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The iGasm is a clever little product tie in. Take an ipod, plug in the ‘marital aid’, and just like that you’ve got ABBA rocking your unmentionables. However, the legion of black turtlenecks from Cupertino aren’t so happy with the ad campaign which has hit a little to close to familiar territory.

According to Gizmodo:

Jacqueline Gold, boss of the sex toy company, received a legal letter from Apple (let’s face it, the symbol of original sin) asking it to cease and desist with its promotional posters, a juicy rip-off of the iPod silhouette campaign—only this time, instead of the white wires going into her pocket, they are disappearing into her scanties.

Ms Gold’s only response has been humorous. “Perhaps I can send them an iGasm to put the smile back on their faces.” Er, I don’t think it will work on Steve, as I think he is lacking the correct—how shall we say this?—plumbing.

A transgender Steve Jobs aside, the legal claims would seem a bit dubious. Is Apple claiming that any silhouette on pastel backgrounds is infringing? I could understand how it might cause some brand confusion among residents of Po’dunk, RedState. But honestly, how many people had even heard of the iGasm until the Apple lawyers went and made it a story?

Well, it’s been a great run for our ‘Second Strife’ Second Life bashing. It was mostly due to the fact that finding fault with the platform, once touted as the second coming of the Internet, was as easy as gazing dreamily at Sun’s Schwartz’s ponytail (he’s so much more winsome than Scott McNealy - something reflected by Sun’s stock rebound over the past year).

However, Second Life has gone from being irresistibly kick-worthy to downright sad. Roving gangs are obliterating commercial interests. And when industry isn’t under attack its mostly due to the fact that nobody’s there. And that’s when the game is up - something that is happening with increasingly less regularity. Unannounced repairs took the world offline for a large chunk of yesterday leaving Second Life’s sex fiends and furry lovers relying on conventional ‘browser based’ titillation. That update came after another ‘rolling update’ the day prior to address bugs introduced in an earlier release upgrade. The future of e-commerce indeed!

So, its with this ridiculousness in mind that we close the book on our Second Life coverage. The Linden Labs project had promise, an incredible amount of press, and the hopes and dreams of dozens of shut-ins everywhere riding on it. But there comes a point when a company maneuvers itself into irrelevance - and that’s exactly what has become of the platform that we’ve come to love to hate.

Goodbye Second Strife. Hello World.

Radio broadcasters have always paid royalties for the music they play. Those nickels and dimes go to one of two major collections agencies to later be turned over to composers and publishers. Performers and labels did not get paid royalties because it was assumed that radio, rightfully so, provides promotion for an act and that promotion would sell albums. However, with their finances in free fall, the music industry is looking for whatever rock to squeeze blood from that it can. The latest from the LA Times reports the labels are petitioning congress. The hope to overturn the radio ‘promotion’ exception.

The battle pits the loathsome RIAA against nearly equally dubious media conglomerates like Clear Channel. While I can superficially state that I want the side who will best benefit the artists to win I have a hard time seeing this as anything other than a turf war between two corporate bullies.

From Wired’s Epicenter blog comes word that the MPAA is positively beside itself with glee. Through efforts like hiring additional staff the Hollywood gestapo was able to arrest a stunning nine would be pirates in the United States. From the post:

John Fithian, CEO of National Association of Theatre Owners, stated: “Future thieves beware: we will find you; we will stop you; and we will have you arrested.”

Sony contracted additional security personnel for more than 160 pre-release screenings and eight premieres. The studio consider it money well spent, crediting the film’s record box office in part to the heightened vigilance.

After all, if those handful of individuals were allowed to spread their evil, deceitful camcorder copies to the Internets more people would have realized what an awful movie S3 was and stayed home.

And what of the argument that piracy is taking money out of the pockets of Hollywood’s bit players? If hiring of additional security was such a smashing success it would seem that piracy is creating new jobs. Contradiction? Perhaps.

Related: Illegal Music Is Not Legal

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Two recent stories concerning Yahoo have crossed the retired circus monkey desk this week. This first is that Yahoo has apparently keyed on the motivation that will help it unify its efforts against the Google behemoth. Is it a refined focus? A killer acquisition? No - as reported by CNet, it’s the color purple.

Yahoo offers contests for the most dedicated evangelist among its 13,000 global employees, she said during the keynote speech at the Liquid Agency Brand Summit 2007 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., Tuesday morning. Employees who do things like ask people who don’t work for Yahoo “Do you Yahoo?”, memorize the company’s mission statement and wear Yahoo gear to the office for a day can win trips paid for by the company, she says. Even visitors to Yahoo offices see purple everywhere, from the oversize, purple velvet seats in the lobbies to the purple sprinkler heads in the lawns as the company tries to embed its purple, fun image into people’s consciousness.

While Yahoo’s marketing tries to associate its purple with ‘fun’ most people are more likely to associate it with the bruising its getting from all sides. And not just from major companies. As TechDirt is reporting Yahoo is being sued by its users because its ad platform sucks. As Mike writes out:

Who knew that it was against securities law to make a product that didn’t live up to expectations?

He then (rightly) points out that most class-action lawsuits are really not about helping the ‘class’ represented but more about the lawyers involved. Still, how discouraging must it be to hype up the advertising system as being the Yahoo savior and then have it be sued by its very users?

Microsoft has some odd promotional videos. Say what you will about the products but the hype machine usually make straw into a very odd sort of comedy gold (’Welcome to the Social’ ineptitude aside).

Then we have this seizure inducing promotional video for Microsoft Vista (hat tip istartedsomething.com):

From this video we learn that Vista:

1. Has Parental Controls
2. Had a lot of press saying something
3. Has one big-ass marketing budget to make these kind of self congratulatory videos

With everything that’s going on today - terrorism, the rising cost of energy, and inter-office political scandal, you would think that Alberto Gonzales would have little time for anything else. Sadly, that’s not true. The highest lawyer in the land has identified, what he feels, is the largest threat facing this nation: attempted copyright infringement. As the Epicenter blog states:

Essentially, the bill would turn copyright law into something more akin to drug law: The government could seize personal property, wiretaps become legit for the first time, violators could face lifetime prison sentences, and, in an ambiguous and far-reaching provision, the mere attempt to violate a copyright would become a crime.
…
Thanks to a new “attempt” provision that wouldn’t require the actual commission of a violation, the bill could conceivably be expanded, in an extreme case, to interpret a computer full of music next to a spindle of blank CDs as an act of piracy.

The proposed law has yet to find a politico to Sherpa it through Congress. I can’t imagine why. The U.S. political system has passed a lot of disappointing technology legislation over the years. But apparently they have enough sense to know that making thought crime punishable is not good job security.

Kevin Rose has had a rough week. First users of his social news site, Digg, flung the company in front of a legal steam roller. Then, that same mob spread news of what they’d done with nearly the same fervor. So what does a young, single, serial entrepreneur do? Why start a new site:

And to think, BusinessWeek once said this man was worth $60 million.

BeersForDiggnation.com
As the home page for this community funded extended frat party states:

For just pennies a day, you too can help feed the hosts of Diggnation. If you happen to notice any of the following signs, it could be due to lack of beer on Diggnation:

- Alex not speaking about his windows *job girls
- Kevin not saying “drink biotch!”
- Alex becoming “pro mac” (don’t you let this happen)
- Kevin not requesting “dancing squirrels”
- The podcast starts to sound like TWiT

While the swipe at cranky old men is a nice touch we have to wonder - is Kevin stocking up for the upcoming Digg trial?

Just to prove that the virtual world of Second Life doesn’t already come with a big enough ‘NSFW’ disclaimer now comes Playboy. With its familiar brand of air brushed idealized beauty the first life media empire’s dominance of the second is anything but assured. As Wagner James Au points out on his New World Notes blog when everybody looks like Barbie and consummates like Anne Nichole Smith its hard to stand out:

Just a couple months ago, MySpace superstar and former Playboy Cybergirl Tila Tequila opened a mansion hangout in Second Life. And though she counts over a million MySpace friends, attendance at her SL crib has been scant; it’s consistently empty during peak periods, with Traffic registering in the low hundreds (i.e., a handful of daily visitors, at best.) Last year, the Suicide Girls launched an SL space of their own, and though the goth-punk babes are extraordinarily (and deservedly) popular on their own site (and again, were featured on Playboy’s homepage in 2004), visitors to their Second Life locale quickly dwindled, and within weeks, most of the dozens of Girls who had created an avatar lost interest with being in-world.

Debates on Tila’s crowd drawing ability aside, Wagner’s story further illustrates just what the priorities in Second Life are:

Ironically, the commerce of sexuality in Second Life was also a barrier, according to Lavonne. “If SL jobs were better and paid more, I’m sure many would be thrilled to play. The sexual aspect was a problem. Some girls mentioned how working at clubs they were expected to pretty much have cyber sex with ‘customers’ for tips, and that it wasn’t worth it.” (Virtual tips are rarely competitive to what a performer makes offline.)

So apparently not only are Second Life’s denizens after the byte-sized bump-n-grind: they’re also cheap. Will Playboy succeed with the Second Life crowd? Only a artificially enhanced silicon 8-ball can tell.

Yes, that’s right: May 14th is the deadline for broadband Internet providers to finish backdoors. These portals are meant to allow the FBI to more easily monitor network traffic. It’s all thanks to a reinterpretation of the CALEA act, originally meant to facilitate traditional phone taps. As the Wired Blog post by Kevin Poulsen says:

While CALEA is all about phones, the Justice Department began lobbying the FCC in 2002 to reinterpret the law as applying to the internet as well. The commission obliged, and last June a divided federal appeals court upheld the expansion 2-1. (The dissenting judge called the FCC’s position “gobbledygook.” But he was outnumbered.)
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Making surveillance easier and faster gives law enforcement agencies of all stripes more reason to eschew old-fashioned police work in favor of spying. The telephone CALEA compliance deadline was in 2002, and since then the amount of court-ordered surveillance has nearly doubled from 2,586 applications granted that year, to 4,015 orders in 2006.

Sure, privacy on the net is about as realistic as watchable Uwe Boll movie. Still, living in blissful ignorance is so much easier when the government isn’t involved.