Facebook co-founders give $170K to pro-pot measure

          
                                                                                                                                                                                         SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — California's ballot measure to legalize marijuana has a new friend: Facebook co-founder Sean Parker has given $100,000 to back the proposal.
Parker's donation was reported in Proposition 19 campaign finance filings this week.
And he's not the first big Proposition 19 donor with ties to the social networking site. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has made two donations totalling $70,000, including a $50,000 contribution last month.
Neither Parker nor Moskovitz are still with Palo Alto-based Facebook, but both still have ownership stakes. Recent estimates put the value of the privately held company as high as $33.7 billion.
"What's interesting here is that (Parker) is a member of the generation that really gets it," said Stephen Gutwillig, a spokesman for the Drug Policy Alliance, the main beneficiary of Parker's contribution. "We think he's pivotal to the future of drug policy reform in the country."
The 30-year-old served as Facebook's first president and helped transform the company from dorm-room project to big business. Parker and Moskovitz have become household names since the recent release of "The Social Network." The film chronicling the contentious origins of Facebook was No. 1 at the box office last week.
Pop musician and actor Justin Timberlake plays Parker in the movie, which portrays him as a hotshot who convinces Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to push out his friend from the burgeoning company.
In a recent Vanity Fair profile, the media-shy entrepreneur is described as a computer-programming prodigy with an uncanny knack for anticipating online trends and a penchant for designer clothes and partying.
At age 19, Parker helped develop Napster, the music-sharing software that turned the recording industry upside-down. He is now a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
Parker did not immediately respond to e-mails seeking comment.
About $1.5 million of the $2.4 million raised so far in support of Proposition 19 has come from the measure's main sponsor, Oakland medical marijuana entrepreneur Richard Lee. The only other six-figure donation not from Lee came from adult entertainment entrepreneur Phil Harvey, who gave $100,000.
Parker's donation came shortly after the Yes on 19 campaign committee reported having meager cash on hand heading into the final weeks before the election. The money from Parker and Harvey went to a separate committee to fund the Drug Policy Alliance's work on behalf of the measure.
Much of the money will go toward a get-out-the-vote campaign targeting young voters and voters of color, Gutwillig said.
Facebook recently came under fire from some marijuana advocates who claimed it was turning away advertising on the site in support of Proposition 19. Facebook said in a statement that company policy prohibits images of drugs, drug paraphernalia or tobacco in paid advertising but that ballot measure supporters were still free to advertise using different images.                                                                                                                                                             Be Sure to Leave Your Comments! Also be sure to subscribe to my feeds http://feeds.feedburner.com/dotblogger and Follow Me on Googles Friends connection Recommend @lilruth to @MrTweet on Twitter....

People Continue To Object To Facebook Beacon Settlement, Despite Zuckerberg's Claims That They Don't Care About Privacy

                

In February of 2008 Facebook member Ginger McCall added Season 5 of the TV show "X-Files" to the roster of discs she wanted to rent from Blockbuster.



The Maryland resident knew of Facebook's Beacon program, which told Facebook members about their friends' activity at retail sites, but says she thought she had disabled the feature. Nonetheless, by the afternoon of Feb. 5, a friend had noted the activity on McCall's wall: "I see that you have added the X-Files, Season 5, to your Blockbuster queue," the friend wrote, according to new court papers.



Now McCall is objecting to the proposed settlement of a privacy lawsuit stemming from the Beacon program. McCall works as an attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which filed separate criticisms of the settlement, but she is opposing the deal as an individual consumer.



The proposed resolution calls on Facebook to permanently shut down Beacon and contribute $9.5 million to a settlement fund. Around two-thirds of that sum will be used to launch a new privacy foundation, while the remainder will go toward attorneys' fees.



McCall alleges that this deal falls short for several reasons, including that Facebook will have too much control over the foundation. "Under the proposed settlement, the only 'relief' for the class would be a privacy foundation established by Facebook -- an organization whose founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, believes that people no longer care about personal privacy," she argues, referring to Zuckerberg's recent justification for new privacy settings that make a host of information available by default.



The new foundation's initial co-presidents will be Facebook's director of public policy Tim Sparapani and Berkeley Center for Law & Technology's Chris Jay Hoofnagle. Journalist and Internet safety advocate Larry Magid will serve as chief financial officer and secretary.



McCall argues that the foundation is unnecessary because other organizations already advocate for online privacy and because Facebook "retains unwarranted influence" over it.



A Facebook spokesperson said last week that the new foundation "will proactively improve the experience of all Internet users."



McCall also objects to the potential settlement because it does not provide monetary compensation for Facebook members other than the 19 named in the original complaint (who are slated to receive between $1,000 and $15,000 each). McCall says in her motion papers that the program shared information about her Blockbuster queue on at least two occasions. In addition to the February incident, Facebook in January of 2008 allegedly informed her friends that the movie "Untraceable" had been added to her queue.



A federal law, the Video Privacy Protection Act, prohibits companies from sharing information about movie rentals and provides for damages of $2,500 per violation.



"The absence of any monetary relief for class members is telling evidence that the settlement is unfair, unreasonable, and inadequate," she argues in papers filed on her behalf by Philip Friedman, the law firm Chavez & Gertler, and the Public Citizen Litigation Group. (Public Citizen is representing MediaPost in an unrelated matter.)



A separate group of Texas consumers said last year that they objected to the settlement and unsuccessfully moved to intervene in the lawsuit. Lawyers representing those consumers had independently sued Blockbuster for participating in the program.



Facebook launched the Beacon program in November of 2007 on an opt-out basis. Several weeks later, the company changed the program to opt-in and also introduced a feature to allow members to permanently turn Beacon off.



The attorneys who negotiated the potential settlement are expected to file papers defending it by the end of next week.   By Wendy Davis from: On line Media
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Did you know FaceBook had been sued for patent infringement?

For those of you who did not know this happened awhile back It's pretty much a rite of passage for any tech company these days, as you get larger and more recognized, some company that has an overly broad and probably obvious patent will sue you for patent infringement. For the company in question, the lawsuit is as much a publicity event as it is an attempt to squeeze revenue from an actual innovator. The latest example of this is with an Ohio company no one's heard of called Leader Technologies, who is suing Facebook for patent infringement, and was kind enough to send out a press release announcing this before Facebook even got to see the lawsuit. Clearly, this is a publicity stunt.
As for the patent itself, it basically describes the rather obvious process of associating a piece of data with multiple categories. It's almost surprising that the company is suing Facebook instead of Google. While I'm not a heavy Facebook user, I'm not sure where Facebook uses such a system. Google, however, has made widespread use of a similar idea with its Gmail "labels." The idea is that rather than sorting data into a specific folder or category, it can be associated with multiple categories. If that seems rather obvious and ridiculously broad, well, that's the patent system for you these days. If anyone knows the outcome of this to be sure to leave a comment and let us know if this was settled? Source: tech news
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