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• Did Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky And Jesus All File Complaints With The FCC?
  We've recently seen how the NAB apparently faked complaints to the FCC about the XM-Sirius merger when the actual people had no idea what the merger was even about. So, it should come as no surprise that it's pretty easy to file a statement with the FCC that appears to come from someone else... perhaps someone famous... or someone who's dead. Matthew Lasar writes in with a bit of a time waster, noting some of the more amusing "faux celebrity" filings with the FCC, from Donald Trump ("Here, hold my hairpiece for a minute while I take this call from California -- what? You think cell phones should be regulated somehow? Disclosure? Costs? You crazy? Hell, I'll NEVER allow California to do any such thing! . . . YOU'RE FIRED!") to Leon Trotsky ("I'm a dead Communist, but I don't want to pay more for my telephone service!") to Joseph Stalin ("Net Neutrality is essential to free speech, equal opportunity and economic innovation in America.") to George W. Bush ("This is the President of the United States Bitch!") to a variety of different Jesuses (some using more colorful language than others) to Paris Hilton ("I don't want the same company that owns my TV station or my radio station to also own my newspaper I would just get the same news all over again."). While it's all rather amusing, it does point out how silly it is for the FCC to take some of these filings seriously. Too many of them are simply generated by lobbying campaigns, rather than real people.
  
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• Perhaps The Real Bubble Is In Overly Aggressively Intellectual Property Claims
  Last week, Kara Swisher posted a video to the AllthingsD site, with a parody song, based on Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" called "Here Comes Another Bubble." It was a bit silly, but self-referential enough that lots of folks couldn't resist highlighting it, so it quickly got passed around and linked on various sites. The video kicked off with a video clip that Kara herself had filmed and posted and then included a bunch of other photos and videos and the parody song. However, someone took exception to it and sent a takedown notice, forcing it offline. The first thought many people had was that it was the record labels, protesting the use of the Billy Joel song without credit, but Valleywag has another, perhaps more plausible, theory: a photograph of Valleywag bigshot Owen Thomas was used briefly in the video, and the photographer who took it got seriously pissed off about it. Thomas thinks the photographer may have sent the takedown notice that got the video pulled offline. If true, that would be unfortunate, and most likely an excessive use of a takedown. An extremely brief clip in a video that doesn't hurt the commercial value of the work is unlikely to be seen as infringing on the copyright. There's a reason fair use exists. If anything, this may be yet another example of copyright being used to prevent creative works, rather than encourage them. Of course, the performer of the song probably isn't too upset. This will just provide a second round of publicity for the song -- and, besides, he apparently just raised $3 million for his (unrelated to the video) startup anyway.
  
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• Ask.com Targets The Coveted Paranoid Demographic
  Ask.com is seeking to differentiate itself from its more popular competitors by adding a new feature called AskEraser that will prevent Ask from retaining personal information about its users. A prominent link on the front page will allow users to turn AskEraser on and off. When it's set to "on," Ask will automatically discard the information it normally collects in order to provide users with personalized service.It's great to see Ask focusing attention on search engine privacy, and giving users more choices is rarely a bad thing, but I can't help feel like this is more a marketing gimmick than a serious privacy initiative. In the first place, as the Times article points out, Ask will still be feeding query information to Google, which has not promised to respect the user's AskEraser setting. This would seem to limit the usefulness of the service for users who don't want their activities tracked or recorded. But the more serious flaw, it seems to me, is that it forces the user into making an all-or-nothing choice between privacy on the one hand a personalization on the other. I doubt very many users want either perfect anonymity with no personalization, or compete personalization with no privacy. Rather, most users want a search engine that strikes a reasonable balance by collecting the minimum amount of information necessary to provide useful personalization services and handling that data in sensible ways that enhance user privacy. Rather than an all-or-nothing choice between functionality or privacy, search engines should make clear to users the trade-offs they face and let them choose which personalization features they want to enable. In addition, there are lots of ways search engines can enhance privacy without any significant reduction in functionality. For example, earlier this year Google announced that they would start anonymizing their logs after 18 months, a small but sensible way to protect customer privacy. More steps like that would enhance the privacy of all users, not just those who are privacy-conscious enough to click the AskEraser link.

  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.

  
  
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• How Many Irish Politicians Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb?
  American politicians have been toying with such legislation for a while, and Australian politicians have already approved similar legislation, but it appears that Irish politicians are in something of a rush to ban incandescent lightbulbs. New legislation would ban the sale of the traditional lightbulbs as of January 2009 -- basically just one year. The Australian plan, that was approved earlier this year, would phase out the bulbs by 2010. While we can understand the basic reasoning, it's still unclear why a full ban is really necessary. Fluorescent bulbs keep getting cheaper and cheaper (and better and better in quality) than incandescent bulbs. They last so much longer and use so much less energy that it won't be long until most people voluntarily move to fluorescents, without any unnecessary ban on incandescents.
  
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• The Porn Parallel To Viacom Suing YouTube: Vivid Sues PornoTube
  We all know that Viacom is suing YouTube, claiming that the