The real solution, as Mike noted in the previous case, is for physical stores to become more attractive, not for governments to pass yet more clueless and ineffectual laws trying to diminish the power of the Internet.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

I called to cancel U-Verse because Time Warner offers Docsis 3.0 speeds for far cheaper in the Austin area. Uverse told me that select FTTH customers can now get 24/3 instead of the previous cap of 18/1.5. They just have to send a "special" technican to upgrade my equipment. I am letting them come and try because I don't believe it.

While AT&T took the cheaper route when upgrading portions of their network to fiber to the node, the company has historically offered fiber to the home to a few locations (less than a few hundred thousand), primarily in upscale housing developments. While those lines are capable of significantly higher speeds, AT&T has traditionally capped those users at the same speed as other U-Verse users. The company told me in 2007 this was to create a "more consistent experience."

That means you have users on cutting-edge fiber infrastructure, in some places seeing downstream speeds of just 6 Mbps -- and upstream speeds of just 1.5 Mbps.

Given these past speed issues, this is why most AT&T customers will believe 1 Gbps only when it's up and running.

Today, AT&T announced that in conjunction with its previously announced Project VIP expansion of broadband access, it is prepared to build an advanced fiber optic infrastructure in Austin, Texas, capable of delivering speeds up to 1 gigabit per second. AT&T's expanded fiber plans in Austin anticipate it will be granted the same terms and conditions as Google on issues such as geographic scope of offerings, rights of way, permitting, state licenses and any investment incentives.

“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data,” said Thomas Vinje, Brussels-based counsel to the FairSearch coalition. “We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market. Failure to act will only embolden Google to repeat its desktop abuses of dominance as consumers increasingly turn to a mobile platform dominated by Google’s Android operating system.”

[....] Google achieved its dominance in the smartphone operating system market by giving Android to device-makers for ‘free.’

You don’t need a cable subscription to watch ABC, CBS or NBC – but don’t expect to learn about alternatives if you’re a Charter customer. Over-the-air antenna maker Antennas Direct recently wanted to buy some air time on Charter‘s cable channels to explain how TV viewers can access these channels without a pay TV subscription.

“We thought it was a fairly benign message,” Antennas Direct President Richard Schneider told me Thursday. Charter disagreed – and rejected the spot for competitive reasons.

Meanwhile the evidence of international patent filings is looking increasingly ominous. According to data compiled by the World Intellectual Property Organization, the world’s single most prolific filer of international patents as of 2011 was ZTE, a Chinese telecommunications corporation. Its filings were up an astounding fivefold from 2009. Another Chinese corporation, Huawei, moved up to third in the 2011 league table. The only United States corporation to make the Top 10 was Qualcomm.

All this is the more troubling because United States patent law has now been drastically weakened. Congress has made it much harder for small American inventors to protect their intellectual property from infringement and theft.

Pat Choate, the author of “Hot Property,” a book on the theft of intellectual property, maintains that if the new patent regimen had existed when corporations like Apple and Microsoft first got going, they might never have made it out of the little leagues. Their patents would have been quickly infringed by predatory larger corporations, and rather than engage in unequal litigation battles against deep-pocketed and ruthless opponents, they could have felt forced to share their technology on concessionary terms.

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then the have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want.

Not surprisingly, SodaStream would like to advertise this fact.  In fact, it is so keen on advertising the relative benefits of its product over the more traditional route of buying pre-made soda from the store that the company ponied up for a Super Bowl commercial.  Unfortunately for SodaStream, the ad was rejected by CBS, not because it was too risque, but because it “disparages” other major advertisers (which is apparently more objectionable than borderline softcore porn a la GoDaddy and Mercedes).  As Ad Age reported:

The content of its planned commercial seemed to have concerned CBS because it was a direct hit at two other Super Bowl sponsors and heavy network TV advertisers: Coke and Pepsi.

We’ve discussed elsewhere CBS’s newfound affinity for the ban hammer, but this isn’t even the first time this has happened to SodaStream.  British regulatory authorities yanked Sodastream’s first major advertising campaign for “being too disparaging towards soda manufacturers like Coke and Pepsi.”

How disparaging was SodaStream that its ads were pulled from television?  Well, it simply pointed out that SodaStream was more environmentally friendly than drinking off-the-shelf sodas because, with SodaStream, “you could save more than 2,000 bottles a year.”  Wow, that is incendiary.  Not safe for public consumption!

It gets better.  Clearcast, the NGO — funded by the British broadcasters — that pre-approves most advertisements for British television, reportedly offered this rationale for pulling the ad:

The majority decided that the ad could be seen to tell people not to go to supermarkets and buy soft drinks, [and] instead help to save the environment by buying a SodaStream. [SodaStream] was also told that it constituted denigration of the bottled-drinks market.

Hypocritically, U.S. broadcasters have allowed Pepsi to air Super Bowl ads that bashed Coke directly, as Ad Age also pointed out:

Interestingly enough, Pepsi has scored big points with viewers over the years by showing Super Bowl ads with Coke deliverymen abandoning their employer wholesale for a sip of a Pepsi drink.

Moral of this story:  Pepsi and Coke can attack each other over trivial differences in their products, but don’t attack the business model of big incumbent advertisers.

Fortunately, there is an upside for SodaStream.  All the controversy that these ads have stirred has generated a buzz around them.  The SodaStream “banned Super Bowl ad” has already generated more than two million hits on YouTube in two days and generated a media buzz around the company itself.  And that’s without having to splash $3.8 million worth of cash for a Super Bowl commercial.  Another example of the Streisand Effect in action.

[SodaStream is running a commercial during the Super Bowl, but it was forced to replace Coke and Pepsi with fictional soda companies.  However, that ad only has a little more than 17,000 YouTube views in the last two days.]

Cross posted from Project-Disco.

“I've been doing this almost 40 years, and I've done dozens if not scores of government investigations on both sides, and I have never seen a more unprofessional, incomplete, incompetent investigation,” said Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley lawyer who represented some of Google's complainants before the FTC.

“The FTC's decision to close its investigation with only voluntary commitments from Google is disappointing and premature, coming just weeks before the company is expected to make a formal and detailed proposal to resolve the four abuses of dominance identified by the European Commission, first among them biased display of its own properties in search results.

The FTC’s settlement is by no means the last word in this case, leaving the FTC without a major role in the final resolution to the investigations of Google's anti-competitive practices by state attorneys general and the European Commission. The FTC’s inaction on the core question of search bias will only embolden Google to act more aggressively to misuse its monopoly power to harm other innovators.

State attorneys general who reportedly disagreed with today's announcement by the FTC have an important role to play in ensuring both that Google is not allowed to continue practices that hurt every American business through artificially high advertising costs, and to demand that whatever changes Google is forced to make in Europe also apply for U.S. consumers who risk losing innovation because of Google's aggressive abuse of its dominance.

ISE first sued the Chicago board back in 2006, claiming infringement on its own patent—filed in 1999, just two months before CBOE's first patent filing. CBOE beat that lawsuit at the district court level, but this May, it was revived (PDF) by the nation's top patent appeals court. Now it looks like the lawsuit against Chicago is going to go forward, whether the exchange likes it or not—and filing their own "defensive" patent suit is the best way to get leverage.

[....] The patent suits seem to have grown out of an earlier dispute over licensing, which also reached a head this year. ISE had long wanted to offer "index options" tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500. Dow Jones & Co. had maintained that was a use of its intellectual property rights and required a license; McGraw-Hill Companies, which owns the S&P 500 Index, held the same position.

[....] ISE tried to take that case to federal court, saying it was a copyright issue. The court sided with CBOE and the index owners, however, saying the claims for misappropriation and unfair competition weren't about "authorship."

That left the case in Illinois state courts, which sided with the Chicago exchange and its allies. The courts said that ISE shouldn't be allowed to "profit for free from the efforts, skill, and reputation of the Index Providers." ISE appealed that to a higher state court, but in May it lost there as well. In that case, Illinois judges allowed the index owners to lean on the controversial "hot news" doctrine, first enunciated in a 1918 case brought by The Associated Press against a competitor.

The plight of dyslexic individuals served as inspiration to Abelardo Gonzalez, a New Hampshire-based mobile app designer, who devised a clever font to help dyslexics read digital text easier.

The font, dubbed "OpenDyslexic", employs a trick in which the bottoms of characters are weighted. Curiously some dyslexic individuals visual processing cortexes rotate images that look slender, making characters appear backwards or upside down. By making the bottom look "heavier" the font reportedly reduces this kind of visual "bug" in the brains of people with this disability.

He relates that he was contacted by font designer Christian Boer (who sells an alternative font called dyslexie for $69 USD per "single-use" license) to "cease and desist" early during his process.

At the time he was charging a nominal fee and did reuse some bitstream-vera-sans characters as the basis for his font. Bitstream-vera-sans' license explicitly allows derivative fonts to be sold (free of fee to the bitstream font creators), however, Mr. Boer was claiming that the offense occurred due to the fact that Mr. Gonzalez had changed the (free) font in a similar way as he had. By all appearances the real issue was that Mr. Gonzalez was offering it for far cheaper than Mr. Boer.

In order to create the infrastructure for the cable and gigabit internet service, Google was given everything from free fiber, government employees, buildings, and discounted services; an agreement that a Time Warner Cable spokesman feels puts them "at a competitive advantage compared with not just us but also the other competitors in the field."

He continued by stating, "We're happy to compete with Google, but we'd just like an even playing field."

Time Warner has set up a phone hotline and an email address that will award three gift cards a week for employees that "[share] tips, rumors, and rumblings about Google Construction or launch activity..."

In exchange for the incentives, the cities are requesting that the companies improve their community services to be on par with Google's efforts, which have resulted in free internet connections in hundreds of locations chosen by the government... The WSJ cites an unnamed source that claims Time Warner Cable has improved its service's speed and performance in the area in return for discounts that mirror Google's, as well as a partial refund of city fees that the company paid earlier this year.

Musicmetric found that music file downloads using BitTorrent tend to increase in countries that don't have legal music streaming services such as Spotify. Among the top 10 countries with the fastest growing BitTorrent market share in the first half of 2012, only one, France, had Spotify.

Conversely, in the top 10 countries where BitTorrent activity has decreased fastest, five have access to Spotify.

• Americans pay four times as much as the French for an Internet triple-play package—phone, cable TV and Internet—at an average of $160 per month versus $38 per month.
• The French get global free calling and worldwide live television. Their Internet is also 10 times faster at downloading information and 20 times faster uploading it.
• America has gone from #1 in Internet speed (when we invented it) to 29th in the world and falling.
• Bulgaria is among the countries with faster Internet service.
• Americans pay 38 times as much as the Japanese for Internet data.

"The telecos got the rules changed while we weren't watching," says Johnston in the accompanying interview. Basically, the phone and cable companies lobbied Washington to change laws and regulations to favor their businesses over their customers.

And remember the so-called "Information Superhighway"?

Over the course of the last 20 years, nearly $500 billion has been collected by the telecom companies to (allegedly) bring America into the 21st century with an "Information Superhighway," says Johnston. That works out to $3,000 per household to have access to high-speed Internet.

But America did not get what it was promised and much of the country will never get fiber optic lines...

"The huge increase in digital sales shows how rapidly readers and publishers are embracing e-book reading," said Richard Mollet, the trade body's chief executive (Publishers Association, ed.). "Whether books are enjoyed physically or electronically, publishers will continue to invest in exciting authors and titles. They can do this because of the stability provided by the UK's robust and flexible copyright framework. This is why The PA is at the forefront of calls to government to ensure that copyright is not eroded and that creators' rights are protected and supported online."

1. It believes that there is a loophole in the net neutrality rules in that it does not apply to preloaded apps, and they can set whatever access rules for such apps that they want:

   The FCC’s net neutrality rules do not regulate the availability to customers of applications that are preloaded on phones. Indeed, the rules do not require that providers make available any preloaded apps. Rather, they address whether customers are able to download apps that compete with our voice or video telephony services.



2. It believes that as long as some other competing apps are available, they can restrict the apps they want to restrict.

   AT&T does not restrict customers from downloading any such lawful applications, and there are several video chat apps available in the various app stores serving particular operating systems. (I won’t name any of them for fear that I will be accused by these same groups of discriminating in favor of those apps. But just go to your app store on your device and type “video chat.”) Therefore, there is no net neutrality violation.

If you go back to the mid-1990s, there was their famous "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft. Apple's case there was eerily similar to the one they're running today: "we innovated in creating the graphical user interface; Microsoft copied us; if our competitors simply copy us, it's impossible for us to keep innovating." Apple ended up losing the case.

But it's what happened next that's really fascinating.

Apple didn't stop innovating at all. Instead: they came out with the iMac. Then OS X ("Redmond, start your photocopiers"). Then the iPod. Then the iPhone. And now, most recently, the iPad. Given the underlying reason that Apple has been bringing these cases to court was to enable them to continue to innovate, it's hard not to ask: if copying stops innovation, why didn't Apple stop innovating last time they were copied? Being copied didn't stop or slow their ability to innovate at all. If anything, it only seemed to accelerate it. Apple wasn't able to rest on its laurels; to return to profitability, and to take the mantle they hold today of one of the technology industry's largest companies, they had to innovate as fast as they could.

If Apple ends up winning this case against Samsung — and either stops Samsung from releasing their phones and tablets to the market, or charges them a hefty license fee to do so — does anyone really believe that the market will suddenly become more innovative, or that devices will suddenly become more affordable? Similarly, if Samsung wins, do you really believe that Apple will suddenly slow its aggressive development of the iPhone and iPad? It's certainly not what happened last time they lost one of these cases.

Now, if you're with me so far, then I don't think it's a leap to suggest that having these companies duke it out in court over "who might have copied who" is counterproductive. All these lawsuits flying around suggest that everyone is already copying each other, anyway. A better solution? Let's have these companies solely focused on duking it out in the marketplace — where consumers, not courtrooms, make the decisions about innovation. In such a world, the best defense against copying isn't lawsuits, but rather, to innovate at such a rate that your competition can't copy you fast enough. That, to me, sounds like an ideal situation not just for consumers — but for the real innovators, too.

a.) Bite the bullet and start handing out refunds
b.) Start patching like hell and fire your current Customer Service team
c.) Drain all bank accounts and reorganize under the name Net Sortie, LLC.
d.) Whistle nonchalantly while sweeping bad reviews under the rug

Rakuten launched the Kobo Touch in Japan with the expectation that they would dominate their home market. They are native to the country, and Rakuten does have a sizable retail presence there. Given their technical and CS resources, you’d think they would have been able to pull this off.

Unfortunately, it now looks like Rakuten has paved the way for Amazon to dominate yet another ebook market.This launch is rapidly turning into a debacle and it’s going to damage Rakuten’s reputation. And according to some of the tweets I’ve seen (in Japanese) it already is.

It’s been just under a week since the Kobo Touch started shipping in Japan, and things are going so well that Rakuten has removed from their website all the reviews of the Kobo Touch.

No, seriously, all of the reviews are down – both good and bad. I suppose there were too many people writing things like “I’m going to buy a Kindle” and that upset someone at Rakuten.

Luckily one of Rakuten’s potential customers tipped me to the story, including giving me a link to a blog that had collected responses and a screenshot of the review page before Raskuten removed it. That’s why I can show you things like this:

If you can’t see the image above, it says that the Kobo Touch has a 3 star rating largely due to the vast number of 1 star reviews.

Update: My source found a Google Cache page of reviews. Thanks, Bibo!

Folks, they took the reviews down from the website so new customers wouldn’t be warned about the many problems. I want you to look past the fact they did it and think about how customers will feel once they discover the deception. That is what will make this a major debacle and not merely an embarrassment for Rakuten.

A bad launch could be recovered from. This is closer to being a systematic effort to lie to their customers. Okay, eventually people will forgive Rakuten, but in the short run this debacle could drive readers to Amazon.

First, we take issue with the scope of the patent test’s almost unrebuttable presumption of patent validity. This presumption assumes away the question being litigated in the underlying patent suit, enforcing a presumption that the patent holder would have prevailed. We can identify no significant support for such a policy. While persons challenging the validity of a patent in litigation bear the burden of defeating a presumption of validity, this presumption is intended merely as a procedural device and is not a substantive right of the patent holder.... Moreover, the effectively conclusive presumption that a patent holder is entitled to exclude competitors is particularly misguided with respect to agreements – like those here – where the underlying suit concerned patent infringement rather than patent validity: In infringement cases it is the patent holder who bears the burden of showing infringement.