uTube.com or YouTube.com – uChoose

The Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation, operator of uTube.com, has not only taken YouTube to court, it’s also decided to capitalise on the likeness in domain names. uTube is a manufacturer of steel products, in particular tube! And as YouTube’s popularity grew, so too did people accessing uTube.com. This caused an increase in the bandwidth they required, and hence costs.But now when you go to uTube.com, at the top of the page you find links to a range of sites such as “Win the Lottery” and “Meet Christian Singles”. Kevin Fayle, an attorney, writing in The Register reports in 2005 uTube.com received 1,500 visitors a month. But now there are roughly 70,000 per day, including me today. According to The Register, uTube “alleges that this caused its web host’s servers to crash, which disrupted its business and sullied its reputation. It also claims that bandwidth overages bumped its hosting fees from $100 a month to $2,500.”

So they added the advertising, and these links now pull in $1,000 a day or more, according to The Register. In the court case, uTube is asking “for monetary damages, as well as injunctions to stop YouTube’s operation and for the court to transfer the YouTube.com domain to uTube.While some of uTube’s claims have been dismissed, others haven’t and the judge “gave uTube permission to amend its complaint to see if it can revive any of the dismissed causes of action.” The Register continues “the court said that uTube didn’t have a case for trespass to chattels, since some physical contact with an object must be involved for such a claim to go forward. Domain names aren’t physical objects, the court argued, and uTube used a third-party hosting service, so it couldn’t claim ownership in the computer equipment that crashed as a result of the influx of visitors.

“Moreover, the court continued, the visitors to the site were the ones that ‘violated’ the site, so YouTube itself wouldn’t be liable even if there had been a trespass.

One of uTube’s nuisance allegations has been dismissed, “since nuisance claims must involve land, and uTube had not shown that a domain name, website, or host server somehow constitute real property in any way.” I find this quite interesting, and maybe this will be one of the important decisions to come out of the case. Eric Goldman writing in Circle ID picks up on this point, noting to him it’s also the most interesting point.

Goldman notes that in this case “we’re talking about a smaller possessory interest than conversion, and the court rightly understands that [trespass to chattels] TTC could become a bypass to trademark infringement. As a result, this decision channels unhappy domain name owners towards trademark claims instead of some TTC bypass.”

Goldman then notes “Even if the domain name itself can’t be trespassed, the plaintiff can still claim that the computer servers attached to the domain name were trespassed.” The court dismisses the claim for two independent reasons:
“1) The plaintiff uses a third party web host, and the court says that the plaintiff didn’t allege an adequate possessory interest in its host’s equipment.” Here Goldman questions whether as he pays a nominal amount for bandwidth charges associated with his domain name, should he bear a cost for a third party trespassing his website and he bore the economic consequences from bandwidth usage, then he should be able to claim TTC even though he only ‘leases’ the computer space and shares the computer with other sites.” I agree with his view that “perhaps this warrants more thought.” Goldman gives a more detailed explanation in the Circle ID site.
“2) Independently, the court correctly says that YouTube’s customers, not YouTube itself, are “contacting” utube.com, and therefore YouTube isn’t committing the actus reus. This result also appeared to be designed to channel this complaint into trademark law.”

The Register notes this case is unlikely to succeed, and with my limited knowledge of the law, I’d have to agree it “seems laughable that a court would shut down YouTube or strip it of its domain name, since the relative detriment to YouTube would greatly outweigh the benefit to uTube.”And finally, The Register notes “Oh, wait – YouTube still doesn’t have a solid revenue model, does it? That could change things a bit … Maybe they should try selling ringtones.”

Google makes progress with Desktop for Mac

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That’s very welcome – I was delighted at the responsiveness of the initial release of Google Desktop on my iMac G5 compared with Spotlight’s sluggishness, but the instability it brought in the form of freezes and even kernel panics were unacceptable.

Version 1.0.1’s release notes didn’t mention any fixes in this respect, so I didn’t bother with it, but 1.0.3 claims to fix critical bugs that “cause the machine to either crash or become unresponsive” as well as plugging memory leaks, so I’m giving the program another chance.

Among the improvements are faster crawling after a restart, compatibility with Camino 1.5 (not everybody uses Safari or Firefox) and some tweaks to the updater.

One potentially very useful feature is an HTTP based API for desktop search. Google Desktop’s built-in web server can be asked to deliver search results to a program running locally. The results are returned in XML format, which is generally easier to handle within a program or script compared with trying to ’scrape’ the required data out of HTML results intended for display in a browser.

Google Maps becomes “Go Ogle Maps”

Curiosity, outrage, humor, blog entries and more has erupted since Google Maps brought 360 degree “Street View” photography to the world, prompting yet another round of Google privacy concerns.
Given the detail with which Google Maps’ new Street View lets users “view and navigate within 360 degree street level imagery” of selected streets in selected US cities, concern for people’s privacy implications has been raised.

Google’s explanation for the service certainly does make sense, and makes it sound like a very useful service indeed. Google says that: “By clicking on the “Street View” button in Google Maps, users can navigate street level, panoramic imagery. With Street View users can virtually walk the streets of a city, check out a restaurant before arriving, and even zoom in on bus stops and street signs to make travel plans”.

Wow, that does sound cool, especially as more and more cities worldwide are added to the mix, and the content is mashed up in many different ways online. But almost immediately, people started looking at the photographs closely, and started noticing things that the people in the photos concerned might not have wanted published to the world.

Online reports of a man picking his nose, another scaling a wall, yet another at the entrance of a strip joint have been found and discussed, while the hunt is on to see what else the photos contain. The discovery some photos allow web surfers to see inside homes through open windows has also caused alarm.

Google says it has options for users who find photographic information about themselves or their properties that they would like removed, and in a statement reported by the Associated Press, Google spokeswoman Megan Quinn said “This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street. Imagery of this kind is available in a wide variety of formats for cities all around the world.”

Google also claim the images were taken in a public place from a cameras specially mounted onto cars that travelled the streets, as well as buying similar imagery from another company.

While Google is offering to take down material people are unhappy about, it’s a bit like the DMCA excuse – the rights holders need to find out they’re being infringed before they can do anything about it, as Google takes all care but no responsibility.

The rather logical suggestion has been made that Google simply blur people’s faces, open windows or other sensitive information, but naturally, this would result in a lot of blurred sections on the photos concerned, and you can imagine Google probably doesn’t want that to happen.

Ultimately, Google might have to take multiple photos from multiple cars travelling one behind the other, in the hope to get enough of the ‘same’ photo to be able to mix them all together and remove all the people from it, regenerating the background behind the people by having taken many photos and having the computer re-create and insert what would have been there.

Technology to do this type of hyper intelligent automatic photo editing was demonstrated by Microsoft at their Australian Tech Ed conference in 2006, and no doubt demonstrated elsewhere as well.

Given Google’s massive computing power, this might be feasible – but it would make cities look like ghost cities as Tom Cruise had to face in the movie Vanilla Sky. Still, if open windows could be closed (or simply blurred or replaced with a similar image of a closed window) and people removed, at least the photos would look relatively normal, as opposed to having people blurred out everywhere.

Other companies have tried this in the past, notably Amazon with their A9 search engine, although they have now scrapped the project, with the fellow responsible for that part of the Amazon project now working at Google, while Microsoft has been busy introducing a similar service for their competing mapping project, always doing their best to keep nipping at Google’s heels in every way they can.

Google’s new Street View mapping service certainly does add a whole extra level of usefulness to their mapping service, especially as it grows to cover cities worldwide. But if public opinion has anything to do with it, the unintended ‘Go ogle’ feature of seeing faces, seeing into homes, seeing license plate numbers and other private detail on Google Maps is one feature that’s likely to disappear.

You tube tiene solo menos de la tercera parte de la audiencia de internet

El sitio de videos compartidos YouTube a menudo es tenido en cuenta como un perfecto ejemplo del éxito del sitios de contenido generados por el consumidor, pero un nuevo estudio sugiere que menos de la tercera parte de usuarios del Internet visitan regularmente el sitio.

Una investigación de 2.541 adultos que utilizan internet en los EEUU reveló que el 69% nunca concurre al sitio de videos compartidos, mientras que el 22% utiliza You Tube al menos una hora por semana. Por ultimo, apenas un bajo 2% lo utilizó para más de cinco horas por semana.

Puede ser que esos números quizás sean una pequeña exageración , ya que los videos de YouTube pueden ser incluídos fácilmente en otros sitios, de modo que es posible que consumidores accedan al sitio sin estar enterado de ello.

YouTube, que fue comprado por Google en noviembre por 65mil millones de dolares, ha experimentado un enorme crecimiento por su combinación de videos amateurs, clips de música y extractos de televisión. Sin embargo, a aumentado la presión para que You tube custodie las infracciones del derecho de autor en su sitio, aunque ha tenido algún éxito al negociar tratados con compañías y cadenas de televisión de EEUU, para poder darle mayor uso a sus contenidos.

A otros sitios de consumidores generadores de contenido, les ha ido un poco mejor en el estudio. MySpace es utilizado regularmente por 27% de consumidores, y el mismo número dijo que ellos leen regularmente blogs.

El fundador de Wikipedia pleane crear un buscador para competir con Google

Wikiasari esta planificado para ser lanzado en el primer trimestre de 2007, informa The Times de Londres. El nombre es tomado del nombre del wiki, hawaiano para “rápido,” y asari, japonés para “registrando la búsqueda”. Wikiasari utilizará la misma tecnología usuario-basado como Wikipedia, una enciclopedia en línea que permite a lectores redactar las entradas. El nuevo motor de búsqueda trabajará en una premisa semejante, ya que el fundador Jimmy Wales reclama que las búsquedas algorítmicas de computadora de Google están siendo manipuladas y no buscan lo mismo que el juicio humano.

Los dichos de Wales llegan menos de dos semana después de que Wikipedia reveló darle hosting en sus servidores a grupos de la comunidad Wikipedia, con la condición de que ellos no cobren por sus servicios. Los tratados del plan llegaron días después de que se haya anunciado que Amazon.com sera el primer inversionista corporativo en el brazo comercial de Wikipedia, Wikia.

Lanzado en 2001, Wikipedia tiene más de seis millones de artículos escritos y es uno del los sitios web mas visitados del mundo. El sitio ha sido discutido por la controversia sobre su certeza debido a que los lectores redactan los articulos. Un ejemplo concreto incluye la reescritura de la biografia del periodista John Seigenthaler, en 2005, que reclamaba que fue El quien estuvo ligado a los asesinatos de John F. Kennedy y Robert Kennedy. El incidente forzó a Wikipedia a introducir guardias para la revision de los artículos.