Google just announced that a U.S. district court has granted the company’s motion for summary judgment in Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. The court argued that YouTube is protected by the so-called ” safe harbor ” provision . Viacom first sued Google in 2007 and the court case continued to simmer ever since. Viacom accused YouTube of deliberately withholding filtering technologies and knowingly infringing on the company’s copyright. Sponsor Today’s judgment once again reaffirms the importance of the DMCA’s safe harbor provision, which protects Google and other media companies from lawsuits that are based on content that their users upload to their services. According to the DMCA, these companies are protected, as long as they delete infringing copyrighted material if they receive a notification from the copyright holder. Viacom Plans to Appeal According to CNET , Viacom intents to appeal this judgement as soon as possible: “We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court as expressed in its most recent decisions. We intend to seek to have these issues before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as soon as possible. Viacom Didn’t Help Its Own Case It is worth noting that – in the end – Viacom probably did not help its own case by secretly uploading its own videos to YouTube while still complaining about the face that YouTube hosted these videos. Often, Viacom even “roughed up” these videos to make them look stolen, which YouTube’s chief counsel Zahavah Levine noted earlier this year. Discuss

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When Apple purchased the cloud-based music streaming service Lala in December of 2009 and then announced a few months later that it was planning to shut it down, many hoped that this signaled Apple’s intentions to launch its own cloud-based version under the iTunes label. And so, a replacement for Lala was on many people’s wishlist for announcements they hoped to hear Steve Jobs make today at WWDC. But unfortunately , Jobs had no such news. Sponsor Lala was a favorite tool for many music fans as it had an unlimited music locker, the ability to purchase web-accessible-only music, and a social sharing element. The cloud is ideal for music storage, syncing, and sharing, and competition – with or without an Apple-based service – has been heating up recently. Many companies, including MP3tunes and Grooveshark , have sought to woo displaced Lala users with special deals. With no announcement from Apple today and with the popular European streaming service Spotify rumored to launch stateside in Q3, it seems like the market for a cloud-based music service is still wide open. So, following today’s lack of announcement from Apple, what are your plans to store and stream your music? Why do you think Apple had nothing to say about a cloud-based music service today? What are your thoughts on why Apple did not announce a cloud-based music service at WWDC? online survey Discuss

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AT&T’s announcement that it will begin offering mobile tethering to additional devices for a fee but will stop offering unlimited data plans to new customers is being called cynical and anti-consumer. But the cap is 2 GB a month, with extra GB available for an extra $10 if you go over. Are you concerned this will be a problem? “The announcement comes at a time,” media watchdog Free Press said in a statement today, “when the company’s investments as a percentage of its revenues are steadily declining, indicating that AT&T is choosing to manage scarcity and ration its network, rather than build to meet users’ needs.” But do users need more than 2 GB a month? Sponsor Are You Concerned About AT&T’s New Data Plans & Limits? online survey You can see how much data you use by going into your AT&T account and looking at “past activity.” I’m willing to bet you fall far below 2 GB of monthly data usage. But what about a future of live video streaming to and from mobile devices, video chat and unforeseeable data-intensive innovations? All video delivered all over the web? If it’s going to be a data-intensive, mobile and real-time future – it may be time to crank up our expectations and capacity – not limit data available to consumers. Free Press Policy Counsel M. Chris Riley issued the following statement, which intuitively sounds pretty compelling: “While AT&T asserts that its high-end 2 GB cap will only impact the heaviest users, the fact is that today’s heavy user is tomorrow’s average user. Internet overcharging schemes like the one AT&T proposes will discourage innovative new uses and stifle healthy growth in the mobile broadband economy. It is price gouging for AT&T to charge the low-end users $15 per 200 MB, and to charge $20 for tethering capability even if no additional capacity is used. This pricing system is clearly divorced from the actual underlying cost of service. “If there was true competition in the U.S. mobile market, providers would invest in their networks to keep pace with consumer demand, removing the need to implement usage-based pricing plans. The fact that AT&T can introduce an Internet overcharging scheme that bears no resemblance to the cost of operating the network, despite constant complaints about the network’s quality, further demonstrates that our wireless markets are not competitive. Unfortunately, until the FCC takes seriously the need to promote meaningful competition in the wireless industry, Americans will continue to face a market of high prices and poor service. “This pricing ploy further illustrates why we need the FCC to put an end to the anti-consumer practice of handset exclusivity. For the wireless market to be competitive, consumers must be free to choose both devices and services, and take their devices to any compatible network.” What do you think? Do you think this is an anti-competitive blow against the future, or do you think a 2 GB limit is just fine for now? Please share your thoughts. Photo by Flickr user magerleagues . Discuss

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Washington, D.C. CTO Bryan Sivak is creating the infrastructure for a city that makes everyone a map maker in the cloud. His plan? Give citizens easy tools to create their own mapping applications that can be augmented with additional data. Sivak spoke at the Gov 2.0 conference this past week where he outlined projects now underway in the city. According to Information Week , these include his plans to create a private cloud that acts as a shopping experience for the IT manager. After adding a server to an online shopping cart, the order is completed and a server automatically spools up into the private cloud. Sponsor That’s not the map part but it shows the level of sophistication and the modern focus the city is adopting in order to develop an infrastructure that leverages the cloud for city operations and the community. As for his geospatial goals, Sivak’s plan is to crowdsource the process of creating geodata that is layered on to map locations. The city is now developing a series of templates and best practices to spark the development of mapping applications. For example, this might include support to create apps that provide pointers to city services or polling place locations. Information Week: “The city is already a heavy supplier of mapping applications, having 26 apps that mash maps up with data on crimes, evacuation routes, school data, emergency facilities, addresses of notaries public, leaf collection, and much more.” Sivak also wants to provide ways for citizens to update city maps or augment maps with additional information such as the location of park benches and traffic lights. The idea is to take crowdsourcing to a higher level of detail by offering the capability to use this geospatial data to mark not just locations but documents and data relevant to the place. This is ambitious but the challenge, as always, is to provide the tools that will make it easy for people to add information. That means simple ways to create their own online maps or those provided by the city. The reality of an augmented geospatial municipality will emerge if there truly is interaction with the community. Our poor economy creates constraints that force local, state and federal governments to look at new ways cloud-based services may be provided. To save money, municipalities are adopting online email services such as GMail. But the forward looking leaders are looking beyond email. They are providing tools so people may create information networks that span the geographies and the cultures of their rich communities. Discuss

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The launch of the “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha was one of the most anticipated product launches of early 2009. Since then, it’s been rather quiet around Wolfram Alpha, even though the company continues to add new features and data on a regular basis. Today, we had a chance to talk to Wolfram Research’s founder Stephen Wolfram about the first year and the company’s plans for the future. Sponsor Looking Back As Wolfram told us, the most basic question he tried to answer when the company started development was simply to see if it was even possible to take all this data and make it computable. Now, a year later, his answer to that question is an emphatic “yes.” Wolfram, however, also acknowledged that right after the launch the user experience for first-time users wasn’t necessarily ideal, as Wolfram Alpha didn’t yet have data for a lot of knowledge domains. The choice at that point, he said, was to either delay the launch and get more data, or to release Wolfram Alpha and be able to learn how its users would use it, and then enhance the experience over time. Wolfram says that today, most users are aware of the difference between a search engine and Wolfram Alpha, and the experience for first-time users has become far better. He stressed that the team (which consists of about 200 employees and 500 volunteers) is currently adding new data at an increasing pace. That’s gotten easier as the team has learned how to import information from a large variety of knowledge domains and sub-specialties. Getting the Data is Just 5% of the Work Unlike Google , Wolfram thinks that the Web “isn’t useful for getting raw data.” Indeed, whenever the Wolfram Alpha team experimented with this, the data simply wasn’t up to par. Instead, the company will continue to mostly work with data from primary sources. Getting this data, however, is only 5% of the work. The real difficulty is to understand how to compute this data and to understand how people talk about this data: What kind of questions do they ask? What are the alternate names for a specific chemical element? In addition, the Wolfram Alpha team and volunteers also check for anomalies in the data they receive. If there are major outliers, the team will track down more information to verify the original source. Sadly, though, not all data is free and Wolfram Alpha has to pay if it wants to include some databases. To make Wolfram a viable business and still offer this data, the team is considering a subscription plan that will give paying users access to deeper datasets from subscription databases. Challenge: Bringing Wolfram Alpha to More Users The question now, however, is how to get more users and how to bring Wolfram Alpha to more users through more channels. As we noted earlier this year, the company’s newly minted managing director Barak Berkowitz thinks that the team’s “number-one priority is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone.” To get to this point, they will soon release more and better tools for third-party developers who want to use the company’s APIs to integrate Wolfram Alpha’s functionality in their own sites and services. It’s also worth noting that Wolfram Alpha now offers an appliance that companies can install behind their firewall to curate and compute their own data. Looking Ahead: Analyzing Your Own Data, More Knowledge Domains, Programming with Natural Language Queries Besides looking back, we also asked Wolfram about his plans for the future. In answering this question, he stressed that this new approach to computing is just getting started and it usually takes him about 10 years to develop his projects before he fully understands what’s possible once this new paradigm has arrived. For the near future, however, Wolfram hopes that Wolfram Alpha’s users will be able to upload their own data and perform complex computations on this data and use Wolfram Alpha to find correlations within Alpha’s vast database. The usage scenarios for this could include anything from analyzing sales data to doing personal analytics on data from devices like the Fitbit . In addition to uploading data, Wolfram Alpha will soon make it easier for users to download data to use in presentations. Wolfram also wants to bring Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica closer together. One development that Wolfram is especially excited about is using Wolfram Alpha’s ability to understand and compute natural language queries in order to create Mathematica programs. By building on this capability, Mathematica users may soon be able to write and manipulate their code using natural language queries just like in Wolfram Alpha. Obviously, the team behind Wolfram Alpha will also continue to add more data across an every-growing number of knowledge domains. Today, for example, the team is launching real-time space weather data, 12 complete genomes and local maps, as well as numerous other knowledge domains related to math, biology, physics and geography. Discuss

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