Popular gossip blogger Perez Hilton is being sued over posting a topless photo of Jennifer Aniston.

The picture was allegedly “misappropriated and illegally copied” during production or post-production of the 2006 romantic comedy hit The Break-Up, starring the actress and Vince Vaughn, the suit said. The shot of Aniston, 38, was not included in the final version of the movie, which earned more than $118 million at the box office.

Perez Hilton has taken a lot of swings at Aniston and has a starseeker category devoted to stalking following her — and many other stars — every movement. I didn’t see any word from him on the site about the “Maniston” (as Hilton refers to her) topless picture lawsuit. The last post about her was as fresh as yesterday however. Hilton also didn’t respond to USA Today reporter contact, according to the news piece, to give his side of the story.

The gossip blogging game seems very risky to me. I must admit a little gossip is humorous once in awhile, but in a sort of aliens are visiting every day type of farce humor way. And sometimes it all seems trashy and intrusive to people’s private lives. I realize these are stars that make ridiculous amounts of money for starring in films but everybody deserves some amount of privacy. I consider most gossip material as quasi-fiction so if I had even seen the nude Aniston picture — and I don’t recall seeing it — I would probably have questioned the legitimacy anyway.

My somewhat unrelated question after paying to see the Break-Up in the theaters is why didn’t they use this nude pic/scene? It would have made what was an awkward, mostly unfunny picture better seeing a little Aniston skin. I’m thinking a lot of the reason that film made over $100 million is because of the off screen romance between Vaughn and Aniston, not because the film was very good (Rotten Tomatoes scored the film 33%).

I agree with Howard Stern (who has had Perez Hilton on his show before BTW) that Aniston projects a grumpy personality. She has a hot body but man could she smile a little more maybe?

As for Perez allegedly using pictures he shouldn’t have and probably drawing something snarky on it — that’s what this blogger does, just check out his current and past work — it’s exactly the juicy type of thing we expect from gossip rags like Hilton’s. I’m guessing this case will be settled out of court. Maybe we’ll learn what’s happening on this from another gossip rag. Rag justice.

One of the primary graphics card makers Nvidia (another is ATI) is responding to the Windows Vista graphics driver backlash.

Less than a month after Windows Vista has launched for non-business users, NVidia has launched WHQL Certified drivers for GeForce 8800, GeForce 7 series, and GeForce 6 series GPUs:

For those of you that are using Windows Vista and experiencing any problems, we’ve set up a website for bug reporting – www.nvidia.com/vistaqualityassurance. Our product managers will be reviewing this information daily and will be contacting users to help resolve any issues they might be experiencing.

I took some heat from a couple commenters on YouTube telling me that my clicking frenzy problems reported Hmmcast style were the fault of the graphics card hardware, not Windows Vista. Problem is the video I showed was the default Gateway hardware (Intel Extreme) that shipped with Windows Vista Home Premium. It also happened when I tried using a brand new Nvidia card I had.

As a customer my problem is that when I buy something I expect it to work with common applications. World of Warcraft is the #1 game out there so the Microsoft Windows team should have been working closely with graphics driver companies — especially if they wanted to bring back the gaming experience as they have been saying — so that when Vista launched people like us who bought a brand new system wouldn’t have a bunch of stupid problems.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, there shouldn’t be an error condition that pops the same message over and over again. That’s just bad coding. Some want to blame the driver programmers, but from the customer perspective, it’s not the driver programmers that get the complaint when it’s the default drivers that come with the system.

Some commenters got it and didn’t resort to ad-hominem attacks to make their point. Others that called me stupid, well, ok, then I guess myself and a lot of others that were complaining are stupid.

Hat tip to Slashgear who I’m considering removing from my RSS subscription because of those annoying intelliTXT links. People hate intelliTXT links, just look at these Jyte (see Hmm Jyte overview) claim results and clickthru to the comments:

I’ve unsubscribed from other blogs for this reason, so it’s nothing personal against Slashgear, it’s just the intelliTXT links. If you’re trying to compete against the likes of Engadget and Gizmodo when neither use intelliTXT, then you’re not making a compelling case.

Today Sirius and XM satellite radio announced a merger:

XM Satellite Radio (NASDAQ: XMSR) and SIRIUS Satellite Radio (NASDAQ: SIRI) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement, under which the companies will be combined in a tax-free, all-stock merger of equals with a combined enterprise value of approximately $13 billion, which includes net debt of approximately $1.6 billion.

Unfortunately this won’t happen until the necessary regulatory approval process, which isn’t exactly a slam dunk. If the merger is declared a monopoly the merger will be denied.

From the perspective of somebody who first subscribed to Sirius satellite radio in September, I’m pretty stoked by this announcement, but also disappointed that the necessary regulatory red tape will prevent it from happening by this baseball season. XM has the Major League Baseball contract and Sirius has the NFL. Sirius has Howard Stern and XM has a bunch of others. If the deal goes through then the marriage of the two satellite companies will make one killer satellite package for people who still love radio.

I wonder what happens to the price if/when this deal gets approved? They better not do something stupid like double the subscription prices. Guess we’ll find more details tomorrow during the joint conference call:

The companies will hold a joint conference call and webcast on Tuesday, February 20, 2007 at 8:30 AM ET to discuss this announcement. The conference call can be monitored by dialing 800-573-4840 within the U.S. and 617-224-4326 for all other locations, passcode 29490052. The webcast can be accessed at http://www.sirius.com/ and http://www.xmradio.com/ as well as on their satellite radio services by tuning to SIRIUS channel 122 and XM channel 200.

Hat tip to Gizmodo, the first place I saw the XM press release linked.

It’s sad when policies meant to protect legitimate buyers of something are abused. There is a five day trial period to be able to dump a new domain if it’s not what you wanted. This process is being used to sample domains with Google and Yahoo paid search ads. You know those pages that come up for mistyped domains that show you nothing but ads?

The grace period was originally designed to rectify legitimate mistakes, such as registrants mistyping the domain name they are about to buy. But with computer automation and a burgeoning online advertising market, entrepreneurs have turned the return policy into a loophole for generating big bucks.

Personally, I don’t care for domain parking pages with ads but it is a very profitable market. One way to cut down this exploit might be to allow only a certain number of trial returns per company per year. I can’t imagine businesses that aren’t exploiting this loophole choosing a domain and returning it within five days that many times in a year. I’ve never used this trial period and we’ve bought many domains over the years.

The Sonics days are numbered in Seattle and I haven’t cared about the NBA very much the last five years. Seems like too many thugs and too few stars in the sport for my liking. The whole King (Lebron) James thing is mildly interesting. So what does the NBA do to get people interested?

Start toying with 3D.

A select group of sports fans will watch the National Basketball Association All-Star game on Sunday in the first-ever live high-definition 3D sports telecast that NBA officials hope will create a buzz about profiting from the new technology.

I would like to see this expanded to all professional sports. Imagine going to a movie theater and watching a 3D game. The ball coming at you as it goes out of bounds? I like it. Speaking of theaters, we’re heading out shortly to check out Ghost Rider. Motorcycles and fire, vrrrrrrroooom. That would be cool in 3D too, come to think of it.

I’m a sucker for 3D and wish it was used even more. Are you a 3D fan?

On Monday I wrote about deeplinking and terms of service for blogs and today I see The New York Times has a story about a Brussels court telling Google they must pay $32,600 USD each day it displayed links to articles from Belgian newspapers without permission.

Ouch.

The ruling, which Google said it would appeal, was hailed by some newspaper industry representatives and may also have an impact on a lawsuit against Google by the news service Agence France-Presse.

“As the first decision to condemn a search engine for indexing news articles, you can be sure publishers around the world are paying attention,” said Cyril Fabre, a lawyer in Paris at Alexen, a law firm specializing in Internet law and intellectual property.

The Times article is a bit vague on the details but my immediate though was if it had to do with Google News, I didn’t understand the infringment.

Google News (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock), which happens to be my favorite place to check for news headlines, still isn’t running ads. I don’t go to Google News to read any actual news though, just the headlines, and I’m sure if they are counting my clicks on each visit, I’m visiting 3-5 news sources on average for every visit. I also keep track of news by keyword and RSS using Google News. Next to search (#1), Adwords/Adsense (#2) and Gmail (#3), Google News is still my #4 favorite Google service right now (see my top 10 Google products/services list from June 2006)

I don’t see how Google News is hurting any news organization, in fact they are likely helping them by sending a significant amount of traffic (readers and potential subscribers) they might not receive otherwise. If a website really wants out, they can use a robots.txt file to block the spider from coming.

Indeed, this is exactly the recommendation on the Official Google Blog about the court case yesterday:

Today’s ruling does not affect the current content of Google News because the websites represented by Copiepresse have already been removed from Google News. In fact, hundreds of news publishers in Belgium and around the world are delighted to be included in Google News because it helps more people find their websites and read their articles. That’s why Google receives far more requests for inclusion than requests for removal.

What are others saying?
Joe Duck points out that Google makes money from other people’s content, they don’t do their own content. Actually, they do create their own content. They have their own toolbar, they have online spreadsheets and docs software. And what about Gmail? Yeah, it’s us looking at our email and monetizing our eyeballs, but the program itself is content. And then there are all the blogs they have. Definitely original content there. I don’t see news headlines and a few words as not being Fair Use.

Donna Bogatin at ZDNet talks about Google’s reactionary tactics on copyright: “Google will not change its reactive handling of copyright infringement issues, however, because if Google had to pay for content, like every other “conventional” business, than it would not have the super profit margins or market cap that has made it the darling of Wall Street.”

John Blossom: “It’s time for publishers to stop playing games and to take a more serious look at Google as a business partner that can deliver good value from their services - if you have a good handle on the metrics needed to prove out that value.”

Greg Sterling’s recommendation (argh, dump the Snap popups already) for the Belgian newspaper? “[Include] their feeds in Google, strengthening their own sites and potentially creating a separate, newspaper owned Belgian news aggregator/social news site.”

See more commentary at TechMeme.

Hmm thoughts
This one’s easy and doesn’t require the courts. There are plenty of competing news agencies that will be more than happy to take the high quality Google traffic. I love Google traffic and I don’t care how they use my headlines and a few words — Fair Use from a copyrighted content source — to monetize past, current and future works. If they start gobbling up more than what would be deemed Fair Use by reasonable people and monetizing that then it’s time to call in the lawyers.

With the band chemistry in disrepair and no concert tour since the eighties Sting contacted his other two bandmates and got The Police reunion ball rolling. This turned into a Best Buy Reward Zone (BBRZ) members offer to be able to buy Police tickets early (must be a Best Buy Reward Zone member prior to 2/1/07 to be able to take advantage of this offer) through Ticketmaster.

This might be the best Reward Zone offer I’ve seen offered yet. These concerts are going to be sellouts, details:

Receipt of a Code does not guarantee that you will be able to buy tickets during the presale period. It simply gives you the opportunity to purchase two presale tickets.

As far as band reunions go, I’m looking more excited about a Van Halen reunion with David Lee Roth, but this is a nice perk for members.

I’ve written about the BBRZ a couple times before and received dozens of comments, predominantly negative, about the service. People saying they aren’t receiving their Best Buy reward coupons, bad customer experiences and worse. Even a post about an alleged class action lawsuit against them (not sure whether or not that’s true). I offer that as counter perspective to what we’ve experienced as customers.

We’ve had a positive experience overall with this program and received hundreds of dollars worth of coupons from well over one million Reward Zone points.

Costco Business Member “check”
We signed up for the black Costco Business Member card ($100) and have been accumulating 2% cash back on our purchases. Yesterday the check arrived and it was only good at Costco (something we weren’t told) and was $91. We went and did a little shopping last night and used that $91.

We also received $21 back from our recent shopping at Fred Meyer.

Why not sign up for Reward Clubs?
My feeling with these reward programs are why not sign up? Yeah, they will track what you’re buying but so what. I’m going to do these things anyway, so if we’re spending the money, why not get some money back?

Divorce is no laughing matter — perhaps with the following exception.

Taipe Times:

On the wedding night, Lin slept fully dressed and wrapped with a quilt, the daily said, without citing any sources. When Chen tried to sleep with her, the report said, she pushed him away shouting: “You are ridiculous!”

What a crack up. He was being ‘ridiculous’? What did this ’shy’ woman think they were going to do when they got married, play checkers? She fled to her mother’s house feigning illness and would only get back together and have sex if it was for having children — which still didn’t stimulate any lovemaking.

If Lin’s quote didn’t make you smile, then read some of the comments at digg. This wouldn’t be a laughing matter of course if there was some medical reason for the rejection. The article is a little lean on details, so the digg commenters are out in conspiracy mode as well, suggesting she might not have been interested because it was an arranged marriage or something.

Lin’s suitor Chen was awarded roughly $9,000 USD in a divorce settlement.

The feds went to bust a suspected pedo but it turns out it was a grandmother with an open WiFi network in an apartment building who was none the wiser to the activity. If you follow RIAA logic in the music file trading sector, grandma would be responsible but fortunately the courts are beginning to see this as overzealous.

“We’re not sure yet how to combat that,” said Kevin R. West, a federal agent who oversees the computer crimes unit in North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation. “Free wireless spots are everywhere, and it makes it easy for people . . . to sit there and do their nefarious acts. The fear is that if we talk about it, people will learn about it and say, ‘I can go to a parking lot, and no one will catch me.’ But we need to talk about it so that we can figure out how to solve it.”

The Washington Post article goes on to report on open networks as mostly being a negative thing from the authorities point of view. Articles like these don’t seem to get the point of free, open internet access to everyone yes, even the bad guys. Just the web is filled with content from the bad people — and I’m all for taking these people down — bad people will use open WiFi networks.

The Waving Cat is disappointed with the article:

What freaks me out is how badly research the article is. Not a single counterstatement, or alternative point of view to be found. Is this the same Washington Post that’s been around for ages and is well-known for good journalist practice?? I’m so sick of journalists buying one-sidedly into conservative policy rhetorics as far as technology is involved.

Dan Gillmor smells a possible police agenda:

They want to stamp out open networks, period. And as they see cities starting to offer WiFi, they want to prevail on governments to force a registration system that will track everyone who uses such municipal systems.

Let’s compare an unsecured WiFi network to a park. Anybody can visit a park. What if drug dealers start visiting the park? The cops can make more trips to the park, but does this mean they should put up security cameras everywhere? I’m sure some/many/all are not going to want to visit a park where drugs and seedy types are hanging out. I’m probably not going to take my family there.

It’s all about choice. The park isn’t to blame for where it’s located no more than the open WiFi is to blame for who uses it. The police need to do a better job going after the people producing illegal content and way, way, way down the list of priorities should be what to do (nothing IMO) about unsecured WiFi networks. If the illegal content isn’t being produced and available, there is nothing for these sick bastards to find and trade among themselves over grandma’s open WiFi.

The police have repeatedly said they are outnumbered in the fight against illegal content the internet. So the solution when you are in a fight like this isn’t to widen the net, parden the pun, and create more things for less people to try and police. The whole fight against gambling on the net to me continues to be very ill-advised and what it has to do with terrorism is a whole other story. There are far more important battles to be fought taking down illegal content than worrying about somebody playing blackjack in their knickers.

The solution is to focus.

This is Bizarre with a capital B.

The relatively short, sad and active life of Anna Nicole Smith is destined to become a movie. Who will play her, I don’t know, but the news has hit the wire that she’s gone and her death, like her son who died recently, is under investigation.

Anna Nicole Smith, the pneumatic blonde whose life played out as an extraordinary tabloid tale _ Playboy centerfold, jeans model, bride of an octogenarian oil tycoon, reality-show subject, tragic mother _ died Thursday after collapsing at a hotel. She was 39.

Smith was labeled a gold digger after marrying an oil tycoon many years her senior and can’t say I disagree, but still believe the news of her son dying was tragic and sad. I don’t like to hear that anybody has died, even alleged gold diggers. The family of the oil tycoon probably won’t have to continue fighting any more although — and this is purely speculation — it wouldn’t shock me if news comes out that somebody paid to take Anna out. I hope that’s not what happens but then I hoped Enron wasn’t real and believed that President Bush would do the right thing with the war. What I hope for and what actually happens tend to be different things in life sometimes.

Whatever happens, I fully expect more twists and turns. This will be one of those cases where death doesn’t end the story.