The U.S. government is mandating a program called Secure Communities be enforced in the city starting Tuesday, May 15. Secure Communities requires police to send fingerprints of everyone arrested to immigration officials. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents then check to see whether that person should be deported.

City officials said yesterday the program threatens New York’s immigrant-friendly nature, where police trust immigrants to report crimes, not fear being stopped by cops.

“Secure Communities would put us all at risk by making law-abiding New Yorkers less likely to report a crime or come forward as a witness,” Public Advocate Bill de Blasio said.

Both the city and state fought Secure Communities; in 2011, when the program was optional, Gov. Andrew Cuomo suspended state participation.

But now, it’s mandatory and New York police have no choice but to comply.

Federal officials argue the program is an effective way to deport violent criminals.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, more than 135,000 illegal immigrants convicted of crimes across the nation were removed through Secure Communities since the inception of the program in 2008. Nearly 50,000 of those deported were convicted of offenses like murder, rape and sexual abuse of children.

But critics say that the program does not differentiate between dangerous criminals and people who are arrested during a mere traffic stop. Also at risk for deportation could be those people who are arrested and charged with a crime, only to have the charges dropped later.

Some also worry the program will make immigrants less likely to trust police and report crimes, such as terrorism, in their neighborhoods.

De Blasio penned a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Sunday, asking him to halt the program. And City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said she would monitor the program and is drafting legislation to clarify the limits of NYPD contact with immigrants.

What does the NYPD do now?

Right now, when ICE asks New York to hold a prisoner, the city only honors the request if the person meets one of the following criteria:

Previously convicted of a misdemeanor or felony
Defendant in a pending criminal case
Has an outstanding criminal warrant
Is or has been subject to a final deportation order
Is a known gang member in the FBI’s national gang database
Identified as a possible match in terrorist screening database

“We wish they would have looked at the process we developed here, which strikes the right balance by protecting public safety and national security while ensuring we remain immigrant friendly,” said John Feinblatt, a chief policy advisor to Bloomberg.

How does the process work?

An ICE spokesman said that the fingerprints are checked against their database of immigrants who entered the country legally, looking for whether arrestees are listed there.

And that database might also include immigrants who came into the country legally, but overstayed their visas or were picked up by the police but let go while immigration proceedings continued, an ICE spokesman said.

If the fingerprints do not match at all, officials investigate things like Social Security numbers to find out whether the person might be in the country illegally. Read more from Metro New York

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, however, the Justice Department argued that the agency model came from the publishers, not Apple. And therein lies the key to the government’s price-fixing complaint.

Before the iPad’s arrival, publishers sold e-books to retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble on a wholesale basis, charging about half the list price of the hardback edition. The retailers then set whatever price they pleased. After it released the Kindle in 2007, Amazon started selling the most popular titles for $9.99 — taking a loss on the book sales in the hope of promoting sales of its new $399 device. That discount put pressure on other e-book retailers to follow suit.

The contracts Apple signed with five of the six largest publishers ushered in a different pricing arrangement. Those contracts let the publishers dictate the price of the e-books sold through the iTunes store, with Apple taking a 30% commission. Notably, they also included a “most favored nation” clause that required the publishers to offer e-books to Apple’s rivals for no less than the price at iTunes. This combination of factors effectively forced other retailers to adopt the agency model just to compete with Apple.

The publishers and Apple, who also face a class-action suit in federal court in New York, have denied any collusion, and Apple has argued that the agency model allowed it to compete in the e-book market without having to lose money on e-book sales.

The Justice Department outlined an alternative explanation in court papers released Wednesday. According to the DOJ, Apple initially assumed it would buy e-books from publishers at conventional wholesale prices. “At the suggestion of two Publisher Defendants, however, Apple began to consider selling e-books under the ‘agency model,’ ” the department alleged. It added:

In January 2010, Apple sent to each Publisher Defendant substantively identical term sheets that would form the basis of the nearly identical agency agreements that each Publisher Defendant would sign with Apple (“Apple Agency Agreements”). Apple informed the publishers that it had devised these term sheets after “talking to all the publishers”….

Through frequent in-person meetings, phone calls, and electronic communications, Publisher Defendants, facilitated by Apple, assured each other of their mutual intent to reach agreement with Apple. After each round of negotiations with Apple over the terms of their agency agreements, Publisher Defendants’ CEOs immediately contacted each other to discuss strategy and verify where each stood with Apple. They also used Apple to verify their position vis-à-vis other Publisher Defendants. Penguin, for example, sought Apple’s assurance that it was “1 of 4 before signing” — an assurance that Apple provided. Two days later, Penguin and two other Publisher Defendants signed Apple Agency Agreements.

Five of the six major publishers — Penguin (a unit of Pearson), Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Hachette — signed “functionally identical” agency deals with Apple over a three-day period in January 2010, a few months before the iPad was unveiled, the department’s complaint contends.

The whole point of the arrangement, the complaint asserts, was to give both sides something they coveted. The publishers wanted to raise the price of their e-books, and Apple wanted to “avoid retail price competition from Amazon.”

Remember, these are just allegations. And the three publishers who agreed to settle the department’s claims against them — Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster — did so without admitting to any of the accusations.

In case you missed it, The Times’ editorial board weighed in on the issue Wednesday morning before the lawsuit and settlements were announced. The board noted that defenders of the agency model for e-books say it helped loosen Amazon’s stranglehold on the markets for e-books and e-book readers. But that defense won’t be much help if the department can prove that Apple and the publishers colluded to set prices. Read more from the Los Angeles Times

A state with its own immigration law — that is, its own foreign policy — raises obvious constitutional issues. The Supreme Court is taking up S.B. 1070 next month, addressing the question of whether federal authority pre-empts state and local immigration crackdowns. A decision is expected this summer. The court could help bottle up a dangerous trend, or unleash more mischief across the country.

Last year was a banner year for immigration laws in the states. Arizona’s law set a low standard that other states have tried to match or outdo. Thirty-one states introduced legislation in 2011 imitating all or part of S.B. 1070, and five — Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Utah — went whole hog, passing Arizona-style omnibus laws.

Despite evidence that such laws are terrible for business and constitutionally unsound — courts have blocked key parts of the laws in Arizona and the copycat states, while employers and residents have complained bitterly about their burdens and expense — lawmakers have not been deterred. Missouri, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia are considering similar crackdowns. (Mississippi’s bill also includes a provision that shields “international business executives” from being hassled by the police, perhaps inspired by an incident in Alabama where a manager from Mercedes-Benz was arrested under the new immigration law.)

The restrictionist trend is hitting cities and local governments, too, hundreds of which have passed laws and ordinances touching on immigration, including requiring employers to certify workers’ legal status, cracking down on rental housing, mandating English as an official language, and forbidding day laborers to seek work in public. Some of these have faced legal challenges — notably the anti-solicitation laws, which have had a string of defeats in federal district and appellate courts.

The new legal crazy quilt isn’t all hostile to immigrants. Some places are trying to be more welcoming while ensuring that immigration remains a federal responsibility. New York City and Cook County, Ill., are among the governments that have passed laws limiting the role of local police in immigration arrests, and California is considering such a law. While lawmakers in 37 states last year proposed bills requiring the use of a federal database, E-Verify, to check the immigration status of job applicants, most of those measures were rejected; only eight states adopted new E-Verify regulations last year. Arizona, Mississippi, South Carolina and Utah already had such laws; California and Illinois have laws forbidding governments to force employers to use E-Verify.

The zeal to crack down locally is based on several fallacies. One is that the federal government hasn’t enforced immigration laws, even though it has greatly expanded border security in the last decade and the Obama administration is deporting immigrants at a record clip. Another is that illegal immigration is soaring, when it has ebbed in the last few years.

The final myth is that voters really want unrelenting harshness. In fact, polls show broad support for a comprehensive federal solution with tougher border and workplace enforcement, but also a path to legalization for the undocumented and a streamlined process for new legal immigrants.

The reaction in places like Alabama, where civil rights advocates who re-enacted the Selma-to-Montgomery march last week demanded the repeal of the state’s immigration law, shows that citizens are willing to fight back when their lawmakers go too far. Read more from the New York Times

Good news for Megaupload users: Your data just got a two-week reprieve from being deleted.

Friday, U.S. district attorney Neil MacBride had written to Megaupload’s lawyers, informing them that federal investigators had finished reviewing Megaupload data, and that it could be deleted from servers just one week later. “It is our understanding that the hosting companies may begin deleting the contents of the servers beginning as early as February 2, 2012,” wrote MacBride.
In the United States, Megaupload leases servers from two hosting providers: Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications. Since the Justice Department froze Megaupload’s assets, however, the file-sharing site could no longer pay its leasing bills.

But Ira Rothken, Megaupload’s U.S. attorney, said the two hosting providers have since agreed that they won’t delete the Megaupload data they’re storing, for at least two more weeks. “The hosting companies have been gracious enough to provide additional time so we can work out some kind of arrangement with the government,” Rothken said, according to news reports. The negotiations are meant to free up funds to pay the hosting providers to recover some data, which he said may also aid Megaupload’s defense.

[ Proposed U.S. anti-piracy legislation has been widely criticized for trampling Internet privacy, but are EU Data Rules Worse Than SOPA? ]

The data reprieve means that Megaupload users who used the cyberlocker service to store files may one day regain access to them. The servers have remained offline since being taken down earlier this month by the FBI, after a Justice Department indictment–unsealed in federal court–accused seven Megaupload executives of racketeering, money laundering, and copyright violations, and of using their file-sharing site to amass $175 million in “criminal proceeds.”

That takedown quickly sparked a reaction from some other file-sharing sites. For starters, 4shared, FileJungle, FilePost, Fileserve, UploadStation, VideoBB, and VideoZer began deleting accounts, disabling sharing, or canceling affiliate programs that rewarded people for uploading popular content. Similarly, FileSonic–which has seen a billion page views per month–disabled sharing and canceled its affiliate program. But other file-sharing sites, such as MediaFire and RapidShare, have said they have nothing to fear over their cyberlocker business practices.

Given that variation in reaction, what legal lessons might be drawn from the Megaupload takedown? So far, that’s not entirely clear. While the company’s founder, Kim Dotcom, remains in prison in New Zealand at the request of the FBI, he’s denied all of the charges leveled against Megaupload, and said he plans to mount a vigorous defense.

Furthermore, the Justice Department has faced criticism over the takedown for not distinguishing between material stored on Megaupload’s servers that may have infringed U.S. copyright laws, and non-copyrighted material that was legitimately stored there by users, some of whom had purchased a premium subscription from Megaupload. Lawyers in other countries have also accused the Justice Department and FBI of overstepping their authority by taking Megaupload offline not just in the United States, but worldwide.

In addition, the indictment itself has been criticized for being founded on a criminal complaint. Past cases involving alleged copyright infringement–for example, involving YouTube–weren’t treated as criminal matters, but rather civil ones, said Jeff Ifrah, an attorney who co-chairs the American Bar Association’s criminal justice section and committee on white collar crime, speaking recently by phone.

The bigger lesson, Ifrah said, may be simply that the Obama administration is attempting to satisfy demands from music and movie trade associations that it do something about piracy. “We have an administration that’s very captive to that industry,” he said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if they were the ones propelling the Eastern District action in this case. That’s the only reason you get a prosecutor who wants to ignore the fine line between civil and criminal in this case.” Read more from Information Week

In March a federal district court judge in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Prince — whose career was built on appropriating imagery created by others — broke the law by taking photographs from a book about Rastafarians and using them without permission to create the collages and a series of paintings based on them, which quickly sold for serious money even by today’s gilded art-world standards: almost $2.5 million for one of the works. (“Wow — yeah,” Mr. Prince said when a lawyer asked him under oath in the district court case if that figure was correct.)

The decision, by Judge Deborah A. Batts, set off alarm bells throughout Chelsea and in museums across America that show contemporary art. At the heart of the case, which Mr. Prince is now appealing, is the principle called fair use, a kind of door in the bulwark of copyright protections. It gives artists (or anyone for that matter) the ability to use someone else’s material for certain purposes, especially if the result transforms the thing used — or as Judge Pierre N. Leval described it in an influential 1990 law review article, if the new thing “adds value to the original” so that society as a whole is culturally enriched by it. In the most famous test of the principle, the Supreme Court in 1994 found a possibility of fair use by the group 2 Live Crew in its sampling of parts of Roy Orbison’s “Oh Pretty Woman” for the sake of one form of added value, parody.

In the Prince case the notoriously slippery standard for transformation was defined so narrowly that artists and museums warned it would leave the fair-use door barely open, threatening the robust tradition of appropriation that goes back at least to Picasso and underpins much of the art of the last half-century. Several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan, rallied to the cause, filing papers supporting Mr. Prince and calling the decision a blow to “the strong public interest in the free flow of creative expression.” Scholars and lawyers on the other side of the debate hailed it instead as a welcome corrective in an art world too long in thrall to the Pictures Generation — artists like Mr. Prince who used appropriation beginning in the 1970s to burrow beneath the surface of media culture.

But if the case has had any effect so far, it has been to drag into the public arena a fundamental truth hovering somewhere just outside the legal debate: that today’s flow of creative expression, riding a tide of billions of instantly accessible digital images and clips, is rapidly becoming so free and recycling so reflexive that it is hard to imagine it being slowed, much less stanched, whatever happens in court. It is a phenomenon that makes Mr. Prince’s artful thefts — those collages in the law firm’s office — look almost Victorian by comparison, and makes the copyright battle and its attendant fears feel as if they are playing out in another era as well, perhaps not Victorian but certainly pre-Internet.

In many ways the art world is a latecomer to the kinds of copyright tensions that have already played out in fields like music and movies, where extensive systems of policing, permission and licensing have evolved. But art lawyers say that legal challenges are now coming at a faster pace, perhaps in part because the art market has become a much bigger business and because of the extent of the borrowing ethos.

Dip almost anywhere into contemporary art over the last couple of years to see the extent. The group show “Free” at the New Museum in 2010 was built partly around the very idea of the borrowing culture, the way the Web is radically reordering the concept of appropriation, with works that “lift, borrow and reframe digital images — not in a rebellious act of stealing or a deconstructive act of critique — but as a way to participate thoughtfully and actively in a culture that is highly circulated, hybridized, internationalized,” as its curator, Lauren Cornell, wrote.

Christian Marclay’s wildly popular video “The Clock” from 2010 was 24 hours of appropriation, made from thousands of stitched-together fragments from films and television shows. Rob Pruitt’s show “Pattern and Degradation” at the Gavin Brown and Maccarone galleries in 2010 lifted designs from Lilly Pulitzer, from Web photo memes and from a couple of T-shirt designers, whose angry supporters staged a flash-mob demonstration to protest the use of the design without attribution.

Mr. Marclay and Mr. Pruitt were both born before the 1980s. But to look at the work of younger artists, especially of those who don’t remember a time before the Web, is to get a true sense of the velocity, and changing nature, of appropriation.

“For the generation that I spend my days with, there’s not even any ideological baggage that comes along with appropriation anymore,” said Stephen Frailey, an artist whose work has used appropriation and who runs the undergraduate photography program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. “They feel that once an image goes into a shared digital space, it’s just there for them to change, to elaborate on, to add to, to improve, to do whatever they want with it. They don’t see this as a subversive act. They see the Internet as a collaborative community and everything on it as raw material.”

At the same time the tools for mining and remolding those mountains of raw material are proliferating. In November a developer and a designer introduced an iPad art app called Mixel, aimed at amateurs but certain to end up in artists’ studios. It allows users to grab images from the Web or elsewhere, collage them almost effortlessly and then pass them around, social media style, for appreciation or re-mixing.

One of its creators, Khoi Vinh, a former design director of NYTimes.com, has been surprisingly frank when asked about the tsunami of copyright problems such an idea stirs up. “This is really a case of, you have to do it, try it and ask for forgiveness later,” he said to an interviewer. “Otherwise it would never get out there.”

In a homage-to-old-“Sesame Street” video that was made to promote the app, the friendly narrator urges, “Pick anything that inspires you.” And, in a sense, that simple exhortation goes to the heart of the issues raised by the Prince case and Web-driven reuse culture in general.

American copyright law has always performed a complicated balancing act involving both commerce and culture. It tries to protect products of creativity so that people have economic incentive to keep on creating, so that a new movie, for example, is not immediately copied and resold on Canal Street, depriving the moviemaker of the possibility of income. But the law has also evolved ways to allow for creative uses of copying: the fair use exemption, which allows some copying for things like criticism, comment or news reporting.

Over the last couple of decades part of the equation for deciding whether fair use is indeed fair is how much the thing copied has been transformed. In other words, even if we are long past making anything completely new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes declared a couple of millenniums ago, copying should be allowed only to the degree to which it adds to or builds on what came before.

Deciding what is sufficiently transformative and what is not has often been tough enough in other cultural realms, like music and literature. But as copyright tensions mount and the courts increasingly confront the issue in contemporary art, the question becomes ever trickier. In large part this is because the questions turns on artistic intent, often a much grayer area in the visual arts than in other arts, and especially so over the last three decades as art movements have fragmented.

What were Mr. Prince’s intentions in re-using the Rastafarian pictures taken by the French photographer Patrick Cariou and why did he choose them? For the sake of parody? For criticism? Or did he just pick something that inspired him, for reasons as difficult to plumb as any those of many postmodern artists?

In a deposition in the case that was recently published as part of an unlikely art book by the writer and director Greg Allen, lawyers for Mr. Cariou follow Mr. Prince deep into the strange and often trackless territory of artistic intention. About as close as they get to pinning him down is that he wanted to use the borrowed pictures to explore his fascination with the painting of Willem de Kooning and also thought of his collages and paintings as part of an idea for a movie about a post-apocalyptic world in which Rastafarians, famous literary lesbians and others commandeer hotels on St. Bart’s.

“So what are four lesbians from the early 20th century doing on St. Bart’s in, now, when there’s a nuclear war, like why are they there?” a lawyer asked Mr. Prince, who responded: “Your guess is as good as mine. That’s what I do, I make things up.”

At another point in the transcript of the deposition, a lawyer asked, “What is the message?”

Mr. Prince replied, “The message is to make great art that makes people feel good.”

He also made it clear that he was not making art that commented on Mr. Cariou’s work itself. (Judge Batts ruled that for a work to be transformative it must “in some way comment on, relate to the historical context of, or critically refer back to the original works” it borrows from, a test she said Mr. Prince’s work failed.)

In an interview Daniel Brooks, Mr. Cariou’s lawyer, said that if such a subjective principle for borrowing as Mr. Prince’s were to become the legal standard — and in parts of the art world it is already much more subjective in practice — there would be no way to protect copyright.

“It can’t just be random, that he ‘liked it,’ because there’s no practical boundary to that,” he said.

But Joshua Schiller, Mr. Prince’s appeals lawyer from the firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner, said the boundary is whether a new work of art results from the borrowing. And he argued that it was clear that Mr. Prince had made parts of Mr. Cariou’s pictures into distinctive Richard Prince works, not just copy them to pass them off as his own and deprive Mr. Cariou of his livelihood. Whether the work was successful and whether Mr. Prince’s intentions were interesting or even explainable can be left to debate. But the primary intention was to create a work of art, Mr. Schiller said, and that is the kind of creativity the law seeks to encourage.

“This is not piracy,” he said. “These are not handbags.”

Mr. Prince’s appeal will probably be heard in the next few months. But the decision will not answer the larger questions about how copyright should evolve to deal with the reality of artists in a digital world or how the art world should deal with such questions morally and ethically. The possibility has often been raised of establishing an extensive system of licensing and permissions for images and other artistic material, akin to the one that operates in the music industry, but even many advocates of stricter copyright standards do not seem optimistic that such a system could work in the art world.

At a debate about the Prince case at the New York City Bar Association last month Virginia Rutledge, an art lawyer and former general counsel for Creative Commons, a nonprofit group that advocates for more open copyright standards, said she believed that the problem facing the art world was as much a “cultural attribution crisis” as a legal crisis and that the problem could be at least partly addressed by cultivating a stronger climate of simple acknowledgement and credit.

But Hank Willis Thomas, one of the artists taking part in the debate, said that the recycle and remix culture was gaining speed so rapidly that trying to bring order to it was, even now, like trying to hit a moving target.

“Whatever’s after this,” he added, “is going to be pretty crazy.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 1, 2012

A cover article this weekend about the legality of visual artists’ appropriating the images of others misstates the action the Supreme Court took in a 1994 case regarding the group 2 Live Crew’s sampling of a Roy Orbison song. The court referred the case back to a lower court and, in the process, clarified the legal standard to be applied; the court did not find fair use in the case. Read more from the New York Times

Bikram Choudhury, famed creator of Bikram Yoga, is suing Yoga to the People in the East Village for stealing his signature sequence of yoga poses.

Choudhury is demanding $1 million from Gregory Gumucio, a former student and the owner of Yoga to the People, for profiting off of what he says are his copyrighted yoga moves, as first reported by DNAinfo.

Choudhury claims he has copyright protection of his sequence of 26 poses and 105-degree temperature environment, and says Gumucio’s “Traditional Hot Yoga” classes are a ripoff of his idea.

“The use of the copyrighted material is limited to certified Bikram yoga studios,” Robert Gilchrest, Choudhury’s attorney said.

In order to become a Bikram-certified studio, Gilchrest said, instructors must pay $10,000 to study under Choudhury and get explicit permission from Choudhury to teach Bikram.

“It’s crazy that [Choudhury] can think he owns yoga,” Gumucio responded. “If he owns the sequence, it opens a floodgate for lots of people to start trying to copyright, trademark and patent this traditional, sacred knowledge.”

Gumucio, in addition to his legal defense, has started an online petition on YogaTruth.Org to protect what he says is the public’s right to yoga.

Can you copyright a class?

Metro spoke with intellectual property lawyer Douglas Wyatt about the legality of the lawsuit.

“It is possible for yoga poses to be protected,” Wyatt said. “The copyright statutes allow for the protection of expression, which includes things like dance.”

He also said that the whopping $1 million price tag may not even be out of bounds.

“The valuation of copyright and copyrighted material depends on the market. There might not be an established rate,” he said, referring to the range of how much people pay for a yoga class. Yoga to the People charges $8 per class; Bikram demands $20. Read more from Metro New York

The order, announced by the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, stems largely from changes that Facebook made to the way it handled its users’ information in December 2009. The commission contended that Facebook, without warning its users or seeking consent, made public information that users had deemed to be private on their Facebook pages.

The order also said that Facebook, which has more than 800 million users worldwide, in some cases had allowed advertisers to glean personally identifiable information when a Facebook user clicked on an advertisement on his or her Facebook page. The company has long maintained that it does not share personal data with advertisers.

And the order said that Facebook had shared user information with outside application developers, contrary to representations made to its users. And even after a Facebook user deleted an account, according to the F.T.C., the company still allowed access to photos and videos.

All told, the commission listed eight complaints. It levied no fines and did not accuse Facebook of intentionally breaking the law. However, if Facebook violated the terms of the settlement in the future, it would be liable to pay a penalty of $16,000 a day for each count, the F.T.C. said.

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, conceded in a lengthy blog post that the company had made “a bunch of mistakes,” but said it had already fixed several of the issues cited by the commission.

“Facebook has always been committed to being transparent about the information you have stored with us — and we have led the Internet in building tools to give people the ability to see and control what they share,” he wrote. By way of example, Mr. Zuckerberg pointed to more explicit privacy controls that the company introduced over the summer.

Facebook has long wanted its users to post content — links, opinions, pictures and other data — on their Facebook pages with minimal effort, or “friction,” as company executives call it. The settlement with the F.T.C. will undoubtedly require it to introduce more such friction.

The order requires Facebook to obtain its users’ “affirmative express consent” before it can override their own privacy settings. For example, if a user designated certain content to be visible only to “friends,” Facebook could allow that content to be shared more broadly only after obtaining the user’s permission.

On Tuesday evening there seemed to be some disagreement about what the agreement entailed. A Facebook spokesman said in response to a question that it did not require the company to obtain “opt in” data-sharing permission for new products.

But David Vladeck, director of the bureau of consumer protection at the F.T.C., said Facebook would have to inform its users about how personal data would be shared even with new products and services that it introduces over the next two decades. “The order is designed to protect people’s privacy, anticipating that Facebook is likely to change products and services it offers,” he said.

Ever since its public release in 2004, Facebook has drawn an ever-larger number of members, even as its sometimes aggressive approach to changes around privacy have angered some of its users.

“We’ve all known that Facebook repeatedly cuts corners when it comes to its privacy promises,” Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, wrote in an e-mail after the announcement. “Like most Internet companies, they thought they could get away with it. They didn’t.”

Facebook is also obliged to undergo an independent privacy audit every two years for the next 20 years, according to the terms of the settlement.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is part of a coalition of consumer groups that filed a complaint with the F.T.C., commended the order but said settlements with individual companies fall short of what is needed: a federal law to protect consumer privacy.

“We hope they will establish a high bar for privacy protection,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “But we do not have in the United States a comprehensive privacy framework. There is always a risk other companies will come along and create new problems.”

Several privacy bills are pending in Congress, and Internet companies have stepped up their lobbying efforts. The F.T.C., meanwhile, has ratcheted up its scrutiny of Internet companies. This year alone, it has reached settlement orders with some of the giants of Silicon Valley, including Google.

The order comes amid growing speculation about Facebook’s preparations for an initial public offering, which could be valued at more than $100 billion. The settlement with the F.T.C., analysts say, could potentially ease investors’ concerns about government regulation by holding the company to a clear set of privacy prescriptions.

“When you have an I.P.O. you don’t want investors to be skeptical or jittery,” said Ryan Calo, who leads privacy research at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “In order for you to be as valuable as possible, you want to make sure the seas are calm. This calms the seas.” Read more from the New York Times

The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry claims the Brooklyn Grange cannot use the word “grange” in its title because it has a trademark on the word.

The Washington, D.C.-based organization filed a lawsuit on Nov. 1 in Brooklyn federal court in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York to stop the farm from using the name. A court hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

“We needed to take action to preserve our name,” said National Grange spokeswoman Amanda Brozana, whose group sent a letter to the rooftop farm more than a year ago. “It’s something we’ve had since the late 1800s.”

The National Grange has more than 2,500 chapters, including one in Connecticut known as the Brooklyn Grange since 1886, she said.

“Preserving the name ‘grange’ is really not about being stingy with a word,” said Brozana, who added local chapters do everything from donating dictionaries to local children to building playgrounds. “It’s our true identity.”

The group holds a trademark on “grange” for anything from farmers markets and catering to jewelry and clothing, she said. But it does license it for annual fees ranging from $100 to $1,000.

Trademark attorney Stephen Baker, who has no affiliation with the case, said it is fairly common for companies and organizations to obtain trademarks in the fields that they do business in.

The word “grange” means a farm or a “farmhouse with outbuildings,” according to Merriam-Webster.

But “you can’t use a trademark if it’s likely to cause confusion with another company that uses the same or a confusingly similar trademark,” said Baker, of the Manhattan and New Jersey firm Baker and Rannells, PA.

James Bikoff, the lawyer who represents the National Grange, said his client has communicated with the Brooklyn Grange, but they have not reached a resolution.

“We wouldn’t have filed the suit if we didn’t feel we were in the right,” Bikoff said.

The Brooklyn Grange, which planted its first crop in May 2010, did not respond to questions on whether it plans to fight the case in court.

“We respect the work of the National Grange and their long history of supporting small farms,” the farm said in a statement. “We hope we can come to a resolution of this matter.”

BY CLARE TRAPASSO

Read more from New York Daily News

A three-judge panel of the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia upheld its earlier ruling that the FCC’s indecency fine of $500,000 against the network was invalid.

At issue is the procedural process the regulatory agency used to fine CBS for the 2004 halftime show in which Justin Timberlake tore off a piece of Janet Jackson’s clothing, exposing her breast for a few seconds to an audience of about 90 million. Jackson later attributed the incident to a “wardrobe malfunction,” a phrase that became part of the lexicon. The court ruled that the FCC’s fine represented an undisclosed change in the enforcement of its indecency policy with regard to “fleeting images” and hence could not be enforced.

“We again set forth our reasoning and conclusion that the FCC failed to acknowledge that its order in this case reflected a policy change and improperly imposed a penalty on CBS for violating a previously unannounced policy,” the court said.

The FCC said in a statement that while it was disappointed by the decision, it was pleased that the court “did not question the FCC’s statutory responsibility to regulate indecent broadcasting” and added that the agency would “continue to use all of the authority at its disposal to ensure that the nation’s broadcasters fulfill the public interest responsibilities that accompany their use of the public airwaves.”

“We are gratified that once again the court has ruled in our favor. We are hopeful that this will help lead the FCC to return to the policy of restrained indecency enforcement it followed for decades,” CBS said in a statement.

It is unclear whether the FCC will appeal the ruling to either the full 3rd Circuit or to the Supreme Court, both of which are options. A spokesman for the FCC referred calls to the Department of Justice and a spokesman there said the matter was under review.

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