By publishing the names of customers and the videos they rented, Facebook and Blockbuster may have violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988, New York law professor James Grimmelmann explains on his blog. Don’t worry Zuck, it’s only $2,500 per violation.

Grimmelmann examines Facebook and Blockbuster’s most likely defense: Facebook and Blockbuster did offer users a chance to opt out of the notifications with litte popups. But the VPPA requires “the informed, written consent of the consumer given at the time the disclosure is sought,” and the popups don’t quite pass that test. One presumes that Amazon.com and Netflix, which have allowed customers to share movie purchases and rentals for years, but voluntarily, have managed to satisfy this test.

Grimmelmann’s conclusion? “Class action lawyers,” he writes, “start your engines.” Good thing Facebook allowed users to turn off Beacon when it did.

Source:Valleywag

It’s not that people object to Google making money on YouTube, really. They just want their cut. Yesterday, YouTube opened a program which pays a portion of ad revenue to content creators to all comers. Well, all comers from the U.S. and Canada whom YouTube deems acceptable, that is. Rather than specifying who it will accept, YouTube suggests you keep applying if you’ve been rejected. That worked so well with Susie in the 8th grade, after all.

The policy just confirms what we always suspected was Google’s attitude: Users are losers, and we know best. The Google-owned video site claims that channel partners who regularly produce videos with more than a million pageviews can earn “several thousand dollars per month,” but those are few and far between. The real winner is Google, which continues to dominate the Internet video market, and now eliminates the small advantage held by rival upstarts Revver, VuMe, and Metacafe which have been touting their own loser-generated-content reward programs for some time.