They'll Make it up in Volume
The RIAA's actions make no sense on any level. Witness:
The RIAA paid Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million, to pursue its "copyright infringement" claims, in order to recover a mere $391,000. [ps there were many other law firms feeding at the trough too; these were just the ones listed among the top 5 independent contractors.]
Looks like they're following the patented Jonathan Schwartz "we'll make it up in volume" strategery.
English is a Second Language...
"We believe that the district court's dangerously expansive reading of the liability immunity provisions of the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] DMCA upsets the careful balance struck within the law and is bad public policy," Cary Sherman, RIAA president, wrote in a blog post. "It will actually discourage service providers from taking steps to minimize the illegal exchange of copyrighted works on their sites."
Gosh, the court actually read the law and applied it. Maybe they can order remedial english comprehension for the RIAA.
The Stupid Burns
Sometimes I think society as a whole is engaged in a suicide pact. First example:
Transocean’s ban on employee knife possession nearly killed several BP drilling rig survivors, by preventing them from cutting the rope that attached the life boat to the drilling rig.
And, the second example, from San Francisco:
Last week, the city's board of supervisors voted 10-1 to require cellphone retailers to show how much radiation their phones emit. Mayor Gavin Newsom is expected to sign it, making it the first such law in the nation.
At some point, we'll all be so safe that we won't be able to do anything but quietly starve in a padded room...
Someone Hand John Gruber a Skype Account
I'm sure he'll be amazed with the service, what with how he seems to think that Apple's FaceTime is somehow revolutionary. Psst - Gruber - with Skype I can anyone, whether they have Skype or not. Heck, I can even get a Skype number.
While he's at it, maybe he should check out Google Voice, too. Sheesh.
Technorati Tags: clueless
Someone Smack the NY Times with a Cluestick
Oh, this is just awesome. The NY Times claims that the Pulse News Aggregator (iPod/iPad) "infringes" because it allows people to read their RSS feeds:
But by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company (NYT) declaring that “The New York Times Company believes your application named ‘Pulse News Reader’ infringes The New York Times Company’s rights.” In an unusual coincidence, the Times Web site was on prominent display on a huge screenshot of the iPad during Jobs’s speech.
It's hard to begin to criticize this, because there's so much stupid. First, the Times chose to make their RSS feeds available. Second, it's easily possible to configure access to an endoint based on the inbound request source - sure, that can be scammed, but most people don't know that. The bigger issue is the first one though - the Times made these feeds available, so it's not possible for an app that reads them to be infringing. It's sort of like putting a huge rolling sign with headlines in your window, and then yelling at any passerby who has the temerity to pause to read it.
The lawyer for the Times has a pretty stupid take on it:
“The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.”
If that's true, then Safari needs to be yanked, since it can see RSS feeds as well. As does the Atom browser, and any other RSS reader in the app store - and when I searched just now, there were pages of them. When will the Times and this moron of a lawyer go after those, and Safari?
Update: Seems Apple has a clue. They reversed course, and put the app back. If and when they explain why to the Times, I hope they use small words.
Darwin Award Candidate
The judge in this suit should not only throw the case out, but nominate the plaintiff for an honorable mention in the "Darwin Awards":
On January 19, 2010, Rosenberg was apparently trying to get from 96 Daly Street, Park City, Utah, to 1710 Prospector Avenue, Park City, Utah. She looked up the walking directions using Google Maps on her Blackberry. Google Maps suggested a route that included a half-mile walk down "Deer Valley Drive," which is also known as "Utah State Route 224." There's not much more to say--she started walking down the middle of a highway, and a car hit her. Who wouldn't have seen that one coming?
In what version of reality does behaving like that involve a lawsuit?
Update: Credit where due - Danny Sullivan originally broke the story.
Living in 1975
How can a modern person be able to say this?
Said [Senator] Nelson: "I've never used an ATM, so I don't know what the fees are. It's true, I don't know how to use one."
That was in the context of a debate about ATM fees. Never mind the issue itself; I'm just gobsmacked by the idea that we have a person in the Senate who's never used an ATM. Sadly, I doubt he's alone in that regard....
Focusing on the Trivial
You have to love the deep minds at the MPAA. While other people discuss the actual issues behind US troops being in a war, the MPAA is worried about.... piracy:
Less known are the movie industry’s efforts to clamp down on copyright infringers who are defending their country’s interests on foreign soil. Because the availability of legal movies and TV-shows is limited in countries such as Iraq, soldiers sometimes use BitTorrent to get their fix, or buy pirated DVDs from local sellers. The MPAA is not happy with these defiant soldiers. A declassified document from the United States Central Command shows that, a few years ago, the MPAA asked the military what they do to prevent soldiers from accessing pirated DVDs in Iraq.
Because that's clearly the most relevant issue there - whether some soldier managed to get an illicit copy of "Iron Man".
Every time I think the MPAA can't get stupider, I end up having to expand the definition of "stupider"...
Stop me Before I Browse Again
It would be nice if the people running telecoms had the slightest idea what people use the internet for. Here's Verizon's clueless leader:
But when we now go after the very, very high users, the ones who camp on the network all day long every day doing things that—who knows what they're doing - But those are the people we will throttle and we will find them and we will charge them something else
Awesome. Maybe he wants FIOS to just come with Pine and Lynx and be done with it?
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