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I wonder if this means even more will join ?

I hope that eventually more countries will adopt a similar law, as it appears they might.

Eyeballs my friend. Eyeballs.

Even though companies complain about ROI (which is a valid argument) it is still an extremely effective way of connecting to consumers. This is not going away any time soon. They are at ~450 million mobile users. Mobile commerce is exploding.

It's great to push people to your blog/website from Facebook but if it's mirroring your website's content you can connect with your users (read:customers) via 1 or 2 clicks instead of 12. You choose the 1 or 2-click method, always.

I think it's more that the native UI is typically a better experience and allows full use of the device's capabilities (contacts, GPS, camera, accelerometer).

For example, see:

http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/7832-the-fight-gets-technical-mobile-apps-vs-mobile-sites

http://mobithinking.com/native-or-web-app

I wouldn't. The endless lawsuits would be sickening, and based on some of the things I've read about google lawsuits in the past, google are likely to lose. Even though they are giving people a preview of life after SOPA, which no one in the process will understand.

Google's Belgian Newspaper problem. The quick flip-flop makes me call this the Belgian Waffle.

They will win their lawsuits, regret it, and have entrenched SOPA in the process, making it impossible to back out of. For a while, they will be happy, until everyone complains about everyone else. Especially when Congress peoples' websites which host verbatim copies of news articles get delisted. Then the fun begins.

You need to take a look at the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). A violation of this act is a criminal matter. There have been a number of criminal cases brought by the government for TOS violations. Take a look at this article. http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/6189-can-terms-of-service-turn-you-into-a-criminal. How about this article http://www.onthemedia.org/blogs/on-the-media/2011/sep/28/senate-advocates-terms-of-use-reform-computer-fraud/. Note this quote
"Late last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved an amendment to the law that specifically decriminalizes terms of service violations." How do you "decriminalize" something that in not currently criminal? Here is the EFF article about the amendment. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/09/senate-committee-agrees-violating-terms-service-shouldnt. Here is the amendment. http://judiciary.senate.gov/legislation/upload/JEN11A19-Grassley-Franken.pdf

Your second point is moot because the ruling clearly states that the tabular data was not copyrightable and focused on the descriptions and pictures which are.

You are confusing the two aspects of the case; breach of contract and copyright infringement. The scraping was a breach of contract as it contravened the web site TOS which the court ruled is a binding contract. The display of copyrightable descriptions and pictures was ruled copyright infringement. These are separate issues in the case.

Computers don't lie. They can get a list of IPs from a torrent tracker and connect to them. If they upload the content, that is proof that the connection is being used to break the law.

Actually, it's evidence, not proof. And only evidence that the connection may be being used. You then (at least, in the UK, I'm assuming NZ has similar copyright laws as I think they borrowed most of it from us) have to prove that the content was copyrighted, prove that whoever uploaded it didn't have a licence (or other legal option) to do so, prove that you own the copyright to said content and prove that a person (you can't sue a computer) did the uploading or authorised it. Then you can sue them for it.

Interestingly, from what I recall, during the ACS:Law fiasco over here, some of the leaked files showed that, of the IP addresses identified as being involved in copyright infringement at a certain time (by ACS:Law's "client"), about 1 in 4 weren't even allocated at the time the alleged infringement occurred. When you have a minimum 25% error rate, there's no way to get a criminal conviction on the basis of that alone, and (combined with the uncertainties in all the other elements), even a civil case is looking unlikely.

Pesky thing, due process; causes all sorts of troubles. That's why these laws (this one, the French Hadopi, UK Digital Economy Act, the US ProtectIP) are created; they're mostly designed to circumvent the requirements of existing law (in terms of what needs to be proven). But who needs due process; copyright infringers are all evil thieves and don't deserve it.

Of course, most UK Internet users infringe copyright on a daily basis (particularly given the recent Meltwater decision, which seems to hold that merely visiting a website is a prima facie infringement)...

all kinds of dirty tricks on competitors

Did you read Edelman's bio? The guy is a paid whore:

• Ben's consulting practice focuses on preventing and detecting online fraud (especially advertising fraud). Representative clients include the ACLU, AOL, the City of Los Angeles, the National Association of Broadcasters, Microsoft, the National Football League, the New York Times, Universal Music Group, the Washington Post, and Wells Fargo.

Wait, we are talking about the same Google whose former CEO said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"

Thanks for assuming that I'm a Fox News-watching idiot and intentionally leaving out the remainder of his quote: "but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important to remember, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."

CSEs

Foundem had appeared to be mimicing an affiliate spammer (note: which Foundem later corrected). Foundem's story is little more than a moron's outrage over his own incomprehension, expecting others to capitulate when the failures are his own making. The disappointing fact at the time was that Bing & Yahoo hadn't been penalizing Foundem, naively believing it to be an authentic site, as mentioned in the earlier link:

• "The last word on this goes to Ciaran Norris, who says: “I have to wonder whether the fact that Foundem apparently continues to rank well in Bing and Yahoo isn't in fact a perfect example of why those sites currently struggle to manage 10% market share between them.”"

unsuspecting WLAN owners

If Google wanted this data to begin with -- which doesn't align with their business model of negotiating and retaining information -- why would they be using a 5-minute-setup of Kismet dumped in total to an unencrypted and non-hidden drive? When large companies plan malicious deeds it's usually a lot more thought out.

The guys who have been tracking your every movement on the web through Analytics and their search engine for years

Great, you picked something we both agree on :). Analytics is reprehensible (tho quite easily blocked). I don't place the blame for it entirely on Google though -- even though they deserve the criticism for buying out DoubleClick -- but also on the website owners who endorse it. IMO the advertisement industry should be regulated, because unlike search engines, earning a monopoly by being better than the competition is a dangerous accomplishment. Computer users can't simply switch to an Analytics competitor.

There's a recent trend of prosecuting people for "unauthorized use of online systems" when all they did was violate the terms of agreement of Facebook or the like. It's a real stretch to call that "hacking" but they sure tried hard in the 2008 Lori Drew case:

http://hackaday.com/2008/05/27/violating-terms-of-service-equals-hacking/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lori_Drew

They actually failed in that case:

http://www.burneylawfirm.com/blog/tag/hacking/ ...but it was *federal* prosecutors who argued that the same thing the Air Force wants to do is in fact illegal if private citizens do it. And that wasn't the only such case - two more are discussed on this 2010 page:

http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/6189-can-terms-of-service-turn-you-into-a-criminal

On top of all those issues, there might be something else illegal about this, something unique to government actors. Is it constitutional for the state to lie to influence public opinion? Seriously, are we a "democracy" (yeah, I know, technically a Constitutional Republic) anymore, if public opinion can be systematically shifted via...well, bullshit? We have "freedom of information" laws - doesn't that at least imply that information coming from government sources not be a total fraud from top to bottom?

If we let government actors spread BS at will...ummm...we have some really ghastly examples of where that leads. North Korea is probably the worst of the worst possible endgames there but there's a ton of others worldwide.

Agreed - these price-comparison sites are almost universally leeches. They provide no added content, the contents are often out-of-date, and you can get the same functionality by just clicking on individual links in Google. I wish they would all go away. That said, I have never seen Google shopping come up in the results of a search for a product. I am always skipping over spammed results from other price comparison sites - not to mention eBay (I hate eBay). If Google is cheating, they surely are doing a lousy job of it :-)

According to one article, Foundem is a case study in SEO fail. Perhaps it's easier to sue than to fix your business concept.

But they do. They are so keen on it that if you opt out of location tracking, you can't use the iTunes store. http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/6126-iphone-users-will-have-to-get-used-to-tracking

If you look at the HTML source of Foundem, you find a set of meta keywords usually associated with webspam sites. Then there's a big block of ad-like links - Ipods, plasma TVs,"cheap flights", "fitness equipment online", etc. It looks like your typical junk link site.

The Register reported their troubles with Google back in 2006. What they were bitching about was not that "Foundem" disappeared from Google, but that all the pages of "price comparisons" they put up were pushed way down in search results. They were also hit with an AdWords penalty. This was written up as a case study in SEO fail.

However, at least they have a business address on the site.

The last word on this goes to Ciaran Norris, who says: "I have to wonder whether the fact that Foundem apparently continues to rank well in Bing and Yahoo isn't in fact a perfect example of why those sites currently struggle to manage 10% market share between them."