IT Buoy

Like so many mothers before her, Stephanie Lenz thought her friends and family might enjoy seeing her toddler. So she uploaded a video to YouTube of her son dancing to Prince. Universal, Prince’s label, demanded that the video be taken down. In 2008, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued Universal of behalf of Lenz, claiming that Universal’s failure to consider whether there actually was any copyright infringement before demanding a take down violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA was developed, in part, to deter copyright holders from abusing their ability to demand things be taken down from sites. Read the rest of this story

From TechCrunch: After hitting a flat spot last fall, Twitter’s worldwide growth is pointing in the right direction again. According to worldwide comScore figures released today, Twitter’s own site attracted 73.5 million unique individuals in January, up 8 percent from December, 2009 (when it had 65.2 million visitors). Its annual growth rate is still a phenomenal 1,105 percent. A year ago, Twitter.com attracted only an estimated 6 million visitors. Continue reading at TechCrunch

Less than a week after Google introduced a new social networking service, Google Buzz, the company is working feverishly to address user unease about the privacy of the product. Google Buzz lets users share posts and notes with people they are connected to or “follow,” a model similar to Twitter and Facebook. But unlike those services, it automatically signs users up to follow people they email and chat with the most through Gmail. It also makes that list of first followers public, by default. That decision has triggered a wave of complaints from users concerned the feature would inadvertently publicizing the names of people they frequently emailed with, like a spouse or ex-boyfriend. The critics say that Google doesn’t understand that some people don’t want their email contacts to become their social networking contacts, period. “Users’ are being enticed to accept Buzz without fully understanding that the email address book is becoming their friends list,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Rotenberg says EPIC plans to file a complaint Tuesday to the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that by blending the two – namely, treating users’ email contacts as social networking contacts – Google is guilty of “unfair and deceptive trade practices.” Rotenberg called it a rare miscalculation for Google, which he said has been conscientious about giving users control over their privacy

Forget users and privacy advocates, here’s why it matters that Google (GOOG) botched its Buzz roll-out with privacy flaws. Google just announced new technology that will allow it to target ads to third-party Web site visitors based on their most recent Google search. Hunch cofounder and New York VC Chris Dixon called the news “the most important Google announcement in a while.” Read the rest of this story

Last night The Gotham Gal and I had dinner with our friends John Heilemann and Diana Rhoten . As dinner was ending, the talk turned to chatroulette and what to make of it. John and I both had the exact same reaction the first time we used chatroulette;