August 2012

Reviews by ordinary people have become an essential mechanism for selling almost anything online; they are used for resorts, dermatologists, neighborhood restaurants, high-fashion boutiques, churches, parks, astrologers and healers — not to mention products like garbage pails, tweezers, spa slippers and cases for tablet computers. In many situations, these reviews are supplanting the marketing department, the press agent, advertisements, word of mouth and the professional critique. But not just any kind of review will do. They have to be somewhere between enthusiastic and ecstatic. “The wheels of online commerce run on positive reviews,” said Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago, whose 2008 research showed that 60 percent of the millions of product reviews on Amazon are five stars and an additional 20 percent are four stars. “But almost no one wants to write five-star reviews, so many of them have to be created.” Liu estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service.

Twitter filed an appeal with the New York State Supreme Court, looking to overturn a lower court's order to reveal the personal information of one of its users.

New York City prosecutors are demanding Twitter's data on Malcolm Harris, who was arrested for disorderly conduct during an Occupy Wall Street protest. The prosecutors asked Twitter for Harris's email address and all of his tweets in a three-month period. Twitter argued that police would need a search warrant to access the communications and that Harris has the legal standing to challenge the request on his own. A lower court denied Twitter's motion in June and ordered the company to handover the information.

A federal appeals court may have put the final nail in ivi's coffin.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a lower court's temporary injunction against the online pay TV service that was streaming over-the-air TV stations on the Internet without getting permission from the station owners. The ruling was a sweet victory for TV station owners, which are still in legal battle with Aereo and Barrydriller.com, two services that also aim stream TV station signals over the Internet. Broadcast owners NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC, The CW, PBS, Tribune, Univision and others sued ivi in 2010 for infringing on their copyright. The U.S. District Court for the southern district of New York granted the broadcast owners' request for a preliminary injunction in 2011.

A publisher in Pasadena (CA) who said he received death threats when he started hiring workers in India to write local stories five years ago nevertheless has launched a business to help other local publishers start outsourcing.

James Macpherson, who founded local news site Pasadena Now nine years ago, launched a business called Journtent last week, just a month after the outsourcing company Journatic sparked panic in US newsrooms when it emerged that local stories outsourced to Journatic by the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle and others had been written abroad and then published with fake, American-sounding bylines. More recently, there have been reports of Journatic laying off staff and cancelling independent contracts as it tries to recover from the scandal.