Federal Judge Stephen Crocker in western Wisconsin rebuked US Attorneys for seeking records from Amazon in connection with D’Angelo’s tax evasion and mail fraud case. News of his stance against the grab for personal information emerged after D’Angelo’s indictment, and the subsequent unsealing of court records.

MarketWatch cited Crocker’s comments, where he likened the request to "an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon’s customers." D’Angelo reportedly sold 24,000 used books through Amazon over a four year period.

Crocker perceived news of such a request would have a chilling effect on e-commerce. He considered the impact of such news becoming public knowledge online, and the resulting debate:

"One might ask whether this court should concern itself with blogger outrage disproportionate to the government’s actual demand of Amazon. The logical answer is yes, it should."

The Bush Administration’s Justice Department endured a similar setback when former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and DoJ attorneys tried to subpoena Google for hundreds of thousands of search records. The two sides finally settled on a much more scaled-back amount of search data being disclosed to the Justice Department.

An AP report noted federal prosecutors did not want these court records unsealed.

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“As a result, some large communities saw a drop of 100 members,” noted Leonardo Mesquita, a software engineer, on the Orkut Blog.  “This was just an initial adjustment.  Now we’re working to keep this and other counters correct all of the time.”

I’m genuinely surprised that the company would (a) address this problem, and (b) publicly admit to its existence.  Not that this is a major issue (like, say, Facebook’s subpoena), but it’s still not the sort of thing that’s usually discussed.

One has to wonder, then, what motivation Orkut had to make this move.  Sure, Google’s back there somewhere, and we all know how good and kind the search giant is.  But it looks as if Orkut is being brought into shape for, well, something.

I can’t say it will be a Facebook competitor – in America, the gap’s just too large for that to happen in the near future.  Still, over the past couple of months, Orkut has undergone a facelift, gained a Facebook-like “updates from your friends” box, and, in a move to appease users, removed AdSense ads.  Orkut probably hadn’t seen that many changes in the couple of years previous.

With all these changes, Orkut may soon see its user count rise again.

Remember that Facebook may be trying to prove it’s worth $10 to $15 billion; a legal battle in which the company appeared to be defending sex offenders wouldn’t do it a lot of good.

Neither would cooperating with the AG, though, if it turned out that a bunch of unsavory individuals were hanging about.  AllFacebook’s Nick O’Neill recalls, “Everyone remembers all the buzz surrounding MySpace and sexual predators.  It looks like Facebook is now the new site to receive the same negative buzz.”

Facebook’s (potentially) facing a no-win situation.  It has until October 12th to react to the subpoena, so whatever its decision, the social network will have to move quickly.  The best response, in terms of public relations, might be some sort of proactive sweep.  But this solution would require even faster work.

Facebook did not immediately return a call requesting comment, but it’s fair to guess that the company is taking the subpoena seriously.

Our favorite blawger (law blogger) on the scene of these cases, Eric Goldman, has been following Rhino Sports v. Sport Court for a while now. The case goes back to 2002, when Sport Court strong-armed Rhino Sports into agreeing not to use the phrase "sport court" directly or indirectly on the Internet – not for domains, sponsored links, HTML, tags, you name it.

Back in May, after sponsored ads for Rhino popped up with the keyword phrase "sport court," Sport Court dragged them back in front of the judge, who ruled at the time that under Google’s broad-match system that this type of thing could happen without Rhino’s intent.

Since then, Rhino’s been trying to wriggle out of the injunction against bidding on the keyword phrase, which may or may not be why Sport Court has issued a subpoena to Google for its records regarding all purchases of the keyword phrase, cost-per-click calculations, estimated ad positions, and search volume trends.

Apparently, Google is complying, as the company sent notices to all of its advertisers informing them of the subpoena and encouraging them file with the court if they object to Google sharing that data.

It’s unclear if others face risk of litigation if they have bid on the phrase, but what’s clear to Goldman is that this type of data would be valuable to advertisers.

"I suspect every trademark owner and SEO would LOVE to have this data," he writes. "This data may be yours for the price of a complaint and a subpoena."

Yahoo Tells Google What To Go Do

Just as Amazon.com did in October, Yahoo has rejected Google’s attempts to crack open its book-scanning operations. A Reuters report noted how Yahoo had no interest in helping Google bolster its copyright infringement defense.

Yahoo called Google’s subpoena a “brazen attempt to pry into its trade secrets” in snubbing the request. Amazon similarly called the subpoena “overly broad and unduly burdensome” in October about two and a half weeks after receiving the legal missive from Google.

The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have both sued Google for its book-scanning practices. Neither organization approves of the search advertising company’s opt-out policy, requiring the copyright holder to ask Google not to scan or make any part of a book available.

Google has long retorted that such scanning is no different than its indexing of websites, and the presentation of snippets of text in response to a search is protected under accepted standards of fair use. Having to search out every single copyright holder for permission would make the project untenable in Google’s opinion.

But if Google wants to convince the court of its good and law-abiding actions, Google may have to do so without the help of its competitors. It’s an interesting reversal from early 2006, where Google fought off a Department of Justice subpoena; now Google is on the other side of the fight, and probably doesn’t care much for it.

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(Some search companies fully complied in handing out the data, like search queries and indexed URLs, while others – like Google – tried to narrow it down to what seemed a more meaningful portion.) Seth Finkelstein now has the findings of this report… and it turns out that, quote the report, “About 1 percent of the websites in the Google and MSN indexes are sexually explicit. About 6 percent of queries retrieve a sexually explicit website. Nearly 40 percent of the most popular queries retrieve a sexually explicit website.” The report also states that “The number of sexually explicit websites is huge.”

*The COPA, which Seth calls a “censorware report”, states “the protection of the physical and psychological well-being of minors by shielding them from materials that are harmful to them is a compelling governmental interest”.

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Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped.

Until last week’s report, it was only known by most that Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and AOL were subpoenaed by the DOJ to release searcher information. And then, it may not have been known if Google hadn’t denied that request.

It turns out that a total of 34 companies received governmental inquiries. Among them were EarthLink, LookSmart, AT&T, Comcast, Symantec, Verizon, Bell South, Cox Communication, and Time Warner.

According to the article, at least two companies objected to the request: Cable Systems Corp., who said the request was “overly broad, vague, ambitious, and unduly burdensome;” and Verizon Online, who was concerned about documents being revealed to parties already suing the company like the DOJ and the ACLU.

Google was successful originally in persuading the government to pare down its initial request, but refused to deliver any information until the matter reached the courts. Last month, a federal judge forced Google to release some of the requested information.

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The greatly-loathed Digital Millennium Copyright Act takes center stage again, as a subpoena filed under its provisions by American Airlines has been issued to Google. American wants all the information related to who may have uploaded part of the “Flight Attendant, Upside Down” training video to Google Video.

Google does obey requests made under the DMCA, but is playing a delaying action against American by forcing it to go to federal court to request the subpoena, Mercury News reported. This gives the person who posted the video a chance to respond to the request and file an objection.

Google may have to comply with the subpoena, an outcome EFF legal director Cindy Cohn described as likely in the article. Compliance will end any illusion of privacy expectations people may still cling to as Google battles the Department of Justice over its subpoena for information from Google’s databases about searches performed at the site:

The issue comes at a time when Google is thought to be interested in persuading its users to keep all of their data on company servers. A product called GDrive generated lots of chatter when details of the service were inadvertently revealed as part of an Analyst Day presentation Google held recently.

Google also made a “Search Across Computers” feature available for users of the latest release of the Google Desktop beta product. Data made available by a person for use with Search Across Computers will store a 30-day temporary copy of that data on a dedicated subset of Google’s servers.

If businesses or individuals can pry that data from Google with a simple subpoena, that could erode demand for or usage of such services.

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As a party fighting the government in a Pennsylvania court over the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act, the ACLU would have no choice but to perform discovery of Google’s inner workings, the organization said in a legal brief filed on Friday.

At issue is the DOJ lawsuit against Google, stemming from Google’s opposition to responding to a federal subpoena requesting information from Google’s search databases. Google contends fulfilling the DOJ request would violate user privacy and expose trade secrets.

Should the US district court in San Jose compel compliance, the ACLU would have to make the same request, given its role in the COPA lawsuit. The ACLU described the kind of information it would have to request:

The ACLU said it does not have a need or desire to probe Google this way, but will have no choice if the government sides with the DOJ on Gonzalez.

In its own response to the DOJ, Google’s law firm Perkins Coie submitted Google’s 25-page response on Friday, where it called DOJ “uninformed” about how search engines work.

That response contained a number of declarations from Matt Cutts, the well-known Google engineer and likely the most expert person on how the search engine functions. Google claimed providing DOJ with the information it requested would open up its trade secrets to the competition:

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US District Court Judge Joseph J. Farnan Jr ruled from his Delaware bench that companies receiving subpoenas from AMD can comply with them, The Inquirer reported. Apparently, many firms had refused to comply, because of their existing agreements with Intel.

AMD sued Intel in June 2005, claiming a variety of abuses by Intel. AMD CEO Hector Ruiz and his attorneys made an entertaining, human-readable version of the lawsuit available to detail their complaints, which they also supplemented with a conference call about the antitrust filing.

Among the stories emerging from the filing was one anecdote about Compaq and Intel. Former Compaq CEO Michael Capellas characterized his firm’s relationship with Intel as having “a gun to his head.” Ruiz also accused Intel of “old-fashioned threats, intimidation and ‘knee-capping’ to deter OEMs from dealing with AMD.”

Now that Judge Farnan has compelled the waiver of non-disclosure agreements with Intel by third parties, even more enlightening tales of the hyper-competitive world of processors should emerge through court testimony.

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