Marc Dautlich and Nick Eziefula of Times Online discuss the myriad ways that Web 2.0 is changing our concept of privacy and copyright.

From “podcast” to “poke”, “wiki” to “weblog”, the internet generation has a language all of its own. But since web guru Tim O’Reilly popularised the phrase “Web 2.0″ in 2004, even those who never considered themselves internet-literate have worked the new technology into their daily lives. Facebook, the social networking phenomenon, dominates water cooler conversations everywhere, having gained a staggering 42 million users since its worldwide launch in 2006. YouTube, which was founded as recently as 2005, attracts some 100 million page views a day.

New forms of interaction are forcing us to develop new social rules: is it wrong to spy on your ex’s Facebook page? At what point does an unanswered friend request become a gentle hint that you are not wanted? But such rapid change also raises a more serious question: do we need new laws to govern this changing internet landscape?

The analysis continues.

The New York Times reports today that several major libraries are saying no to Google:

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service.

Google pays to scan the books and does not directly profit from the resulting Web pages, although the books make its search engine more useful and more valuable. The libraries can have their books scanned again by another company or organization for dissemination more broadly.

It costs the Open Content Alliance as much as $30 to scan each book, a cost shared by the group’s members and benefactors, so there are obvious financial benefits to libraries of Google’s wide-ranging offer, started in 2004.

Many prominent libraries have accepted Google’s offer — including the New York Public Library and libraries at the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. Google expects to scan 15 million books from those collections over the next decade.

But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions.

The article continues the analysis.

The Open Content Alliance has just released a video which documents their intents and efforts.

Information Technology Week reports that the “seven-year-old battle over access to WHOIS data – the names, street addresses, e-mail addresses and phone numbers of those who have registered Internet domains — remains a stalemate this week, leaving reforms undone.”