Reader Jonathan points us to a story that's also made the rounds on Boing Boing. Basically a blogger who apparently is somewhat well connected in the comic book/superhero world decided to get a bunch of artists he knew together to create comic character-based artwork to auction on eBay with the proceeds being sent to a children's charity who had helped out his own family at one point. The charity auction was announced, a bunch of artists signed up and created superhero-related artwork, and the auctions began on eBay. At some point, Warner Brothers, who owns the rights to many superhero characters contacted eBay to shut down a few of the auctions. This made the guy pull the rest of the auctions and get a bit nervous about whether or not he broke the law. Oddly, after all of this started getting attention Warner Brothers let one of the auctions proceed, but didn't respond to a question from the guy about letting the others move forward. In fact, in an email, Warner Brothers didn't explain its position at all.

On the whole, the legal issue is a bit murky (and it doesn't sound like anyone's making any legal threats here, so this probably won't go any further). The artwork may very well have infringed (though there are reasonable arguments for why it was not infringing as well). However, once again, this does seem like a situation where lawyers jumped ahead of what actually made sense from a business or PR standpoint. A smart company would have seen this going on and would have figured out a way to embrace it and come out of it looking like a good guy -- perhaps sponsoring the charity auction in some manner or another. But in shutting down the auctions, Warner Brothers comes off as a big legal bully who doesn't want to help kids with cancer. One more reason why legal solutions should always be looked at as a last line of defense, rather than an automatic solution.

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A bunch of folks have been submitting various news reports claiming the "news" that -- but that's hardly news. We had a story about that last November. What is a bit more interesting out of the same study (though, not very surprising) is the news that Comcast has been less than forthright in explaining what it's doing. While Comcast denied any traffic shaping for the longest time, when it finally 'fessed up (just a bit) it said that it only used traffic shaping during peak hours. However, the research suggests otherwise. After testing a bunch of users at various times, this new study found no noticeable difference in blockages based on time.

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Last week, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard oral arguments in In Re Bilski, a crucial case relating to patents on business methods, software, and other abstract "inventions." The hour-long discussion highlighted the Federal Circuit's incoherent jurisprudence on the patentability of abstract concepts.

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The latest in a long line of patent lawsuits in every patent hoarders favorite district of East Texas involves the game controllers used by Nintendo. A company holds a patent on and sued Nintendo (and Microsoft) for supposedly violating the patent. Not surprisingly, the jury . Juries quite often side with the patent holder, no matter how questionable the patent may be. In this case, there would seem to be a ton of prior art raising validity questions. The patent itself was filed in November of 2000, at which point there were already numerous game controllers that seem to meet most of the criteria outlined in the claims. Whatever minor differences there may have been between what was on the market and what's in the claims should be seen as an obvious iteration of game controllers. As for Microsoft's involvement, it paid up to settle last month, once again showing how it's often cheaper to just pay up rather than to fight questionable patents. And, that, of course, is why we will keep seeing more and more questionable patents being filed. It's just so lucrative.

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The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has released a report that analyzes how we're responding to the fact taht the Internet running out of IPv4 addresses. It advocates IPv6 deployment and government procurement mandates as the best solutions.

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Last month, we pointed out that the market for stolen credit card data was so saturated that prices were falling. Of course, that just inspired scammers to go looking for other types of data that was a bit harder to find: VoIP accounts. According to the BBC, scammers selling VoIP account info are now able to get higher prices than those selling credit card data. Of course, it's not at all clear how widespread this really is. The info seems to be coming from a company trying to sell a solution to deal with this -- which already makes it somewhat suspect. Also, you have to wonder how valuable VoIP account data really can be compared to credit card numbers which have much wider applicability. Either way, it will be interesting to see how the market deals with the "glut" of credit card data out there, and where else data scammers turn.

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The BSA has released its annual report on software piracy around the world. The overall picture is improving, but serious questions remain about the group's methodology and assumptions.

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I'm currently attending a workshop on "The Future of News" at Princeton's Center for IT Policy. One of the most interesting things about the conference is that it has proven to be a kind of "meeting of the minds" between the "old media" (the Wall Street Journal and the San Diego Union-Tribune are represented) and practitioners of Internet journalism. One of the frequent complaints we've heard from some of the newspaper folks is that they're losing business to aggregators like Google News. On the surface, this doesn't seem to make sense, because as we've pointed out before, aggregators drive traffic to news sites, and it's silly for an ad-driven website to complain about another site sending them traffic.

Yet complain they do. And indeed, the complaint seems so common that there has to be something behind it. It has become clear that incumbent media outlets hate aggregators because aggregators increase competition. Incumbent media outlets -- especially local newspapers -- grew accustomed to a cozy relationship with their readers in which their readers had few alternatives for their daily news. That meant they could maintain high circulation (and advertising rates) without worrying too much about the quality of their product. When newspapers migrated to the web, they expected to maintain this captive audience.

What aggregators do is make it a lot easier for readers to find new news sources. That's good for an up-and-coming site with a lot of great content, because aggregators enlarge the potential audience for the content. But it's not good for a mediocre site with a large readership based largely on inertia. The easier it is for readers to find news sources of news, the faster mediocre news sites will bleed readers. We tend to think of competition in terms of price, but competition is important even when a business is already giving its product away for free. More competition forces sites to create more and better content, have fewer and less intrusive ads, and offer content in formats that are convenient and appealing. The increased competition enabled by aggregators may be bad for some websites, but it's unambiguously good for consumers. Google News isn't a competitor to newspapers. Rather, Google News forces newspapers to compete with each other. And when newspapers compete, readers win.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Popular online address book and social network service Plaxo announced yesterday that it had signed an agreement to be acquired by Comcast. It plans to continue working with the cable giant to integrate their services together, although not all users are happy about it.

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Three years ago, reporter Tom Foremski tossed out his idea for how Microsoft could kill Google in an underhanded way: offer $100 million to whoever clicked on a random Google ad. The trick would be that no one (other than the person administering the prize at Microsoft) would know what the ad is. Foremski's theory was that this would lead to massive clickfraud and anger from Google advertisers. Of course, there are a lot of assumptions in there that likely wouldn't hold up in a real world test (with the biggest being that the whole deal would stop working the second someone "won"). However, now we've got Mark Cuban tossing out a suggestion for how to take down Google that seems to come from the same "wishful thinking" playbook. Cuban's idea is that Microsoft (with Yahoo) should offer to pay the top 100,000 sites in Google to get them to remove themselves from Google, and agree to be "exclusively" in the Yahoo/Microsoft listing. The idea is that the money would serve to pay for the lost traffic from Google -- but that's highly speculative.

If Microsoft actually tried this, it would be quite difficult for the Justice Department not to call an antitrust foul, first of all. But, at a more practical level, it just wouldn't work. It's based on the false premise that those top 100k sites are really the only sites that matter. If they all disappeared from Google's index, another 100k would quickly fill in to replace them. In fact, it would get more and more difficult to convince sites to leave Google's index, since the competition for clicks would get easier and easier as others did leave. On top of that, if this actually did happen, my guess is Google would continue to index those sites anyway forcing some sort of court battle over whether or not a site can actually block a search engine from spidering it entirely. These sorts of ideas are fun to think about, but once you think past the basic idea, it's not hard to recognize why the scams would never work. Beating Google is never going to be about a scam.

Now, I should add that I started writing up this post last night. This morning, the news came out that Cuban is that Carl Icahn has put up to try to force Yahoo to sell to Microsoft. The timing, obviously, is no coincidence. Cuban's blog post went up just hours before he was revealed to be a potential board member. However, just because this could, conceivably, put Cuban in a position to actually push Microsoft/Yahoo to implement such a plan, it doesn't make it any more viable. In fact, it makes it that much more questionable.

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Well, well, well. The RIAA is not having a particularly good week. In the Tanya Andersen case (where the RIAA sued an innocent person), the court has awarded Andersen $108,000 in legal fees from the RIAA. You may recall that the RIAA had protested having to pay legal fees, which the judge smacked down. Note that this is entirely separate from Andersen's racketeering case against the RIAA.

However, the much bigger news concerns the infamous Jammie Thomas case. As you'll recall, the RIAA won that case, even though it now admits that it said false things under oath. Much of that decision hinged on the fact that the court said that "making available" was infringement, which is the opposite of what many other courts have been saying. In fact, it turns out that it went against the binding precedent in a different case within the same circuit. The judge has now admitted that he may have committed a "manifest error of law" in his jury instructions, and it sounds like he's going to order a new trial.

This is a big deal. The RIAA has been holding up the Thomas case over and over again as proof that (a) "making available" is infringement and (b) that courts will award huge fines for those caught file sharing. If that decision gets tossed out (not even by an appeals court, but by the judge who ruled in the first place), it will suddenly make the RIAA's claims relating to that case disappear completely.

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NBC Direct is back with another beta, offering 720p episodes of The Office and faster downloads via new P2P technology. Ars Technica takes NBC Direct for another spin around the couch to see if anything has improved.

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Last month we wrote about how New York was changing a law to try to force Amazon to collect and pay sales tax in New York by defining any affiliate in the state as being an Amazon point of presence. This is a clear perversion of the intention of the law that only requires collecting sales tax if the company has a physical presence in the state. While Amazon is now fighting this law in court, others are taking more drastic measures. E-commerce site Overstock.com has declared that in order to avoid having the state consider it to have a "physical presence" there. This would be an unintended consequence of such a law. In an effort to get e-commerce providers to cough up more in taxes, not only will Overstock not be paying those taxes, it just made life a lot more difficult for thousands of Overstock affiliates in New York.

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It's an ongoing theme around here, but ideas are everywhere. The real trick to making something great often has extremely little to do with the idea, and much more to do with the execution. That's where the real innovation occurs -- in taking an idea and trying to figure out how to make it useful. It's that process that's important, much more than the original idea. As nearly anyone who has brought a product from conception to market will tell you, what eventually succeeds in the market is almost always radically different than the original "idea." That's part of the reason why patents are so often harmful to innovation. The patent is for that core idea, which is rarely the key in making something successful. But by limiting who can innovate off of the idea (or just by making it much more expensive) you're limiting that process of innovation.

Some people disagree with this, but the failure of Cambrian House, once again seems to demonstrate the vast gap between ideas and execution. Cambrian House was a well-hyped company that tried to "crowdsource" new companies and products. I've paid attention to them for a while, since their business model had some similarities to what we do with the Techdirt Insight Community. However, as the founder of Cambrian House admitted in explaining the company's changing plans, it wasn't difficult to get people to come up with all sorts of interesting and exciting ideas -- but where the company failed was in getting anyone to actually execute on any of those ideas. Ideas are a starting point -- but it's high time that we stopped worshipping the idea, and started recognizing how much more important execution is in driving innovation.

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Nobody wants to get caught on Google Street View walking out of the porn store down the street. That's why the European Union has reminded Google that the company must respect local privacy laws when it comes to publishing photos of people on the service, although it remains confident that Google will figure out a way to comply.

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New research from Germany says that the US has the most BitTorrent-blocking ISPs of any country in the world, but that most of the blocks are on Cox and Comcast networks. And they don't just occur at peak periods.

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Citing a flawed jury instruction and a precedent-setting Eighth Circuit ruling he was previously unaware of, Judge Michael Davis is on the cusp of granting Jammie Thomas' request for a new trial.

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While the Patent Troll Tracker remains darkened, the world at large is definitely missing out on some of the more useful information he provided on his blog, shedding all sorts of light on some of the sneakier practices of various patent hoarding companies, who were often shell companies to hide the real identity of who was behind the lawsuits. Without much information to fight back against these shell companies demanding millions and millions of dollars, various large tech companies seem to have seen an opportunity to team up to fight back. Joe Mullin points out a new organization called PatentFreedom that is basically an association of large tech companies to share information privately on some of the patent hoarding firms that pop up and sue all too often. Mullin has some fascinating background on the organization, which is actually spinning out of another firm that (of all things) was co-founded by Nathan Myhrvold (the guy some folks now accuse of creating a huge patent trolling organization on his own). That existing firm helps companies both big and small in their patent litigation strategies -- but this spinout organization will focus on larger companies facing shell companies that don't produce any products.

While I think it's a good thing that the companies who are often on the receiving end of questionable patent lawsuits are trying to combat the information asymmetry concerning these lawsuits, it's a bit worrisome that this perpetuates the stereotype that this is really a battle between "big companies" and "small inventors." That's a false dichotomy that opponents to patent reform like to set up, because no politician wants to be seen as going against the "small inventor." The truth is that there are all sorts of problems with the patent system, and big companies are some of the worst abusers of the system. Focusing merely on the non-practicing entities, rather than the overall problems with the patent system, may be a necessity these days, but it's merely dealing with a symptom, rather than treating the actual problem.

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Exonerated P2P defendant Tanya Andersen was awarded $107,834 in court costs and attorneys' fees for her successful defense against the RIAA's copyright infringement charges. It's the largest fee award so far against the RIAA, and over triple what the RIAA argued it should pay.

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Microsoft is boasting that the Xbox 360 is the first current-gen system to hit 10 million units sold in the US. These numbers leave out the year-long head start the Xbox 360 enjoyed, as well as the Wii's worldwide dominance.

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