Anthony was serving time for the lesser guilty verdicts she received for giving police false information, and will be released, free to resume her ever so public life. That being said, if Twitter is any kind of indication, it will be some time before anyone forgets why she’s famous. It’s hard to imagine all of the “amateur journalist” pictures that will show up the first time Anthony parties with her pals, if there are any remaining.

Needless to say, once news of her release hit the airwaves, Twitter responded in kind. Mind you, not “kind” as in friendly or caring, either. Most of the responses are about what you’d expect, although, the people who are trying to capitalize on her popularity by issuing dating site-style tweets and making misguided signs are just as interesting. Starting us off on this trip down Casey Anthony Reaction Lane is Perez Hilton (what the hell happened to him?) with the kind of reaction you’d expect:

As indicated, Hilton’s response is pretty much on par with the rest of the public, with the exception of these gems:

Come for the attention-grabbing tweet, stay for the NRA logo. There’s more where this came from too, thanks to the official Opie and Anthony Twitter:

And then there are the images:

The yfrog link goes to this piece of genius sign-making:

The goal of the “Caylee’s Law” petition is as follows:

…there should be a new federal law created called Caylee’s Law that will make it a federal offense for a parent or guardian to not notify law enforcement of a child going missing in a timely manner.

Perhaps some good will come out of the verdict after all. As for the rest of the Twitter reaction to Anthony’s impending release, a lot of it is like this:

And then, there are the “too soon” attempts at humor, courtesy of Gilbert Gottfried:

Over 100 retweets, too.

If this is what things are like when the news of Anthony’s release breaks, what’s it going to be like next Wednesday when she’s a free woman? Will she even make it through the day?

Some might say the Pope while others might say President Obama. It’s total speculation; an argument can be made for just about any well-known person.

Could "The King of Pop" have been considered the most famous person in the world? With global album sales somewhere between 700-750 million, a career that spanned nearly 50 years, two widely covered pedophilia charges and various charitable contributions… Michael Jackson, quite possibly, was the most famous person in the world.

His popularity caused big problems for some of the Internet’s more popular sites as rumors began to swirl about his rumored death.

Famed celebrity news site TMZ was the first to break the news of Michael Jackson’s death. People from all over the world rushed to the site to see the news for their own eyes. Due to the mass amounts of traffic TMZ began experiencing erratic downtimes, which left people searching other sites for confirmation.

AOL, owner of TMZ, released the following statement about the downtime…

"Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth. Historically, celebrity news prompts a worldwide outpouring with several key consumer behaviors – searching, sharing and reacting to the news followed by online tributes has become the modern way to mourn. Princess Diana was the first notable Internet example. Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett are the latest.

With other sites such as CNN reporting that Jackson was still alive but in a coma, that only added fuel to the fire, as people wanted to know the truth. Sadly in the end, TMZ was correct.

Michael Jackson has also been immortalized on the popular FamousDeadDB.com  website.

The Michael Jackson ripple effect wasn’t just felt by TMZ, shortly after Internet users made their way to Perez Hilton’s train-wreck of a blog only to be greeted by the following despicable post by the blogging diva…

You can see that Perez was pretty much calling Michael Jackson a liar. It should be noted that shortly after it was confirmed by multiple sources, Perez updated the post to hide his travesty of a post.

Twitterers weren’t pleased with the post, and #unfollowperez became a trending topic on the famed microbloggnig site.

Some of the major news corporations showed marked slowdowns; Keynote Systems had the following to say about the traffic phenomenon…

"Beginning during the late afternoon Pacific Time major news sites, including those of ABC, AOL, LA Times and CBS all started to show marked slowdowns in performance. Beginning at 6:00 p.m. Eastern time until 8:00 p.m. Eastern, the following sites showed became nearly unavailable (down to nearly 10% availability): ABC, CBS, LA Times, AOL, CNN Money.

Beginning at 5:30pm (EDT), the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds. During the same period, the average availability of sites on the index dropped from almost 100% to 86%. The index returned to normal by 9:15pm (EDT)."

With the news of Jackson’s death, people turned to the web like never before. Large traffic spikes were documented, the likes of which have never been seen before.

Below you can see a chart from Nielson, which shows the Jackson death discussion far exceeded those of the inauguration of President Obama and the swine flu.

In the UK it was documented that Twitter had its busiest day, EVER. The traffic spike might not be as large as expected, but this is probably due to the time difference between the US and the UK. You can see the Hitwise graph below…

Yesterday I told you about how Michael Jackson was dominating the Twitter top 10 trending topics, where he held nine at that time. Almost a full 24 hours later and he still holds four of the ten.

The death of Michael Jackson also had other sharing their condolences via Twitter…

The death of Michael Jackson was met with many different opinions; some are looking back at his music career why others only see his alleged wrong doings. However you choose to remember him you can’t deny the fact that his death had a huge impact all over the world… especially the Internet.

One week ago today Kris Allen was unexpectedly crowned the winner of American Idol season 8. But how could this be? Wasn’t the shows runner-up, Adam Lambert, a lock to win?

With over 100 million votes cast, Allen was announed as the winner… but just how many of those votes were assisted by AT&T employees? Do you feel the American Idol results were tainted? Tell us. 

It seems that American Idol corporate sponsor, AT&T, may have assisted in the casting of extra votes for Allen and shattering the dreams of Lambert. (It should be noted that AT&T is the only service where you can vote via text message)

Literally thousands of fans are outraged by this development, a simple Twitter search for AT&T turns up the following…

In a statement issued yesterday, a spokesperson for AT&T said, "In Arkansas, we were invited to attend the local watch parties organized by the community. A few local employees brought a small number of demo phones with them and provided texting tutorials to those who were interested."

The NYTimes stated that no such free texting services were extended to Adam Lambert supporters.

Perez Hilton, the self-proclaimed "Queen of all Media", had the following to say about the texting tutorials, "The phone company even showed guests how to "power text", which allows one to text 10 votes at the touch of a button and violates the show’s rules."

Here is a snippet from the American Idol FAQ about power dialing / texting, "The producers reserve the right to remove any identified ‘power dialing’ votes. Note that this applies to both toll-free and Text Messaging votes…"

Now the question is… what are American Idol producers to do? Can they even do anything at this point?

Personally, I don’t watch American Idol… but even I knew who Adam Lambert was. He was just on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, where they all but handed him the key to EW city. As far as I knew he was the winner-in-waiting. So when I heard that some other guy had won, it seemed odd.

So, how do you feel about Idolgate? Tell us.

Please don’t make me sum up what that was about; read about it at Wikipedia and come back.

Great, so stupid questions, stupid answers, and endless, fruitless debates aside, Prejean became the official poster queen for the National Organization for Marriage, and after posting a rather classless video that got entirely too much media attention, Hilton went back to drawing penises on celebrity photos, his chief claim to fame.

Seizing on the controversy, the NOM posted a video featuring a few seconds of footage from the Miss USA pageant and a few seconds of Hilton’s classless video response. Soon after, the NOM received a cease and desist from Hilton’s attorney saying the organization had violated Hilton’s copyright. Miss USA pageant lawyers followed suit, no pun intended.

The NOM’s attorney correctly responded by noting that short pieces of video used for commentary or criticism were protected under fair use, and then had this to say:

“Here is a guy whose very public persona is an infringement on a celebrity and whose own website, a commercial enterprise, contains hundreds of images of celebrities now claims that his profane attack on a young contestant – which he himself posted on the Internet – is somehow protected under the law.”

He almost makes a good point. Perez Hilton’s pseudonym is an obvious and cheap spoof on billionaire heiress Paris Hilton. To my knowledge, a person’s name isn’t copyrightable (with my three common names, I’ve looked into it), so there can’t be an infringement “on a celebrity.” Even if one could somehow infringe on a celebrity or copyright their name, spoofs are fair use, touché. And yes, Hilton’s “profane” attack is actually protected under the law, the very first one on the list of amendments to the US Constitution—but I’m no constitutional lawyer.

That silliness aside, the good point is in the middle of that statement, which is that Hilton’s entire gig is built upon fair use of other people’s stuff, hence all the penises drawn on celebrity photos he didn’t actually take. So it’s just a little bit (a tad) ironic Hilton is attacking his own strategy for achieving largely undeserved fame.

In another twist, the lawyer writing the disclaimer on Hilton’s site must have attended the same law school as the NOM’s. It reads:

“All images on perezhilton.com are readily available in various places on the Internet and believed to be in public domain.”

I’m no lawyer myself, but it doesn’t take one to know that’s crap. 
 

It may have been Hilton’s photo-pinching of Britney Spears’ most indecorous moment (or a number of other indecorous celebrity moments) that pushed X17 Inc., a paparazzi agency, to ask how Hilton dares mooch off their leaching. X17 has filed a $7.5 million lawsuit against him. This puts one of the scummier wings of free society in the position of testing one of that society’s highest-mounted institutions.

The publicity itself has been good for Perez, no doubt, who already charges $9,000-$16,000 per weekly banner ad, promoting various things to his 2.5 million unique visitors. If you haven’t heard of the self-proclaimed “Queen of All Media” (who is currently also in a spat with Lance Bass’s boyfriend), you will.

Perez is shopping around a reality show, is slated to appear on MTV’s New Year’s Eve special, has been profiled by the AP, the LA Times, and GQ. But X17 says he’s built that success by piggybacking on the paparazzo’s talent for piggybacking on fame. And that’s not cool, man. When Perez showed up on the red carpet at VH1′s Big In ’06 awards, the popcorn flash of paparazzi cameras was noticeably absent in protest.

Perez defends his use of the photos taken from X17′s website as free speech and fair use, as none of them were posted on his blog unaltered. Many of the photos appear with crude messages written in the margins, or highly suggestive markings. Those small scribbles and doodles, Perez asserts, make for satire and commentary, both of which are protected speech.

Since the lawsuit, though, some images, like this one of Heidi Klum and Seal’s son, have been taken down and replaced with “Image gladly removed at the request of the copyright holder.”

So now, after all the silliness, cat scratching, muckraking, name calling, and petty snits, the First Amendment will be tested to decide whether or not a blogger can take a copyrighted photo, make fun of the subject with the most rudimentary of alterations, and post it to his highly trafficked and monetized website, putting the silliness, cat scratching, muckraking, name calling, and petty snits back into the government sphere where they belong, and where everybody has a gay ol’ time.

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