The Companies Who Support Censoring The Internet

Free Speech

from the censorship-is-good-for-business dept

A group of companies sent a letter to to Attorney General Eric Holder and ICE boss John Morton today (with cc’s to VP Joe Biden, Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano, IP Czar Victoria Espinel, Rep. Lamar Smith, Rep. John Conyers, Senator Patrick Leahy and Senator Charles Grassley), supporting the continued seizure of domain names they don’t like, as well as the new COICA censorship bill, despite the serious Constitutional questions raised about how such seizures violate due process and free speech principles. While many reporting on this letter refused to actually post a copy of the full letter, kudos to Greg Sandoval over at News.com for doing so (full text also included after the jump on this post).

The companies try to present a united front that censoring the internet is a good thing. It includes the usual suspects of Viacom and NBC Universal on the content side and Louis Vuitton and Tiffany on the counterfeiting side, but there are a few other interesting names: such as Monster Cable (never met an IP law it didn’t want to abuse, apparently), the NBA, MLB and NFL (sports leagues unite in censorship!) as well as Voltage Pictures, famous for suing thousands of fans for downloading Hurt Locker. Activison, which has become increasingly aggressive on IP issues lately is on the list as well, of course. Anyway, here’s the full list of companies that support censoring the internet, because they’re too lazy to compete in the marketplace or innovate when that market changes:

• Nike – Beaverton, OR
• Achushnet – Fairhaven, MA
• Curb Music Publishing – Nashville, TN
• NBC Universal – New York, NY
• Viacom – New York, NY
• Callaway – Carlsbad, CA
• Cleveland Golf – Huntington Beach, CA
• Rosetta Stone – Arlington, VA
• Activision – Santa Monica, CA
• Adidas Group – Portland, OR
• Xerox – Norwalk, CT
• Hastings Entertainment, Inc. – Amarillo, TX
• Fortune Brands – Deerfield, IL
• Coty Inc. – New York, NY
• EDGE Entertainment Distribution – Streetsboro, OH
• Oakley, Inc. – Foothill Ranch, CA
• PING – Phoenix, AZ
• Louis Vuitton – New York, NY
• D’Addario and Company – Farmingdale, NY
• Monster Cable Products, Inc. – Brisbane, CA
• Tiffany and Co. – New York, NY
• Farouk Systems, Inc. – Houston, TX
• Beam Global – Deerfield, IL
• Chanel USA – New York, NY
• True Religion Apparel, Inc. – Vernon, CA
• Concord Music Group – Beverly Hills, CA
• Village Roadshow Pictures – Beverly Hills, CA
• National Basketball Association – New York, NY
• National Football League – New York, NY
• The Collegiate Licensing Company/IMG College – Atlanta, GA
• Anderson Merchandisers – Amarillo, TX
• Trans World Entertainment Corporation – Albany, NY
• Timberland – Stratham, NH
• Major League Baseball – New York, NY
• Lightening Entertainment/Mainline Releasing – Santa Monica, CA
• Sierra Pictures – Beverly Hills, CA
• Voltage Pictures LLC – Los Angeles, CA
• Worldwide Film Entertainment LLC – Westchester, CA
• Nu Image, Inc. – Los Angeles, CA
• Burberry Limited – New York, NY
• Big Machine Records – Nashville, TN
• The Little Film Company – Studio City, CA
• Columbia Sportswear Company – Portland, OR

These companies are clearly trying to protect their own business interests, but it seems reasonable to let them know that you don’t appreciate them seeking to censor the internet. If you haven’t been following this story, and want to understand the details, we’ve discussed why COICA is all about censoring websites without due process and in violation of the First Amendment. We’ve also discussed how the ongoing (pre-COICA) domain name seizures were riddled with serious errors that appear to violate the law as well, including seizing the domains of blogs regularly used and recognized within the music industry based on evidence involving songs sent by the record labels themselves.

And, of course, none of this is to say that violating copyright or trademark laws should be allowed. But we have a system to deal with such things: you file a lawsuit, you have an adversarial hearing in a courtroom (i.e., due process) and you let both sides present their case. COICA and these domain seizures look to avoid all of that. And that’s a big, big problem. That these companies would support such censorship and leapfrogging over due process suggests that they’re companies not worth doing business with.

Filed Under: censorship, due process
Companies: activision, louis vuitton, monster cable, nbc universal, nike, tiffany, viacom

Nike Sues Guy Who Ordered Single Pair Of Counterfeit Sneakers Over The Internet

Trademark

from the nike-picks-up-the-RIAA-strategy dept

Warning: you might not want to ever buy Nike shoes again. If you accidentally buy a counterfeit pair of shoes, Nike might sue you. Via Glyn Moody, we learn that Nike chose to sue a guy who ordered a single pair of trainers online, believing they were legitimate Nike shoes. The shoes were seized at the UK border as counterfeits. Nike could have gone after the actual counterfeiters. Or it could have (perhaps more questionably) gone after some other third parties, such as the retailers who sold the shoes. Instead, it chose option 3 and sued the buyers directly. Most of the suits were settled (or, apparently, ignored).

However, one customer, a Mr. E. Bateman, thought this was ridiculous, and fought it. He pointed out that he simply thought he was buying legitimate Nikes, and it seems rather ridiculous to then be sued for it. The judge noted that, under UK trademark law, the buyer’s intent is absolutely meaningless:

“Whether or not the defendant believed the goods were authentic is irrelevant to the question of trade mark infringement. Whether the goods are infringing goods or counterfeit goods is an objective question. The Defendant’s state of mind does not matter. Equally the Defendant’s state of mind is irrelavant to the question of importation.”

In other words, don’t ever buy Nike shoes, or you might get sued.

Of course, all this makes you wonder: what the hell was Nike thinking? We’ve seen how suing customers backfired badly for the RIAA and others, but this goes even beyond that. Here’s a case where a guy appeared to believe he had just bought legitimate shoes, and Nike’s response is to sue him, take him to court, and then win its lawsuit against him. The judge did point out that he “questioned whether the sledge hammer of these proceedings is necessary in order to crack this nut of this magnitude,” and even then Nike pushed forward, claiming that the companies has “no realistic alternative to enforcing their rights this way.”

Um. Sure they do: the alternative is not suing their customer. That said, at least the judge did not make Mr. Bateman pay any fine or award to Nike (even though Nike did ask for money), but rather, he has to promise not to infringe in the future, allow the shoes (still held by UK customs) to be destroyed and provide the details of where he bought the shoes. Of course, the only way he can make sure not to infringe in such a manner again is to never buy Nike shoes again, since he has no way of knowing beforehand if they’re infringing or not. Nice work Nike.

Filed Under: sneakers, suing customers, trademark, trainers, uk
Companies: nike

Runkeeper's Ability To Outrun Nike & Adidas Shows How Big Companies Don't Always Copy & Win

Economics

from the run,-baby,-run dept

Over and over again we hear this refrain from people that, without extra protection from things like patents, startups would get crushed when big companies decide to just copy them. And yet, over and over again, when we look at the situations in real life, you see that it’s a lot more difficult than people think. We discussed it recently when looking at how Netflix survived competition from Blockbuster, Amazon and Wal-Mart, but some people felt even that wasn’t a good example, because by the time those three players got into the market, Netflix really did have a huge head start (which is something of an exaggeration anyway).

However, here’s yet another fascinating example, sent over by my friend Tom, concerning the iPhone/Android app RunKeeper, and how it’s successfully fended off competition from a bunch of different giant sporting gear companies, including Nike. Now, it’s worth pointing out that RunKeeper (the little startup) initially got its idea for an iPhone app that tracks your exercise routine via a sensor, and then integrates that data into a web service, from Nike’s famous Nike+ attachment for the iPod. Rather than using a shoe sensor, the guy who started RunKeeper decided to build it ontop of the iPhone’s GPS, and make it so that it wasn’t shoe specific, as Nike’s was (though, to be fair, I know plenty of people who used Nike+ devices on non-Nike shoes).

RunKeeper definitely picked up a following among iPhone users. However, a year after it came out, Nike not only came out with their own version of Nike+ for the iPhone and iPod Touch… but it had done a deal with Apple to come pre-installed on every one of those Apple devices. A bunch of people predicted that Nike was going to “kill” RunKeeper this way, and all the folks who always insist that big companies will just come in and kill any innovative startup by copying them, would be proven wrong:

But quite the contrary, Nike’s arrival did nothing but help RunKeeper. Nike poured their huge marketing budget into educating people on why to run with their phone, and as a result, RunKeeper’s numbers more than doubled. My blog post from this time period is here.

And flourish RunKeeper did. We gained more than 2 million iPhone users, we were named by TIME Magazine as a top 10 iPhone app of 2009, and this big, passionate, global community of runners rallied around the RunKeeper system on the social web, and at www.runkeeper.com. We also ported our solution to Android (where we are currently a featured app), enabled manual map creation on the web, and integrated with a wi-fi scale, so users could send their weight data to www.runkeeper.com as well.

Along the way, other footwear companies like New Balance tried to get in the game with the ‘NB TotalFit’ app, but didn’t make a dent (white labeled from our ‘big scary’ competitor).  Then, Nike’s arm got twisted even further when Adidas came out with their MiCoach system in August 2010, which is a GPS-based system.  Here was another running shoe company jumping into the mix with a reasonable attempt, this one without tethering users to a specific pair of shoes.  And Adidas came in with full guns blazing, running TV ads, sponsoring major races/events that featured MiCoach prominently, and investing heavily in trying to unseat RunKeeper as the go-to smartphone fitness tracking platform.  So, one month in, what are the results so far?  As of today, Adidas is ranked #18 in iPhone health/fitness and RunKeeper is ranked #14.  Not bad for this little startup from Boston with zero marketing budget .  In fact, MiCoach was #61 until last week, when Walt Mossberg’s column gave them a big (and arguably misinformed) plug in the WSJ.

The point of the blog post was to discuss the fact that Nike was again copying RunKeeper, and going from a shoe-based sensor to a GPS application, but RunKeeper notes that it’s not that worried. Why? Because it recognizes some key and important differences:

All of you big guys jumping in with major marketing budgets, you are doing this as a brand play. We are not. You are doing this to try to ultimately sell more people your footwear/apparel. We are not. You are big and slow moving. We are not.

Fascinating stuff. In Oded Shenkar’s recent book, Copycats, there are many examples of this kind of thing. It talks about the importance of copying, but also how many companies really aren’t able to copy effectively. In many cases, it’s because of very different cost structures and incentives. In this case, Nike is focused on selling more apparel and the Nike offering has to work towards that end, while RunKeeper can focus on other features. Could Nike successfully overtake RunKeeper? Absolutely. But a lot of it depends on execution, and there’s certainly no guarantee. As for the others who entered the market, in at least some cases, it looks like they engaged in cargo cult copying, where they copied the superficial aspects of what they saw, but didn’t truly understand the market.

And, really, this is what competition is good for. Having more players in the market try different things is good for everyone. Not only does it force everyone to keep adjusting, it also pushes them all to keep experimenting with ways to better serve customers and to leapfrog over one another. Each one of these solutions may appear similar on the surface, but there are differences, as each company tries to tweak an idea to see what works. RunKeeper’s initial tweak on the Nike+ appears to have worked, but so far none of the “tweaks” on RunKeeper’s success have worked all that well. But, as those other (much larger) firms continue to tweak and tweak again, it’s also pushing RunKeeper to keep improving its app. That’s good for everyone.

What we’re seeing is, once again, plain old imitation by itself doesn’t appear to work very well, but imitation, plus some element of innovation to make it better does wonders. And yet, so many people don’t seem to recognize this and simply assume that the “big guys” will automatically copy and kill any new startup.

Filed Under: big, competition, copying, small
Companies: adidas, nike, runkeeper

Apple Trying To Patent Not Letting You Use Your Nike+iPod With Non-Nike Shoes

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the this-raises-some-questions dept

I know plenty of folks (including my wife) who have purchased the Nike+iPod device to use with non-Nike sneakers. The device puts a sensor in your shoe, which communicates with a separate dongle connected to your iPod (or built in to the new iPod Touch), and tracks your running stats, which you can then upload. Many Nike sneakers have a little cutout underneath the insoles where you can stick the sensor, but you can buy (or make) a little pouch and connect it to shoelaces on non-Nike shoes. However, not only is Apple thinking about ways to stop this — it’s trying to patent those ways. It’s got a patent application in for smart garments which would create basically a DRM for devices — forceably pairing a device like the Nike+iPod sensor to a specific shoe.

This seems odd for a whole variety of reasons. First, it seems positively silly for Apple to do this, as it severely limits the market for the devices, and lessens the value of the iPod. You can see why Nike might ask for it, but it’s hard to see why Apple would implement it. Second, however, is that this seems highly questionable as a patent. I mean why would you patent something that makes your product less desirable? Would Apple actually sue someone else (say, Microsoft) for doing the same thing? That would (oh no!) force Microsoft to make its product more useful and more valuable. Finally, as a patent, how is this not “obvious”? It seems like a bad idea to implement, but that doesn’t make it non-obvious. If any engineer wanted to create such a system, it wouldn’t take much thought at all. The whole thing seems rather pointless.

Filed Under: drm, ipod, nike+ipod, patents, running, sneakers
Companies: apple, nike