Home / techdirt.com rss archive / October-04-2007


Chalk One Up For The Armchair Economists
Mike Arrington, over at TechCrunch, has written up a post about "The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free" which will sound mighty familiar if you're a Techdirt reader. It's pretty much the same thing I've been saying for almost a dozen years at this point, pointing out the economics and inevitable trends facing the music industry -- and also noting why that isn't necessarily a bad thing. While he's dealing with emotional responses in the comments (again, that'll sound familiar...), it's more interesting to watch an "industry analyst" trash Arrington as an "armchair economist" without backing it up... and then getting his own economics totally screwed up. In this case, we need to chalk one up for the "armchair economists."The analyst, David Card of Jupiter Research (the same analyst who incorrectly said that Radiohead's new offering would only work because the band was well known), dismisses Arrington's economics as "oversimplified analysis," but doesn't explain...

Homeland Security Can't Even Configure Its Mailing List Software Correctly?
Just after the federal gov't screwed up and shut off ca.gov, we find out that the Department of Homeland Security misconfigured its email list software causing a deluge of annoying emails to over seven thousand government employees. The list, normally used to broadcast news summaries of security news, apparently was set up so that any reply messages automatically were broadcast to all members. What happened next is familiar to lots of folks on mailing lists, where the "reply all" button is misused. The one difference, though, was that this wasn't a misuse of the reply all button, but on the mailing list automatically sending out anyone's message to everyone on the list. Many security experts on the list are apparently wondering what that says about Homeland Security's ability to deal with cybersecurity issues. Perhaps it was just a little configuration error, but you would think that the folks at the DHS would be a bit more careful about those things. ...

Yes, We Knew Tech IPOs Were Coming, But We Didn't Expect It This Soon
Only a few days have passed since we wrote about the looming crop of IPOs on the horizon. The IPO of direct marketing software provider, Constant Contact, caused a stir as hit the street with a surprisingly warm reception. Opening the day at $16, $2 more than the initial estimates, the price rose to over $30 during the first day of trading. This despite the fact that Constant Contact is not yet profitable -- which people had been saying was necessary this time around for IPOs. Investors are clearly banking on speculative growth of its revenues, which are expected to double for 2007 versus 2006. That said, IPOs of unprofitable companies are popular cannon fodder for the many "return of the bubble" rumors that are already starting to spread, and certainly should turn up more interest both in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street for starting to explore what internet firms could potentially go public.

RIAA Wins Case, Gloats
As we expected this morning, the RIAA has won its lawsuit against a woman for sharing files. This is unfortunate in the long run, as the decision is actually going to hurt the companies the RIAA represents more than if it had lost the case. That's because the RIAA will take this as a validation of its "sue our fans" strategy, rather than realizing it's finally time to try a different model. In the meantime, the woman in the case, Jammie Thomas, never should have let the case go this far as there appeared to be plenty of evidence that she actually did break the law. The RIAA often has weak evidence, but in this case the evidence was much stronger. Unfortunately, that distinction won't be made by most, and they'll simply assume that if the RIAA won this case, it should win many others. The RIAA, of course, wasted no time in gloating about the decision and is using this to push others to settle rather than fighting the RIAA lawsuits. This actually is reasonable advice if,...

It's Time To Redefine News
Last week, we suggested that newspapers need to stop defining themselves as newspapers. That's defining themselves by a specific product, not the benefits people get from the offering. Instead, we felt that newspapers should start thinking of themselves as news organizations -- more broadly defining what they do. However, that leaves open a really important question about how do you then define "news." We recently covered the somewhat controversial report about how user-curated news aggregation sites tend to highlight different stories, compared to editor-managed news sites -- which really does open up the question of what really is news for people these days. Luckily, Jeremy Wagstaff has taken a fantastic stab at answering that question with a new column on how "news" is being redefined. He notes that the entire concept of "news" no longer fits with what many journalists think news is. It used to be about delivering important information from the source to the people...

What Does It Mean When Most Mobile Content Execs Don't Use Their Own Services?
I vaguely recall a very similar study making waves a few years ago, but can't find any trace of it right now. However, a recent study of executives working in the mobile content space found that more than half of those surveyed don't actually use the mobile content they're pitching. Now, there can be plenty of questions about the methodology here, and it's not entirely clear from the wording if they asked specifically about the mobile content from that particular exec's company, or mobile content in general. However, when your own executives can't be convinced to use the product they're supposed to convince others to use, there's a problem. If anything, it suggests that there's been too much hype in "mobile content" and a bunch of execs have jumped on the bandwagon, not because of an interesting product, but because of the hype. That's unfortunate. Mobile content should be a big deal, but it's not as simple as some may think -- and if you have bandwagon-riding execs,...

Video Game Exec Wants DMCA Everywhere
CNET is reporting that Entertainment Software Association president Mike Gallagher argued in a recent speech that "very few countries follow the path of the DMCA." Which is a bit of a head scratcher; the EU passed its version of the DMCA in 2001, CAFTA included provisions requiring that Central American countries adopt the DMCA, and the US has also signed "free trade" deals requiring adoption of a DMCA clone with Chile, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, and other countries. Japan has a limited DMCA. Canada doesn't have a DMCA yet but politicians there are hard at work trying to change that. Now obviously, that doesn't encompass the whole world, but it certainly encompasses the most important markets where video games are concerned. What Gallagher doesn't mention is that the DMCA has had a stifling effect on third-party experimentation with videogame consoles. Console makers have pretty much been able to lock their consoles down so that only "authorized" software manufacturers...

Bill Gates Damns Zune With Faint Praise
By now, most people are aware of the "reality distortion field" that surrounds Steve Jobs. Folks attending his keynotes or product launches talk about how it's almost a religious experience, where he really does make you feel like the latest iPod nano is the greatest device ever invented. It's no secret that Bill Gates has a rather different personality -- but it's still quite bizarre to see the level of faint praise Gates gives the Zune as its second generation launches:"For something we pulled together in six months, we are very pleased with the satisfaction we got.... It was just so-so on the software side. I'm sure a year from now we'll do even better."He does insist that the satisfaction was "superhigh," but satisfaction and passion are two very different beasts. Of course, this fits right in with how Microsoft has attacked this problem from the beginning: designing the product by committee, rather than coming up with something that they can be passionate about. When...

AT&T Content Filtering Plans Actually About Helping AT&T Subscribers?
We were confused over the summer when AT&T announced plans to follow the entertainment industry's request to have ISPs install filters to try to block the transfer of unauthorized content. It didn't make much sense for a variety of reasons. First, it's hard to see why AT&T should be involved at all in a business model issue for the entertainment firms. It's difficult to see the business advantage to AT&T. It's going to cost quite a bit to install those filters and it's likely to piss off plenty of AT&T customers -- especially once those filters start slowing traffic down and blocking perfectly legitimate material (and, yes, it will do both things). However, AT&T is now defending this decision before Congress by claiming that these filters will actually help consumers: "It's about making more content available to more people in more ways."That's quite a claim considering filters do exactly the opposite of that. The whole point of the filter is...

RIAA May Have A Pretty Strong Case
Lots of folks are paying plenty of attention to the first RIAA lawsuit to go to a jury trial. Initially the reports were that the defendant's case was strong, and the RIAA didn't have very much evidence. In fact, the RIAA's star technical witness has been debunked before, and it appears that many of his claims were once again debunked in the court room. However, even with such weak technical evidence, I have to agree with Tim Lee that this sounds like the RIAA has a pretty strong case, based on the combination of the IP address and the username in Kazaa. It's the identical username that the woman uses for many, many different online accounts -- making it tough to believe that someone else happened to be using that same username from an IP address assigned to her account. It also seems highly questionable that the woman would claim she never had Kazaa with that kind of evidence. There are still some legal questions here -- including whether or not the court will instruct...

Feds Accidentally Turn Off California Gov't Websites
Every once in a while you hear stories of companies having problems with their domain names, often because someone forgot to re-register the domain name or possibly because of a routing problem. However, you don't really expect that to happen to a government website. However, after a California county agency had its gov't website hacked, the feds back in Washington DC accidentally turned off all of the ca.gov domain, causing quite a bit of confusion among California state gov't employees. It gets even better. Apparently, it happened around noon Pacific Time which is 3pm back on the east coast. Yet, as the article notes: "Unfortunately that was about 3 in the afternoon and folks back East were already going home, so it took us some time to get hold of the right people in the General Service Administration to get this address reinstated." Sure, I can understand time zone differences... but 3pm isn't exactly quitting time. Must be great to be a government employee, huh?...