Techno File: Keeping an eye on moving goalposts

Published on Sunday 14 June 2009 19:41

A DIGITAL rights group has created an automatic system for tracking changes to website terms and conditions and privacy policies.

The tool is designed to help users of websites to keep up to date with their rights and obligations.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the digital rights advocacy group behind Tosback.org, an online tool that allows web users to see who is changing what. The EFF said it created the site because many website users are ignorant of how much their behaviour is controlled by such policies.

Users can subscribe to an RSS feed that will automatically update them when there is a change to the terms and conditions of one of the monitored organisations. These include Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Google, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.

Pirate party walks plank to Brussels

A POLITICAL party dedicated to legalising the sharing of copyrighted content without payment has won a seat in the European Parliament.

Sweden's Pirat Partiet, or Pirate Party, won 7.1 per cent of the country's vote, entitling it to send an MEP to Brussels. In Germany the party won a 0.9 per cent share, which will entitle it to state funding, a party statement said.

The party won the fifth-biggest share of the vote in Sweden and is yet to decide whom it will select as its MEP.

"We have just written political history," said Rick Falkvinge, the party's chairman, in a statement. "Politicians have learned that doing what the lobby asks will cost them their jobs."

Facebook steps up trademark vetting

SOCIAL networking site Facebook has put trademark protections in place ahead of a move this weekend to allow users to register domain names for their profile pages.

The company will allow users to register any name they like after the main Facebook address, such as: www.facebook.com/nike.

This raises the prospect of individuals registering names that are trademarked to companies or organisations.

The company has put in place a pre-registration process by which companies can list their trademarks and bar others registering them as names before registration begins.

John MacKenzie, an intellectual property specialist at Pinsent Masons, said Facebook's actions were a sensible response to an obvious problem: "Facebook is one of the world's biggest communities, with a growing commercial community. Increasingly, consumers will look to those communities for reviews of products and even to buy products."

MacKenzie said registering someone's trademark as a Facebook name is analogous to cybersquatting domain names: "This is the same as if someone registers any domain name with another company's trademark in it. In the UK there is case law deciding that just holding the domain can amount to unlawful conduct."

Will more domains damage the net?

&#149 ALMOST two thirds of consumers believe the opening of the internet's addressing system to a limitless number of domain names will clog the internet with pointless addresses, a survey says.

French internet registrar Gandi.net asked 1,000 consumers about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' plan to lift restrictions on top-level domains (the final letters such as .uk or .com in a URL).

The Gandi survey found 65 per cent of the people it interviewed thought the move would create a jumble of pointless domain names, while 57 per cent thought it would be confusing.

Baseball big hitter is mad at Twitter

A US baseball manager is suing Twitter over fake posts in his name on the micro-blogging site. Tony La Russa claims the fake posts infringe his trademark rights and count as cybersquatting.

Twitter, which called St Louis Cardinals' manager La Russa's suit "frivolous," said it has removed the profile in line with its existing policies, but denied reports it had settled the suit and paid a donation to charity.

In a blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the site had taken the fake profile down, as it would any others that were demonstrably fake. He said it would not settle the lawsuit, and would demand that a court throw it out.