While debate regarding unauthorized use of Facebook pics rages on, a photograph from the pre-digital age has gotten one indie group in some serious trouble. Former fashion model Ann Kirsten Kennis is suing buzz band Vampire Weekend for a cool $2 million, claiming a 1983 photo of her was used in their Contra album cover art without her consent.

Kennis, who currently resides in Fairfield, Connecticut, with her family, was reportedly very surprised to see her doe-in-headlights likeness in a preppy Polo shirt on the Contra cover, when her daughter showed her the disc earlier this year. “Her daughter came home one day and said, “Hi, Mom, see your picture?’” Kennis’s lawyer, Alan Neigher, told Entertainment Weekly. Neigher also told EW that the photo was never intended for professional use. “It was taken by her family. It was a Polaroid, not a modeling picture,” he insisted. “Her mother was a chronic Polaroid snapshot-taker, and used to sell whole archives of photographs to these shops, five bucks a hundred or whatever. Her mother may have given away to a charity bazaar a whole ream of photographs. We just really don’t know…[Kennis] has no idea how that photograph got into the photographer’s hands.”

The photographer in question is Tod Brody, who along with Vampire Weekend’s record label, XL Recordings, is also named in Kennis’s $2 million misappropriation-of-identity lawsuit. See, Kennis claims Brody duped Vampire Weekend into believing he was the photographer who had shot the Polo pic, and that he forged her signature (as “Kirsten Johnson” in one spot and “Kirsten Johnsen” in another, Neigher says) on the photo’s release form. Brody of course has denied this, telling EW: “Ms. Kennis’s claim that I didn’t take the photo is blatantly false. I took the photo in 1983. The photo was in my possession the entire time, for 26 years, until it was delivered to Vampire Weekend.” (Incidentally, the photograph seems to have been removed from Brody’s website, www.todbrodyphoto.com, although it was once included in the Portraits section under the file name “Kirsten.”)

The band, who reportedly paid $5,000 to use the picture, have also issued their own formal statement: “As is standard practice, Vampire Weekend and XL Recordings licensed the rights to use the photo on the cover of Contra pursuant to a license agreement that contains representations and warranties authorizing this use of the photo. Now that a lawsuit has been filed, we look forward to having the matter resolved in court.”

So there are several questions here. First, who took the photo–Kennis’s mother or Tod Brody? And if it was the mom, then did Brody really forge Kennis’s signature and claim he was the real photographer? And if so, how did he think he’d get away with such a scam, since it was inevitable that Kennis would eventually see the cover? (After all, the album did debut at number one on the Billboard album chart in January 2010, so it was hardly obscure.) Conversely, if it was Brody who took the pic, is it possible that Kennis failed to read the fine print and didn’t realize she was signing away rights to the picture 27 years ago?

And finally, did Vampire Weekend have any responsibility–as Kennis alleges–to make sure the photo release form’s signature was legit? It’s unclear just how much the band knew about their cover model before this lawsuit; when asked about the girl in interviews at the time of Contra’s release, they gave deliberately vague answers. Lead singer Ezra Koenig told MTV News: ”We know where the image came from, but we’re not being very specific about her. We don’t know her or anything….there’s just something infinitely fascinating about a nice portrait of somebody, especially when she’s got this ambiguous look, and people can read a lot into it….It makes you realize how much you can imagine about somebody when you know nothing about them, based on only a few signifiers.”

The mystery surrounding the enigmatic golden girl on the Contra cover continues, although not in the way Koenig may have imagined. Kennis retired from modeling years ago; additional photos of her, from either the past or present, professional or candid, are seemingly non-existent on the Web (even the profile pic on what appears to be her private Facebook page is a photo of a dog); and she’s refused to speak to the press thus far (she did come to the phone when the Village Voice rang her recently, and was reportedly polite, but declined to be interviewed). Perhaps when the reclusive ex-model finally appears in court, we’ll all find out the real story behind this now-infamous photograph.

More than 25,000 people and organizations have filed comments in a U.S. Federal Communications Commission inquiry into whether it should reclassify broadband as a regulated service, with the overwhelming majority appearing to favor such a move.

Thursday night was the deadline for the first round of comments in the FCC’s notice of inquiry (NOI) on reclassifying broadband from a largely unregulated information service to a regulated common-carrier service. Thousands of people filing comments in the NOI used form letters supplied by network neutrality supporters Free Press and Public Knowledge.

Public Knowledge had gotten more than 6,000 people to sign their petition and send comments to the FCC as of Friday morning, and it appears that Free Press’ campaign was even more successful.

“I rely on the Internet as a public platform for free speech, equal opportunity, economic growth and innovation,” the Free Press letters said. “Without vital Net Neutrality protections, companies like Verizon and Comcast, which have a commercial incentive to limit the free-flowing Web, can decide whether I will have a voice online. These companies should not have the power to determine my fate on the Internet.”

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed that the agency reclassify broadband and claim regulatory authority over broadband after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled the FCC did not have the authority to enforce informal net neutrality principles in a case involving Comcast and peer-to-peer traffic.

Genachowski and other supporters of broadband reclassification say it’s needed because the court ruling casts doubt on the agency’s ability to create formal net neutrality rules and enact large portions of its national broadband plan, released in March. Net neutrality rules would prohibit broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web content.

Under Genachowski’s plan, the FCC would forbear, or opt out of, enforcing most common-carrier regulations under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. However, because the proposal is just in the comment-collecting stage, it’s unclear how many common-carrier rules the FCC would attempt to enforce.

While thousands of people called for the FCC to reclassify broadband, several broadband providers and trade groups urged the FCC to keep broadband largely unregulated.

The ruling in the Comcast case did not strike down the FCC’s ability to take limited actions involving broadband service, it only struck down the agency’s method of enforcing informal net neutrality rules, Comcast said in a filing Thursday. New regulations could slow the FCC’s efforts to bring broadband to areas in the U.S. that don’t yet have it, the company said.

“We are committed to working cooperatively with the commission to offer better, faster, ubiquitously available, and widely adopted broadband Internet service,” Comcast’s filing said. “But Title II regulation, with or without forbearance, poses significant risks to the investment and innovation that will be needed to achieve these goals.”

The FCC proposal is “bad policy” that has raised the concern of more than half of U.S. lawmakers, Bob Quinn, senior vice president for federal regulatory policy at AT&T, wrote on the company’s policy blog. Reclassification would chill private investment in broadband and job creation in the telecom sector, he said.

“The FCC’s … proposal is truly like hunting flies in your home with a sledge-hammer,” Quinn said. “When it is all said and done, some of the walls, ceilings and floors will be gone but the flies will still be there.”

CTIA, a trade group representing mobile carriers, said the FCC “cannot show a market failure that would justify the type of heavy-handed regulation proposed.”

While many people commenting used the language from Free Press or Public Knowledge, others put the argument in their own words.

“The Internet is the greatest vehicle for communications ever invented,” wrote someone identifying himself as William Haynes. “It gives everybody the power of the press; everybody gets a voice. I have never seen a corporation who places the public interest above the corporate interest, or people above profits. Keeping the internet free of corporate control is essential to keep this unique line of communication free and open for all.”

Another commenter, identified as Paula Nessa, wrote that she’s married to a man who is “cheap,” by his own admission. “We depend on the NET for all sorts of free information and we don’t want it filtered by a commercial company,” she said. “Don’t limit us and the world to filtered information.”

MySpace is showing off today its new, polished look, which is a far cry from the hodge-podge of textboxes featuring strippers and porn star “friends.” The “clean new profile” was announced by CEO Sean Percival who revealed his profile page in stark black and white (although won’t we kind of miss that passionate purple?)

Like competitor Facebook, MySpace has put the profile on the left and created a MySpace Stream, similar to Facebook’s newsfeed, and uploads Twitter status updates.

It makes more sense as to why MySpace is buying Threadbox, a social messaging service that replaces email and instant messenger accounts, and is incorporating it into their site. MySpace’s heyday of 2007 is gone and it seems to be a sinking ship of irrelevance against the onslaught of Facebook, so it has to do something revolutionary to woo back a generation.

MySpace began losing users in 2008, when Facebook started muscling in its social network territory. By May 2009, Facebook’s unique visitors outstripped MySpace 70,278,000 to 70,255,000 and has never stopped, according to data provided to PC World from comScore. As of June, Facebook’s numbers were double those of MySpace — 141,638,000 to 66,633,000. In other words, since last year when both social networks were neck-and-neck, MySpace has dropped 5 percent while Facebook has grown 50 percent.

Shouldn’t that be a sign the users have spoken?

While MySpace showed some slight upticks in a few months, most notably in March 2010 when users jumped to 70,136,000 — likely due to its revamp and “Discover and be Discovered” campaign, numbers slid back down in April and still lower in May and June.

So far, user comments on the new interface have been positive, unless you’re one of those cynical folks who thinks that Percival might be editing out the negative comments on his profile page:

“How much longer do I have to wait to get this profile style. I don’t mind testing it!” net.xero wrote.

“I like it. Less cluttered. Hope to see many more improvements,” wrote Hockey BLADES.

I expect Myspace’s modern-looking user interface and may woo back more visitors, but if history is any indicator, it’s more likely that its numbers will be another quick rise and settle into a slow but inevitable sink.

Facebook is shuttering its virtual gifting service, which among many other items for a time included music. The Facebook Gift Shop closes Aug. 1, according to a company blog post, saying the move is to help “focus our product development efforts” such as photos, news feeds, games and comments.

The gifting service begat Facebook’s credit-based virtual currency, which lets users pay real money to buy virtual credits that could be used to buy virtual items. The credit system remains in place.

For a time, Facebook Gifts included the ability to buy and give away music tracks via the Lala service. Facebook and Lala struck the deal last October, and at the time Lala founder Bill Nguyen singled out Facebook’s credit system as a key motivator of the deal. However Facebook Gifts lost access to music when Lala shut down May 31.

“Closing the Gift Shop may disappoint many of the people who have given millions of gifts, but we made the decision after careful thought about where we need to focus our product development efforts,” he said in a blog post.

Morgenstern said Facebook users will no longer be able to give new gifts from August 1 but gifts that have been received will remain visible on a user’s page

By Grant Gross, IDG News