Home / techdirt.com rss archive / October-05-2007


If You Play Your Radio Loud Enough For Your Neighbor To Hear, Is It Copyright Infringement?
In the past, we've wondered about the business logic of various music performance societies suing restaurants and bars for playing a music without a license. However, we never denied that it was well within their legal rights to go after these places for not getting a license for performance rights. It just didn't seem very smart from the business side of things. Still, it's not hard to go from the question of whether or not restaurants should pay for performance rights when playing music to rather ridiculous situations. Take, for example, the case that reader El Nege points us to in the UK, where a car repair firm is being sued because its mechanics listened to their personal radios too loud. It's not difficult at all to figure out what's going on here. The mechanics working out in the garage have radios playing while they work, and there's plenty of noise in the garage, so they're likely to turn those radios up. Customers in the enclosed area next to the garage are...

Exploiting Telco Regulations For Free Calls And For Profit (Lots And Lots Of Profit)
Earlier this year, we wrote about how suddenly a bunch of "free" calling services were popping up that all seemed to use phone numbers in Iowa. This included a service that would let you call an Iowa number and from there call anywhere in the world for free as well as a variety of "free conference calling" services. All of these systems were actually exploiting some legacy telco regulations, that were officially designed to help rural telcos get extra money to build out more rural service. Basically, the government allowed rural telcos to charge high termination fees to other telcos when calls from their lines terminated on one of the rural telco's lines. So, if you had AT&T and called your cousin in Iowa who had some small rural telco, AT&T would actually have to pay that telco some charge per minute, with the idea being that the telcos would use that money to invest in infrastructure. Of course, the infrastructure they invested in wasn't exactly building more...

Blu-Ray Glitches Illustrates DRM Pitfalls
A story about flaws in two new Blu-Ray discs illustrates an important problem with digital rights management technologies beyond the fundamental flaw of treating customers like criminals. Ordinary open standards are designed to be as easy to implement as possible, and when hardware or software in an open platform detects a possible error, it makes a good-faith effort to recover from it gracefully. As a result, if one manufacturer makes a minor mistake in implementing a standard, the other components can often adapt and prevent it from bringing the entire system to a halt. Digital rights management turns this attitude on its head. The fundamental goal of a DRM scheme is to prevent unauthorized devices from working properly, which means DRM providers are required to react to any discrepancy as evidence of hacking and refuse to work with it at all. That's how we get Blu-Ray players manufactured by well-known consumer electronics companies refusing to play legitimate Blu-Ray...

Wall Street Looking To Continue Its Buy 'Em Up Then Break 'Em Up Strategy With Yahoo?
In the past, we've joked about Wall Street's amazing ability to convince companies that they need to acquire each other and merge to bring out "synergies" and then convince those same firms to later break themselves up into separate companies to "release shareholder value." It's all part of the shell game, where the investment bankers on Wall Street get to take out their huge fees whether a company is being built up or broken apart. It looks like the latest such target may be Yahoo, as an analyst at Sanford Bernstein has kicked off the discussion by noting that the company could release shareholder value by breaking itself up into three companies. Which companies? Well, it would want to split up the search and the advertising parts of the business... you know, the same parts of the business that folks convinced Yahoo it needed to buy four years ago if it was going to successfully take on Google. Now, of course, the only way for it to successfully take on Google is to get...

SEC Suspending Trades On Spam Scam Stocks
Pump and dump spam scams have been quite successful for scammers, but the SEC is apparently increasingly successful in stopping the practice. It's now suspending trading on certain stocks that appear susceptible to pump and dump scams -- and that's more than cut in half the number of complaints its received in the last few months. What still isn't clear, however, is why it's so difficult to track down those responsible for pump and dump scams. You just need to follow the money and look at who bought the stock right before the scam started and who sold out immediately afterwards and you probably have a pretty short list of suspects.

Are 10% Of iPhones Sold To Unlockers?
Analysts from investment bank Piper Jaffray are making some news today after releasing a report claiming that 10% of iPhones are actually being sold to groups that are unlocking them and reselling them. They seem to be basing this on the fact that there are a bunch of folks going in and buying the maximum single allotment of 5 iPhones at a time. If this is true, the actual number of unlocked iPhones could actually be significantly higher, as many unlockers are buying the phone and unlocking it themselves. On the flip side, there could be other explanations for people buying 5 iPhones rather than to resell them unlocked. Either way, it should be clear that there's a fair amount of demand for unlocked iPhones, which again raises the question of why Steve Jobs ever agreed to an exclusive with AT&T.

IBM Drops Outsourcing Patent, After Outsourcing Patent Review To Slashdot
IBM consistently is one of the more aggressive companies in applying for patents (and, at times, enforcing those patents). However, in the last few years, the company has started realizing just how much patents can harm innovation -- and the company has been trying to work on ways to improve patent quality (though, it still gets involved in some questionable patent lawsuits). Over the weekend, however, the company got quite a bit of attention after Slashdot posted about a recent IBM patent application that appeared to cover figuring out how to best offshore workers. It was the type of thing that sounded so absurd that lots of other sites and the press picked up on it... leading IBM to apologize withdraw the patent application, put the "process" into the public domain and saying that with its new processes, it wouldn't have applied for that patent at all. This is a nice surprise, as you could see most companies simply trying to defend whatever ridiculous patent they had...

Geek House Call Services: Expensive, Wrong And Could Be Stealing Your Data
As less tech savvy folks start having computer problems, if they don't have in-house tech support (i.e., kids living at home) they tend to call or visit one of the growing number of computer fixit services -- many of which advertise the fact that they'll come to your home and fix your computer. The problem, though, is that they're pretty expensive, have little training and quite often completely screw up the diagnosis. On top of that, they may snoop around your computer or even download your hard drive. Many people probably suspected this, but when a Canadian TV station put ten such companies to the test with an easy-to-diagnose computer problem only three out of the ten accurately diagnosed the problem -- and then all three charged huge markups on the replacement part to fix it. Six out of the ten got the diagnosis completely wrong and one just gave up (but didn't charge anything either). Many suggested expensive other alternatives -- with a few suggesting that the customer...

If You're So Smart... Why Don't You Prove It (And Make Some Money While You're At It)?
It's been a little while since we've spoken about the Techdirt Insight Community service that we launched earlier this year. If you're not familiar with it, you can see a quick two minute video explaining what it is. It's been going great, as the experts in the community have been providing fantastic insight to all sorts of companies worldwide, helping those companies make important strategic decisions, filling in key knowledge gaps and or (in some cases) helping to validate certain ideas and plans. It's been a great way for some really smart folks to get companies to listen to their advice, to find out about the challenges facing companies in their space, to validate their insight... and also to make quite a bit of money for being smart.Some of the open cases are displayed in a running ticker on the front page of Techdirt.com, but in case you haven't been watching, here are a few that recently opened where top insights can earn between $400 to $600 -- as well as validate...

Open Standards Are the Ultimate Media Extender
Last week, Microsoft unveiled its latest push into our living rooms with a new line of "extenders" that allow people stream media from a Windows Vista Home or Ultimate PC to their home entertainment system. I'm sure they're great devices, but what I find really remarkable is how slowly products like this are coming to market. The hardware required to stream video over a network and display it on a television have been around for years, and there's no reason there shouldn't have been a ton of video-streaming products on the market years ago. It's worth comparing the trickle of computer-based home video products with the flood of MP3 players that were released in the late 1990s. Within two years of the first MP3 player appearing on the scene, there were at least half a dozen companies producing competing MP3 players, with a wide variety of feature sets and price point. And this was at a time when the products were still incredibly primitive: the...

Should There Be Mandatory Email Address Portability?
Apparently someone has filed a petition with the FCC to try to have the FCC require email address portability. The idea is that, if you were to change email providers, the old provider would be required to forward your email to a new account. If you go to the link above, Declan McCullough points out seven reasons why it's dumb to mandate this (in part because this is way outside the FCC's scope of authority). However, that doesn't mean it's not a good idea for email providers to offer that service themselves as a differentiator. In the meantime, this doesn't seem like much of a problem for most people. Either they have their own domains or they do a pretty good job of informing anyone who matters whenever they change email addresses.

Apple's iPhone Walled Garden An Opportunity For Competitors To Make The iPhone The Next Hiptop
While we agree with some others that Apple's decision to focus on a walled garden approach to iPhone apps seems short-sighted, it certainly does open up an opportunity for competitors -- and those competitors seem to be realizing it. A bunch of companies are starting ad campaigns around their mobile phone offerings highlighting how open they are compared to the iPhone. That would be competition at work, and a response to anyone who may be suggesting that Apple should somehow be required to open up. Of course, touting openness is just one part of the story. It helps to also have some really good technology to stack up behind it, and on that front, most of the competitors still have a long way to go. That probably means that Apple's closed strategy won't hurt it very much in the short-term, but it does open up a huge opening for someone who can actually get closer to matching the iPhone on the technology side. Apple could respond by opening up a bit more (and there's some...