The Canadian government has imposed a limit on Parliamentary debate for Bill C-11: The Copyright Modernization Act which will completely change the way that Canadians interact with web content.

While the bill’s proponents state that there are many benefits to the act, opponents state that the bill’s "digital lock" provisions are excessively restrictive and feel that they are the result of increasing pressure from US corporations.

Opponents state that these provisions will lock down content that has previously been available to consumers and must be immediately revised. In effect Canadians will not have the right to take material they purchase (music, movies etc) and transfer it onto different devices. If the proposed bill passes without amendment, any circumvention would be a crime; regardless if you have legally purchased the material you want to view on another platform.

The Stephen Harper conservative government has decided to defeat all proposed amendments to the bill from the Liberal and NDP parties. The Speaker of the House has selected 18 proposed amendments from Green Party Leader Elizabeth May for debate in the House of Commons.

In an email newsletter sent to constituents and in a video release, May contends that this is Canadians last chance to make any changes to the act:

"These amendments represent sensible changes that will ensure this bill does in fact modernize our copyright law, rather than unfairly undermine our rights as consumers – They will remove digital lock provisions and allow for exceptions, while addressing creators’ concerns about the possible effects of the addition of ‘education’ to the list of fair dealing categories."

The Liberal party has also launched a petition calling for amendments to Bill C-11’s digital lock rules which would make it illegal to copy a DVD so that you can watch it on your tablet device even if you are not infringing on the copyright.

They also state that "If the Bill passes without amendment, any circumvention will become a crime, even if it is only done to enjoy material you have legally purchased on the platform you want to view it on."

Following in the footfalls of the SOPA and PIPA controversies the ongoing debate for a fair and equitable balance between the copyright infringement and legitimate fair public usage is far from being resolved.

In a piracy case that’s been sitting around since 2010, a Finnish Court^{(*Ylivieskan käräjäoikeus)} has officially sided with the defendant, stating that she is not liable for her open WiFi connection.

The details of this particular case were very unique in that the timing of the infringement, a 12-minute period of piracy, occurred shortly after the woman in question hosted a public play with an audience of over 100 people in her home, which used to be a school until she purchased it.

Since there’s clearly no way to prove the home owner committed the act of piracy the court moved on to deliberate if the woman could be liable for ‘copyright infringement’ simply for not applying password protection to her WiFi connection.

After some deliberation the court concluded that an owner of open WiFi cannot be held responsible for the acts of third parties. Had this not been the final decision the legal status of all other open WiFi units, and wireless devices in general would have suddenly become questionable.

Personally, when I consider the frightening implications of assigning blame to someone who is partially a victim in a crime is horrible.

Lets put this in another context:

How would you feel if someone used a sophisticated cordless phone to attach themselves to your mom’s old cordless base station, ran some credit card fraud with her phone line, and she went to jail/was fined because she didn’t have enough security on her cordless phone?

It’d be like charging someone with a robbery because the suspects eluded the police by driving through someone’s property. You can’t say someone’s guilty of a crime because they didn’t lock their driveway gate.

While these examples aren’t exactly the same thing, this case opens the door to all sorts of concerns where we can’t hold people accountable for unwittingly providing an avenue for crime.

Google Glass Design is Patented

Not only does this show some further commitment to ‘finishing’ the Google Glass project, it also gives us a ‘sneak peak’ at a bit more of the design of the hardware.

 
In particular I found the ‘behind the ear’ data module really interesting and it answers a few questions I had about how expensive it would be to get the needed circuitry down to a compact enough scale to fit into this product design.

I’m guessing that the top area near the ‘eyebrow’ with the ‘hashing’ marks is touch sensitive, allowing you to trigger things like photo capture or toggle an option that you need to be triggered explicitly.

I don’t need to tell readers that I’m personally excited about wearing my cell phone ‘inside’ the glasses I already wear every day. People who worry about the weight clearly don’t know much about eye-wear and balance.

The only thing I can see in this design that worries me is that it might have a tendency to be ‘right side heavy’ and I’m sure they could resolve that by moving something like the battery over to the other side and wire it via the frame.

You have undoubtedly heard about the Penguin algorithm update from Google and the effects it has already to have on rankings. There is increasing speculation around the Google webmaster forums that another update has just been rolled out.

Scattered communications from Google seem to indicate that this is not a new update being rolled out, and that it is not a Panda refresh either.

Regardless, there have been many reports in the forums discussing major ranking fluctuations during the last 24 hours. One user details the steps he took to recover after being hit by the latest update stating:

"I had around 30 sites hit by Penguin on the 24/4, yesterday the first one resurfaced back to number 2 for its keywords which is encouraging."

"What did I do – the site was just 15 pages, the inner pages were all thin content boiler plate stuff, so I deleted them all to see what would happen and left the home page which is 500 words of original content."

"Links – did i touch incoming links, no I am going to try anchor text dilution on some other sites where I suspect this problem but did not create any more links on the recovered site."

Barry Schwartz is in the process of contacting Google for clarification on weather this is an isolated incident related to Mother’s Day search skewing traffic and rankings or is it a legitimate algorithm change.

As with the Panda updates, several more iterations of the Penguin algorithm are inevitable and will certainly cry havoc on many sites over the coming months.

While Google retains its standoffish approach to divulging information to the public, it is comforting to have someone like Mr. Schwartz advocating on behalf of the confused millions left to the mercies of the Google gods.

We could have ‘spun’ the information that it’s very unlikely we’ll see competing browsers in ARM edition of Windows 8, explaining that the difficulties make it the same as a ‘ban’…

…But we respect the fact that all (3?) of our readers come here for the truth on these topics, and only dirty laundry needs a spin cycle.

Where else is FireFox ‘banned’?

ChromeOS ? Yep!

iOS ? Yessir!

So why would Firefox/Mozilla come out today and only complain there’s a ‘ban’ on Firefox for Windows 8 ARM Edition?

Well from what I can tell, they never did, and the ‘b-word’ was all ‘spin’ by a very annoying technology news site that keeps amazing us with bad headlines and horribly inaccurate publications.

The TRUTH is that it will be VERY hard for any company to get approval for a browser running in Windows 8 ARM Edition because it’s not just ‘another version’ of Windows, it’s a Mobile OS with very clear goals that make it unique.

First of all is memory handling and battery use. By now we should all understand that you can’t deploy programs coded for x86 operating systems and expect them to sip carefully on resources like batteries and memory without some major changes.

Since ARM is aimed at ‘portable’ we can also expect people to seek more privacy and security on these devices. Allowing any-old-app onto the OS won’t happen. You’ve had to have a certificate to publish your apps on Microsoft’s mobile operating systems since the very first days of Windows Mobile, and that will not change any time soon.

If Microsoft wants to protect the quality and end user experience of their mobile products, locking down risky third party software clearly is one of the best ways for them to do it.

This is in no way a ‘ban’ on applications, and Microsoft admits that they are willing to help developers reach a quality standard that will permit them to publish to this new mobile platform.

On the plus side, I was tossing out some rather negative feelings about Microsoft’s investments in technical news sites, and this latest fumble leaves me with some doubts as to who’s invested in whom. Either that or this oft mentioned news source is chock full of people who not only don’t know what’s going on but they don’t even know the hand that feeds them? Crazy.

SEOmoz wants to develop software to add to their existing toolset available to subscribers on their website to aid in determining if their own website or a competitor’s website appears to be spammy in nature.

If SEOmoz has developed a method to analysis signals that can be used to determine if a site is spammy, it is safe to assume that Google is viewing the page or site in question in the same light. Links that are determined to be spammy will pass little link juice and could potentially incur a penalty from Google. Fishkin summed it the process by saying that if they (SEOmoz) classifies a site or page as having spammy backlinks, “we’re pretty sure Google would call it webspam.”
Some in the SEO community are angered at Rand Fishkin’s policy of “outing” SEOs for spamming practices, so this time, Rand has enlisted the public to answer whether or not he should do so.

Some of our team members, though, do have concerns about whether SEOs will be angry that we’re “exposing” spam. My feeling is that it’s better to have the knowledge out there (and that anything we can catch, Google/Bing can surely better catch and discount) then to keep it hidden. I’m also hopeful this can help a lot of marketers who are trying to decide whether to acquire certain links or who have to dig themselves out of a penalty (or reverse what might have caused it).

Preliminary results show that most are in favor of Rand’s reporting of other SEOs for spammy practices. Certainly the reporting of offenders will help Google to combat the unwanted webspam that has permeated search results since the inception of the Internet into mainstream society. It is the new mantra of the modern web; you need to follow the rules and guidelines established by Google for fear of serious reprisal – whether or not you agree with it. Ultimately, what benefits the search results, benefits the searcher.

On a slighlty related note, I would like to suggest Feathers McGraw as the new face for the Penguin algorithm update from Google…

 
Google can now legally send it’s self driving cars out solo, with nobody inside.

I had to say that to myself to fully appreciate how impressive this moment is in history.

Sure this puts a twist on Driving Miss Daisy 2 – Drive Harder, but overall I’m very excited about the countless ways this will improve our lives, save gasoline, time, money, and most of all, lives.

Hopefully Mr.Freeman won’t mind?

Why Buy Facebook Stock?

Lets say you had money that isn’t already invested in proven winners like Google, HTC, Intel, etc.., and you wanted to invest in something a bit different, and for some reason wanted to gamble on something as fickle as social media (remember MySpace?).

Personally, even with that list of caveats, I wouldn’t be looking at buying FB stocks, and Reddit’s co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, agrees.

In an interview that is circulating the web like mad, Mr.Ohanian explains why he wouldn’t invest anything in Facebook, citing their support of CISPA as a primary reason. While I agree that the CISPA support is horrible, my list of concerns is a bit longer.

For my needs I’d want to pick a business with a clear path forward, not one with heavy investments from Microsoft, yet promote’s the competition’s browser :

This is taken from the Power Editor tool in FB

 
I also wouldn’t invest in a company that’s decided it’s crucial to place privacy so far behind promotion.

These ‘login to view this story’ roadblocks are a bane of FB and recent studies back up my own findings: people will not login to FB to read something. It’s much easier to highlight the title and right-click it for a Google search and that’s what users are doing.

When you stop listening to your users, and usher them to the competition, you really can’t be shocked when people don’t struggle to get their wallets out for a chance to buy some stock.

Britain to Block Porn Sites

The Prime Minister of Britain, David Cameron is reported to be announcing "network-filtering plan" that would target pornographic websites.

Initially the campaign received little support from the Prime Minister and was met with criticism from digital right groups and a variety of industry bodies, the movment is being spearheaded by The Daily Mail and MP Claire Perry

MP Claire Perry states that this is not censorship. Plans are to have ISP users being forced to opt-in in order to receive anything rated as adult content. “There is a ‘hands off our internet’ movement that sees any change in how access is delivered as censorship,” she said. “We are not being prudish, but we just think the current method of blocking that material is broken."

Feds Return Seized Music Site

Feds seized a popular Hip-Hop music site on assertions from the Recording Industry Association of America of copyright infringements and that the site was linking to four pre-release music tracks.

Control was relinquished to the owners of Dajaz1.com after 13 months with Feds unable to produce sufficient evidence to warrant any civil or criminal charges.

Feds state that the inability to obtain evidence was largely due in part to apparent recording industry delays in confirming infringements according to the court records. The site was returned without explanation or apology.

Although the Internet has been available en masses for over 20 years, we are still far from reaching any kind of consensus over these issues. Certainly conflicts will continue to arise over copyright infringement, censorship, privacy and net neutrally.

The conversations that arise from these ongoing debates are necessary to shape the future of the Internet and many more discussions are required before we can reach an acceptable balance of protection for the industry and the artists it represents and the freedom and exchange of uncensored information.

The Star Wars saga continues to grow in popularity with the increasing May the Fourth be with You/Star Wars Appreciation Day. This unofficial day of recognition for anything Star Wars has grown from a meager recognition but has been given a ‘faster than the Millennium Falcon making the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs’ boost in popularity mainly due to SEO’s.

Search Engine Land has put together a great blog article about the role that SEOs have had in the rise in popularity of Star Wars Day. The growth in popularity of the internet meme that propagated the Star Wars Day phenomenon, speaks to the multitudes of youngling Padawans that grew up with the Star Wars movies (the original episodes 4,5,6…not episodes 1,2,3).

I take great personal pride that the first movie I watched in a theatre was Star Wars. I was immediately hooked. From the fly through opening text, to Chewbacca’s growl at the end of the award ceremony! Needless to say I dressed up as Luke Skywalker that year for Halloween. Buy why should we stop there? I think an internet community, we can encourage the spread of Star Wars Day phenomena and have people dress up for the May the Fourth date next year in appropriate star wars garb! Who’s with me? (pics to follow next year . Maybe a flash mob of stormtroopers and/or Jedi?

In very much the same way, Beanstalk SEO is akin to the Rebel Alliance. We are a last bastion of white-hat SEOs trying to work within the confines of the Google Empire while staving off a constant barrage from the black-hat forces of scum and villany seeking to bring ruin to our peaceful Alderaan of search results. (ok, the metaphor was a stretch, but just go with it…)

Remember: Don’t give into hate. Do not turn to the Dark Side as Vader did. Complete your training and become an effective SEO Jedi worthy of a seat on the White-Hat SEO Jedi Council. Many Bothans died to bring you this message….

Have fun with this soundboard from starwars.com

… but it crashed on saving and now we can’t use Google Docs because the servers are flooded with people trying out the new fonts!

If only I hadn’t already used that face palm image too much.. Oh wait! I can see the new presentation themes and they have a LCARS theme?!

So we’ll have to come back to this later on when the service isn’t packed full of people checking things out.

Motorola’s Mobility division wins in Germany against Microsoft

Just when you thought you were done with the ironic face palming?

Apple and Microsoft’s heavy handed patent abuse forced Google to buy Motorola’s Mobility division, and now Microsoft is scrambling to avoid insane fines or a complete ban on sales of Windows 7 and XBox 360 consoles in Germany because they clearly infringe on H.264 video encoding and playback patents owned by Motorola.

Microsoft has two remaining strategies left to save them, and neither are that great.

Microsoft themselves have calculated that if they were to pay the licensing demands set forward by Motorola they would have to pay $4 billion per year, a figure that Motorola has already dismissed as incorrect.

If Microsoft can get a judge to accept their math as correct they could try to appeal the decision on the grounds that such excessive fees would violate Motorola’s Frand obligations. This is a bit hollow in terms of legal defence because the Frand-commitment is simply:
“a promise to licence innovations deemed critical to widely-used technologies under “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” terms”

The other strategy is appealing to Motorola’s humanities with statements like this:

..we are confident that Motorola will eventually be held to its promise to make its standard essential patents available on fair and reasonable terms for the benefit of consumers who enjoy video on the web

Yep, Microsoft wants Motorola to ‘do the right thing for the consumers’ like some professional shot-putter standing in the middle of a glass window manufacturing plant.

Google’s Fiber Causes Fear for MPAA

Typical of Hollywood, any advancement that could be used to unseat the unnecessary roadblocks between consumers and entertainment must be met with fear vs. evolution.

Google is currently laying down fiber optic cables in Kansas City that will bring tornado like speeds of over 900 Megabit downloads to houses and businesses in the area.

While most people are very happy with this advancement, the MPAA is ducking for cover fearing the worst for it’s industry if even more people have even easier access to downloadable content while they have yet to make a system that can handle selling said content.

It could just be me, but if they spent less time hiding under the bed with Toto, and got to work building a system that makes piracy less tempting, they would welcome faster internet access?

Considering that the MPAA had to refer to South Korea’s high speed internet as an example of how fast internet access impacts a film industry, literally taking the long walk for the short drink of water, we’re doubting they will do much more than ‘remark’ on the potential for piracy, but even that seems really disappointing.

This wraps up the week of face palming for me; Hopefully next week we’ll be able to cover some more ‘positive’ stories and show off a bit more of the new Google Docs features!

Facebook then decided not to pursue this course of action. Following this disappointing decision by Facebook, House Republicans also voted down a bill that would have prevented employers from doing asking for login credentials.

While some Maryland took steps to protect individuals from being asked for private, sensitive information, the ACLU seemed to be the only group willing to deem these practices as a blatant invasion of privacy. They even went so far as to produce a video called "Want a Job? Password, please!"

According to thehill.com, it seems now that a bill titled: "The Social Networking Online Protection Act" introduced by Democratic Reps. Eliot Engel (N.Y.) and Jan Schakowsky (Ill.) would prohibit current or potential employers from demanding a username or password to a social networking account.

They bill was summarized with the following statment:

"We must draw the line somewhere and define what is private," Engel said in a statement. "No one would feel comfortable going to a public place and giving out their username and passwords to total strangers. They should not be required to do so at work, at school, or while trying to obtain work or an education. This is a matter of personal privacy and makes sense in our digital world."

Ars adds, "The bill would apply the same prohibitions to colleges, universities, and K-12 schools. … Facebook has already threatened legal action against organizations who require employees to reveal their Facebook passwords as policy."

It would appear that many states are getting on board with the new laws to protect their citizens. Many feel that the bill will be successfully passed this time as it is a bill of its own and not an amendment to an existing bill that would have attempted to reform FCC procedures. Certainly we have not heard the end of this and if this bill fails, then a large public outcry will surely be inevitable. But if it passes it will certainly be more than One Little Victory!

(On a side note I have been looking for a way to incorporate a tune from Rush into my blog post for sometime…but I also get to mix Queen meme with Rush