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The Governator Wasting More California Taxpayer Money Over Unconstitutional Violent Video Game Ban
Last month, California was the latest in a long list of states who discovered that passing a ban on the sale of violent video games violates the Constitution. This shouldn't be a surprise. More than 10 states have passed such laws and every single one of them has been thrown out. Any state still trying to pass such a law is clearly just wasting taxpayer money so some politicians can claim (incorrectly) that they're "protecting the children." It looks like California's Governor Schwarzenegger is joining the crowd of wasteful grandstanding politicians. He's appealing last month's ruling and making a bunch of factually incorrect statements in doing so. First, he claims that "many studies show the link between playing ultra-violent video games and violent behavior." That's incorrect. The studies that people like to cite have all been debunked, as the interpretation usually doesn't follow from the data in the studies. Furthermore, the real world evidence that violent crime...

More Tech Firms Stung By Weak Financial Sector
Because a company can only be as strong as its customers, there's no way for tech companies to be completely insulated from broader economic events. Companies with a lot of exposure on Wall St. are going to be particularly susceptible to a slowdown, as some companies, like Cisco, have already stated that they're seeing weakness in this market. The latest to sound a similar warning is Tibco, a software provider with a lot of customers in finance. The firm described the financial sector as "notably weak" blaming it for an overall earnings shortfall. It should be noted that Tibco hasn't had a particularly stellar few years, so the company was already struggling a bit. Still, what's affecting Tibco is likely to affect a host of other related companies. Right now, there's a lot of concern about the health of the financial sector, but if troubles continue to persist, then the malaise is likely to spread elsewhere, potentially leading to spending slowdowns in other sectors....

MPAA Moves On To Making Up Stats About Camcording In The UK Market
After successfully bullying Canada into passing stricter anti-camcording laws, using bogus stats, it appears that the MPAA has moved on to a new country: the UK. TorrentFreak lets us know that MPAA chief Dan Glickman has crossed the pond to warn UK politicians about the horrible "threat" of camcorded movies. Of course, he's still making up stats and still ignoring what's actually happening in the industry. We've already seen that while Glickman gets paid big bucks to hype up the threat, these laws don't seem to stop camcording activities at all. However, more importantly, camcording doesn't appear to be much of a real threat to the industry. Remember, first of all, that the industry is bringing in record revenue, despite the increasing availability of movies online. Second, the problem isn't from camcorded movies. Most of the movies you find online are studio prints leaked by insiders. Third, even with these laws the movies are going to end up online... and all it takes...

Sprint Claims Vonage Wouldn't Exist Without Sprint's Patents
Already facing possible shutdown and huge fines from Verizon over some VoIP patents, Vonage is apparently facing a similar threat from Sprint as well. The case was filed nearly two years ago, but it finally is underway, with Sprint making the ridiculous claim that without Sprint's patents, Vonage wouldn't exist. We've already gone through this with Verizon, but there's a ton of prior art on VoIP offerings -- and almost all of these patents seem overly broad and quite speculative. Lots of different folks all figured out how VoIP could work at about the same time (suggesting that the concept was the natural progression of the technology, which isn't something that's supposed to receive patent protection). Vonage's real innovation was in figuring out how to package and market the service -- something that neither Sprint nor Verizon did. Both companies are now simply trying to shut down a rival who out-innovated them in the market. That's not what the patent system is designed...

News Outlets Decide Not To Give Rugby World Cup Free Publicity
Just earlier today we had a post on how the NFL still thinks it can tell news organizations how they can do their job, in spite of fair use, and well, logic and reason. The Rugby World Cup kicks off Friday, and its organizers are involved in a similar spat with media groups covering the event. Back in April, organizers tried to put restrictions on the number of photos news outlets could publish online, and also how they were published (lest anything cover up a sponsor's logo). Major media outlets, including the AP, Reuters and AFP aren't playing ball, though, and are boycotting the event until the dispute is resolved. As much as the World Cup organizers would like to think they don't care, they depend on widespread media coverage and the free publicity it generates to drive their money machines. They say they're acting to protect companies that have paid for certain broadcasting rights, but what they're really trying to protect are the huge fees these companies have paid. They...

RIAA Finally Pays Legal Fees On Mis-Filed Suit... But Manages To Screw That Up As Well
Remember last month when the RIAA was simply ignoring a court order to pay up the legal fees for one of the people that they incorrectly sued for file sharing? Well, they've finally paid up... but even then they ignored both the interest they owed for being late and the instructions for how payment was to be delivered. At some point you have to wonder if they're just messing with people on purpose or if they're really this incompetent.

Still Not Betting On An eBook Revolution
eBooks have been touted as the next big thing for quite some time now, but invariably, each new generation of the new technology fails to win over consumers. Of course, that's not going to stop the publishing industry from pursuing them in their belief that they'll be the savior of the industry. The latest iteration comes from Amazon.com, and for $500 it offers the ability to connect wirelessly to an eBook store, meaning you won't have to plug the device into a computer in order to make a purchase. For eBook aficionados, this might be a nice convenience, but it's pretty hard to imagine this feature proving pivotal to winning over the broader population. Of all the problems people have with eBooks, the fact that you have to connect them to a computer probably isn't a significant one. The above article also mentions Google's planned foray into digital publishing, as it intends to sell digital versions of books from select publishers. But it's not clear why Google thinks...

No Shortage Of Ideas... It's Successfully Bringing Them To Market That's Tricky
For years, plenty of people have pointed out the difference between innovation and invention, with a popular quote (attributed to way too many different people over the years) being that "invention is turning money into ideas; innovation is turning ideas into money." Basically, invention is coming up with a new idea -- innovation is successfully bringing a product to market in a way that people want. Where some people disagree is how important each of these stages are. Our position has been that innovation is a lot more important than invention. Successfully bringing a product to market is what makes the world a better place -- because it satisfies needs in the market and expands the economy. There were music players before the iPod, but Apple innovated the iPod into more of a "must have" device. There were cars before Ford, but he innovated to make it affordable for the average person. This is one of the reasons why we have such trouble with the patent system as it's...

Universal Music Too Impatient To Wait For Earlier Lawsuit Results; Sues Veoh
A month ago, we detailed the long history of Universal Music mistakenly suing just about every online video hosting firm (other than Google's YouTube, who gave Universal Music a sweetener to sue everyone else and skip YouTube). The conclusion to that story was that, following a typical "pay up or else" threat from Universal Music, video hosting site Veoh took the initiative and preemptively sued to have a judge claim that what it was doing was perfectly legal. Rather than wait to hear what the judge has to say on the matter, Universal Music simply went right ahead and sued Veoh anyway. Once again, this is a misguided lawsuit against a company that is doing nothing wrong for a service that isn't taking any money away from Universal Music. People sometimes complain that we spend too much time pointing out the mistakes of the recording industry. We'd love to stop it -- but the record label execs seem to have absolutely no recognition for how badly they continue to muck up...

Wikipedia Edits Show How Important The Site Has Become
With all of the stories last month about various companies or organizations trying to edit Wikipedia to their own advantage, many Wikipedia haters used it as evidence as to why Wikipedia was no good. However, some are realizing exactly the opposite. Jeremy Wagstaff has a good column showing that all of these embarrassing Wikipedia edits show the reverse: it shows just how important and credible a source Wikipedia has become. As for the worries about biased entries, Wagstaff notes that nearly all of the controversial edits were quickly replaced. While some may point out that this doesn't help for the people who saw the edited entries, it appears that Wikipedia is trying to solve that problem by highlighting recent or less-trustworthy edits. So, really, all that we've learned from this is that Wikipedia is quite important -- and it's only getting better over time.

If You Want To Stop Your Husband From Using The Internet, Chopping Off His Hand Seems A Little Extreme
We've certainly heard of family members growing frustrated over the amount of time a spouse or a child was spending on the internet, but you have to admit that it's on the fairly extreme side of the spectrum of responses to deal with this by chopping off the person's hand. However, according to some news reports, that's exactly what one woman in China did to her husband after she felt he wasn't paying enough attention to her. As he sat at the computer in an internet cafe she chopped off his hand. Oddly (and somewhat unbelievably) the guy claims he only noticed when the pointer on the screen stopped moving and he felt a numbness in his hand that had been on the mouse (and then he noticed the blood). It's not clear how he didn't notice his hand being chopped off -- or even how it was chopped off. So, perhaps the story is simply urban legend, but there appear to be a fair number of news organizations reporting that same story. We're hoping that at least one bothered to fact...

NFL Still Thinks It Can Tell News Organizations How They Can Report The News
Back in July, we couldn't figure out how the NFL could get away with telling news organizations that they could only put 45 seconds of video online that had either game clips or videos of players. This made no sense. The NFL does not have any right to determine how reporters report the news. If they conduct their own interviews with players or film their own footage, they should be able to broadcast as much of it as they feel appropriate. They also shouldn't (as demanded by the NFL) have to link back to the NFL's official website. While these may be what the NFL wants, it has no way of actually enforcing this -- as news reporters don't need the NFL's permission to broadcast an interview they filmed with a player. However, it still seems like broadcasters aren't up to challenging the NFL on this bogus rule. Reader Jon writes in to let us know that the NFL (how kind of it) has exempted NBC, CBS, Fox and ESPN from these rules. However, the reasoning isn't that the NFL...