Home / techdirt.com rss archive / September-20-2007


Class Action Lawsuit Filed By People Who Want A La Carte TV
For many years, there's been a pretty big debate over whether or not cable and satellite TV providers should offer "a la carte" options, where subscribers could just pick and choose the channels they want to subscribe to. At a first pass, many people think this would be great -- believing that it would save them money because they wouldn't be paying for all those channels they get but don't watch. However, this is short sighted. Studies have actually shown that in most cases a la carte offerings would end up costing more.There are a variety of reasons for this. First, the pay TV providers would need to revamp their systems to support this, including their marketing and customer service setup, which would almost definitely raise costs. Second, what the current bundles do is allow certain popular channels to subsidize other channels. When you switch to an a la carte system, many of those subsidies are lost, and it would likely drive up the prices for many channels, rather...

E-Commerce Still Sucks When It Comes To Customer Experience
Back in the early days of e-commerce, it wasn't too surprising to see the various studies saying that people often had bad e-commerce experiences, but you would hope that these days it wouldn't be so common. Unfortunately, a new study suggests that plenty of people are still having terrible customer service experiences with various e-commerce sites. And, of course, those bad experiences are leading them to do less business with the companies. Obviously, things fall through the cracks here and there and not every customer experience is going to be perfect -- but you wouldn't expect it to be so bad that nearly 90% of people surveyed said they'd had a bad e-commerce experience lately.

Want To See A Patent Nuclear War In Action?
We've talked about how patents have become a sort of nuclear stockpiling system, where companies hoard a bunch of patents for defensive purposes, mainly to keep competitors from lobbing patent claims at them -- knowing that the original company would just toss a bunch of patent claims right back. However, sometimes that detente breaks down and nuclear war ensues. You can see exactly that in the ongoing three way patent battles between Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nokia. We've been covering some of the individual skirmishes in posts here over the past few years, but the link here pretty much sums up how nuts things are. There are lawsuits in courts all over the country, followed by counter suits from the opposing companies in many of those courts as well. On top of that, there are reviews going on at the International Trade Commission, which has increasingly become a second chance way for companies to fight patent battles. If someone can explain how all of this helps to promote...

What's More Important: Accurate Elections Or Fast Results?
As the debate continues over e-voting machines, we're seeing some more misplaced whining over attempts to make elections more fair and accurate. In San Francisco, election officials are complaining about the rules set by California's secretary of state, which will mean that this year's mayoral election ballots will need to be checked and counted by hand. Effectively, that means that results for the election won't be known for a few weeks -- rather than instantly. This leads to all sorts of whining and complaining from election officials about how unfair this is -- but since when should speedy results be more important than accurate vote counts? And, the problem is not the secretary of state at all (as the election officials imply). It's because of two separate e-voting firms who refused to take the necessary steps to make sure their machines could be properly reviewed. First, there's Election Systems and Software (ES&S) makers of buggy e-voting machines (that they...

GPS 'Selective Availability' Ends -- Where Are We Now?
The US GPS system set its 'Selective Availability' levels to zero back in May 2000, and now the DoD is permanently removing the feature that allows the US to degrade GPS signal accuracy at will. While this probably saves US taxpayers a few pennies by not having to include some unnecessary signal processing parts in new GPS satellites, the decision also seems to mark a turning point in the availability of wireless location data. With more and more location based services cropping up that don't actually rely on GPS signals, such as the location-aware mobile search from Sprint and Microsoft which triangulates a caller's position between cell towers, the access to accurate location data is becoming commonplace. In fact, as more terrestrial wireless signals broadcasting potentially-useful location data everywhere, the idea of using far away satellites to tell us where we are seems like an archaic concept -- and projects like Galileo begin to sound even more redundant. The adoption...

Popular Online Poker Site Changing Names Due To Patent Dispute
Shawn Patrick Green writes "As if online poker weren't embattled enough. Popular online poker site, Bodog, was forced to change its name to NewBodog.com after they failed to show up at a patent-dispute trial in Nevada, prompting the judge to suspend its domain, Bodog.com. The site has now "permanently" changed its name to BodogLife.com and the founder, Calvin Ayre, says that he refuses to pay the guy that brought up the overly-broad patent dispute, who is claiming $48 million in damages." If you're interested, the patent in question can be viewed here. It hardly seems unique or innovative. If you asked someone how they'd design a system for prioritizing the display of certain content over a network, plenty of engineers would have come up with the same sort of solution. The bigger question, though, is why a judge would take away a website's domain name in a patent dispute?

No One Ever Said Free Is The Business Model -- But It Absolutely Should Be A Part Of The Business Model
Following Rupert Murdoch's latest hints that he's going to take down the paywall at the Wall Street Journal, a bit of a debate has developed about whether or not it's a good idea. Dow Jones executives are apparently against the idea (ironically, published in a "free" article on their site). However, the WSJ's Kara Swisher is all for it. Watching the debate unravel, however, I keep seeing people arguing against the idea, using similar logic to what I saw in the comments earlier this year when I wrote about how "free" is an essential part of many business models (if you know how to leverage it). It's typified by Mark Potts, who declares: "Free is Not a Business Model," in dismissing the commentary in support of a freeing both the NY Times and the WSJ. Unfortunately, it seems like Potts is blinded by the word free and forgets to look past it. No one is saying that "free" is the business model. They're simply saying that free is a component of the business model -- just...

Not Recommended: Trying To Boost A Company's Stock By Bombing Investment Banks
Investors do all sorts of odd things in trying to get the stocks they like to go up, rather than down. However, there's a limit -- and apparently one guy went way past that limit in trying to boost the stock of networking firm 3com. He sent bomb threats to 17 different investment firms, demanding that they boost the stock. Apparently, he actually did send two bombs, though it doesn't sound like they exploded. Either way, if you suddenly feel that you need to send bombs (or even just threats) to investment banks to make your investments rise, perhaps you should consider different investment opportunities.

Americans Giving Up Sex for Interneting? Not Quite as Bad As It Sounds...
New technologies, from email to Blackberries, are often blamed for everything from failed marriages to bad sex lives. A recent study claims that a large percentage of Americans are spending less time having sex due to the amount time they spend on the Internet. However, reading past the publicity grabbing headline, the truth may be less alarming. Sure, Americans are reducing the amount of face-to-face time they spend with their friends, but they are replacing it (and other non-interactive activities like newspaper reading and television watching) with time on the Internet. They may spend less time face-to-face, but the net amount of time spent interacting with other people is increased. The statement made by the director of the study that "I don't suppose their partners are too pleased about it" is short sighted -- the assumption that only one of the partners is online is a bit antiquated. Perhaps both partners are actually quite enjoying their time online, and perhaps...

No Evidence That Online Gambling Creates More Problem Gamblers
While the US continues its attempts to wipe out all forms of online gambling (other than those forms of gambling that politicians partake in, such as horse racing and lotteries), a new study is suggesting that, contrary to politician grandstanding, online gambling does not lead to more problem gamblers. The study takes place in the UK, where they measured the different types of gambling that people engage in and determined the number of problem gamblers out there. What they found is that, even though it's a lot easier to gamble these days, the number of problem gamblers seems to have remained mostly constant (representing less than 1% of all gamblers). This shouldn't really be all that surprising. Problem gamblers are problem gamblers whether or not they have internet access to gambling sites. Either way, this should raise some questions about the idea that preventing online gambling somehow protects gambling addicts.

What The Entertainment Industry Could Learn From Al Neuharth
No matter what you feel about USA Today founder Al Neuharth (who certainly elicits quite a strong reaction from many people), he revealed a very interesting story about a decision made in the early days of USA Today in an interview on the 25th anniversary of the paper. It's a story that the entertainment industry, busy in its plan to sue college kids, could learn a lot from. Apparently, soon after USA Today launched, some college kids stole some of the cool looking vending machines USA Today was using. Neuharth then took what may seem like the counter-intuitive step in dealing with it: "Our lawyers, as lawyers are wont to do, said, "Let's sue the bastards." And I said, "Like hell we will. Let's find them and we will make them our distributors." And we did that."Every time we write about why it's dumb for the entertainment industry to enforce its copyrights in doing things like suing YouTube, people yell at us for taking away the rights of content creators. This is a misreading...