Home / techdirt.com rss archive / August-26-2007


NYTimes Values Tracking Over Visitors; Keeps Freakonomics Feeds Crippled
It appears that despite the massive amount of reader backlash against the NY Times for switching the Freakonomics blog to partial RSS feeds rather than full feeds, the powers that be have decided to keep the feeds partially crippled. In the long explanation, Stephen Dubner references my own post about why full feeds actually increase page views, but basically says that it wasn't convincing enough for the money watchers at the Times. The reasoning behind the decision is pretty tortured, and Scott Karp does a fantastic job ripping it apart:"Sure, you can't place tracking cookies in these people's browsers or serve behaviorally target ads. But HOW IS THAT BETTER THAN NOT REACHING THEM AT ALL??? The idea that publishers, under pressure from advertisers, can put the horses back in the barn and get people to consume content through channels that publishers fully control, just like in old offline monopoly media, is so reactionary that it really does amount to betting against the...

Guy Who Uploaded Star Wars Wearing An Ankle Bracelet, Banned From Using Linux
When discussing how silly it is that the movie industry freaks out about people uploading movies online, we often point to the case of the last Star Wars movie. That movie was leaked the week before the movie came out in the theaters and was downloaded by fans around the world -- and yet it only seemed to get people more excited to go out and see it in the theaters. There were huge lines and theaters sold out left and right. That's because it's the same thing that many of us have been saying for years: going to the movies is a social experience. People want to go out with their friends and have fun and see a movie in the theater (that is, if the theater makes the experience worth while and doesn't treat them all as criminals or children). However, what we didn't know about that Star Wars example is that one of the guys who uploaded it (and you can bet that it was more than just one guy) ended up getting arrested for doing so and eventually he plead guilty to 'conspiracy...

Mary Meeker's YouTube Math Misses The Mark
YouTube's new ad overlays continue to engender a lot of discussion about their potential impact on the online video market. One person who is quite optimistic about the program is the infamous (but still employed at Morgan Stanley) Mary Meeker, who estimated that the new system would add a staggering $4.8 billion to Google's top line. But, as none other than Henry Blodget points out, there's a little problem with Meeker's analysis (via Valleywag). She mistakenly took CPM to mean 'cost per impression' rather than 'cost per thousand', meaning that her estimate was off by a factor of 1,000. In other words, by her own logic, the new ad system will contribute lead to a modest $4.8 million revenue bump, which is nothing compared to the $1.65 billion Google paid for the site. Meeker has been covering this space for a long time, so it's hard to imagine that she really didn't know what CPM meant. Perhaps she was just trying to rush out a quick report on the topic and didn't take...

Let's All Blame Facebook!
Well, you can tell that Facebook is the hot media darling company of the moment these days based on how many other companies are using it as a press hook for advertising themselves. Earlier this week we wrote about a bogus study claiming that Facebook was killing productivity. That report was based on a study done by a company that just happened to sell filters. It seems that others have quickly caught on. Constantine von Hoffman angrily points us to yet another security company that has put out a questionable poll claiming that half of all employers now completely restrict access to Facebook. This is making headlines all over the place this morning, but as von Hoffman notes, no one seems to be verifying that it's actually true. It's only sourced from the security firm, and some in the press are simply taking the firm's word on which companies block Facebook without actually checking with them to find out if it's true. It's definitely likely that Facebook is being blocked...

EU Tests Out Its New 'Patent Ambush' Antitrust Law On Rambus
Rambus has been involved in a whole series of lawsuits concerning its patents. If you don't recall, the company has been accused of sitting in on meetings for a standards body and then modifying its patent applications to cover technology included in the standard. Of course, once the patents were granted and the standards were set, Rambus basically went after everyone demanding licensing fees. The case has gone back and forth over the years in courts and in the US Federal Trade Commission -- who ruled that these actions were a violation of antitrust law. Over in Europe, it seems that officials feel that this is the perfect test case for a new kind of antitrust violation: "patent ambush." It's nice to see regulators realizing that abuse of patents should be considered an antitrust violation. Hopefully we'll see more of that going forward. Rambus, of course, claims this is nothing new, but it can't be good for them. In the meantime, as always when we post about Rambus,...

Analyst: If You Want To Keep Your Job, Keep Using Microsoft Office
For a long time, Google insisted that it had no intention of competing directly against Microsoft in its core business areas, but as the company started to expand its online office suite, it became clear that the two companies would form a rivalry. That being said, few have argued that Google's office apps actually offer a substitute for MS Office (at least not yet), but rather that they work well in certain key areas. Nonetheless, one analyst is warning that deploying Google apps could be a potentially "career limiting" move for any enterprise architects. In other words, don't throw out your Office licenses just because you can save money going with Google. That might be good advice, except that it's basically just knocking down a straw man, as it's hard to imagine there are many people out there actually considering such a drastic course of action. What's funny is that the analyst then goes on to describe the 'limited' areas where Google's service might be useful; they...

Another Good Patent Ruling: Standard For Willful Infringement Raised
Just last week, we were talking about how the fear of being accused of "willful infringement" was once again distorting the purpose of the patent system. If you're found willfully infringing, rather than just accidentally infringing, the damages can be tripled. For that reason, many companies now have policies telling employees that they are not to search through patents, as any indication that they saw a specific patent could potentially be used as evidence of willful infringement. However, there is some good news on this front. The Against Monopoly blog points out that a new appeals court ruling has raised the bar on what is considered willful infringement to the point where the accuser must show "clear and convincing evidence that the infringer acted despite an objectively high likelihood that its actions constituted infringement of a valid patent." It's interesting to see this ruling come out of CAFC, the appeals court that handles patent cases. The Supreme Court...

Antigua Seriously Pushing For WTO Approval To Distribute Free Music And Movies
Since 2003, we've been following the saga of Antigua's fight against the US in the World Trade Organization. Basically, Antigua argued that the US's ban on online gambling violated the free trade agreement the two countries had signed -- as it blocked online gambling sites based in Antigua (of which there are a bunch). Since then, the case has been fun to watch if only for how the US has responded to it. The WTO ruled in favor of Antigua at which point the US basically ignored the WTO, despite the WTO occasionally making angry noises. Then, there was the time that the US went so far as to declare that the WTO had reversed that original ruling on appeal... but the details showed that the US was making up that claim and the WTO was still supporting Antigua. Earlier this year, after the WTO started stomping its feet again, the US responded by saying it was simply (unilaterally) going to change its free trade agreement with Antigua, so that online gambling wasn't included....

Group Behind 'To Catch A Predator' Claims Wikipedia Is A Corporate Sex Offender
We've seen all sorts of criticisms of Wikipedia over the years, but this might be a first. Apparently the group "Perverted Justice," the controversial online vigilante group that tries to lure online pedophiles out into the open (and is the group that is used by NBC Dateline's equally controversial "To Catch A Predator" show) is now claiming that Wikipedia is "a corporate sex offender." Apparently, if you follow the links from Wikipedia to Perverted Justice's site, it has a screed against Wikipedia -- claiming "each article on Wikipedia that deals with any issue relating to pedophiles or internet predators has been heavily targeted and edited by the online pedophile activist movement." Of course, there's a bit more to the story. Apparently, Perverted Justice's founder was recently barred from editing Wikipedia after people felt that he was flaming other users, deleting any negative reference to his organization, accusing others of being pedophiles without substantiation...

NY Times Launches My Yahoo Clone A Decade Late
We were just wondering why the NY Times doesn't seem to understand the basic workings of the internet, and perhaps the answer is just that they're still a decade behind the rest of us. The company's digital unit has now launched an offering called "My Times" which just about every observer is noting seems remarkably similar to MyYahoo, just more than a decade after Yahoo launched MyYahoo. The NY Times is hyping up the fact that the site will have NY Times reporters recommend their favorite sites, but that's hardly compelling since it's really not that difficult to find popular sites these days. I think there are some really fantastic reporters at the Times, but it seems that the people figuring out the company's digital strategy need to update themselves to the current decade.

Was MTV's Rhapsody Decision Really Punishment For Microsoft Abandoning PlaysForSure?
We chalked up MTV's decision to drop Microsoft for RealNetworks in its online music store efforts to MTV's typical internet bumbling. However, there is another interesting possibility. MTV dumped Microsoft to punish the company for pulling the rug out from under them when it killed off "PlaysForSure" DRM. You may recall that Microsoft used to have its own DRM that it tried to get pushed as an industry standard. The company called it "PlaysForSure" in a bit of marketing hubris to try to make sure people felt comfortable with it. There was just one teensy problem. When Microsoft decided to get into the business of selling its own digital music players, it wouldn't support PlaysForSure, making the name that much more ironic. When your own digital music players won't play your own PlaysForSure DRM files, you have a problem. Not only did it screw over all the users who had been buying PlaysForSure files, it hurt all the different music stores, including MTV's, that had bet...

Law Firm Freaks Out That Ridiculous Corporate Song Leaked Out To Blogs
I must admit that there's something fascinating (in the "train wreck" sense) to me about corporate songs and anthems. It's amazing how many of them there are out there, and I'm disappointed that ZDNet UK gave up its old chart that supposedly tracked the popularity of those songs. While these songs are both awful and entertaining at the same time, you really wouldn't have expected there to be a copyright battle over one of them showing up on a blog... except, of course, if the song was about a law firm. Denise Howell points out that the Above the Law blog posted a horrifyingly awful song from the law firm Nixon Peabody. While you might think that any firm that would create a song that bad must have a sense of humor, it appears that Nixon Peabody not only didn't mean for the song to be funny, but they're taking the matter so seriously they're threatening Above the Law with copyright infringement. Of course, as the guy who runs the site notes, he has a pretty strong fair...

UK VCs Fund Washed-Up Bands With Washed-Up Business Model
Rock star involvement in the venture capital industry is old hat (see: Bono), but there aren't many examples of the opposite, VCs getting into rock. The Wall Street Journal reports on one UK VC firm that's taken to financing comeback albums from has-been rock bands, like UB40 and Prodigy. The firm sees itself as filling a funding gap brought on by the tough times facing record labels these days. It also believes that these albums offer steadier, more predictable returns than those from unknown bands. What's funny is that this is exactly the opposite of the typical VC strategy, which typically involves placing bets on lots of losers, with a few winners accounting for all of the profits. So far, it sounds like the fund isn't doing particularly well, though for now it's sticking with the strategy. There is certainly a lot of room for improvement in the record label model as it relates to funding bands, but it seems doubtful that simply replicating the traditional model with...

Major League Baseball Deletes Popular MySpace Page For Using Cubs Logo
By now, it certainly shouldn't come as any surprise that Major League Baseball mis-interprets various intellectual property laws to pretend is has total control over certain content. After all, this is the organization that has insisted repeatedly that it owns facts, despite court after court explaining that facts aren't copyrightable. MLB also seems confused about copyright law when it comes to the legality of placeshifting. In the past, MLB also freaked out about fan websites potentially violating trademarks -- but that was a long time ago. Or so we thought. Apparently the fun lawyers at MLB shut down an immensely popular MySpace page for Chicago Cubs fans that was linked to a fan website called Cubbies Baseball. That fan website actually has a license to use the official Chicago Cubs logo, but MLB claims that the license didn't extend to MySpace as well -- just the Cubbies Baseball site. King Kaufman, the sports writer at Salon, blames MLB for not asking the owner...

No Harm, No Foul In Yet Another Data Leak Case
Over the last few years we've been hearing story after story after story about data leaks. These kinds of leaks didn't just start happening, but we're finally hearing about them because of new laws that require disclosure. One of the big problems is that there's very little risk to companies if they leak someone's data. They issue an apology, agree to pay for one year of credit monitoring and go back to storing data in easily leaked ways. Not surprisingly, many of the folks whose data was put at risk don't feel that's adequate and have tried to sue over the matter, but in a decision that mimics earlier decisions the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has said that those suing Old National Bancorp have no right to sue, because nothing was actually done with the leaked data. In other words, since they weren't directly harmed, they don't have standing to sue. You can understand the legal reasoning here, but it still makes you question why simply leaking data shouldn't be...

Should The SEC Allow For A SOX-Less Market?
As evidence that Sarbanes-Oxley has made it too burdensome for small companies to go public, many have pointed to the rise of London's Alternative Investment Market (AIM), where several American companies have chosen to list. This market is basically a haven for shakier companies that can't list on more established exchanges. A new academic paper suggests that AIM itself represents a model of financial market regulation that warrants exploration. The basic idea is that if you have a system like Sarbanes-Oxley in place, you could also have a market that is exempt from the regulation. Smaller, shakier companies would flock to this market, but investors would know to be wary about investments in these firms. Such a market might resemble the NASD-owned OTC BB market, which trades penny stocks, except that even that market is currently subject to SOX. You can see this concept in place to some extent in the private stock exchanges being established by Wall Street banks, which...

Ghost Of SunRocket Sues Vonage For Spamming The Customers It Cut Off
VoIP provider SunRocket's troubles and subsequent collapse are well known, leading many to wonder if it's a warning sign for Vonage's prospects. Of course, Vonage (unwisely) decided to dance on SunRocket's grave, celebrating that it had caused SunRocket to go out of business. Perhaps they should have waited until SunRocket was really, totally dead. The whole taking credit for SunRocket's demise might come back to bite them as the ghost of SunRocket is now suing Vonage for emailing SunRocket's customer list. Apparently, the two companies had discussed, under a confidentiality agreement, Vonage buying SunRocket's customers or customer list, but talks never went very far. Soon afterwards Vonage emailed SunRocket's customers asking with an offer to move over to Vonage's service. The liquidation firm handling the SunRocket shutdown (incidentally, it's Marty, the dot com cleanup guy's firm) potentially saw this as an easy lawsuit to try to recover some cash for SunRocket, and...

Jury Out On The Impact Of 700 MHz Spectrum Auction Rules
The talk around the upcoming 700 MHz spectrum license auctions continues. After Google's CEO earlier this week said the company would "probably" bid in the auction, even though the FCC didn't implement the open-access provisions Google wanted, a couple of divergent opinions on the auction's impact on the telecom landscape have come out. On the one hand, former FCC bigwig Blair Levin says the auction isn't likely to result in a new nationwide mobile operator; on the other, a "source at a major cellular company" says the auction isn't attractive for incumbent operators. Who to believe? As usual, the truth in somewhere in the middle, but we're more inclined to take Levin's view of things. Incumbent operators will likely shy away from the 22 MHz of spectrum with open-access rules -- not just because they don't want to operate under the restrictions, but also because if the auction for those licenses fails to generate $4.6 billion, the open-access rules will be lifted, and the auction...

Latest Bogus Stats On Music Piracy Losses
It's getting rather tiresome to need to debunk the bogus stats that come out every few months about the impact of "piracy" on one of the various copyright industries -- alternating between music, movies and software. What's most frustrating is that the press continues to take these studies at face value, and never once questions the most basic (and ridiculous) assumptions used to create the numbers. Take, for example, this report on the supposed impact on the economy of music piracy, put together by The Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI). It, like many of these reports, counts every pirated song as a loss (Update: turns out it doesn't count every copied song as a lost sale, but does make some random assumptions using a totally-pulled-out-of-the-air conversion factor), and never bothers to count back in the promotional impact of unauthorized music sharing, that helps get more attention for certain bands. Actual economic studies tend to show little, if any, impact in either...

Dumb Thieves With Saws, Not Guns, To Blame For Internet Blackout
Well, well, well. Earlier this week we wrote about a report (the second one we'd ever heard of!) saying that gunfire had damaged a fiber optic cable, causing a bit of an internet slowdown in the northeastern part of the US. Turns out that wasn't exactly accurate -- though the real story isn't necessarily any less bizarre. It appears that the cable was actually cut with a saw, most likely by thieves hoping it was copper that could be sold. Of course, fiber optic cables don't contain copper, so the thieves ended up with something worth a lot less than they expected. But what about the gunshot? Well, it turns out that when crews arrived to fix up the cable, they discovered that the replacement cable had been shot up by gunfire. It's not explained how or why this might have happened, but the folks who store the fiber optic cable might want to come up with a better storage place.