Seemed like a cat pic kind of day. (Photo: Pusheen.com)

Two more execs are leaving Yahoo. Call it the "Mayer effect." Or is that the term for bringing Googlers to Yahoo? [AllThingsD]

The social media sector has LinkedIn and Yelp to thank for boosting its image by meeting their projected revenues. The rest of y'all look like chumps. [Wall Street Journal]

Hey everyone let's freak out and say you can't read Quora anonymously. But psst...you can. Just change your settings. Problem solved! [GigaOm]

Au revoir, piracy police. At least in France, anyway. [PaidContent]

Yes, you can go to jail for admitting to rape on Reddit. Also, you're a monster. [BuzzFeed]

(Photo: Mark Lennihan/AP)

Elon Musk got his crazy futurism on at PandoMonthly. He's the best, isn't he? [PandoDaily]

London ain't got nothin' on New York's IPOs. [Wall Street Journal]

Meanwhile, the U.S. is going after a 24-year-old British kid who set up a portal to find pirated content, but never hosted any of it himself. FYI, America, ya look desperate. [New York Times]

Facebook is monitoring your chats for "criminal activity." Maybe keep your cybering to off the record Gchats? [Mashable]

You can now go on a road trip through California's national parks without ever having to leave your house. [Google]

Mr. Wilson, right.

At the Paley Center for Media yesterday, New York tech's paterfamilias Fred Wilson offered something largely absent from recent anti-SOPA debates: a plan for an alternative. Better yet, he wasn't just preaching to the choir. Rather, the Union Square Ventures managing partner broke on through to the other side: media execs.

Last month, he seemed frustrated, tweeting out "#screwcable" when a feud between MSG and Time Warner Cable forced Mr. Wilson to consume pirated content if he wanted to see the (pre-Linsanity) Knicks. But during yesterday's talk, Mr. Wilson seemed more convinced of the universality of the condition.

"Making everybody a criminal is not the way to do this," he told the crowd in an impassioned speech, appearing visibly moved by the wrong-headedness of the government's approach:

"We gotta fix the system so that the content is available legally on the internet in a way that it is available for people to consume it. As convenient as turning on your TV and watching HBO, that's how convenient it has to be. The content industry has not made this content convenient to access on the internet and as a result everybody, and I mean everybody, is a pirate. Okay so in the world where everybody is breaking the law, you gotta look at the law. Is it the right law?"

Rather, as CNET reports, Mr. Wilson proposes establishing an independent group to develop "a black and white list." He listed Hulu, Netflix, Rdio, Spotify, and Rhapsody under "the good guys." (One could also add Boxee and Turntable.fm, both USV-backed companies, to that list.)

Then the Web sites that wish to participate would serve a pop-up notice when users tried to visit blacklisted sites.

"We're not blocking people from the site," Wilson continued. "The interstitial says, 'You're going to a site that's on our blacklist. We believe this site contains almost entirely pirated content and by the way you can get that content legally on these whitelisted sites.'"

Wilson would like to see Google, Facebook and even Mozilla participate and if they did he would want them to report "to the world" how many people they're sending to "MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay and the BitTorrent sites...Using technology, we train our youth to know that they're doing something bad and how they could do something that's good."

It's an intriguing proposition that seems to borrow elements from the quantified self. "You visited X number of pirated content sites today, give us back your good Internet Samaritan badge." But even Mr. Wilson seemed skeptical about the viability of the plan, admitting, "Google should do this. They won't but they should." CNET was likewise dubious about whether studios and labels will bite. (The content providers favorite part, noted CNET, seemed to be when Mr. Wilson said pirate sites should be shut down.) In the wake of the outcry over SOPA and PIPA however, content providers might be willing to compromise to get some good will from the tech community.

Mr. Wilson's invitation to the lion's den seems like a step forward. Hopefully, the media moguls stopped fretting over perceived lost revenues long enough to pay attention to this part:

"Our children have been taught to steal," Wilson said, "and they have been taught not just by the MegaUploads, BitTorrent (sites) and Pirate Bays but have been taught by the content industry because the content industry has not let them have what they want legally, inexpensively, and conveniently."

Fred Wilson: 'Everybody Is a Pirate, So Fix the... by tvnportal

Anti-piracy rhetoric holds that online piracy is a devastating force on the U.S. economy, responsible for the theft of between $200 billion and $250 billion per year and the loss of 750,000 good American jobs. "These numbers seem truly dire: a $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs – that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010," write the economists over at Freakonomics.

But those numbers are wrong, the authors say, citing a breakdown by the Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez. 

In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.”

More recently, the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) placed the number at $58 billion; but that reporter is methodologically flawed, Mr. Sanchez and tech journalist Tim Lee have deconstructed, and is guilty of double-counting with results that "swell the estimate of piracy losses considerably."

So, how much is piracy hurting us? "At this point, we simply don’t know," say the Freakonomists. "It’s clear that, at least in some cases, piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction... In other cases, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This is especially true if the consumer lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he downloads. Do we count this latter category of downloads as “lost sales”? Not if we’re honest."

Then there's the trouble of calculating the impact lost sales have on jobs. Money saved on a DVD is money that consumer is likely to spend elsewhere, possibly creating jobs in the skateboard, cereal or comic book industries.

Cares about you, kind of. Not really.

You should not listen to him, nor commend him, nor care. Why?

Posting to his public Facebook profile, Mark Zuckerberg writes:

The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can't let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet's development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.

The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.

Pro-Internet! That sounds nice. Zuckerberg then links to Facebook's page detailing all of their political stances on piracy bills.

Just don't forget: Facebook's only against this piracy bill because it could affect them in a not-nice way, not because of how it might effect you. If that were the case, they'd be advocating for your rights while policing their own biggest problem, privacy.

Considering the FTC is now probing Facebook over potential privacy violations in the new Timeline feature, and considering that un-tagging one's self on Facebook is now basically an act of sedition (given how difficult they've made it to do), and considering that Zuck himself has noted "The Age of Privacy" as "over", do you really think Facebook cares about you? Not so much. But they definitely don't want the government up in their business, which is the actual reason a gigantic, money-making business like that would oppose SOPA, as opposed to the ostensible reason they're giving: That this is all for You, The User.

Google, pretty much the same deal. At least they're trying to educate the public on the various ways in which they violate your privacy through a new ad campaign, something—like cigarette companies admitting their products give people cancer—that's good to have out there, even if it is long overdue on arrival.

When you look at companies opposed to SOPA, simply ask yourself two questions:

Do they stand to lose money?

And then:

What kind of money do they stand to lose?

With a company like Wikipedia—who thrive off of donations and is an essential part of a movement like open-source technology—people with good intentions stand to lose well-intentioned money. If their autonomy and freedom is muted, Wikipedia isn't just a moot website, it's a moot idea. If Google (a public company) and Facebook (soon to be a public company) were to be shut down or restricted by the government for SOPA compliance, the inevitable result is a downgrade in your experience, potentially costing their respective businesses some coin. At the very least, compliance with a massive government law like this costs money. Nobody likes spending money that doesn't make money, especially when it comes to government compliance. It's a giant pain in the ass (just ask Goldman Sachs!).

In the end, SOPA isn't great for You, The Internet User. But it's especially bad for They, The Internet Money Companies.

Remember this as they keep shoving their party lines down your throat.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

By Flickr user keiro-super-hero

Deadline Hollywood brings us the news that Gilberto Sanchez, a 49 year old Bronx resident, was sentenced yesterday to 1 year in federal prison for uploading a copy of "Wolverine" to MegaUpload one month before the film's theatrical release.

“The federal prison sentence handed down in this case sends a strong message of deterrence to would-be internet pirates,” said United States Attorney André Birotte Jr. “The Justice Department will pursue and prosecute persons who seek to steal the intellectual property of this nation.”

The ruling comes amid vigorous debate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would give the film and music industry far reaching new powers to combat illegal uploads of copyrighted material. Venture capitalists and tech companies, along with many of the original architects of the internet, have argued that SOPA would undermine innovation on the web and fundamentally threaten the security and stability of the internet.

The case highlights the conundrum of policing the web. Deadline Hollywood quotes from the court documents. “Although Fox was able to get defendant’s Wolverine Workprint removed from his Megaupload account within approximately one day, by then, the damage was done and the film had proliferated like wildfire throughout the internet, resulting in up to millions of infringements.”

MegaUpload, you might have heard, is currently suing Universal over an alleged "sham" takedown of a Youtube video that show pop stars like Kanye West and Will.i.am singing the praises of Hong Kong based file sharing service.

In the comment section on the original article, a number of readers applauded the sentence. Others, despite working in the film industry, were taken aback.

"Jesus, you make me embarrassed to admit we work in the same industry. No, this wasn’t too lenient a sentence. This was far too harsh a sentence. When our “solution” to piracy is prison and attempted censorship of the entire internet, maybe we’re taking light entertainment a little too seriously. Especially when the kind of real criminal behavior that decimates the middle class is what actually hurts our industry – and yet on that topic we’re silent. So yes, while people are losing their houses, jobs, retirements, and families, let’s crow about how someone getting a year in prison for uploading a mediocre franchise sequel is “to lenient” – because we don’t have enough problems with our audiences (aka customers) thinking that we’re out of touch, greedy bastards already."

Despite the pirate copy that hit the net one month before its release, "Wolverine" opened at number one in the box office and went on to gross more than $370 million worldwide.

Here's how things played out.

The tweet in question came from Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) tweeted out,

zing!

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat who CNET notes was was named the "meanest" member of congress by Washingtonian magazine, wasn't having it. She stopped the hearing to read the tweet out loud and declared that Rep. King should apologize for his offensive behavior.

At this point Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) suggested that the word "offensive" was itself offensive and should be stricken from the record. A ludicrous back-and-forth ensued.

In the meantime, all the amendments to the bill which would have removed the worst parts of the bill, like DNS blocking, were voted down by the pro-SOPA majority on the committee.

We'll leave you with the words of 83 engineers instrumental in building the internet, from their open letter to Congress:

"Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network errors and security problems. This is true in China, Iran and other countries that censor the network today; it will be just as true of American censorship. It is also true regardless of whether censorship is implemented via the DNS, proxies, firewalls, or any other method. Types of network errors and insecurity that we wrestle with today will become more widespread, and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government."

image by dettmer otto via the economist

The Economist is well and known and well regarded for its intellectual and stridently capitalist takes on everything from healthcare to governance. But when considering the new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that is currently being debated by Congress, the magazine's editors took the unusual stance of siding against America's big entertainment industries.

"Compared with other countries’ anti-piracy laws, SOPA is indeed draconian," they wrote. It's not that international, online piracy isn't a serious problem. But targeting the companies like AT&T and Google which provide the infrastructure for web service and search is far more damaging to consumers and the internet economy than the problem demands. 

The Economist points to methods that have worked in Europe and Asia, the "graduated response" laws, which ask ISPs to shut off service to individual users who are downloading illegal files. Consumers get two warnings first. In South Korea, most consumers stopped downloading pirated files after the warnings.

As the folks at BitTorrent recently pointed out, even if all the users currently downloading files through Bit Torrent sites switched over to paid streaming services like NetFlix, it wouldn't add up to the yearly budget of the MPAA, the industry's leading crusader against online piracy.

And yet independent artists are finding new ways to thrive. Kickstarter is on pace to pass the annual endowment for the arts in terms of the capital they raise for creative projects. The Economist takes a dour view of attempts to regulate piracy out of existence. "Neither piracy laws nor newfangled ideas offer creative types a reliable path to prosperity. Services that provide legal music over the internet pay out little in royalties. Only the biggest bands really do well out of touring—and to become big they need to sell albums, says Mr Mensch. No law can do much about that."

What these industries need is increased investment in new legal technologies that will encourage consumers to pay for their music, movies and television to be delivered in fast, flexible ways that truly satisfy their current digital lifestyle.

Image via The Guardian

Tumblr’s 32.5 million users woke up last week to a vision of a dystopian future. ““WTF,” a frustrated fashionista working on her own startup wrote to Betabeat. “I can’t see any of my god damn archives. UGGGGHHH.”

Logging in to their dashboards, where they browse the stream of posts from the blogs they follow, users were greeted with text and images that were blacked out like the redacted sections of a classified briefing.

Those obscured blogs represented Tumblr’s take on American Censorship Day, a protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was going before a hearing of the Congressional Judiciary Committee that afternoon. The bill would allow companies to sue service providers like Tumblr or Facebook for hosting content like copyrighted music files or movies, a big reversal from the safe harbor provisions which had long defined internet piracy law.

The startup community, both entrepreneurs and the investors who back them, had been raising the alarm for several weeks about their concerns that this bill would cripple their ability to innovate and damage the internet economy. But if SOPA was the first real test of the political muscle of the entrepreneurs and small-business owners who are driving the tech sector, it was a test they would fail. Whether SOPA eventually becomes law or not, the issue provided a clear illustration to many in the startup world that they may be frighteningly unprepared to navigate the dangerous waters of Capitol Hill, where buttonholing trumps beta-testing and hard-nosed lobbying beats “likes.”

“We’ve got all these blogs and these Twitter followers, but when it comes to politics, I worry that we’re the tree falling in the wood and nobody is hearing us,” said Fred Wilson, New York’s most prominent venture capitalist and an outspoken opponent of the SOPA bill.

Mr. Wilson and his partner Brad Burnham had travelled to D.C. recently to put in face time with Senators and members of Congress. But he worries that talk is cheap, and the startup community won’t be able to wield much influence until it begins working through D.C.’s more traditional channels. “We’re outmanned and outgunned by the older, more mature industries,” he explained. “The startup community is beginning to find its voice, but we don’t have a PAC or lobbyists.

“When the startup industry has more friends in Congress and when we are giving more money, then we will have more say. But so far we have not had a lot of success.”

SOPA would essentially reverse the conditions set out by Congress in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1997. That legislation gave companies like Youtube and Facebook protection under “safe harbor.” If someone uploaded a copyrighted television show or music file to one of these sites, the copyright owner can file a claim to have it taken down. As long as these sites respond in a timely fashion, they were considered to have done their part.

Under the SOPA act, companies and the government have the new ability to force internet service providers, giants like AT&T and Verizon, to block access to certain domain names if those sites are thought to be hosting pirated content. It would also give copyright holders the ability to sue search engines, blogs and forums if they contain links to this copyrighted material. It would give corporations a powerful enforcement mechanism, by making it possible for them to demand that advertising networks and payment processors stop doing business with offending sites.

- - SOPA Opera: The Craziest Congressional Quotes About Online Piracy >>

Mr. Wilson’s concern that opponents of the bill would go unheard turned out to be unfounded. Tumblr users who clicked on the redacted text they saw on America Censorship day were taken to a screen encouraging them to call Congress and protest. Tumblr is better known as a home for hilarious cat animations and underground mixtapes than a hotbed of political activism. But its irate users placed an astonishing 87,834 calls to Congress in the next 12 hours, averaging at one point 3.6 calls per second.

The internet was practically howling. A petition posted to the White House website from a user on Reddit quickly gathered more than 40,000 signatures. “This Bill would essentially allow a Great Firewall of America and would be a shameful desecration of free speech and any sort of reasonable copyright law,” it read. “Essentially it's a censorship law that would end the Internet as we know it in America.”

But while the members of the House Judiciary Committee heard these voices loud and clear, they seemed more amused and annoyed than alarmed at the vast and vocal outcry. “To those who say that a bill to stop online theft will break the Internet, I would like to point out that it’s not likely to happen,” Rep. John Conyers (D.-Michigan) noted with a dry chuckle, at the opening of Wednesday’s SOPA hearing. “We’re getting a number of reactions from those in the tech sector who think this will strangle startups.”

The strident voices of Boing Boing and Hacker News seem to have backfired. This wasn’t the slick talk of K Street lobbying firms or the prepared testimony of well-heeled industry groups. It was the rage of Reddit, eventually boiling over into the mainstream press. To the Congressmen who crafted this legislation, it came across as childish and suspect.

Rep. Conyers pulled out a sheet of paper with an image of Godzilla on the front. “I reluctantly ask to put this into the record,” he said. “The attack of the internet killers. This is serious business. Don’t walk, run, tell Congress SOPA hreatens internet security.”

Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) interjected. “Isn’t that a comic?”

“No this is serious,” Rep. Conyers replied, laughing. “We ought to know better.”

It was exactly the reaction many in the startup community had feared. “These are people and companies with incredibly large and engaged networks of users,” Anil Dash said, dressed in a black overcoat, black pants and black shoes, sipping a chai tea and chatting with Betabeat at the SunBurst Cafe not long ago. “But it’s not clear that having this big megaphone online will translate into any kind of real political power.”

Mr. Dash recently won a board seat on the New York Tech Meetup, a collection of more than 19,000 members from Silicon Alley, and one of the largest meetup groups in the world. “When Mayor Bloomberg came to our meeting, that made me remember why I was interested in the position. It showed that government was recognizing our power.”

Through Expert Labs, his non-profit, Mr. Dash explores ways for citizens to affect policy through the use of technology. “We need to figure out ways to get more aggressive. Take Nate Westheimer,” Mr. Dash said, referring to the jocular MC of the NY Tech Meetup. “He should be like Al Sharpton, our agitator, making people wake up to what’s important to us.”

The problem for the startup sector is that, while everyone from Mayor Bloomberg to President Obama recognizes their potential to create jobs or become the next Google, they are by definition small, cash strapped strivers, a difficult position from which to find political leverage. This prevents them from engaging the hoards of lobbyists who crafted the language that became the SOPA bill.

- - SOPA Opera: The Craziest Congressional Quotes About Online Piracy >>

And as the committee hearing showed, by the time the issue was opened up for debate, the deck had already been stacked. From the Howard Dean scream to Tony Weiner’s tweet, the Internet has not been kind to politicians. But the opening statements for the SOPA hearing made it clear that the Judiciary committee had strong feelings about the ways in which the Internet was wreaking havoc.

“In my experience there is usually only one thing at stake when we have long lines outside a hearing as we do today, and when giant companies and their supporters start throwing around rhetoric like ‘this bill will kill the internet’ or ‘an attempt to build the Great Firewall of America,’ and that one thing is usually money,”said Rep. Mel Watt (R-NC). “When I hear overblown rhetoric like this bill is a killer to innovation and entrepreneurs, that the co-sponsors of this bill are the internet killers, I become suspicious of the message, as well as the messengers.”

Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California who represents Silicon Valley, tried to defend the impassioned internet activists. “Writing this off as hyperbole is not fair,” she said. It was not the wealthy tech titans who were secretly backing this outrage, she noted, pointing out the many small entrepreneurs, legal and technical experts who opposed SOPA. “It hasn’t generally been the policy of this committee to dismiss the views of those in the industry we intend to litigate. I understand why you’re upset by the rhetoric, but that is not a reason to dismiss these objections.”

Still, the wave of internet based protest did make at least some impact. When Nancy Pelosi was asked via Twitter where she stood on SOPA she responded, “Need to find a better solution than #SOPA #DontBreakTheInternet.” While they couldn't puncture the cloistered walls of the committee hearing, the startup community seemed to have gotten its protest across to at least one important politician, who was embracing both their medium and their message.