Into Tech

The ongoing ridiculous situation brewing between bloggers and the Associated Press has now taken a turn towards the enjoyably hilarious. We had already mentioned the fact that, despite the AP’s complaints that bloggers quoting less than 100 words were violating fair use, the AP had a long history of quoting more than 100 words from bloggers — and not even linking back to the original blog. Now, in a bit of ultimate irony, the AP’s own article about this brouhaha quoted (without linking) twenty-two words from TechCrunch. That’s 18 words more than the supposed four word “limit” the AP has suggested. With an ironic chance that wide, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington couldn’t resist, and asked his lawyer to send a DMCA takedown notice to the Associated Press, along with a bill for $12.50 (directly off the AP’s own pricing schedule). He admits that it’s ridiculous, but that’s what his actions are designed to present. By law, the AP should be required to takedown the content before filing a response — though, since it’s filing the response to itself, then perhaps it won’t need to takedown the content. Either way, this helps illustrate the insanity of the entire situation.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Copyright law, by its nature, is an abuse of free speech. Many, of course, consider it to be a reasonable restriction on free speech — but any time you open that door, you open up the possibility that copyright will be abused in a way to prevent other types of free speech. For example, Techdirt reader cram writes in to point out that Korean officials have arrested the CEO of a video streaming website, charging him with copyright infringement, noting that the site encouraged people to upload copyrighted works by giving uploaders a share of money earned. However, many are suggesting that copyright infringement charges have little to do with the real reason behind the arrest — as the guy arrested also runs another site that has helped publicize videos protesting Korean policies on importing US beef. Well, no matter what they think of imports on US beef, now they know what happens when they import US-mandated copyright law.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

A couple of years ago, we wrote about the fact that the state of Kentucky had started blocking certain political blogs from the computers of state employees. The interesting part was that the state was only blocking blogs that were critical of state officials. The group Public Citizen filed a lawsuit saying that the selective blocking was a First Amendment violation. It looks like that issue won’t get settled in court any time soon, as a new administration in Kentucky has decided that it is changing that policy and won’t block critical sites, leading Public Citizen to drop the lawsuit.

Of course, without a court ruling, it’s now not clear if the original actions were legal — and there’s nothing to stop a future administration from reversing the policy yet again. In the meantime, what kind of politician actually thinks it’s a good thing to block out those who disagree with them rather than hear what they have to say? Talk about sticking your head in the sand…

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I am not currently a Netflix customer, but one of the features of the service that I thought was quite useful (and I know plenty of people who use it actively) was the “profiles” feature that let a single family/household set up separate queues of movies they wanted. So, for example, a husband, wife and kids could each get their own list of movies with separate logins, rather than having to manage a single queue. This made the service a lot more useful for a household. And yet… Netflix is eliminating the feature, and doing so with the bizarre Orwellian explanation:

Why? While it may be disappointing to see this feature go away, this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

Can someone explain how eliminating a feature that many people use improves the Netflix website? You see, Netflix, if you’re going to remove a feature and say that the website is better because of it, it would actually help if you explained how or why it’s better (i.e., you’re replacing that feature with something better). To simply say that removing a well-liked feature makes the website better without any further explanation, you’re basically calling your customers stupid because you think they’ll believe what’s clearly bogus.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

It’s been many, many years since we first asked the question of whether or not piggybacking on an open WiFi network was a crime. Since then, we’ve seen plenty of people arrested, and wide ranging discussions on the ethics of WiFi piggybacking — with various ethicists noting that simply using an open WiFi network doesn’t seem unethical, assuming you don’t significantly slow down the connection by uploading or downloading large files. However, we still see people falsely referring to it as “theft”.

The latest comes in a short column for Time Magazine, where the author admits that he was a WiFi “thief” for many years in his old apartment. In the article, he claims that it is against the law, noting one of the stories of someone being arrested, while quoting Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 47 of the United States Code, which deals with anybody who “intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access.” Well, that sounds good, but there’s a big problem with it. If the owner of the WiFi access point left it open, then they have, by default, authorized access to that device. So it can’t possibly be a violation of that law.

Of course, there will be those who say that the owners didn’t intend for the network to be open — but that’s really besides the point here. The only information a user has is does the network say: “you’re welcome here” or not. If it’s open, it sends out an invite that specifically says: this network is open, come use it. That’s authorization, and using such a network is not “theft” in any sense.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

For years, we’ve given examples of how DRM ends up screwing over customers one way or another. One of the most obvious ways is when that DRM requires files to “check in” over the internet to work, and the company that manages the “check in” server takes it down. That’s what’s Microsoft announced it was doing with its incredibly-misnamed “PlaysForSure” DRM servers back in April. This was, effectively, going back on the terms of the deal they offered to music buyers. Following the outcry in response, however, it appears that Microsoft has reconsidered, saying that it will keep the servers running at least until 2011. So for the 35 people or so who bought into the PlaysForSure system, you have another 3 years to find new DRM-free sources of music.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

We’ve seen so many industries freak out as the market changed around them thanks to the internet, that it really shouldn’t be surprising when those “old school” players pull out the bag of sneaky tricks. However, in the case of retail stores, the tricks seem especially bad. Specifically, the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a lobbying group that represent the biggest retail chains in the US is asking Congress to start regulating what can be sold on online auction sites. The sneaky part is in how this is positioned. Since just complaining about the competition isn’t likely to win over many politicians, these retail stores are claiming that online auction sites are creating a huge crime wave, as organized groups of individuals rob stores and sell off the results online. Of course, if that were the case, rather than blaming the internet, why not focus on better theft prevention techniques?

However, the really sneaky part of this push to get Congress involved is that the reasoning isn’t even accurate. I’m sure there may be some groups of shoplifters out there who have been going around stealing goods out of stores and reselling them on eBay, but the details suggest it’s barely a blip on the radar. A study by the National Retail Federation (who also represents large retailers) found that most store theft comes from employees or vendors. Only 1/3 comes from shoplifting. Stores themselves are partly to blame, as they’ve cut back on prosecuting shoplifters. And, most importantly, retail theft appears to be dropping rather consistently over the past few years.

So, basically, retailers get to push for the idea that they need to ban online auctions from selling certain products — when it turns out what they really want is to get rid of the competition. There’s no real evidence of an epidemic of thefts due to online auctions, and even if there were, the problem should be dealt with via the retailers’ own loss management efforts.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Plenty of other companies have tried to take on PayPal and discovered that it was a lot harder than it looked. Even though there are a lot of folks dissatisfied with PayPal, most attempts to compete with it have fallen flat. Even Google’s efforts haven’t really made a huge dent. However, could Amazon shake things up a bit? Over the years, it’s done a few things to put its toes in the water of personal payment systems, and now some are predicting that it’s gearing up to launch a full on PayPal competitor in the next few months. The analyst who wrote that report notes that Amazon isn’t “just another” PayPal competitor, suggesting that its knowledge and experience with online retailing will allow it to create something better. It would certainly be an interesting fit with other “web services” that Amazon has been offering lately — and would even tie further into Amazon’s existing knowledge and scalability. That said, for whatever reason, this market has been a tough one to crack, so we should probably wait and see what the specifics are (if any) before determining its likelihood of success or failure.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Ah, shrinks. Where would we be without respected members of society justifying our day to day habits with fancy words.

Recklessly providing the webophile with ammunition to fire at whining spouse who complain because you spend too much time online, US psychiatrist Dr Jerald Block says you can now claim to have a ‘clinical disorder’.

Barely a day goes by it seems without Gear4 releasing some sort of iPod accessory or twist on a portable speaker.

This new one is part of its existing BlackBox series, which are portable Bluetooth speakers with a funky sleek black design. Unfortunately while good looking enough the original models weren’t particularly powerful so the new Blackbox 24/7 seems aimed at making the most of its strengths.