Group items tagged

Cybersquatting complaints dropped 9.5% from 2008 when a record complaints were logded. WIPO head mentions drop may just be due to economic climate, and companies limited budget to start litigations. This article mentions even the fifa world cup site lodged a cybersquatting complaint.

BROADCASTERS will be able to air extra advertising on their digital free-to-air channels and erase breaches of the rules governing free-to-air TV if they swiftly correct errors, under significant concessions given by the communications watchdog.

Following customer complaints, CommSec recently fined $55K for not providing customers an Opt out option when sending out e-marketing. As a response, CommSec have appointed an independant auditer to assess their e-marketing activity and provide training. I do question a lot of marketing departments... does it take a fine from ACMA before they get up to speed with how to conduct their communications and campaigns?

Their ad agency should know what they're doing! It's not hard to put an unsubscribe link in an email. Wacky.

Hmmm makes one think whether someone in marketing was too lazy in their job or whether CommSec knowlingly defied spamming laws. Australian spamming laws can be found at http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Privacy/spam.html#acts

Classic case of RC style censorship. Facebook presumably in response to a complaint but ... who knows.. removes all pictures of this woman happily breastfeeding her twins in a completely non sexual context yet allows many overtly sexual 'titty' groups to remain - with pictures. Grassroots campaign of support starting on twitter but as the originator says.. no major media interested! Many women are starting to collect instances of other breastfeeding photos and groups being 'disbanded', 'removed' or in Australian terms 'refused classification'.

This article introduces another 'body' called auDA the Australian domain name administrator. The article discusses a complaint from the president of the Australian Web Site Developers Association after 500 sites he had set up, and $100K later were just switched off by the auDA bases on their assessment of use. Perhaps the auDA needs its own audit and regulation over policy approval!

Yelp is a website that allows users to rate, review and talk about businesses - regardless if the feedback is good or bad. Many business owners, specially small-scale operators, value the reviews they receive on this site since it's a way of building their reputation for free. Recently, Yelp has been slapped with a number of lawsuits from different business owners. They claim that when they declined to purchase advertising in the website, their ratings suddenly went down.  

Well here's a good old fashioned police crackdown on online copyright infringement. The largest illegal download site in Greece had its alleged key players arrested in their homes after a complaint was made by a copyright protection agency.

Apple has taken down two apps from German media, as they were considered offensive. This moves towards censorship could extend to a larger control of editorial content. Do media have to comply? 

Minister Stephen Conroy challenges Google's credibility in response to the search engine giant's criticism of Australia's looming mandatory filtering. Interestingly he also says he is unaware of complaints from Hilary Clinton - which his department responded to in the previous article I posted. Interesting...

Overview found on legal site about the Spam Act. The release covers examples of what the Spam Act is all about, breaches, consequences of breaches and also how companies and individuals can protect themselves (however this is more a sales pitch).

The search giant has hit back at state requests (or court orders) to censor content on YouTube or in Google search by releasing a map showing the number of requests for censorship by country. Google has stated this move is "part of its continuing championing of openness of information" and insists the timing is purely coincidental regarding the complaint from 10 nations that Google releases new products without due consideration for privacy implications (as posted by Liz Gan), Reading the comments in these articles is always insightful. Someone points out that a lot of the requests may simply relate to slanderous items requested by courts to be removed (rather than evil government censorship requests).