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Startups with clever .ly domain names such as bit.ly and ad.ly could have their Web addresses pulled out from under them if the government of Libya, which controls the .ly domain space, objects to their content.

Online entrepreneur and consultant Ben Metcalfe wrote Wednesday that his registration of the domain vb.ly, which he co-owned with sex writer Violet Blue as a link shortener for adult-oriented links, was revoked without warning because content on the site did not comply with Libyan Islamic law. The domain was deleted by NIC.ly, the government-owned top level domain registrar around September 23rd.

“Pornography and adult material aren’t allowed under Libyan Law, therefore we removed the domain,” wrote Alaeddin S. ElSharif of NIC.ly according to Metcalfe.

Metcalfe claimed that vb.ly contained no adult content, just links. He expressed his biggest concern over the idea that Libya was exercising editorial control over .ly sites. “I believe the .ly domains should be considered unsafe. Anyone running a business or relying on a website with a one, two or three letter .ly domain should be incredibly cautious,” he warned.

Metcalfe and Blue launched the service in August 2009, and had pre-paid for a second year before it was shut down.

ElSharif wrote that promoting the site as adult oriented, rather than as a generic link shortener such as bit.ly, was enough to violate the country’s decency laws. The full text of ElSharif’s response can be found on Violet Blue’s blog (warning: adult-oriented links).

Metcalfe summed up:

• .ly domains deemed to be in violation of NIC.ly regulation are being deregistered and removed without warning – causing significant inconvenience and damage.
• .ly domains are being deregistered and removed due to reasons that do not correspond to the regulations defined in the official NIC.ly Regulations.
• NIC.ly seems to want to extend their reach beyond the domain itself and regulate the content of websites that use a .ly domain. The concept amounts to censorship and makes .ly domains untenable to be used for user-generated content or url shorteners.
• Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law is being used to consider the validity of domains, which is unclear and obscure in terms of being able to know what is allowed and what isn’t.
• NIC.ly have suddenly decided that <4 letter .ly domains should only be available to local Libyans and this appears to create motivation to recover what premium domains they can to go back into this new local-only pot of domains.

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Barely a week after launch, a Seattle-based streaming TV startup filed suit against major broadcast networks, hoping that a court will approve of it’s attempt to retransmit live television broadcasts over the Web.

Unlike streaming video-on-demand services like Hulu and Netflix, the plucky ivi, Inc. says it will give viewers access to more than 20 live TV streams from networks such as ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox for the low price of $4.99 a month. Only one problem: Nobody ever told the networks.

Because it’s “retransmitting” TV streams online, ivi claims that it does not have to pay the pesky FCC mandated retransmission fees like a cable company would, but it does pay content royalties to broadcasters through the copyright office, and releases viewership data to Nielsen so networks can factor it into their advertising calculations. According to ivi, it’s actually doing broadcasters a service by distributing existing broadcast feeds to a larger audience. However that hasn’t kept most of the major broadcasters from sending cease and desist letters to the company.

Rather than wait to get sued, ivi filed a suit of its own against broadcasters including NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and Major League Baseball, seeking a declaratory judgment from the state of Washington’s legal system.

The 18-person ivi says it has gone to great lengths to prevent content piracy by encrypting its feeds, and founder Todd Weaver scoffed at a comparison between ivi and online piracy. “We’re conforming to us copyright law exactly to the letter and paying the original broadcaster. We’re more comparable to the early cable companies. It has nothing to do with piracy whatsoever, and we frown upon piracy,” he said in a statement.

For the legally-minded, a ful .pdf of ivi’s complaint can be found here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In a PC World story last week discussing social media in the context of e-discovery rules, technology writer Kim Nash opined on the bemoaning implications for privacy of Mayor Kilpatrick’s plight. In social media we talk about privacy usually in the context of personal publicity, and the privacy complaints about Facebook commonly focus on questions of access to personal information: Who gets to see what we post about our lives and the lives of others. The focus is on the author, not the subject, and usually we don’t worry too much things like truth or falsity, or the impact on third parties. For that matter, presumably, we take it as a given that statements are true when not written for a public audience.

Things get dicey when the presumptions break down and social media speech can be used against us. So, for example, what if it’s not true? Put aside defamation, although freedom of expression and the unfettered nakedness of social media have in no way done away with the law of libel. Just look at this past summer’s craziness in England, “UK businessman wins Facebook libel case.”
Also, the problems with social media’s use in employment screening have been long known. You’d have to be living under a rock to think that your real or claimed sexual exploits and opinions on explosives will remain uncovered by potential employers.

I write employment contracts for new media and technology companies and lots of other companies. These contracts and company personnel policies typically contain some statement about how computer usage is subject to company oversight and “your telephone, cell phone, blackberry, and email are not yours”, or statements to that effect. Pretty standard stuff.

But what about corporate usage of Twitter and other social media? In the case that toppled Detroit Mayor Kilpatrick, the police officers who sued for wrongful discharge weren’t seeking the Mayor’s private thoughts for the sake of embarrassment. They definitely achieved that, but as collateral damage while trying to demonstrate wrongful termination of employment. Privacy is a lot like many other rights in this respect.

Its scope can be limited by other competing and legitimate public policy concerns. In the Detroit case, the litigants had pursued their rights under law to obtain information relevant to a vindication of their labor and civil rights. They were seeking to impugn the truth of statements made by the mayor and his chief of staff. Along the way, of course, they ruined the political careers of 2 public officials and sent the Mayor to prison. But it’s not that your Facebook wall will be subpoenaed.

That’s out there anyway for anybody to see and use. In litigation, companies and government agencies are subject to e-discovery orders, which require preservation and production of all relevant electronic communications. This includes email, but also instant messages, text, video, and the detritus from company social media applications — blogs, wikis, and other social media materials. From an employer’s perspective, IM and cell texts of employees are particularly vulnerable because of their popularity and usage, as well as the general inability of companies to truly regulate their usage by employees.

As a user of their employer’s technology, the individual employee is nearly completely exposed to disclosure. These attacks on privacy come up in the context of broader litigation not specifically targeting you as an individual — but rather your employer or agency or group. Worse, it seems just as likely to come up in unrelated government audit and regulatory actions as well. For example, a Department of Labor workplace audit.

In the PC World story, Nash cites an interesting 2008 California federal case, also involving police officers, but explicitly claiming privacy violations in suing the city’s wireless provider for providing the city with transcripts of the officers’ sexually explicit text messages. While Mayor Kilpatrick in Detroit was subject to Michigan’s view that no “expectation of privacy” existed in use of city-provided technology, the California court ruled otherwise, particularly where the city was consistently inconsistent in its enforcement of published usage and monitoring policies.

The California officers sued under a federal privacy statute preventing electronic communications companies from disclosing private messages, overcoming a defense that the service was merely a storage service rather than a communications medium covered by the privacy law. That was helpful to the California officers based on the facts at hand, but also highlights the limitations of this particular privacy view, which depends on who is seeking protection.

Privacy will never be an absolute, and never has been under the law. Privacy in social media is no different, and will be subject to balancing tests with competing public policy subjects such as court discovery demands and different states’ concepts of what one has an “expectation of privacy”.

What’s next is the overlay of social media, company and government privacy policies, which are contracts between you and the social media host: The expectation of privacy under the law can be contractually improved or reduced, depending on the applicable state law and the specific contract terms. How does your contract with Twitter or Facebook change what you should expect? More on this to come.

Andrew Mirsky is principal of Mirsky and Company, a new media and technology law firm based in Washington, DC with an office in New York City. Andrew advises media and technology clients on all legal aspects of business operations, including corporate and finance, intellectual property, contracts, and human resources. Andrew is also founder of Media Future Now, a (roughly) monthly gathering of DC professionals, focused on finding ways to keep media-centric businesses agile, innovative and future-focused.

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