective or compromised version of Mac OS X is worth $129 to a lot of people. Of course, that's not a new insight. One of Red Hat's most lucrative products is its software subscription service, which allows companies to pay money in order to guarantee the software they get will be stable, secure, and will work well together. Red Hat's customers could download the software themselves and roll their own version of Red Hat, but for many companies it's just not the risk that they'd miss a critical bugfix or security patch.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

On November 21, our friends at Kidrobot will issue their Yo Gabba Gabba! line of toys and awesome hoodies. For those who have not opened their hearts to Yo Gabba Gabba!, it's a mindbending, surreal, and absurdly funny children's TV series about five toy monsters. Regular guests include the likes of Biz Markie and Mark Mothersbaugh. Link (Thanks, Jason Weisberger!)

Previously on BB:
• New kids' show: Yo Gabba Gabba! Link

Gamespot is reporting that the Electronic Consumers Association (ECA) has picked its first legal fight since vowwing to step up lobbying efforts. The organization is going head-to-head with the Electronic Software Association (ESA), a long-time backer of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), by coming out in favour of H.R. 1201 (also known as the Fair Use Act of 2007). "If it became law, the Fair Use Act would create a variety of exemptions to the DMCA's prohibitions on circumventing anti-piracy measures. The Fair Use Act would make it legal to bypass anti-piracy measures in a handful of situations, for personal archiving; for researching, critiquing, or reporting on works of substantial public interest (if that is the sole reason for the circumvention); or to skip commercial or personally objectionable content. It would also create an exemption in copyright law for people who make and distribute equipment used to bypass copyright protection (like modchips), provided the device 'is capable of substantial, commercially significant noninfringing use.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Akezys says: "Recently police at the Vancouver airport were attempting to question a recent immigrant that could not speak English. They tasered him after 24 seconds of speaking with him. The man had spent 10 hours stuck in the airport with no-one helping him."

The 40-year-old construction worker, who had never left Poland before, was immigrating to Canada to join his mother, 61, who lives in Kamloops, about a five-hour drive from Vancouver.

They had arranged to meet at the baggage carousel in the international terminal at YVR....

Mr. Dziekanski arrived at about 3 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 14.

"He made his way to primary customs in the ordinary fashion … he went through there in the normal time frame … he then proceeded through and was directed to secondary customs, which is normal for someone who doesn't speak English and is immigrating to the country," Mr. Kosteckyj said. His papers were in order and he proceeded without difficulty.

But what happened after that was far from normal. For nearly 10 hours, Mr. Dziekanski stayed in the Arrivals Hall, growing increasingly frustrated and eventually becoming frantic.

Outside, in the public area, his mother spent nearly six hours pacing the corridors and, in broken English, asking airport officials for help in locating her son.

Mr. Kosteckyj said she visited one booth in international arrivals "at least three to four times and conveyed to them that she was concerned about her son being in the area and she wanted to get a message to him and how could she do that? They wrote her name down and said that they would make inquiries."

At about 10 p.m., she was told he wasn't there. She made the long drive home, only to find a phone message waiting, saying her son had been found.

"She called back to immigration when she got in, which would have been around 2 a.m., and spoke to someone there and was advised that her son was somewhere in the area and was fine. And she advised, you know, 'Please take care of him because he can't speak English and I'll get there as soon as I can.' And of course he had died, been killed really, some time on or about 1 or 1:30," Mr. Kosteckyj said.

Link