Band Leaks Own Tracks To BitTorrent, Pretends To Be Pissed Off
Yes, part of the business model for using free music to your advantage is recognizing how that free music acts as a promotional good for you, but the band BuckCherry seems to have taken that a bit too far. It definitely seemed quite suspicious when the band, signed to a major label, put out a press release about how angry they were that their latest music was leaked online. So, the good folks over at TorrentFreak did a little investigating, and tracked down the fact that whoever leaked the album just so happened to use the same exact IP address as the band's manager. Oops.
So, let's try this again. Using free music as a promotional tool can work wonders, but part of that is in publicly embracing the fact that your fans want to share your music. Not creating mock outrage about it.
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Broadband suppliers blame slowdown on housing crisis
Britain's broadband boom is stuttering as consumers grapple with rising price and the crumbling housing market. Four of the UK's big six providers yesterday announced that the past three months saw demand for high-speed internet access down on the previous quarter and down on last year.
With many households looking to rein in spending and able to access the internet at work, the industry believes growth over the summer is likely to be even slower.
Carphone Warehouse's TalkTalk business is the UK's third largest ISP. Yesterday it cut its prediction for annual broadband customer growth by 50%, to between 200,000 and 250,000, after saying it signed 44,000 new customers in the three months to the end of June - compared with 126,000 last year, and 109,000 in the first quarter of 2008.
Chief executive Charles Dunstone said: "It is a combination of fewer housing transactions, because buying a house is a key time when people change supplier, and more people buying mobile broadband instead of fixed line access." The market is also maturing, he said, with more than 60% of UK households having broadband.
Orange, owned by France Telecom, is the UK's sixth largest ISP. Yesterday it admitted it actually lost 44,000 broadband users in the quarter, more than the 31,000 it lost in the three months to end March, and the 5,000 who defected last year. Orange now has just over a million customers.
Market leader BT, meanwhile, added 103,000 new broadband customers in the three months to end June, down from 150,000 in the previous quarter, and 174,000 last year. It now has 4.5 million broadband users.
Chief executive Ian Livingston said that new technologies it plans to roll out over the next few years would greatly increase download speeds and could push growth - but that is a little way off. BT shares were clobbered yesterday, having their biggest one-day fall since the dotcom bubble burst, as investors saw a dramatic drop in first quarter cashflow and revelations that margins at BT's closely watched IT services business have gone backwards, and its pension fund has gone into the red.
Livingston, who only took over from Ben Verwaayen at the start of June, tried to reassure the City that despite having a net cash outflow of £734m over the three months to the end of June, several hundred million more than expected, BT is still on track to generate £1.4bn by the end of the year. The fact its pension scheme has gone from a £2bn surplus before tax last year to an £800m deficit this year, meanwhile, is due to inflation affecting the way the fund is valued, he added.
Analysts were unimpressed. "Protestations from the company that the year will turn out OK may not carry much weight in the current environment, and the share price would seem to be reflecting doubts over the sustainability of the dividend," said Martin Mabbutt at Nomura. "Poor start to the year" was the headline on a post-results note to investors from Citi.
Gloom surrounding BT was deepened by news that profit margins in its IT operation, BT Global Services, were slightly down on last year and will be lower for the year because of currency fluctuations. BT maintains that the unit (40% of group revenues in the first quarter) can make profit margins of 15% within two to three years, and it is cutting costs. But with first quarter margins of 9.5% down from 9.8%, investors remain highly sceptical; shares in BT closed down 23.7p at 173.9p, wiping £1.8bn off the value of the company.
Another broadband provider, BSkyB, said yesterday that it had added 200,000 customers (half already taking its satellite TV) in the past three months, compared with 229,000 in the previous quarter and 259,000 last year.
Sky announced a drop in annual profits to £60m from £724m because of a £616m plunge in its 17.9% stake in ITV, but said it remains on track to increase its 8.98 million pay-TV customers to 10 million by 2010, with a third also taking broadband.
With more than 1.6 million broadband customers, Sky is now at the heels of fourth-placed Tiscali, estimated to have lost customers in the past quarter. The Italian-owned firm is for sale, with Carphone Warehouse and Sky potentially interested. Tiscali and the UK's second ISP, Virgin Media, report next week.
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Categories: News Tags: Internet Access, LAN, Satellite, Web Stuff
The Hidden Costs Of Micropayments Go Beyond The Penny Gap
For as far back as I can remember, there have always been folks who insist that micropayments are the solution to the "free" content question. That is, they believe that the solution to "free" content is to set up a system where content can be accessed for such a low price that it's "close enough" to free and people don't mind. However, as Clay Shirky pointed out many years ago, it's not that easy at all. As soon as you add in some cost, even a small one, it creates mental transaction costs that go beyond the payment itself. Basically, just the fact that you need to think about whether or not it's worth it, creates a disincentive to consume that content. And, indeed, most micropayment schemes haven't gone very far. Last year, VC Josh Koppelman named this phenomenon "the penny gap" to explain how the "gap" in getting someone to go from $0 to $0.01 is much bigger than the gap from getting someone to go from $0.01 to $0.02 (in some ways, it's the same as the difference from going from 0 mph to 1 mph -- inertia is a powerful force).
However, Andrew Parker is questioning whether the real problem isn't an economics issue, but a usability issue. That is, if it were really easy to pay that $0.01, people wouldn't mind so much. In other words, a big part of that "mental transaction cost" that Shirky talks about is (according to Parker) the effort needed to establish that payment (a login, supplying payment info, etc.). As proof that this may be the case, Parker points to the early distribution numbers for the iPhone App Store which show more $0.99 apps sold than free apps downloaded. His point: since the iPhone makes it so easy to get an app and pay for it, the "penny gap" or the mental transaction costs really aren't that high.
This is a really good point -- and it is a testament to what a good job Apple did with the App Store to make it so seamless to the user. You absolutely can reduce the mental transaction costs, and that shrinks the penny gap significantly. However, I wouldn't be so quick to jump to the conclusion that micropayment solutions will become that big a deal. First off, these are only the initial results from App Store sales, when you're dealing with early adopters. I'll be interested to see if the results remain this way over a longer period of time.
Even more importantly, though, there may be other hidden costs that should deter certain publishers from focusing on micropayments. Mainly, you are driving away the ability of your users to share and promote your content for you. In other words, you're shutting off one of the best tools to get your app more widely used and recognized. So, even removing the transaction costs from the equation, going to a micropayment solution over a free one doesn't always make the most sense.
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Congress Moves Forward With Plan To Make Universities Copyright Cops
For a little over a year, there have been stories about how the entertainment industry has been pressuring Congress to make universities responsible for stopping copyright infringement on their network. This got a lot of attention late last year when Congress tried to tie such a mandate to a provision granting financial aid to students. In other words, the threat was that if universities didn't act to stop file sharing, their students wouldn't be eligible for financial aid. This got plenty of attention, and the bill never passed. The most interesting part of it, though, was that much of the reasoning for the bill was driven by MPAA claims that 44% of all illegal file sharing took place on college campuses.
There was just one problem with that: the number was completely wrong. Earlier this year, the MPAA admitted that it had made a small mistake, and the number was actually something like 15% (and even that could be argued).
You might think that would allow our Congressional representatives to focus their attention on something a bit more important -- but with super low approval ratings, the people they actually represent matter a lot less than their biggest campaign donors. So, of course, the bill to turn universities into copyright cops is back once again. It is somewhat toned down, but will still require universities to basically be the mouthpieces of the entertainment industry, repeating their propaganda and ignoring that the problem is the industry's obsolete business models rather than any legal issue.
However, as you read William Patry's post on this above, you see that the MPAA is also positioning the legislative history on the law so that next year or so, they'll be able to come back and insist on mandatory filters at universities. Basically, it looks like the MPAA tried to bite off too big of a chunk when it pushed for this law last year, so this year, it's taking half a bite, but getting everything ready to get the rest of what it wants next year.
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Categories: Web Stuff Tags: File sharing, Hd, LAN, Web Stuff
Garfield Minus Garfield Gets Its Own Book… And No Lawsuits, Either!
Back in June, we noted how sad it was that we were all so happy that Garfield creator Jim Davis didn't freak out about the derivative comic strip "Garfield Minus Garfield." In this day and age, we're so used to creators sending out cease and desist letters and claiming "ownership" that it was refreshing to see a content creator actually happy about someone building (or, in this case, subtracting) off his work. This should be the norm -- but instead it's a unique thing. Witness the silly spat over who "owns" Flat Stanley, for example.
However, the Jim Davis/Garfield thing is getting even better. It appears that Davis' publisher, Ballantine Books, has worked out an agreement with the creator of Garfield Minus Garfield to publish a book of those strips as well, and they're doing it in conjunction with a 30th anniversary Garfield book. And, once again, Jim Davis seems thrilled about the whole thing:
"I think it's an inspired thing to do. I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: 'Oh, I could have left that out.' It would have been funnier."I look forward to a day when the idea that someone being thrilled that they inspired someone else's creative works as a derivative of their own isn't newsworthy. In the meantime, kudos to Jim Davis, Ballantine... and, most importantly, Dan Walsh for his creativity in coming up with Garfield Minus Garfield in the first place.
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AutoAdmit Lawsuit Leads To Suggestion For Dreadful DMCA-Style Takedowns Of Defamation
For a while now, we've been covering the lawsuits surrounding "AutoAdmit." If you haven't been paying attention, AutoAdmit is a message board system used by law school students, many of whom apparently used it to be what, at best, might be called juvenile jerks. For example, there were certain threads insulting various female law students (in incredibly crude terms), which those students insisted cost them jobs. This point is rather difficult to prove -- because there are many reasons why the women might not have been able to get jobs, and any firm that won't hire someone because of juvenile messages on a message board probably isn't worth working for (also, a few months back, someone sent us some evidence that one of the women actually had gotten a job at a law firm, despite her complaints of not being able to).
However, since we're dealing with a bunch of law students and lawyers, it wasn't long before the lawsuits began flying. First, the women filed lawsuits against the message board, various anonymous posters and an administrator of the message board. Of course, the administrator pointed out (correctly) that he's clearly protected, and eventually he was dropped from the lawsuit -- but not before he lost his job. So, of course, he sued back for the wrongfully targeted lawsuit against him. Quite a mess.
Wired News is running an update on the case, where it reveals that one of the anonymous law students who made the juvenile comments has now been identified to the women filing the lawsuit, meaning that he won't be anonymous much longer. This is a bit surprising, since we've seen a series of lawsuits lately that US courts believe it's important to protect anonymity, even in cases where the content in question is "unquestionably offensive and demeaning."
However, what's more interesting, is the rest of the article from Wired, where it explores the "Pandora's Box" this case has opened up concerning a bunch of issues involving free speech, anonymity and the limits of both. And, of course, since we have a bunch of lawyers involved, there's one downright scary suggestion: create a DMCA-like law that allows someone to demand a takedown of content they find defamatory. If you thought false DMCA takedowns were a bit much, can you imagine how many such defamation takedown's would be sent on a regular basis? As we've seen time and time again, many people (falsely) assume that any content they don't like is defamatory, and already send cease-and-desist letters at the drop of a hat. If you added a notice-and-takedown provision, this would be abused to no end.
But, in the end, as the article notes, it's unclear what good any of this has done. The lawsuit is wasting a lot of people's times, and is doing a lot more to harm various reputations than the original thread ever really did. Yes, it was offensive, demeaning, juvenile and idiotic to some extent. But, opting to file a lawsuit almost seems guaranteed to make the situation a lot worse -- and, frankly, seems to do a lot more damage to the law students suing, than any random obviously childish thread on an open message board would ever do.
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UK Politicians Demand YouTube Vet Content To ‘Protect The Children’
Various safe harbors for service providers that protect them from the actions of their users make a lot of common sense. It's simply wrong to blame a service provider for the actions of its users. We don't blame the telephone company when someone commits a crime using the phone. And we don't blame the car company for providing the getaway car. Nor do we ask those companies to do anything to block those actions. That's because we all realize how silly that is -- to blame a tool provider for the actions of its users. Yet, for some reason, when we move online, that concept gets confused. While most of the focus has been on safe harbors concerning copyright or defamation, when you toss in a bit of "but think of the children!" it gets even more ridiculous.
We've already seen this with US politicians bullying ISPs into blocking "objectionable" content, even though they have no legal basis for this (and, in fact, such blocking will only make it more difficult to track down those actually responsible). And, now we see it in the UK. UK MPs are claiming that Google needs to vet all of the content uploaded to YouTube "to protect children from harmful content." Seriously.
I guess it's only in the techie community that we recognize that the phrase "to protect the children" is almost always followed by a plan that does the opposite.
The politicians seem concerned that occasionally, questionable content is found on YouTube, and it might take them (gasp!) 24 hours to take it down. Apparently it has not occurred to those behind this demand that perhaps they should be focused on using the content being uploaded to track down those actually responsible for the objectionable (illegal?) content, rather than demanding that Google proactively hide the evidence. Next up, we'll be expecting the report where politicians demand that telephone companies "proactively" review all telephone calls to make sure there is no objectionable content "to protect children."
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Everyone Loves A Good Blog
Blogs are the new black, according to Hitwise, who recently reported that 1.19% of all internet traffic in June this year was to blog sites.
Whether it's the potential for a more diverse range of information, the search for amusement, varied opinion or the specific subjects blogs cover in comparison with dedicated sites, they're clearly a big hit among web users in the modern age.
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Tech Company That Junked Unopened Rebate Claims Pays $10k In Fines
It's no secret that most people hate rebate programs. They're a pain to deal with, so many people don't even send in the rebate forms -- and then, the various companies that receive them often go out of their way to find reasons to reject them. However, a tech company in San Jose named Vastech went a bit further than that. Rather than coming up with ways to void the rebates, it was caught having thrown over a thousand unopened rebate claims into the garbage. The company has now paid up on all the rebates that it had junked and has agreed to pay a $10,000 fine on top of that. To be honest, that seems rather low for deceiving the public.
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