Home / techdirt.com rss archive / September-14-2007


Company Betting On GPS-Based Driving Tax
Back in 2003, the state of Oregon considered a driving tax, which would involve putting GPS devices on cars so the government could see how far you drove, and then tax you for it. The idea being that those who drive more should pay a larger portion of taxes to support the roads they drive on. Of course, for many, many people, the idea of the government keeping tabs on where you drive and how far you go seems rather Big Brotherish -- and those people note that you can accomplish pretty much the same thing (making heavy drivers pay more taxes) simply by taxing gasoline. Soon afterwards, the head of California's DMV suggested that a similar taxing and tracking plan made sense. Over in the UK, they've looked at similar proposals as well. It certainly seems a bit early to bet on such a concept as the next big thing, but that apparently hasn't stopped one company from building a device for exactly this purpose and showing it off at a recent conference. The company is smart...

Chinese Student Sues Microsoft; Claims WGA A Violation Of Privacy
American companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have all been accused of violating users privacy in working with the Chinese government. In fact, Yahoo's been sued for handing over info on a critic of the Chinese government. However, the latest such lawsuit to come out of China is a bit surprising and has absolutely nothing to do with government cooperation. A Chinese college student is suing the company for $180 for the fact that Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage system reports some information back to Redmond. There's already been a class action suit in the US suggesting that WGA violates anti-spyware legislation, but it's still somewhat surprising to see such a lawsuit come out of China, where you still expect most of the privacy complaints having more to do with the Chinese government.

Teenagers' Popular Summer Job: Online Poker Player?
We've been wary of news reports over the past few years hyping up various folks who were supposedly making all kinds of money playing online poker. While there clearly are some professional sharks out there who basically prey on bad poker players to take their money, almost every news story seemed to focus on people who (surprise, surprise) only claimed to win money (often lots of it). That's why we were skeptical of the story about a startup that skipped out on raising venture capital, and instead worked on funding the company through poker. Then there were the college students who felt that playing online poker was the best way to pay for college tuition. Even if these stories were accurate, leaving out how rare it is for someone to be able to make that much money in online poker seemed fairly irresponsible. The latest story, however, takes the cake. The San Jose Mercury News has apparently found a bunch of teenagers who saying that playing online poker is much better...

SCO Files For Bankruptcy Protection
From the beginning of SCO's rather odd strategy of claiming ownership of the intellectual property found in Linux, the company has (often pompously) declared that in the end it will be vindicated and that there was no way anyone could conclude that it wasn't the rightful owner. What was amazing was how the company continued to state the same thing in the face of increasing evidence that the claims could not be supported. Then, last month, a judge ruled that SCO didn't even own some of the copyrights it claimed to. Instead, those were possessed by Novell. Monday the two firms were supposed to be in court to figure out how much SCO now owed Novell, but that's going to take a back seat to the news that SCO has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The announcement uses the typical "hoping to reorganize" type language, but it seems pretty clear the company (which was already looking somewhat shaky in terms of its financials) would rather not have to pay Novell... or deal with the...

I've Decided To Major In YouTube Watching
Lots of colleges have random "light weight" classes that people always seem to joke about. When I was in school I remember the jokes about "Physics for Poets" and "Rocks for Jocks" (though, I think that second one had a more formal name). However, with a new generation of internet services, there can now be a new generation of odd classes that people will make fun of, such as the new class being offered by Pitzer College which is all about YouTube. The class seems to involve watching YouTube videos, commenting on them, discussing them and creating your own YouTube videos. To be honest about it, this is really sounds like a typical class in popular culture -- which are found at universities around the world -- but with a slight YouTube twist, which helps it generate news and become part of the pop culture itself. Now, if someone would just offer a class in using Digg... that would get some attention.

Why A Mainstream Digg Wouldn't Dumb Down The News
A recent study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that there is very little overlap between the front-page stories selected by traditional editors, social news sites and Yahoo News user recommendations. There is an interesting interpretation of this study from Nicholas Carr basically stating that if crowd-edited news were to take over the distribution of news, it will accelerate the "dumbing-down" of news.This extrapolation might seem logical but it is done with a few assumptions that are highly debatable to the point of being downright unlikely. First, it assumes that social news sites are promoting mainstream news today, and uses the overlap with mainstream news as a metric to measure whether stories are dumb. Digg and Reddit might be aspiring to become more mainstream but this is not the case today. These sites are still largely serving a homogeneous technology-oriented user base, a niche community where stories about the iPhone are perfectly informative,...

For Your Listening Pleasure... Techdirt On The Air
Every so often we get people saying that the folks here at Techdirt should do a podcast, and we occasionally toy around with the idea, but for the most part it just takes too much time, so we leave it to those who are much more inclined to podcast. However, the folks behind two of the better tech-related podcasts both asked me to stop by as a guest this past week, so I wanted to point them out. Leo Laporte was kind enough to ask me to take part in the latest episode of his massively popular "This Week in Tech" podcast along with professional curmudgeon John C. Dvorak and the ever insightful and entertaining Wil Harris. The TWiT experience was quite a bit of fun... though AT&T decided to cut off my DSL as Leo was introducing me. I heard the "and for the first ti..." part of Leo's introduction and then suddenly I had no internet connection. Luckily I was reconnected with varying quality after about five minutes. As you would expect from TWiT, the discussions range across...

20 Year Old Complaints About Dying Newspapers Sound Familiar
We certainly take our fair shot at pointing out when newspapers make bad business decisions in trying to figure out how to adapt to the internet age -- but (unlike some) we don't believe that "journalism" is dying or even that newspapers are dying. They'll learn to adapt and change with the time. Sure, a few poorly managed and slow to change newspapers may end up having plenty of trouble, but that hardly speaks to the value and demand for professionally produced news. However, for an interesting historical perspective on the imminent death of newspapers it's worth reading MarketWatch editor-in-chief David Callaway's column discussing his 20 years in the news business, where the basic fears sound remarkably similar to what you hear today:"Back in 1987, it was widely assumed that newspapers were dying. The post-Watergate rush to journalism was over. Circulations were down. And new technologies were threatening. At one point, the hot new thing was to deliver news by fax machine,...

AT&T: Bundling Is Lame... But You Have To Buy This Other Bundle To See Why
It's been quite amusing recently to hear AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson's explanations for various AT&T policies lately. First there was that whole thing about how the company wasn't promoting its $10 DSL plan because "people didn't want it" and now we find out that the company that once claimed no one wanted naked DSL (perhaps because the company wouldn't offer it) is now admitting that actually people love naked DSL and hate bundles... except in order to get the "naked DSL" bundle they love so much, you have to bundle the service with a mobile phone. There's nothing wrong with offering bundles, certainly, but it seems reasonable to have a la carte offerings as well. In fact, Stephenson notes that forced bundling "is an old mind-set. We need to get over it." Yet, as Broadband Reports notes at the link above, it's a bit odd that he's saying forced bundling is an old mind-set, when he's promoting the similarly forced bundle -- where it's just mobile service rather...

Autodesk Sued By eBay Seller For Pretending Right Of First Sale Doesn't Exist
The folks over at Boing Boing are pointing us to a very interesting case where an eBay seller who was kicked off eBay is now suing software maker Autodesk for $10 million. The case raises some important issues that don't get nearly enough attention. In copyright, the right of first sale is designed to allow anyone who buys a copyrighted product the right to resell it without going through the copyright holder -- just as when you buy a chair, you can resell it without the manufacturer's permission. In fact, studies have shown that an active secondary sales market often helps boost the size of the primary market (if you'll be able to resell a product later, you're probably willing to pay more for it initially). However, short-sighted copyright holders don't always see things that way.In this case, the guy had a legitimately purchased copy of AutoCAD and was trying to sell it on eBay. This should be perfectly legal. He had purchased a good and was trying to resell it. Assuming...

Verizon Decides It Doesn't Like Open-Access Wireless Rules After All
Discussion of the upcoming auction for licenses for 700 MHz spectrum has been dominated by the desire of Google and other groups to have "open-access" rules put in place. These rules would force license winners to sell wholesale access to their networks, allow any compatible device to be used on them, and follow net neutrality principles. The FCC paid some lip service to the issue by attaching just two of the conditions (net neutrality and allowing the use of any compatible device) to just a portion of the spectrum, and adding that the conditions will be dropped and the auction for the relevant licenses restarted without them if a reserve price of $4.6 billion isn't met. This was a political show that made it look like the FCC was taking some action, but the likely overall impact on the market will be minimal. Perhaps what made it clear that the rules were toothless and wouldn't have much competitive impact was the fact that incumbent telcos AT&T and Verizon voiced some...