Techdirt. Stories filed under "online"

French Politician Wants To Limit How Cheaply Companies Can Sell Goods Online Compared to Physical Shop Prices

Glyn Moody — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 05:45:18 PDT

A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about a store that was trying to charge customers $5 for "just looking", because it felt that many people were merely inspecting goods there before then buying them online. Guillaume Champeau points us to a French politician who is also worried about the same problem, and has proposed modifying the law governing commerce to deal with it (original in French). Here's the politician's explanation in the preamble of why it is needed:

Currently, regardless of the margin necessary for commercial activity the prices charged by distributors in town centers are often much higher than the prices charged by suppliers on their online sites.

This leads local shops to become mere showcases for products, products that consumers prefer afterwards to buy online at lower prices.

Equally, this decay of urban centers affects other sectors, such as hotels and catering.

Also, the proposal submitted to you aims to prevent suppliers from selling online at a price lower than the price at which they sell to distributors. The prices of products sold online may thus remain lower [than in physical shops], but in a reasonable and acceptable way.

The key problem with this idea is that it won't work. Even if the law were passed, people would just buy from online stores outside France, where prices will still be lower, because they would be unaffected by the new French legislation. Nor can that be stopped, because one of the impulses behind the European Union is to encourage precisely this kind of competition among companies located in different countries in order to bring about lower prices across Europe for the consumer's benefit.

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.

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Dumb Policy: Store Charges $5 Just To Look At Goods, To Keep People From Looking And Then Buying Online

Mike Masnick — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 05:53:49 PDT

It's really incredible how many bad strategies legacy companies come up with in trying to compete with the internet. Rather than increasing their own value and figuring out ways to leverage that value, they often go in the other direction and make the experience worse. Case in point, this store in Australia that is so fed up with people shopping in the store, but then buying online that it's now charging people $5 as they enter just to look around. If you buy something, the $5 counts towards the purchase. If you don't, the store keeps it. In case you can't read it, the sign says:

As of the first of February, this store will be charging people a $5 fee per person for “just looking.”

The $5 fee will be deducted when goods are purchased.

Why has this come about?

There has been high volume of people who use this store as a reference and then purchase goods elsewhere. These people are unaware our prices are almost the same as the other stores plus we have products simply not available anywhere else.

This policy is line with many other clothing, shoe and electronic stores who are also facing the same issue.

This story originally got attention via Reddit, and looking at some other photos it appears the store is called Celiac Supplies, and is a "gluten free grocery store."

I can understand where the thought process to do something like this comes from. For years, of course, we've heard things about how Best Buy has basically become Amazon's showroom. But this is the exact wrong response. Rather than showing ways to add more value to the customer experience so they want to come in, they're taking away value and giving customers reasons to never go in in the first place. That's a stunningly short-sighted way of running a business. The people who were coming in, seeing what was there and then ordering online aren't suddenly going to start paying you for stuff anyway. They'll keep shopping online. But, on top of that, some existing customers who are used to buying will be turned off by this and also switch to buying online.

In fact, this seems to be screaming out "hey, you get better deals online and we know it!" Not smart.

Instead of doing that, why not look for ways to add value? For a specialist store like this, they could create all sorts of additional value, including more support in helping customers find what they need, the ability to offer bundles and recipes, cooking classes and much much more. The focus should be on using the local store to provide more value rather than taking away reasons to shop there.

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Launch Day Punishment: SimCity's Online-Only DRM Locking Purchasers Out Of Servers, Purchases

Tim Cushing — Wed, 6 Mar 2013 05:49:14 PST

A few months ago, the SimCity devs stopped by Reddit for an AMA and found themselves fielding several questions about EA's plans to release the game with an "always online" requirement. Requiring an internet connection to play a game, even in single-player mode, has been utilized by more than one company, often with disastrous results. Still, game companies continue to craft software with this requirement, mostly for anti-piracy reasons, although they often play up the "social" aspects as a sort of (completely transparent) smokescreen.

As was pointed out by several Redditors during the AMA, the online requirement was ridiculous and seriously inhibited playability. For one, no one's internet connection is perfectly reliable. Secondly, SimCity was going further than most games, allowing only server-side saves, meaning that players could easily lose progress if their connections dropped.

Six weeks later, a different Redditor signed up for SimCity's closed beta. Even in this limited release, servers were swamped and EA's infrastructure couldn't handle the traffic, something that didn't bode well for the massive amount of players looking forward to playing the full version when it finally launched. The Redditor pointed this out to EA in a lengthy, well-worded forum post that cited previous issues with other online-only game launches that had gone horribly.

This brings us up to date and, now, SimCity has finally been released. One eager SimCity fan (and Redditor), who pre-ordered the game. thought he'd put a little playtime in before bed, and ran head on into this dialog box:

So, the reality is even worse than previously indicated. Not only are your saved games server-side only and an internet connection required to simply fire up the game, but every game is "multiplayer," whether you're interested in playing socially or not, and every game requires an open server slot.

As the Redditor points out, this simply isn't an acceptable situation:

I figured from everything I'd read that the always-on part of the game simply required an internet connection, not a slot on a server like I'm about to PvP or something. I'd be more understanding if I could just play my private region by myself like I intended.

While many people were aware of the online-only requirement, this aspect of the game seems to have been completely underplayed. Why should a paying customer be forced to wait in line for an open server slot? This is a much more onerous requirement than simply requiring an online connection to verify software authenticity. Sure, it's meant to be a social game where people can visit the cities of others, but there should be some option for those wanting to play a "private" game.

EA had to have some idea of how much its servers were going be hammered after the issues it experienced during the closed beta. No one's expecting launch day to go flawlessly, but if you're going to require an internet connection that's reliant on open slots on regional servers, you are going to make paying customers very angry. Many of the people experiencing these problems paid for this game weeks or months ago and are having their loyalty rewarded with half-hour waits to spin the wheel on possibly accessing an open slot.

Not only are paying customers being locked out of playing the game they purchased, but other purchasers are still waiting for their downloads to complete or have their purchases authenticated and unlocked. The authentication servers are being hammered so badly that, according to TotalBiscuit's "review" video, people with pre-orders are purchasing second copies because these new purchases are unlocking immediately, while authentification of their pre-ordered copies is still seriously delayed.

Now, some people may ask, after viewing this dialog box, "Why not just play on another server with more open slots?" Well, therein lies another piece of bad news for SimCity players. Should you have actually managed to get online and start a city, you'll be exceedingly disappointed (and possibly homicidal) to discover that saved games DO NOT transfer between servers.

This all adds up to another spectacular DRM failure. When discussing piracy, game companies like to point out that a majority of their sales occur shortly after release, making these first few weeks critical to the success of the title. This critical sales period is used to justify DRM measures because, while every piece of software will eventually be cracked, anything that delays this inevitability results in a few more sales.

Sadly though, this same crucial sales period is when EA will be punishing its paying customers the most. By refusing to allow single players to start private, unconnected games (in case of a lost or unavailable connection), it's now racing around putting out server fires. Using the launch day traffic surge as an excuse for unplayable/unauthenticated purchases is not acceptable. EA knew the game would be popular. It even had advance warning thanks to the large number of pre-orders. But it's kind of hard to teach a company a lesson about DRM hurting paying customers when it already has their money.

For EA, this works out nearly perfectly. Sure, it's probably not evil enough to want players locked out for hours on end, but it probably considers these "hiccups" a small price to pay to keep piracy to a (temporary) minimum. Of course, considering someone else (the customer) is actually paying that price, it's really not sacrificing anything at all.

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Court Says You Can't Innovate If It Would Negatively Impact NBC's Business Model

Mike Masnick — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 10:52:58 PDT

While there's been a fair amount of focus lately on the legal status of Aereo, the company offering broadcast TV over the internet by setting up a bunch of individual antennas and letting people access them online, there's also the ivi case. ivi, if you don't remember, offered what sounds like a very similar service to stream broadcast TV over the internet (for a fee). However, it used a completely different legal theory, believing it had found something of a loophole in the Copyright Act; namely Section 111 which allows cable providers to rebroadcast content for a compulsory payment to the Copyright Office.

The district court was not impressed, and basically said that ivi was trying to do an impressive tapdance -- defining itself as a cable provider to be able to use Section 111, but then claiming it was not a cable provider under the Communications Act. On appeal, ivi has lost again (pdf and embedded below), as the appeals court went a simpler route, and pointed out that reading the legislative history of Section 111 makes it clear that it was not intended to be used by services over the internet.

While I had bounced around on this earlier, I actually think that the court is probably right here, in terms of what Congress' intent was.

There still are some troubling parts to the ruling, mainly concerning purely faith-based claims by Judge Denny Chin that a service like ivi creates irreparable harm to the TV networks. Chin specifically claims that if ivi streams the videos online it hurts the networks:

First, ivi's live retransmissions of plaintiffs' copyrighted programming over the Internet would substantially diminish the value of the programming.

I don't see how that's true at all -- and it's certainly not obviously true. In fact, it could increase the value of the programming by making it easier and more convenient for more people to watch. Judge Chin tries to back up this statement by arguing that because the TV guys often sell ads targeted at specific segments and times, this could mess with that:

Plaintiffs broadcast their copyrighted programming to various communities at different scheduled times, for example, based on time zone or local network provider. For this reason, negotiated Internet retransmissions -- for example, on Hulu.com -- typically delay Internet broadcasts as not to disrupt plaintiffs' broadcast distribution models, reduce the live broadcast audience, or divert the live broadcast audience to the Internet.

If ivi were allowed to continue retransmitting plaintiffs' programming live, nationally (and arguably, internationally), over the Internet, and without plaintiffs' consent, ivi could make plaintiffs' programming available earlier in certain time zones than scheduled by the programs' copyright holders or paying retransmission rights holders. ivi's retransmissions of plaintiffs' copyrighted programming without their consent thus would devalue the programming by reducing its "live" value and undermining existing and prospective retransmission fees, negotiations, and agreements. ivi's retransmissions would dilute plaintiffs' programming and their control over their product.

But... that makes no sense. If that's true, then one could just as easily make the same argument about VCRs or DVRs. Yes, they disrupt the "traditional" way that a certain industry's business model works, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's automatically diminishing the value of the original. After all, the TV guys made the same arguments about both VCRs and DVRs and now most of them admit that the DVR has actually helped their business by increasing the value of shows by making them more easily watchable by people. There's no reason to think the same thing wouldn't be true here.

In the end, as we argued from the beginning, the situation with ivi and Aereo (and Zediva and others) is silly. They're all looking for loopholes in the law to do what should clearly be allowed anyway. But because of the ridiculously expansive nature of copyright law, which is allowing legacy players to kill off new technologies, such things aren't allowed. And we end up with results like this, where an interesting concept (even if it tried to jump through crazy legal hoops) is flat out declared to break the law and shut down. Innovation be damned. NBC has to sell you more diapers via the commercials it's always sold in prime time. And you're not allowed to mess with that.

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MPAA Pretends 'Offering Something' Is The Same Thing As 'Offering What People Want'

Mike Masnick — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:38:19 PDT

We recently wrote about David Pogue's article highlighting how the movie industry's failure to embrace what technology allows is a huge cause of infringement, and the industry still doesn't seem to get that. In response, in typically tone deaf fashion, MPAA spokesperson Howard Gantman has taken the usual tack of not actually addressing what Pogue wrote, but making an unrelated argument. He says that somehow, magically, because there are more crippled, annoying, expensive, incomplete movie services out there, no one should complain. You see, in the MPAA's world "offering something" is proof that they're innovating, even if it's not what people want.

But this shows a rather remarkable lack of awareness of what customers seem to be saying. They're saying they don't want services that only let you watch a movie for 24-hours. They're saying that they don't want movies that cost ridiculous prices. They want reasonable access at reasonable prices -- and the reasons some people aren't flocking to some of these services isn't that they're evil "thieves," but that they don't find those new offerings compelling. The proper response is to make them more compelling. But, apparently, in the world of the MPAA, the response is to berate and guilt people for not using their crappy offerings.

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State Department Wants To Troll Terrorists Online

Mike Masnick — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 19:04:00 PDT

It's no secret that various extremists and terrorists groups use the internet just like everyone else. And, of course, there are places where they communicate. Some politicians, like Joe Lieberman, think that the way you should respond to this is by having companies censor any account that appears to be connected to terrorist organizations that he doesn't like. That this might cause such marginalized groups to feel even more persecuted and angry never seems to cross his mind.

Of course, that's not the only approach. Spencer Ackerman, over at Wired's Danger Room blog, has a fascinating story about a guy at the State Department (with almost no budget) who is trying to ramp up a plan, called Viral Peace, which is basically all about using social media to troll terrorists and extremists online in the hope of convincing some to give up.

The program, called Viral Peace, seeks to occupy the virtual space that extremists fill, one thread or Twitter exchange at a time. Shahed Amanullah, a senior technology adviser to the State Department and Viral Peace’s creator, tells Danger Room he wants to use “logic, humor, satire, [and] religious arguments, not just to confront [extremists], but to undermine and demoralize them.” Think of it as strategic trolling, in pursuit of geopolitical pwnage.

While I certainly appreciate this idea more than the outright censorship plan that Lieberman seems to like, I do wonder if the program might backfire by doing the exact opposite of what they're trying to do. Trolling has its place and can rile people up, but I'm not sure it's ever effective in getting anyone to change their position. In fact, it can often make people dig their heels in even deeper...

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No That Won't Backfire At All: Questionable Story About Obama's Daughter Disappears From The Web

Mike Masnick — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:57:17 PDT

Generally speaking, the press has something of an implicit agreement that they don't use underage Presidential offspring in politically tinged stories. For obvious reasons, it's considered to be a pretty cynical move. Of course, if they actually do something newsworthy, it might be a different story. This afternoon a bunch of stories started appearing, talking about how President Obama's daughter Malia was traveling in Oaxaca, Mexico as part of a trip with some classmates (and 25 secret service agents). This story was reported on by the AFP wire service, and some tied it to the fact that the State Department recently issued a travel advisory urging Americans to stay away from parts of Mexico. Not surprisingly, some picked up on this story to suggest some sort of... something. Double standard? Hypocrisy? Of course, the details suggest this really was not much of a story. If you actually read the State Department warning, it makes it clear that there is no warning in place for Oaxaca -- so this trip doesn't appear to go against that warning.

It seems likely, then, that the AFP decided to pull back the story once someone pointed that out, but the story is now rapidly disappearing from a variety of online publications (big and small), leading to questions and easy political points about how the story is being "scrubbed." Google News listed about 27 versions of the story when I looked, and later, following the links, I found almost every single one of them was flat out gone. In most cases, they were replaced with a 404 (including The Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Australian) or sometimes just redirecting people to a front page (Huffington Post and International Business Times). The only version I still found up was at TurkishPress.com, but it might not last very long.

Now, I tend to think that using the President's underage kids for a political story is generally a low blow and not particularly nice, but if there is something newsworthy happening, it should be fair game. I also think that, from the sound of it, this story got blown out of proportion by those who didn't bother to actually read the details of the destination or the State Department's specific warning which notes no problem at that destination.

But, having said all that, simply having the article disappear completely, rather than putting up a correction or an explanation of what happened, simply fuels both the conspiracy theories and the interest in the story. It's exactly the wrong way to go about dealing with the situation. There are a variety of possibilities here. The administration may have asked the press to pull the story, which would only generate more interest in the news. The AFP, upon realizing that it shouldn't have posted the story, may have issued a kill order/retraction of sorts. Or perhaps there's some other reasoning. But there are good ways to handle these situations and ways that are guaranteed to backfire. Simply making the articles disappear is pretty much guaranteed to backfire and generate more interest in the story, even if it's a total non-story. Replacing the original story with a "hey, we thought this, but we got it wrong," would have been much more effective.

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Yes, Online And Offline Rules Are Different... Because Online And Offline Are Different

Mike Masnick — Thu, 1 Mar 2012 08:02:00 PST

In the past we've discussed the ridiculousness of claiming that the internet is some sort of "wild west" without laws just because some people don't like the laws covering the internet. Clearly, there are plenty of laws that deal with the internet. What people really mean when they call the internet "the wild west" is that they simply don't like the laws -- and specifically that those laws don't fit into the analogy they have crafted for the internet.

But it's important to recognize that the analogy they have crafted is just an analogy.

Just as claiming that copyright infringement is "the same as taking a CD out of the store" is a bad analogy, so are the claims that the internet is lawless. The fact is that the internet is different. That doesn't mean that there shouldn't be any laws online -- and as noted, there are tons of laws that impact the internet already. It's just that you can't do a one-to-one comparison between situations online and offline, because they're not the same.

And this works in reverse as well, which was brilliantly demonstrated a few weeks back by Julian Sanchez, who sought to flip the analogies by posting the typical "lawless internet" script, followed by a similar screed looking out from the internet:

At regular intervals—too short for it to even be amusing anymore—we now hear that debates over Internet regulation would be more productive if only people would get it through their thick skulls that the Internet is not some special free-for-all zone. There’s no reason it can or should remain magically exempt from the rules that apply everywhere else (we are reminded) and it is absurd and mysterious that some people (we are assured) believe otherwise.

This is a fair point. But what about all these hippy-dippy Real World anarchists who think meatspace can remain immune to the rules any well-managed virtual community understands to be essential? How is it, for instance, that citizens are physically capable of injuring each other, regardless of whether they’ve opted in to player-versus-player? And what fool designed it so that my image is visible to all other users in the same city, even if we aren’t friends? You’ve even apparently got to jump through a bunch of hoops to get something called a “restraining order” just to implement a simple user block!

The key point: there are certain things that are simply different in both worlds, and while you can try to create a direct analogy -- or even say that we must create an analogy, all of those analogies break down as you dig deeper. In the real world, someone taking a CD means there's one less CD to sell. That's not true online. While you can make copies of something in the real world, online it's instantaneous and exact. No matter what the analogy, you'll run into problems, which is why relying on analogies never involves looking at the real issues. So using such analogies is always going to be a mistake. Again, to Sanchez:

What will actually make debates over Internet regulation more productive is universal recognition that the first paragraph is exactly as dumb as the second. (Possibly more so, since the second at least hints at some interesting possibilities.) You cannot implement an analogy. The rules that you’d want to apply if you could make it so just by wishing are not always the rules it is wise or feasible to attempt to actually put in place, once you’ve factored in the probable efficacy of that attempt and its unintended side-effects. Both of these, alas, are determined by annoyingly stubborn “facts” about the nature of the technological context in which you want to enforce the rules.

If we're going to address issues involving the internet, it's going to take actually understanding the internet, rather than trying to apply misleading analogies that don't actually represent the situation. The internet is different. That doesn't mean it is (or should be) lawless. But if there are going to be appropriate laws, they need to recognize the realities of the technology, not pretend that the internet is just like the physical world... but in pixels.

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Network TV Execs Discover What Pirates Always Knew: Making Stuff Available Online Is Good Marketing

Mike Masnick — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:48:58 PST

Want to understand just how tone deaf and clueless the legacy entertainment industry players are these days? It appears that network TV execs have just discovered the brilliant idea of using the internet to pre-release TV shows in an effort to build up buzz and an audience who will watch the full series. The stunning thing here is that these are the very same companies who go absolutely ballistic if their works get "leaked" early online -- and insist that criminal penalties are needed to stop this kind of action. It's really quite amazing how these execs are coming to the same conclusion that pretty much every internet user came to years ago: just make the damn stuff available. Instead, they're acting like it's some big revelation:

The networks have embraced the idea — originally hatched by cable networks — of introducing initial episodes of their shows through other distribution outlets like YouTube before they have their premiere on their own schedules.

Yes, the same YouTube that Viacom is still trying to sue out of existence. The same YouTube that supporters of PIPA and SOPA still insist is really a den of "piracy" from which Google unfairly profits.

So, here's a simple question: How much are these networks paying YouTube/Google for the use of YouTube's software, bandwidth and audience? Nothing? Damn those TV networks... just wanting all that stuff for free. But, more to the point, if laws like PIPA and SOPA were put in place a few years ago, the networks wouldn't even have a YouTube to do this. This is what's most stunning about all of this. They seem to think that they've come up with something brilliant and new here, when this is all that "pirates" were doing earlier: putting stuff online to make it accessible. When "pirates" do it, it's theft? And when companies do it, it's some brilliant marketing scheme? How's that work?

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Online Bullying Really Not That Common

Mike Masnick — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:30:00 PST

To hear some people tell it, "cyber bullying" is some huge and awful problem where "something" needs to be done. It's a classic moral panic situation, but usually seems to involve parents totally overreacting. We've pointed out in the past that kids don't view it as bullying and now some new research from the folks at Pew have pointed out that online bullying and general "meanness" really isn't all that common. Yes, it does happen. And it sucks for those who are the target of such bullying. But that's no reason to overreact and need to pass crazy legislation to wipe out the First Amendment in some quixotic effort to outlaw being mean.

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Hulu's Owners Unable To Find Idiots Willing To Overpay To Take Hulu Off Their Hands Before They Kill It

Mike Masnick — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:08:55 PDT

We recently noted that the attempt by Hulu's owners to sell Hulu wasn't going well, mainly because those same owners had made it clear that they hoped to kill Hulu, by limiting how much it could compete with their lucrative legacy business of cable TV. No one was willing to offer more than $2 billion -- significantly less than what Hulu's owners wanted -- other than Google. But Google would only do it if the TV companies agreed to certain conditions (i.e., not killing off Hulu by limiting content, requiring a paywall, etc.)

So it comes as little surprise that Hulu has now announced that its owners are no longer trying to sell the company off. Instead, they'll focus on suffocating it from within. Well, that part wasn't mentioned, but watch what happens to Hulu execs over the next few months. I think it's likely that we're going to start seeing some departures of key people. Hulu was an amazingly well executed offering with a really capable team... but as we predicted, the fact that the only way it could really succeed was to cannibalize the business of its owners, almost certainly meant that Hulu would never be allowed to execute on the strategy it needed to become a massive player.

Of course, what the big TV companies still fail to recognize is that killing off Hulu doesn't stop the move to an a la cart, online driven world. It just means that when it comes, they will be even less relevant, and less able to capitalize on it.

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TV Companies Plan To Make Hulu Suck Even More Making It More Difficult To Sell Hulu

Mike Masnick — Mon, 3 Oct 2011 03:01:09 PDT

We've talked about how the entertainment industry is really good at killing the golden goose every chance it gets. Any time some new online service actually gets people to move away from infringement, the industry freaks out and complains that they're not making enough money from the service and then tries to kill it. For example, the TV folks have made it clear that they'd like to kill Hulu even though they own it. They're so worried about "cannibalizing" the old revenue streams, that they're killing off the new ones as well. We predicted this would happen a few years ago, and it's amusing to see it happening in real time.

Because of the conflicts between what Hulu management (who do seem pretty clued in) and their ownership wanted to do with the company, Hulu was recently put up for sale. But, now it's coming out that the bids Hulu is receiving are much lower than the owners want -- and it's because they've made it clear they plan to cut off all free content from Hulu:

But the bidders all figured out pretty quickly that the TV companies who own Hulu now want to phase out free ad-supported content completely. So as soon as the current set of Hulu contracts expire in a couple of years, it would be back to the negotiating table.

Because of that, no one was willing to bid over $2 billion -- and the TV guys (of course) think it's worth a lot more than that, even as they're trying to kill it. Well, one exception: apparently Google was willing to pay closer to $4 billion... but it would only do that under certain conditions (which likely involve getting the TV guys to renew/guarantee future deals). So congrats, backwards looking TV guys, not only are you killing Hulu, you're killing the goodwill you build up via the company so you can't even cash out on that.

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Internet Troll Jailed In The UK For Being A Jerk Online

Mike Masnick — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:30:39 PDT

We've written a few times in the past about various attempts to outlaw "being a jerk" online. These efforts are often well meaning, but pretty dangerous from the standpoint of any sort of belief in free speech. Being a jerk is silly and obnoxious, but it shouldn't be illegal. However, as a whole bunch of you have sent in, over in the UK, they feel differently. An internet troll who mocked a variety of dead people to their grieving friends and families has been sentenced to jail for "sending malicious communications." He got 18 weeks as the judge said, "You have caused untold distress to already grieving friends and family."

This is troubling on any number of levels. Most specifically, it's exceptionally worrisome when you base punishment on how someone responds to speech made by someone else. Yes, the comments were obnoxious and totally classless and uncalled for. But, whether or not they cause "distress" should not be the basis for judging whether or not they're legal. There are lots of things that someone can say that would cause distress, but that shouldn't make it illegal to say them. This certainly opens up a can of worms over just what kind of speech is so distressing that it gets you jail time. Either way, if you're from the UK, be careful what you post in our comments going forward. It apparently could get you jail time.

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Why Does Hollywood Insist On Making Online Movies So Annoying?

Mike Masnick — Wed, 11 May 2011 09:18:03 PDT

With Google announcing that it's now offering 3,000 movies for "rental" via both YouTube and Android, it's worth asking a simple question:

Why does Hollywood insist on making online movies so damn annoying?

If you look at pretty much all of the online rental options (with the exception of Netflix), the deal terms are almost always identical. Prices range a bit, but for big name movies they're $3.99. The rental term is 30 days from when you pay... but once you start watching, you only have 24 hours to watch. This particular limitation is particularly annoying to those of us who don't always watch movies in a single sitting or a single day (it's amazing how your movie watching gets fragmented once you have little kids).

Obviously, this has become the standard set of terms that the Hollywood studios are demanding, but these limitations are annoying and make no sense. Why put artificial limitations on offerings like this, making them less valuable and a lot less interesting? It also means that there's little innovation in the space. Basically, every offering in the space (again, with the exception of Netflix, who got grandfathered in with its unlimited model) is basically the same. The only innovation is around the device or the very front end of the service. There's no innovation in the actual model, which is a shame, because this "standardized" offering is really quite annoying and not at all compelling.

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Freakonomics Flips The Window: Releasing Movie Online Before In Theaters

Mike Masnick — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 09:58:22 PDT

We've talked numerous times about the movie industry's love affair with release windows, where they basically try to get people to pay for things multiple times by releasing them in different formats at different times. The first window, normally, is the theatrical release -- and the theaters go absolutely livid if anyone suggests shortening the theatrical release window. Heaven forbid anyone go so far as to suggest something as "radical" as a so-called day and date release, where it's released in all formats at the same time, and watch the theaters go ballistic and boycott the film, as a startling admission that they don't think they can compete with home theaters.

So, it's quite interesting to see that the Freakonomics movie that's coming out in the fall is apparently going to flip the windows over. Sheri Candler points us to the news, as seen at the end of the movie's trailer, that it's going to be released via iTunes on September 3rd, and in theaters October 1st: Yes, it's being released online before it's released in the theaters. This isn't exactly the first time this has been tried. Magnolia Films, who produced the Freakonomics film is trying something similar right now with the film Centurion, which was released via On Demand cable systems a few weeks back, and is about to come to theaters. Still, this is pretty big news. In mentioning this reversed window, Freakonomics author Stephen Dubner mentions that there's also another "wrinkle to the release schedule," but he's not revealing what it is just yet.

I'm curious about this, because what the Freakonomics duo are famous for is exposing how "the common wisdom" is wrong on a variety of things. I don't always agree with their analysis, but it would be fascinating to see if they're exposing that the common wisdom on movie release windows is -- as we've suggested for years -- totally screwed up. I am curious, however, to see how the theaters handle this. As mentioned, in the past, they've boycotted day-and-date releases, and even boycotted movies that they thought were coming to DVD too soon after the theatrical release (in that case, 12 weeks). So, will theaters be boycotting the Freakonomics film? I really don't know enough about how the film is being positioned, so if it's only in indie/art house-type theaters, perhaps it's not as big an issue. Still, I can't see any of the big theaters too happy about these "wrinkles," even if they actually prove that theaters can get more business with simultaneous releases.

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Time For Sports Leagues To Embrace, Not Fight, Free Online Streams

Mike Masnick — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 05:39:26 PDT

We've noted recently the new focus on how online streaming is causing problems for sports leagues, who have gone running to politicians and the courts to demand they "do something." Over in The Guardian, Seth Freedman is pointing out that, as with many other parts of the entertainment industry, fighting against streaming is bound to fail, and a better solution is to get your content out there yourself in a way that you can actually monetize:

Sport, like music and mainstream media beforehand, has a stark choice before its governing bodies. If they remain resolute in their determination to follow old-school methods of disseminating their product, they will quickly drown under the deluge of fraudsters and pirates all too eager to capitalise on their mistakes. On the other hand, if they realise that they have to adapt to financially survive, they need to move fast to prevent a potentially catastrophic loss of income.

He notes that at least some leagues have figured this out:

The Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket games are broadcast live and free via YouTube, effectively heading off at the pass any rogue broadcasters seeking to steal their feed for themselves. The IPL authorities have a guaranteed income from their YouTube deal and, with a dedicated millions-strong audience subscribing to their feed, advertisers know how many people they can reach via the stream and how much each commercial slot is worth.

But, of course, others have not:

Yet with all the signs pointing to a brave new world of online broadcasting, the industry dinosaurs continue plodding along the road to extinction. Premier League enforcers boast of their success in shutting down a handful of illegal feeds, but most online sports piracy goes unpunished. With mobile phones providing yet another alternative to television in the race for audiences, there is even more pressure on rights owners to be proactive rather than simply shut the stable door behind the bolting horse.

In the end, it's difficult to see how any sports league thinks it makes sense to spend all this effort trying to fight against giving people what they want, when there are plenty of easy and lucrative ways to monetize such demand directly. It's too bad that so many leagues are slow to realize this.

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How Depressing Must Your Job Be If Its Focus Is On Breaking What The Technology Allows

Mike Masnick — Tue, 1 Jun 2010 02:19:56 PDT

Rob Pegoraro has a column up about the latest in the very long line of back and forth attempts of companies making browsers for television sets to get around silly blocks from Hulu. Despite the fact that these systems are really just browsers legitimately connecting to a webpage, Hulu's corporate parents freaked out and ordered them blocked for no good reason. Of course, the workaround is easy: just spoof the type of browser, so that Hulu doesn't know that it's a browser on a TV. However, Hulu keeps trying to block these, which leads Pegoraro to ask a good question at the end:

But when does Hulu get tired of playing this silly game? How do Hulu's own developers feel about working to ensure that their site stays broken for the "wrong" users? Do they not have one of the most degrading coding jobs in America? And to what end--so short-sighted suits can find new ways to annoy their customers?

While it may seem like a random question, it could actually be a big deal. When Hulu first came out, one of the points that people made was that it really was put together by folks who understood the power of the internet. That is, they were "internet people" rather than "Hollywood people," which is what allowed the service to work well for many (definitely better than most expected). But, with the corporate bosses continually trying to limit what the site can do, you'd have to imagine that the developers working at the company must be getting annoyed. What kind of developer wants to focus on limiting what users can do with technology, rather than allowing something great? At some point, Hulu is destined to lose its best developers who just get sick of spending all their time breaking their product, rather than building something cool, useful and innovative.

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Mom Who Used Son's Facebook Account Found Guilty Of Online Harassment

Mike Masnick — Fri, 28 May 2010 12:24:37 PDT

We're somewhat skeptical of the various "cyberharassment" laws out there, as they leave themselves wide open to interpretation (often in dangerous ways). In April, we wrote about one case involving a son who sued his mother for harassment after she used his Facebook account (she went to the computer and he had not logged out) to post angry messages on his wall, pretending to be him, and then changed his password and locked him out of the account. (As a quick aside: I just checked, and as with most online services, Facebook appears to require you to type in your old password before you can enter a new one -- so I'm wondering how she had access to his existing password...).

Either way, Rose M. Welch alerts us to the news that the mother has been found guilty, told to pay $435, given a 30-day suspended jail sentence, and ordered to take both anger management and parenting classes. Clearly, what she did was wrong, though I do wonder if it really reaches the level of harassment. Some of the judge's reasoning also is a bit suspect. Part of the reasoning for the guilty ruling was that the mother had left messages on her son's voicemail that included curse words. The son is 17, so it's not like he hasn't heard those words before -- and the mother insisted that this was part of their normal joking banter. The judge, however, declared it "totally, completely inappropriate." Now, I'm not going to say that leaving voicemail messages to your children with curse words is a good parenting technique, but it still seems a bit extreme to use that as evidence of harassment.

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Microsoft Decides It Can't Compete With Salesforce.com; Sues For Patent Infringement Instead

Mike Masnick — Wed, 19 May 2010 07:52:38 PDT

Remember back when Bill Gates said:

"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... A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose."

Those days are long gone, apparently. In its latest patent litigation action, Microsoft has decided to sue Salesforce.com for infringing on a bunch of patents. Basically, it looks like Microsoft went through its collection of patents to find whatever they could that Salesforce might possibly infringe on. Take a look at the list:

7,251,653: Method and system for mapping between logical data and physical data
5,742,768: System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu
5,644,737: Method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display
6,263,352: Automated web site creation using template driven generation of active server page applications
6,542,164: Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information
6,281,879: Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information (the 164 patent above looks to just be a continuation of this patent)
5,845,077: Method and system for identifying and obtaining computer software from a remote computer
5,941,947: System and method for controlling access to data entities in a computer network

Amusingly, Microsoft and its super expensive lawyers were apparently in such a rush to file the lawsuit that they put the wrong patent number in on that second to last patent in the filing. Oops. Either way, look over that list of patents and try not to repeatedly shake your head in disbelief at the ridiculously broad nature of each and every one of those patents. And, then, since patent system defenders always remind us that it's the claims that matter, go take a look at the claims and wonder how these patents ever got approved in the first place. Going through that list of patents, you could use them to sue an awful lot of web-based service providers.

Hopefully (though, unlikely), the Supreme Court gets around to issuing its Bilski ruling and puts software patents like these out of their misery. Here's the full filing for anyone interested:

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Turns Out That People Are Actually Pretty Honest About Themselves Online

Mike Masnick — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:35:00 PST

Many people think that when people set up their online social networking profiles, they may be prone to... exaggerating a bit. Given that they can control what they say about themselves, many have posited that those profiles really represent an idealized version of themselves. Yet, perhaps that's not true. Jose Luis Campanello points us to a recent study that found that people actually tend to be pretty honest in their social networking profiles. This really doesn't seem all that surprising when you think about it. I would guess that the results might be a bit different if they looked at dating sites, rather than social networking sites. On a social networking site, you're connecting with a lot of people you probably already really know in real life. As such, it makes little sense to present much of an idealized version of yourself, because your friends already know you -- and might even call you out for being fake. Still, as the report notes, there are still some people who believe that the norm is for people to lie about themselves, when the truth is that, in such realms, people really do tend to be pretty honest. And that's a good thing.

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Indie Filmmaker Hits It Big With Free Film Online

Mike Masnick — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:50:04 PST

Tom sends over the story of an independent filmmaker, Stevie Long, who wrote and acted in the low-budget indie film Strictly Sexual that has found tremendous success by being online where people can watch it for free. Apparently, Long had a deal with some sort of online distributor, who got the film on Hulu, and word of mouth made it the most watched film on Hulu, ever:

"I woke up one morning and found a dozen or so messages in my Facebook inbox, saying, 'Hey, I just saw this film, and it really touched me, and I love the way it talks about breakups and relationships,' " Long says. "And I just scratched my head, saying, 'Where'd you see my movie?' I had no idea what Hulu was. God bless the people who had the foresight to put it up there.... We were fortunate in that the timing of the Internet and the ability to watch movies came about at the same time. I didn't have any ego about it as an artist, I just wanted my movie to be seen."

But, of course, it's not hurting him financially either:

"I'll give it to you in these rough terms," he says. "The $100,000 film has made 10 times its money."

But... but... but... we keep having Hollywood insiders tell us in our comments that indie filmmakers who distribute online can't possibly make back enough money to cover their costs. Everything's impossible until someone does it.

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Bollywood Movie Released On YouTube Same Day As Theatrical Release

Mike Masnick — Tue, 9 Feb 2010 23:02:14 PST

The whole concept of "windowing" movie releases makes little sense. It's as if the movie industry purposely wants to make sure customers don't get to consume the content in the format that fits them best at the time when they're putting the most money behind a marketing campaign. It's hard to fathom why they do this, other than the pressure they get from the movie theater companies (which is silly, because the theaters would benefit from this too). Every so often, though, we hear about a moviemaker who seems to understand how to better reach out to an audience. Pranav points us to the news of a new movie out of Bollywood that is being released on YouTube at the same time as its theatrical release. There is a big caveat though: the YouTube videos are only available for international, rather than domestic (Indian) viewers. Also, it looks like US viewers will have to pay to rent it via Google's new YouTube rental program, but those in any other country (outside of the US or India) can view it for free. It's not necessarily ideal (and there doesn't seem to be much of a business model behind the free viewings), but at least it's a step in the right direction.

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NBC Universal Boss Jeff Zucker Lies To Congress About Boxee

Mike Masnick — Fri, 5 Feb 2010 07:58:00 PST

NBC Universal management gets more and more ridiculous every time we come across anything they do. While they've left most of the more ridiculous statements to their chief lawyer, Rick Cotton (who is worried about the poor corn farmers harmed by movie file sharing), CEO Jeff Zucker has made his fair share of whoppers. While he got a lot of attention last month for his cowardly handling of the whole Leno/Conan mess, his latest move is to flat out lie to Congress. In a hearing in front of Congress as a part of NBC's effort to merge with Comcast, Rep. Rick Boucher asked Zucker about Hulu being forced to block Boxee (a battle that's gone back and forth a few times). When the whole thing started, Hulu management was very upfront about how they were pressured by their content partners like NBC to block Boxee, which is just another browser. It was quite clear that Hulu didn't want to do the block, but had no choice due to pressure from the likes of partial owner NBC:

Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes....

The maddening part of writing this blog entry is that we realize that there is no immediate win here for users. Please know that we take very seriously our role of representing users such that we are able to provide more and more content in more and more ways over time. We embrace this activity in ways that respect content owners' -- and even the entire industry's -- challenges to create great content that users love. Yes, it's a complex matter. A tough mission, and a never-ending one, but one we are passionately committed to.

For those Boxee users reading this post, we understand and appreciate that you're likely to tell us that we're nuts. Please know that we do share the same interests and won't stop innovating in support of the bigger mission.

So how did Zucker respond when asked about it by Congressman Rick Boucher? He blamed Hulu for making the decision, and falsely claimed that Boxee illegally access Hulu content:

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA): What about Boxee? Mr. Zucker you probably are in a better position to answer that. Did Hulu block the Boxee users from access to the Hulu programs?

Zucker (NBC): This was a decision made by the Hulu management to, uh, what Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal. And, you know, all, all the, we have several distributors, actually many distributors of the Hulu content that we have legal distribution deals with so we don't preclude distribution deals. What we preclude are those who illegally take that content.

Of course, that's a flat out wrong, as Boxee was not illegally "taking" the content at all. Boxee is a browser, like Firefox. If what Boxee does is illegal so is accessing Hulu with Firefox or IE. But it's even worse than that, because last year, in a different situation, Zucker admitted that he had been a part of the decision makers to have Hulu block Boxee, telling Kara Swisher that "our vision" was to block Boxee in an effort to keep "Hulu being an online experience" rather than one you could access via a TV.

So why would Zucker flat out lie during a Congressional hearing, and throw Hulu under the bus while doing so? Does he not understand how Boxee works? Did he forget his own dealings with Hulu? Or is he just making stuff up in a Congressional hearing?

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Ubisoft's New DRM: Must Be Online To Play

Mike Masnick — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:28:00 PST

Ubisoft has this bizarre and misguided obsession with DRM. Rather than focusing on providing value, it's always looking to take it away in a fruitless battle to "stop piracy." The company doesn't seem to understand that if it gives people a reason to buy, they will. But limiting value doesn't help anyone. In the past, the company has made a series of bad choices about DRM and suffered because of it. The company also seems to misunderstand how unauthorized file distribution occurs and what it means. In cases where it finally came around to scaling back its DRM, it seemed to do so petulantly, with a passive-aggressive "open letter" about it.

The latest move, sent in by a whole bunch of you, is to require copies of games to call back home to Ubisoft every time they're used. Yes, you will need to be online, and the game will need to phone home before you can use it. Of course, if Ubisoft actually thinks this is going to hold back those getting unauthorized copies of the game, it's mistaken. The Ars Technica article above quotes one file-sharing gamer:

"This is fine. I only have to access the Internet once to get Ubisoft games. You're the ones paying for a broken copy."

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Pepsi Drops Super Bowl Ads... Goes With Online Promotions Instead

Mike Masnick — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:30:00 PST

Earlier this year, I randomly ended up in a fascinating conversation with a marketing guy from Pepsi, who was telling me about some of the online marketing efforts the company ran during the 2009 Super Bowl, saying that they got the same "response" as the multi-million dollar Super Bowl commercials got, but only cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, rather than millions. Based on that I have to admit I'm not all that surprised to find out (via The Infamous Joe) that Pepsi has decided not to buy any Super Bowl ads for the 2010 game, but will be investing a ton in some online promotions. This is after 23 straight years of Super Bowl ads by Pepsi, costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm sure that the Super Bowl will be just fine (it claims it's sold out 90% of its ads already, though the prices did drop a bit this year, apparently), but it does suggest that some may be realizing that there are better ways to get your message out than spending a ridiculous sum for a single commercial spot.

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