ProfileBuilder is a sponsor of TechCrunch40, the startup conference organized by TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. It's also the subject of a glowing, "exclusive" writeup in TechCrunch today. Coincidence? I'll let you decide. The writeup celebrates ProfileBuilder's acquisition of ZingFu. Say who buys say whom? Exactly. These are companies you're unlikely to need to care about, ever. Except to note this: The friendly TechCrunch article doesn't mention ZingFu's nasty habit of nicking copyrighted images, like this photo of Arrington by Laughing Squid blogger Scott Beale, with no fair-use rationale in sight.

An ongoing YouTube feud between the Rational Response Squad and the Creation Science Evangelism Ministries is highlighting flaws with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The law, of course, requires any online service presented with a copyright notice to remove offending works. The atheist Squad released a series of YouTube videos critical of the Ministries. In retaliation, the Ministries served a notice to YouTube claiming its copyright had been breached. YouTube removed the suspected materials, despite the Squad's claims of fair use and public domain. The Squad protested, and was subsequently banned.

A group of hackers banned together to hack an antipiracy group's email == and uncovered a dastardly plan to entrap file sharers. MediaDefender, the antipiracy organization, spends its days devising new means to thwart BitTorrent networks, the current, most sophisticated generation of file-sharing technology. Recently it's taken to seeding them with fake files. Among the 6,000 captured messages were emails detailing the planned creation of MiiVi, a faux BitTorrent site that would track all IP addresses that accessed the site. MediaDefender executives were also considering hacker tactics like a hostile takeover of computers, transforming them into bots that would spread fake files among peer-to-peer networks. That's a vile technique perfected by spammers, of course.

The Science Fiction Writers of America, presumably acting on behalf of Robert Silverberg and Issac Asimov's estates, served a DMCA "takedown" notice that erroneously removed hundreds of unrelated works from the document-sharing startup Scribd. A mere mention of "Asimov" or "Silverberg" was enough to get a document booted from the site. [Boing Boing]

Nothing demonstrates the ridiculous state of copyright law better than this episode. North Carolina filmmaker Christopher Knight created a commercial as part of a campaign for a seat on a local school board last fall, and posted it on YouTube. Viacom's VH1 cable channel featured the clip — without Knight's permission — on its "Web Junk 2.0" TV series. Knight then posted the VH1 clip on Google's YouTube, only to have Viacom's lawyers demand the video's removal. Let's get this straight: Viacom is asserting that Knight is infringing its copyright by posting a video in which Viacom allegedly infringed on his copyright.

CNET blogger and supposed open-source expert Matt Asay tragically misreads Google's terms of service for Google Apps. An admittedly scary patch of legalese suggests, to Asay, that Google will take all of your private data, take over its copyright, and make it public. But in fact, it just says that if you use Google to host, say, a word-processing document or spreadsheet, and you want said document to be publicly available on the Web, you must agree to let Google, you know, make it public. Why Asay is resorting to scare tactics over this is beyond me. Is he pursuing an anti-Google agenda? Or is he just sloppy? I'm voting for just sloppy.