Davenport Lyons Lawyers Referred To Disciplinary Tribunal Over 'Pay Up Or We'll Sue' Copyright Threat Letters

from the shakedown dept

A few years back, UK law firm Davenport Lyons made a splash by sending out a ton of "pre-settlement" letters to people accused of file sharing, threatening to sue them if they didn't pay a few hundred pounds. The law firm used a default judgment (i.e., a case where the defendant didn't show up) to claim that it had the law on its side and would sue and win. Of course, an investigation into the thousands of letters being sent found that plenty of innocent bystanders were being sent those letters as well -- which certainly raised all sorts of questions about the legitimacy of the effort. The negative publicity resulted in some high profile Davenport Lyons customers backing out of their relationship, and eventually a new entity called ACS:Law to pop up to continue the effort -- though, an investigation found that the documents used by ACS:law were created by Davenport Lyons.

Despite many calls for sanctions against the lawyers for taking part in an effort that has remarkable similarities to a traditional shakedown scheme, there had been little response from regulators. However Marcus alerts us to the news that two Davenport Lyons lawyers have now been referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. I'm not quite sure how this process works in the UK, but it seems like it's about time that someone was checking in on these activities.

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How Musician Ellis Paul Got 300 Fans To Give Him $100,000 For His Latest Album

from the how-it's-done dept

Yet another great blog post by Ariel Hyatt, exploring how musicians are embracing the concept of focusing on the true fans to build a modern business model -- this time looking at how musician Ellis Paul was able to raise $100,000 from just 300 fans. The actual concept appears quite similar to what we've seen elsewhere before, in that he put together a set of "tiers" for support. The Ellis Paul story actually sounds quite similar to the Jill Sobule story -- both musicians who have been around for many years, bouncing around in the old system before realizing that a big label doesn't make much sense, when you have a strong fan base and really aren't selling the amount of albums the big record label really needs to consider you a success. Like Sobule, Paul has focused on really building up a loyal audience, and figuring out ways to communicate with them. What's interesting here, is that it took just 300 fans buying into tiers to get Paul to that $100,000 mark. Not bad.

There are some parts that suggest Paul could have an even stronger model, however. It doesn't appear that he really embraces "free." For example, there's lots of talk focusing on selling albums, even though his manager admits that he makes about 60% of his revenue from live shows, and a key focus for Paul is to build up his audience. In fact, for people who did participate in his tiered offering, they would send them CDs and ask them to pass the CDs along to other potential "true fans." But why not just embrace the more efficient system of offering the music up for free to expand the audience much further, continue to build up that live following, and offer additional alternatives for the business model that might get even more than 300 people to participate?

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Encyclopedia Dramatica Owner May Face Charges Down Under... Despite Not Being In Australia

from the jurisdictional-issues dept

You would think after all these years on the internet we would have figured out how to deal with basic jurisdictional issues, but there are still plenty of countries who think that the laws in their country can reach over borders and be applied to people and websites in completely different countries, just because they don't like it. The problem with this, of course, is that if this is true, it automatically creates a very low ceiling for all internet communications, since they are all automatically held to the most draconian censorship laws out there. But, still, someone sees something they don't like online, even if it's from another country, and legal threats come out.

The latest such example involves the guy who runs Encyclopedia Dramatica, which might be simply described as... 4chan's version of Wikipedia, or the "internet troll's Wikipedia." However you want to describe it, it's filled with content you probably don't want your mom looking at. But, it's quite an institution at this point.

But it turns out that the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) is upset about a "deliberately offensive article about Aborigines," and is threatening to take the site's operator, Joseph Evers, to court. The thing is, the stuff on Encyclopedia Dramatica are deliberately offensive to pretty much everyone. That's the point. But the nice thing about the internet is that if you don't like that sort of thing, you can avoid it. Furthermore, Evers is in the US and isn't breaking any US laws.

But really, what good does this do for Aborigines or Australia? All this threat does is call a lot more attention to this offensive article. Prior to this most people now reading about it never would have known about it. Those who spend their time on ED would see it, but that's what they find amusing anyway. Of course, it also turns out that ED is apparently on Australia's "secret" censorship filter list, so if the gov't ever gets around to forcing ISPs to block sites, the people offended by ED won't be able to access it (and everyone else will just route around the filters anyway).

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Heroes Producer: Honored To Be The Most Unauthorized Downloaded Show

from the recognizing-the-future dept

One of the talks at SXSW was apparently about "multiplatform storytelling," which fits in with a point that we've discussed here in the past. Content creators are realizing that they no longer need to pigeonhole themselves as "just musicians," or "just filmmakers" but can reach out and tell stories in very different ways. And, in the end, that's what every content producer is really doing: they're telling stories. It doesn't necessarily matter what the format is, and there are no rules that say you're restricted to telling your entire story through just one platform.

This talk was given by Tim Kring, creator of the popular TV show Heroes, and he made some interesting points -- noting that he's "honored" that Heroes is the most "illegally" downloaded TV show out there, because "we'll take audience anywhere we can get it." But he's not just sitting back. The reason he doesn't care if people are watching the show on TV or elsewhere is because they're really working on ways to connect with fans in much deeper ways, including creating a pretty complex and massive alternative reality game that had true fans of the show actively involved -- such that they knew about certain characters and important plot points way before they appeared on the small screen, and were made to feel like actual participants in the story. As he noted, "people want to participate in their TV shows."

Again, this is a point that has been made before -- but so many of the suits upstairs still seem to think that TV is a purely broadcast media, not one where people want to communicate and participate in meaningful ways (and, yes, that means a lot more than just calling or texting a phone number to "vote" on something). It's great to see the folks actually making these stories are understanding this, because eventually that thinking will begin to become more common, rather than seem like some crazy idea to appease "the internet folks." We're not there yet, of course. NBC, which airs Heroes is still freaking out about those illegal downloads and wasting tons of money and resources claiming that it must be stopped -- all while its basic network schedule has been a huge disaster. If NBC top brass listened to folks like Kring, and realized the challenge is to make people happy, rather than spending so much time trying to force them into "the way NBC wants things to work," perhaps the network wouldn't be in so much trouble.

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How Much Of That All Important Journalism Is Really PR?

from the more-than-half,-apparently dept

We get pitched stories from PR people all the time, and probably 99.9% of them end up getting ignored and trashed -- mostly because they're not even close to relevant, but often because we have no interest in being someone's free promotional team. What's amusing, however, is that invariably, days after we get pitched on certain stories, I end up seeing them appear in all sorts of mainstream publications, including some of the biggest and "most trusted" names in journalism.

And yet we keep getting told that we need to "support" this all important newspaper industry so they can carry on with the important democracy-saving task of journalism?

Last year, we noted that some attempts to count how many stories a newspaper actually reported on each day showed that the numbers were woefully low -- just a handful per day, with the rest all filled in with fluff and wire service copy. But it gets even more ridiculous once you realize that many of the "stories" that reporters worked on were really little more than gussied up press releases turned into "articles."

Boing Boing points us to a recent study in Australia that looked at a week's worth of newspaper stories, and found that more than half were placed by PR people, though there was definitely a pretty wide range depending on the newspaper.

This seems like a pretty important finding to be included in any debate about "saving" newspapers -- especially when the government is talking about stepping in to tax others to prop up newspapers. If all they're really doing is propping up efforts to run wire copy and run thinly veiled advertisements-as-news, is that really what the government should be supporting? It seems we have this mental "ideal" of journalism, represented by Woodward and Bernstein, holding politicians accountable for their actions -- but that rarely happens in practice. Instead, too much of traditional journalism has become notetaking -- writing down what politicians and PR people say and repeating it back to an audience that could find that information themselves if they wanted it.

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Jaron Lanier Says That Musicians Using Free To Succeed Are Lying

from the wow dept

Jaron Lanier came out with his book recently, and it's still getting a bunch of publicity, despite getting some rather basic facts wrong. But, even so, I was shocked to hear that he recently stood up at a conference and claimed that musicians who say they are using "free" music to their advantage are lying:

"Every single example of these musicians who did really well by giving stuff away... they don't exist," Lanier says. "There are a lot of people who pretend ... and it is fake."

What a bizarre statement, considering just how many real life examples we see every day of musicians successfully embracing an understanding of basic economics (which Lanier apparently lacks). I was trying to better understand how Lanier could make such an easily debunked statement with a straight face, and it's not clear at all. It appears that Lanier is the one who is pretending here. The only explanation I can find for his bizarre claim is the wiggle room he leaves for himself later in his talk:

Lanier adds that artists making a career off music in the digital age are still having success thanks to the traditional models. "Anyone who is making it now is making it off the little shreds of the old system that is still working," he says.

So, basically, he will try to turn any of the many success stories we regularly talk about into a story about how they're still using "the old system." We've seen this before, and it makes no sense. It's the last gasp argument of someone who's been proven wrong. They'll argue that because someone makes any use at all of the old infrastructure or the old system, every bit of their success is due to that. It's wrong on many different levels.

Furthermore, when Lanier talks about "the little shreds of the old system that is still working," I'm wondering what he's referring to -- given that countless studies are showing that the music business has continued to grow. So, if there's anyone "pretending" here, it seems like it's Lanier.

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More Examples Of Patent Incentives Making The World Less Safe

from the hoarding-the-info-needed-to-save-us dept

For years, we've written about how Indonesia has been hoarding bird flu samples and refusing to share them with researchers, because they're afraid that someone will come in and patent the cure, based on the samples they provide, and that will make it much costlier to Indonesia to get the vaccine. Of course, the end result instead might be no vaccine at all... It looks like we may be facing a similar issue with Ug99, a fungus that is aggressively killing wheat crops in Africa and the Middle East -- potentially having a massive impact on global food supplies. FormerAC alerts us to an article about the fight against Ug99, where it's noted that Pakistan won't share some important samples with the rest of the world, again out of fear that some big company will patent what they find:

As the breeders keep tinkering, South Asia is bracing for impact. The CDL recently tried to get its hands on a suspicious P. graminis sample from Pakistan that is said to knock out Sr31. But the country is reluctant to share: "Some countries regard isolates of their pathogens as part of their genetic heritage," CDL director Marty Carson says. "I guess there's a fear that we'll patent something off of it."

Well, given Monsanto's history of patenting disease resistant crops -- and then over-aggressively attacking anyone who uses such crops (even accidentally), it would seem like a rather legitimate fear. Perhaps, rather than brushing this fear off, the USDA's Cereal Disease Laboratory (CDL) should work to do something to fix things?

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Financial Podcast Buys A Toxic Asset To See How It Works

from the reporting-by-getting-your-hands-dirty dept

I've written in the past how wonderful NPR's Planet Money podcast is. During the "dark days" of the financial crisis, it was one of the true beacons of light explaining in easy-to-understand detail what was happening, and exploring aspects of the story that the mainstream press glossed over completely. In the process, they broke some stories, highlighted some key aspects of the debate, and really brought a lot more people into the discussion about how we deal with the economic situation of the day. I still listen to every episode on the day it comes out, but in the last few months there really hasn't been that much going on in the economy that needed a really thorough breakdown.

Given that, it seems like the Planet Money crew has hit on a rather brilliant idea. Back when this whole thing started, of course, much of the focus was on the so-called "toxic assets," the derivatives made up of slices of mortgages that had been packaged and repackaged together in creative ways -- in theory to minimize the risk, but in reality, often putting all of the risk in one big basket made to look artificially safe. The focus on toxic assets has mostly fallen off the mainstream press radar, but the folks at Planet Money decided to check in on those toxic assets and dig into what a toxic asset really means. But they were having trouble getting their heads around what a toxic asset really is, how it functions and how to best explain it to their audience.

So they bought a toxic asset.

Literally, the four reporters on the team, along with their producer, each pooled about $200 of their own money, in order to buy $1,000 worth of toxic asset. They'll be tracking whether or not they make their money back, and if they make anything on top of that as well (any profits will be donated to charity). The podcast itself is fascinating, as two of the reporters spend a couple days with a company called Mission Peak Capital, based out in Kansas, which has been analyzing and buying up toxic assets. They go through the whole process of analyzing and bidding on a few of these things until they find the one they wanted. Mission Peak bought the whole asset for $36,000, marked down from $2.7 million, and then sold a $1,000 sliver to the team at Planet Money.

The Planet Money folks have set up a detailed interactive website that goes into great detail about what's in the asset -- probably a lot more detail than most previous owners of the asset knew about themselves -- as well as how much they've made and how long they have until the asset runs out for them (as more of the houses whose mortgages are included in the asset get sold, they get closer and closer to being kicked out of getting any of the remaining revenue).

The story itself is fascinating, but what really drew me to it is what a great example of modern reporting this is. This goes way beyond what we normally think of as reporting, and breaks down that mythical "impartial reporter" barrier in a very effective and useful way. Some people have suggested that the reason why journalism may be struggling these days is that people can go directly to sources themselves (or sources can broadcast themselves) without needing an intermediary to "write the story." Of course, that doesn't mean the role of a journalist goes away, but it changes drastically. In this case, the team at Planet Money has realized that in order to "report" on this story, they need to become the source themselves, and open that up wide to their audience. It's a fascinating and incredibly effective modern form of journalism, and I can't wait to see where they take it. They're already planning to try to track down some of the mortgage holders whose mortgages are in the asset, as well as homeowners and former holders of the asset. Even if you're not that interested in the details of a toxic asset, it's hard not to find the whole thing incredibly compelling. It's useful and educational interactive storytelling at its finest, which is what true journalism should be.

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Dan Bull Recaps How Home Taping Killed Music With His Latest Song

from the sing-along-everyone dept

Dan Bull, who wrote, recorded and made videos for his brilliant open letters to both Lily Allen and Peter Mandelson, was asked by UK ISP TalkTalk if he would be interested in creating a new song concerning the Digital Economy Bill. In response, Bull created this lovely song reminding us all about the old home taping is killing music argument:

Make sure your sarcasm meter is properly tuned before watching... Best lines? "Home sewing's killing fashion, Home cooking's killing fast food, Home sleeping's killing hotels." Enjoy.

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Want To Know How Meaningless The FCC's Broadband Plan Is? No One Is Upset By It

from the no-one dept

There was lots of press coverage about the FCC's broadband plan on Monday, as the commission released an exec summary of its nearly 400-page plan for broadband in the US. If you want to wade through the details, it's all there online for you. But, if you want a basic summary, it appears that, like pretty much everything this FCC is doing, it's a lot of talk and little of consequence. So far, I've seen statements from lobbyists on pretty much all sides of the issues "commending" or "applauding" or "supporting" the FCC. And that's because there's basically nothing controversial and nothing big at all in the plan. It appears to try to thread the needle and keep everyone happy -- and in doing so, it appears to punt on the all-important questions. If it was really about making the necessary changes, key players would be up in arms. But they're not.

The report pays lip service to greater competition and talks about getting better data and about making better use of wireless spectrum. Well, duh. But it takes no bold steps -- does nothing to really take control out of the hands of the incumbent telco providers -- just as we originally expected, even if really disruptive, but necessary, ideas were considered, they don't appear in the final plan.

In the end, it's the kind of plan you put forward if you're being political and don't want to make waves. It's not the plan you put forward if you're making a bold leadership statement about how to really expand broadband in this country. Too bad.

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Open Sourcing A Disease Diagnosis

from the with-enough-eyes,-all-biological-bugs-are-shallow dept

If you follow Larry Lessig on Twitter, you noticed that all day Monday he was putting messages on Twitter about how "JZ" was sick and was trying to "open source" his diagnosis. This pointed to a blog that only referred to "JZ" as "Z" and had some basic info on the symptoms of "the patient." There were a series of blog posts, detailing some of the details of the sickness, tests that had been done, and some of the general questions that the doctors were trying to zone in on. It even included a list of possible diagnoses, crossing out the ones that had been ruled out. Relatively quickly, two separate readers came up with an obscure medical journal article from South Korea from 1994 "about heptatic mega-hemagionas and FUOs," which apparently quite accurately described the situation.

It didn't take long for people to realize that the JZ was Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain, and once revealed, he put up a blog post of his own clarifying the situation, noting that they no longer needed help with the diagnosis, and everything sounds fine (what they diagnosed sounds treatable). He especially wanted to downplay the situation, and not create too much concern for his well-being or the need for any immediate help. The original blog where the details were being shared was taken down, and it now just points to Zittrain's own explanation.

It's great to hear that this worked out, and so rather than worrying about Jonathan, I thought it was interesting to think about this aspect of "open sourcing" a diagnosis. Obviously, when it comes to medical info, there are always serious privacy concerns, but this definitely does seem like a case where when there's confusion, more eyes and more brains can help. I'm reminded of the silly complaint often lodged against Wikipedia, that people wouldn't want brain surgery done by "a crowd," but by an expert. But, as has been noted over and over again, that presumes the crowd includes no experts, and that the real experts won't quickly establish themselves as such. On top of that, it ignores that once you have many different people -- some experts, some not -- you may get obscure or different perspectives that help lead to the important nugget of info you were seeking out, such as a medical journal article from Korea in 1994.

All this has me wondering if there's an opportunity out there for the medical profession to make more use of something like this, with patient consent, obviously. I know doctors converse informally all the time, but opening up some aspects of the diagnosis could be interesting. Of course, I also don't know how often situations like this occur, where the diagnosis is obscure enought that additional help might be useful, but it seems like an area that has possibilities.

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UK Lords Pass Digital Economy Bill, Now Look To Rush It Through Commons

from the as-expected dept

As was widely predicted, it looks like the UK Lords have passed the controversial Digital Economy Bill, a piece of legislation written by the entertainment industry against consumer interests, to try to prop up an obsolete business model. Now they're planning to rush it through the Commons with little debate or chance to stop an incredibly dangerous bill -- unless people start making some noise about how this bill is being rushed through, and the lack of any real public consultation or debate.

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The US Postal Service's Business Model Is Outdated. Is It Time To Wind It Down Or Privatize It?

from the please-mail-me-a-buggy-whip dept

Just recently, we discussed whether or not ceasing Saturday delivery was a good idea or not for the USPS. John Potter, the US Postmaster General, recently said that the postal service's business model is as outdated as the newspaper industry's. Potter said:

"Twenty years ago we would laugh at the notion that a newspaper would ever embrace the idea that maybe the channel of the future is electronic and that you may have to change your business model,"

Sure, similarities between the industries definitely exist. Craigslist is a much cheaper and more efficient marketplace for local goods than the classifieds section in the newspaper ever was, and email is a much cheaper and more efficient means of communication than snail mail. That said, whereas for the newspaper industry, delivering a daily, physical newspaper to households may actually be an endangered business, the business itself of delivering physical items to households is still very much in demand. After all, with so much shopping happening online nowadays, someone still has to deliver the goods (until replicators, a la Star Trek, are perfected). In fact, for over a decade now, we've been talking about this opportunity to optimize the "last mile," and as of yet, nobody has really even come close to solving this problem.

That said, the USPS is a government institution, and even though it does not take any tax funding to run, an attempt to attack this opportunity may best be mounted by the private sector (like UPS and FedEx), especially when you consider the USPS's projected $238 billion shortfall for the upcoming decade. So, since it's not a private business, the best solution for the USPS may be to simply accept its diminishing role in the daily lives of Americans, and focus on continuing to run as efficiently as possible for as long as it remains useful. That said, the other solution may be to remove the government-mandated monopoly and privatize the USPS, and then let that private entity decide whether or not to invest in the business. Either way, it seems silly to ask taxpayers to invest anything further in the USPS since so many alternatives exist already. We should definitely all be appreciative of the part that the Postal Service has played in the foundation of our country, but what else can be done?

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E-Commerce Sites Realizing They're Media Properties Too

from the blurring-lines dept

We've talked a lot about the fact that adveritisng is content and content is advertising. But, it seems worth mixing a bit of e-commerce into that story as well. As we've been noting (separately), many of the business models that work today have a strong direct-to-consumer component -- giving them a "reason to buy." And, in fact, here at Techdirt, we've begun to blur those lines ourselves -- with various community offerings, including unique opportunities for companies to participate and/or sponsor online conversations, but also with our own CwF+RtB offering, which is really an e-commerce setup.

In the long run, business models are going to combine all these different elements. As we've noted, one of the key scarcities out there is attention -- and that's been the arena that the media business has always been in.

So perhaps it shouldn't be all that surprising to see traditional e-commerce players beginning to realize this themselves from the other direction. That is, many large online retailers are suddenly recognizing that they get a lot of traffic and they can sell that traffic to advertisers (including advertisers from their own competitors) at a nice premium. Of course, I'm not convinced that traditional banner/text advertising will really be all that lucrative in the long term, but it would be interesting to see online retailers work harder at giving people additional reasons to visit their sites beyond just the products alone. We've seen some glimpses of this, such as when Amazon tried to do an online talk show, but I'd bet that we're going to start seeing some much more creative online retail efforts that introduce "content" into the mix more effectively to create other types of scarcities.

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Is Verizon No Longer Betting On The Future?

from the that-would-be-bad dept

Back in 2003, we had written about how Verizon's CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, was betting big on future technologies. It was in response to a Business Week profile that oddly positioned the idea of installing fiber-to-the-home as being a huge risk. Lots of investors were against it, because it was expensive. But if you looked at where the market was really heading, you could see that it would position Verizon way ahead of the competition. Broadband keeps getting faster. While other companies were focusing on minor incremental improvements, Verizon wanted to leapfrog them all -- and has done a damn good job of it. In many of the markets where Verizon FiOS is now offered, the competition is left in the dust.

But, now, it sounds like the bean counters with a shortsighted quarterly focus may be winning out. Broadband Reports is noting that Verizon is basically giving up on any more FiOS implementations. If you're in an area that's not covered, don't expect Verizon to show up at your door with a fiber optic cable any time soon. In fact, they're using the "threat" of not installing fiber to try to get more cash from the government:

But according to long-time industry analyst Dave Burstein, Verizon's essentially cutting and running on additional deployment plans, leaving a very large chunk of their footprint on last-generation DSL and copper-based voice networks.

Burstein tells Broadband Reports that he doesn't see Verizon expanding any further (with the exception of major cities where they've signed franchise agreements) unless they get money from Uncle Sam. "They want to get on the gravy train, although I think the new, less competitive leadership is the primary explanation," says Burstein when asked why. Seidenberg, the driving force behind the first wave of FiOS, is on his way out -- and his replacements aren't quite as bullish on angering investors for the sake of this whole "future" thing.

Of course, they can do that when there isn't any real competition on the horizon. We can hope that Google's toe dipping into high speed broadband turns into a bigger deal (at which point Google becomes the disruptive future-looking company instead of Verizon), but there's still not much of an indication that the company is planning to ever roll broadband out on a widespread basis. In the meantime, of course, other countries that have much greater competition are also enjoying much faster speeds. And, rather than dealing with that, the FCC is talking to puppets (literally) about protecting kids from the evils of broadband. And we wonder why we're so far behind other countries in broadband speeds.

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Just As Netflix Gets In Trouble For Data Release, MySpace Begins Selling Data

from the lawsuits-a'comin? dept

So, just last week we noted that Netflix had gotten itself into a bit of hot water for its Netflix prize contest, which used real user data -- which was supposed to be anonymous. Unfortunately, as with most such data, it wasn't really anonymous, and that's illegal -- especially when it comes to movie rental data. Because of all that, Netflix has also canceled plans for a follow-up prize competition. However, just as that happened, reports were coming out that MySpace has begun selling user data. Among the data up for sale? "User playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. You would have to imagine that at least some people might not be happy about that.

Now, to be fair, the info you provide MySpace is public -- while the info you provide Netflix is not. However, you could certainly see some people not being particularly thrilled that MySpace is now directly selling that information, and you have to imagine that someone will file a lawsuit before too long over this data.

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Simon Singh Stops Writing His Column To Focus On Fighting 'Bogus' Libel Suit

from the bogus-bogus-bogus dept

We've written before about the libel fight that Simon Singh is fighting in the UK, where the British Chiropractic Assocation sued him for libel for saying that some of the things that the BCA claimed chiropractors could do were "bogus." Singh, who has a PhD. and has written numerous books about science, was pointing out that the BCA was making claims that had little scientific evidence to back them up -- hence "bogus." Tragically a court focused on the use of that word, suggesting that Singh meant the BCA had engaged in deliberate dishonesty, rather than just aggressive marketing. Because of the amount of time and resources it is taking him to fight this, Singh is now giving up his column in The Guardian, noting just how damaging a ridiculous libel lawsuit can be on individuals.

The only good news out of this is that the lawsuit against Singh has brought about two important forms of backlash:

1. A large group of concerned citizens online have actively been debunking claims from the BCA, and getting official investigations started of any chiropractor that makes bogus (yes, bogus) claims about what chiropractors can cure.
2. Singh's case has become a focal point in a new, much-needed, effort in the UK to reform libel laws in that country -- where existing laws effectively put the burden on the accused to prove that they didn't libel the other party.

It's awful to see Singh have to go through all of this, but hopefully his sacrifices will mean others won't have to face the same issue down the road.

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Selling 1,000 Portraits And Building A Ton Of Goodwill Not Good Business?

from the seems-fine-to-me dept

Michel Gondry spoke at SXSW to a packed house; it was fantastic to see one of my favorite directors speak about his creative process. During the talk, he mentioned a project he did where fans could buy portraits of themselves, sketched by Gondry himself, for only $20. He did about 1,000 of these portraits before he ended the deal, saying that while some portraits took only 2 minutes, he started getting fancier and fancier as time progressed, and eventually he didn't think that was a good business to continue it. When he said that, a collective, sad sigh was felt across the conference room, since I'm sure I was not the only one in the room who wanted a hand-drawn Michel Gondry portrait -- and if $20 wasn't the right price to make sense, business-wise, surely there was an appropriate price point that would make sense (and, in looking at his site, it appears that he raised the price to $99.95 with a copy of his DVD). Now, while it is true that Gondry is a famous movie director, surely a few hundred dollars for minutes of work is enough to get him interested, especially when he considers that this portrait further serves to endear him more to his most passionate fans, who are incredibly appreciative that he would ever even think to offer such a deal:

It's amazing enough that Michel has the time to draw thousands of portraits a week amidst his incredibly busy schedule and his "Green Hornet" workload. Hopefully this commitment will urge other filmmakers to devote similar generosity towards their fanbases...

So, contrary to what Gondry thought, his portrait offer most certainly made good business sense and was a great example of an RtB deal, since it was soaked in his charmingly quirky artistic personality. Then again, perhaps another example of Gondry's unique understanding of the business world is with this strange notice that he sent out to the purchasers of the portraits, sometimes well after they had purchased the image, telling them they could not resell the image ever.

"By placing your sketch order, you hereby acknowledge... that the sketch is for your personal use only and you shall not have the right to sell the sketch for any commercial purpose whatsoever."

To ask this of his truest fans (especially after they have commissioned a sketch) is not only most likely unenforceable legally (case law here is still a bit messy, but courts have said that you can't just give up your right of first sale based on one side's declaration), it also serves to sour the goodwill and affection that Gondry's true fans have bestowed upon him. Now, that's bad business.

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Band 'Releases' New Album Via Chatroulette

from the it's-a-bit-risky-to-find... dept

By now you've probably heard of the latest internet fad, Chatroulette, which has been pretty much covered to death in the media (though, not us, until now). If, by some amazing chance, you've missed out on this, the best summary would probably be Jon Stewart's amusing take on it:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Tech-Talch - Chatroulette
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However, the reason we're mentioning it here is that Mathew Ingram alerts us to the news that a band going by the rather catchy name of Holy Fuck has decided to leak its new album via Chatroulette. Of course, since Chatroulette is totally random, there's no way to actually find it, except by accident -- meaning you're not going to find it, and as the reporter at the link above discovered, you have a pretty high likelihood of running into something that might disgust you. Still, an amusing marketing gimmick all around.

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Movie Producer Sues Variety Over Bad Review

from the entitlement-culture dept

This is becoming all too common. We recently wrote about the lawyer who sued a publisher over a negative review of her book. Apparently, this sort of thing is becoming more common. The producer of an independent movie called Iron Cross, Joshua Newton, is suing Variety for posting a negative review of his movie after he bought a huge advertising spread from the magazine. In trying to defend the lawsuit, Newton lays out how Variety courted him over a huge advertising deal, suggesting the magazine would help find the film a distributor and also get it into consideration for the Oscars. Of course, nothing in that meant that the magazine's reviews should be compromised. Newton's argument isn't exactly going to win him much support:

I'm not suing them over a bad review. The problem we had was the timing. Robert Koehler, the critic, could have put it on his own website. If he'd have written it for TheWrap it would have just been one of those things. The problem was that Variety should have waited until the campaign was over. They completely destroyed the campaign that they sold us.

Basically, he seems to be suggesting that because he bought hundreds of thousands of ads from Variety, the magazine isn't allowed to post an honest review of the flick. Fascinating.

Newton, by the way, goes on to suggest that the business side at Variety knows it made a mistake, and that the recent firings of Variety's in-house movie critics is to more easily "control" movie reviews, so that Variety doesn't run reviews that trash movies that have paid lots of money to advertise with Variety. If true, of course, that would basically destroy whatever credibility Variety has left. Even so, though, suing over a bad movie review -- just because you bought ads in the magazine -- doesn't make much sense.

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