Wall Street Nerves Over Google IPO, EU Nerves Over E-Music Copyrights, and Other Cyberspace Breakdowns...

What a surprise - Google taking its initial public offering to the online auction arena is making the clubbers around Wall Street nervous. "Google's Dutch Auction plan threatens the status quo," writes New York Daily News finance columnist Pete Siris. "In a Dutch Auction, each investor puts in an order with a specific price. If a company sells 10 million shares, the orders with the highest prices get picked.

"This means everyone has an equal playing field," Siris added. "Big hedge and mutual funds have no advantage over individual investors. It also means there will be no huge spike after the offering, and an end to windfall profits that have benefited the big institutions and other friends of the Bulge Bracket brokers."

But also remember that when the clubbers get nervous, they have nasty enough tendencies to stir the Big Bad Puddy Tat in Washington to turn their nerves into big trouble for the upstarts. And the Big Bad Puddy Tat doesn't always have to wait for the clubbers' nerves to set the mousetraps, either.

Sometimes, when David isn't giving Goliath palpitations, David turns against himself - sort of. Consider an analysis of Internet patent squabbling on MSNBC. It doesn't mention adult cyberspace's most familiar such squabble - Acacia Research Corp. and its Digital Media Transmission streaming media patent claims versus New Destiny/Homegrown Video and a host of other adult Internet companies - but it does sift familiar ground:

"The chaos of the patent-granting process in the Internet and software realms has made Eureka moments just as common in the courtroom as in the invention laboratory," the news site says. "There's a long line of celebrated cases involving Websites deploying commonly-used Internet technologies - in patent lingo, business methods - that are suddenly challenged by a patent holder who seemingly emerges from nowhere. Often, the plaintiff is a small intellectual property firm with big plans to cash in. And increasingly, small companies with no legal budget are being targeted because they are the least likely to mount a challenge."

Among other things, MSNBC was moved to comment by the case of a pair of pre-Internet computer heavyweights whose habit of saving their hardware, software, and anyware goes back to their days as big cheeses at Compuserve in the 1980s. David Eastburn and Sandy Trevor found their inventory wasn't just good for their own computer souls - it was good enough and then some to get a patent infringement claim for electronic donations against the American Red Cross by inventor Witold Ziarno thrown out of court. The Red Cross hired Eastburn and Trevor's Nuvocom to find prior art, Eastburn and Trevor found a virtual ton of it amidst their computer clutter, exhumed more than enough to run the old computers and programs in court, and Ziarno was out of a patent lawsuit and an appeal.

On the other hand, a pair of Davids dealt another setback to Washington's Goliath - on the United States' ban on Internet gambling. Antigua and Barbuda challenged the band at the World Trade Organization and the body handed down a report that went "largely unchanged" from a preliminary finding in March that the U.S. band was just not kosher. And an unnamed American trade official, echoing previous comments by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, thinks the WTO isn't being kosher, either, in this matter. "We intend to appeal," he said, "and will argue vigorously that this deeply flawed panel report must be corrected by [the WTO's] appellate body."

Piracy is not exactly appealing, of course, and Microsoft has issued details of an update to its content-protection technology, including new features which look to get piracy-proof digital content out to mobile devices and home networks. The technology is seen as a way to let subscription music services like the resurrected Napster and RealNetworks' Rhapsody move to portable MP3 player capability - but it's also said to include features to protect content sent around a home network or even block "unsafe" pathways like traditional analog outputs on high-definition television sets, something the film industry wants before switching to digital TV, according to CNET News.

As for the corporate networks, the questions before the house include whether their executives or their software suppliers should do the heavy lifting when it comes to beefing up security - and some of the answers are beginning to say that the vendors should be shipping safer, more secure products. "Until we address some of the software issues - the fundamental flaws in the software we are all using - we are not going to solve the cybersecurity problem," Business Roundtable director Marian Hopkins tells TechNewsWorld. Business Roundtable, a group of chief executives from some of the nation's largest companies, plans to release a set of cybersecurity guidelines later this month.

Former conservative muckraker David Brock - whose very public renunciations of his former writings against the Clinton Administration and his former political alliances turned him into a pariah on the right and provided for a cautious welcome on the left - plans to release a new Website later this week: Media Matters. Brock told the New York Times the site's aim is to "monitor the conservative media and correct erroneous assertions in real time." Brock's Website plans drew skepticism from former allies on the right - including L. Brent Bozell III, whose Media Research Center off- and online aims at doing likewise regarding the liberal side of the media - and encouragement from his new allies on the left, such as former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta.

The home PC market seems anything but a source of skepticism: various computer makers and players continue looking for ways to reinvent the home PC on behalf of multimedia savvy, from chip king Intel saying two new consumer desktop categories (entertainment PCs and lifestyle PCs) could get a stronger position as 2004 moves onward to Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and others getting into making and delivering media center PCS and developing other, similarly focused products. "Our research showed that people want to use PCs within these different scenarios. We think it's a new opportunity for us and the PC industry," said Intel digital home marketing director Bill Leszinske to CNET News. "This is something we've been driving. I think the (PC makers) are pretty accepting of it, and you'll see lots of them later this year."

Unfortunately, we still see lots of child pornography cases on- and offline. Cases like the 56-year-old Huntsville, Alabama psychologist who was arrested April 30 and charged with five counts of producing and five counts of possessing child porn. Police said a complaint from one juvenile victim led to the arrest of Dr. Michael Steven Cometa, whose Huntsville office and home were searched by child abuse police investigators who confiscated computers, cameras, and other equipment. Cometa received a hospital evaluation before being taken to jail.

A preliminary hearing in Wisconsin on the same day ended with Paul Mack being bound over for trial on child porn possession, a case in which he's accused of keeping sexually explicit images of children on a computer hard drive - images discovered by someone else to whom Mack had given the computer, a recipient who turned the hard drive over to police.

The Lutheran Children's Home in Bay City, Michigan was the recent recipient of news it surely didn't want to receive: one of its workers was charged with child porn possession and manufacturing, nine months after the Mid-Michigan Area Computer Crime Task Force seized over 30 thousand images said to be in his possession. The Bay City Times won't reveal the suspect's name until his arraignment, but the paper did reveal that he's looking at a maximum of 20 years in the hoosegow if he's convicted.

Lest you think using the Internet to lure the underage for sexual activity is peculiar to the United States alone, think again: A student from India who is studying in Chicago faces deportation following his arrest for trying to lure a 15-year-old girl online for a meeting to have sex - only to learn the hard way that the girl was really a police officer posing as a teen girl. Ramachandran Karthikeyan was arrested in Harrison Township, MI, where he was hoping to meet the girl and came prepared, authorities said, with a bottle of wine, a packet of condoms, and a little marijuana.

But let's move away from the child porn world for now. The European Commission may be hoping that those responsible for collective licensing of music copyrights for online use are prepared to answer antitrust questions. "Sixteen collecting societies around the European Union," says MacCentral.com, the online news service of Macworld, "may be in breach of antitrust rules because the cross-licensing arrangements they have made to distribute royalties to lyric authors and songwriters may lead to an effective lock-up of national territories, the Commission said." And if the EC is right, MacCentral.com added, it would turn the Internet into a haven for "the national monopolies that these societies have traditionally held in the offline world."

What a surprise that Macworld would be interested: online music services like Apple's iTunes Music Store depend on the agreement known as the Santiago Agreement - in which the 16 collecting societies agreed to cooperate with cyberspace music distribution - to get access to the music repertoires of all the collecting societies in all the European Union's and the societies' territories.

Meanwhile, AT&T said May 3 they want to help companies link offices securely over an end-to-end Internet protocol network, offering a new service that uses pure IP or private line ties to link various sites and thus giving an IP connection end-to-end, according to CNET News. "Some customers are religious about wanting IP end to end," said AT&T IP services product manager Dan Blemings. "So we decided instead of trying to convince them that Frame Relay and ATM access does the same thing as IP, that we'd just give them what they want."