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A new law quietly enacted recently along with the budget of the state of New York has opened a can of worms, and sent shockwaves through the world wide web.

In a nutshell, the law states that any online retailer who solicits sales through affiliates located in the state of New York is responsible for collecting sales tax on any items shipped there – even if they don’t have any employees, offices or other physical operations in the state.

While tax counsel for the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) George Isaacson doesn’t feel that it will affect online affiliate marketers, he does say that “At its extremes, the New York statute is clearly unconstitutional.”

Ecommerce giant Amazon.com agrees, and has already filed a suit challenging the statute on those grounds.

Popular website Overstock.com has reacted by restricting their affiliate program to disclude New York affiliates. The company’s general counsel told InternetNews.com that he had read a bulletin intended to clarify the law and felt certain that his company could be held responsible for collecting the tax.

This change can affect any affiliate marketers in New York who have a custom online store containing Overstock.com items or even those who simply have affiliate links on their site.

Spyware is a [expletive-deleted]!

We all hate it, yet we all have it. It’s a total invasion of privacy and it leaves (less computer savy) users feeling violated. Best case scenario, you end up with a ridiculous toolbar or some annoying pop-ups. Maybe your homepage gets hijacked. Bad case, your computer crashes or you need to reformat your harddrive. Worst case, you have your sensitive information stolen and possibly even your identity.

Now finally (FINALLY!!) someone is doing something about it. Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor introduced a bill yesterday that would make it illegal for companies to install spyware on PCs without user knowledge or consent. As reported by Information Week, the Southern Democrat is targeting hijacking, spam, denial of service, pop-ups, changing default home page and security settings, Web proxies, toolbar setups, etc. This new bill would allow the Federal Trade Commission to step in and impose fines and penalties on those to continue to ruin the internet, our computers, and unfortunately in some cases, our lives.

It wasn’t until I received my Google Adwords Certification last week that I learned the ugly truth: Google reads your email to determine the Adwords ads to target within your Gmail account.

This is an excerpt from Lesson 1c: Ad Distribution in the Google Adwords Learning Center; and I quote…

The AdWords system analyzes the content of emails viewed within the Gmail interface, and matches ads to this content. Emails about upcoming vacations may, for example, display advertisements for local attractions, lodging, or businesses.

I wont go into the specifics, but obviously, there are some major privacy issues here. I know that technically it’s the software that reads the emails; but technically, this software can store and regurgitate your information on-demand if the government or anyone so desired.

The fact that Google is a store house of private user information is the basis for a huge SEO debate that has gone on for quite some time now. This is the debate over whether to use Google Analytics. It’s nifty, it’s free, and it can be used by Google to procure more sales in your industry by disclosing your stats and keywords for others to target and outbid . Some consider it a necessary evil; the cost of doing (free) business and essentially getting what you pay for. Others just boycott the package altogether ‘Enemy of the State’ style.

Yes Google rocks! But at what cost?

The most circulated cyber news piece of late revolves around a cracked HD-DVD encryption key being posted on Digg, and the head Diggers’ decision to bury all related posts per a cease and desist order even though the posts did not violate their terms of use. This story has been picked up by Forbes.com, and BBC News, as well as the usual suspects CNET and Slashdot.

On Tuesday, May 1, after being inundated with anti-Digg posts and link backs to the HD DVD hexadecimal code, Digg surrendered to social media democracy and reluctantly gave the power back to the posters by not only ignoring the cease and desist order, but by using said code as the title for a post on the Digg Blog and stating “If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.“

To his credit, Founder Kevin Rose was not left with much of a choice. The Digg community was outraged and the amount of posts received were much more than the Digg crew could handle. The sheer numbers proved to be too much for them to police. Digg conceded; as Kevin Rose writes “But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.” Digg was caught between the proverbial rock (suffering at the hands of the same social community it had fostered), and a hard place (suffer in court by the likes of the AACS, MPAA and others). But this may not be such a bad thing after all. Digg’s situation is just the latest in a crop of DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Copyright infringement stories.

Viacom has a major suit against Google for allowing users on The Daily Show and video clips from MTV. Some observers have said that the YouTube founders, forseeing the impending legalities ahead, sold out before to Google to avoid going to court. Others suggest the impending legalities is exactly why Google snatched up YouTube when it did: As unappetizing as court may sound, if you could afford the court battle and had the chance to set a legal precedence and go down in history (with or without flames) for doing so, wouldnt you?

Although it was not an easy decision to make, Digg has placed itself in that exact position and now has an opportunity to set legal precedence in the ongoing Freedom of Speech/Censorship paradox that constantly plagues internet sites and any mediums that try to be whole heartedly democratic without being served court papers everyday.

Jordan Glogau and I have had quite a few discussions regarding intellectual property before. When it comes to our personal beliefs:

Jordan takes the traditional stance…

“Just because its easy to copy digital Intellectual Property doesn’t make it right. Whether its physical or intellectual, it’s still property and the creators deserve to get paid for their work.”

And I, well…

“We are 3 blocks from Canal St. I just purchased the DVD of a movie that hasn’t been released yet for $5 and this designer knockoff was only 30 bucks. God Bless America!”

One of the main reasons DRM is so hot button right now is because of the quality and ease of new technology.

Jordan adds:

“With a book you first had to actually copy it or typeset it. When copiers came along you still had to stand at a copy machine to make copies and chances were that it was not nearly as good as the original. That’s simply not the case with a digital copy. It’s just as good as the original.”

But when it comes to rights management in the social media space regarding our clients, because we are SEOs, we are very by the book/white hat about things. The worst thing you can do is get a client banned on MySpace because you just HAD to change the unchangable meta data and really, REALLY needed to make javascript work in the profile.

Because the internet is always evolving in such a ‘you aint seen nothin’ yet!‘ manner, sometimes it’s hard to keep up. We here at ECommerce Partners are constantly keeping up with the latest news, trends, programming codes and internet laws as they become available. We would be honored to set a legal precedence in a historic court battle; but we much prefer to serve our clients and offer the best eCommerce solutions and SEO/SEM services available.

What would you do if you were Google? (Imagine that thought for an instance!)

I don’t mean in size or capitalization, but just as the newish owner of a social networking website that specializes in video. I mean of course the difficult newly-adopted child, YouTube.

Consider that you’d purchased, for $1.65 billion, the upwardly rocketing newcomer, only to find that with all the added commercial scrutiny your jaw-droppingly enormous deal attracted, it turned out that video – the absolute mainstay of your new possession’s identity – was freshly the subject of ugly copyright disputes with some real BIG guys.

And by big guys I mean enormous media outfits like Viacom and NBC Universal. The trouble has gotten serious in recent days with Viacom filing its & billion suit for damages. Also included in the troublesome scenario have been smaller but still on occasions vitally important players, like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who right after the Oscars ceremony demanded YouTube take down scenes from the trophy-fest – which of course it exclusively owns.

You might consider changing tack, wouldn’t you? Well … softly, softly Google is still trying to negotiate reasonable accommodations with the indispensable titans of the content universe, but at the same time it IS changing tack. It’s concentrating on tying up a broad range of really quite small entities, which in the main could be described as niche purveyors.

Two typical examples … the National Basketball Association with whom YouTube is teaming up to create a new channel where the NBA itself would show authorized clips and where fans could upload short videos showcasing their best moves … and the independent music label, Wind-Up Records, who will stream music videos on YouTube and allow users to incorporate Wind-Up music tracks into their own videos.

Jordan Hoffner, You Tube’s head of Premium and Information Content Partnerships has set up a team dedicated to creating partnerships with such relatively minor entities in the video-production universe, and so far they have concluded some 1,000 deals – with little or no publicity, and certainly no details of the financial arrangements being made public. The partners range from the Sundance Channel to tiny production houses of video. (And just looking at the YouTube home page reveals already participating companies like Ford Models, Ford Motor Company – not to be confused with each other – Hollywood Records, and the YES sports network.)

And just to be clear again, this doesn’t mean that YouTube execs are ignoring the really big video-producers, the ones who can mean such legal trouble, but do control that essential video commodity in such bulk. They have now signed a deal, after all, with the BBC, one of the world’s biggest and oldest content-providers (and how they hate that description!). But it appears to be far from a triumphant accomplishment. Indeed industry insiders are saying the BBC deal isn’t all it was cracked up to be by YouTube, and falls far short of the deals YouTubers have been aiming for, so unsuccessfully so far, with US networks.

Predominantly only short BBC clips are being offered to YouTube visitors, including excerpts from shows like “Spooks,” “Top Gear” and “The Catherine Tate Show” (they’re British – and not known much beyond Britain) as well as the posting of 30 new news clips daily on YouTube – though that is some months away. Advertising, something the publicly-funded BBC has traditionally been forbidden to carry, will be displayed alongside some clips, but only for visitors from outside the UK.

And Google itself won’t be able to take advantage of the new deal – the BBC material is limited to YouTube, since “the Beeb” already has a broader search-based deal with Google’s rival Yahoo.

So we have a new Congress, due to start its possibly more bipartisan ways (or alternatively, its vengeful rollback of Bush policies) in a few short weeks. And of course we still have in the meantime those same weeks to spend with the old Congress, now inescapably labeled a “lame-duck”.

Did you know, by the way, that the unkind phrase for such truncated power comes originally from my old home town’s (London’s) Stock Exchange – soon to be possibly swallowed up by its transatlantic modern-day successor, NASDAQ? In the genuinely old days, a stockbroker whose credit was entirely used up, but who still tried to deal despite his bankruptcy, was given that unflattering description.

But our current lame duck could still, according to the activist group, the Center for Democracy & Technology (http://www.cdt.org) create some sever and lasting damage. And it has issued a warning (http://www.cdt.org/legislation/2006watchlameduck.php) on some dangerous internet-connected laws that the session may attempt to pass, and that will need resistance.

The Center argues that these proposed legislative changes threaten Web users and publishers, either by jeopardizing privacy or imposing burdensome restrictions on Web site owners. One of the bills, a mandatory data retention law, would require Internet Service Providers to retain information about users for at least one year.

The bill endangers users’ online privacy for at least two reasons, according to CDT. One is that the government could seek information about individual users’ search history or other Web activity for all sorts of investigatory purposes – and as is often the suspicion with government, it need not necessarily be legitimate. The other consideration is that if an ISP is thus empowered to collect and store vast volumes of data, in order to comply with governmental requirements, this same provider could also leak this data, either deliberately or not.

If that sounds too conspiracy-theorist to you, there is a disturbing precedent on record already, in fairly recent history. The lobbyists of CDT don’t overtly refer to it in their current warning, but industry watchers like those hawk-eyes at MediaPost.com (mediapost.com) readily point to the AOL debacle of summer 2006.

You’ll recall, I am sure, how an AOL employee quite intentionally put out publicly online (with a minimum of “anonymizing”) the search histories of 650,000 users, which had been conducted over a period of months. When a large, public company finds itself – compromising its users’ privacy even if only temporarily – till they were shamed within days into taking the offending material down – we are all left (conspiracy-theorists or not) to contemplate the potential for massive error by accident or omission.

The CDT also points out, on another self-interested level for users, that legally requiring ISPs and other companies involved in connectivity to retain vast amounts of data will be costly -and that the consumer will ultimately have to carry that increased cost.