Millionaire File-Sharer To Fight Music Industry Law Suit

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits against filer sharers on networks like Kazaa and Napster, who have all accepted to pay damages to avoid going to court.

The recording industry has artfully developed a variation of the “John Doe” lawsuit program that offers plaintiffs the opportunity to settle. After learning the identity of an illegal file sharer through a “John Doe” lawsuit, but prior to amending the complaint to reflect the infringer’s name and address, the RIAA offers the opportunity to settle the case before proceeding further with the litigation. So far, all the accused Kazaa and Napster users have had no recourse but to settle, paying $2000-$3000 to the RIAA.

Enter Shawn Hogan.

Shawn is founder and CEO of Digital Point Solutions, and with clients like Disney, he is not short of a buck or two. Last November Shawn got a call from a lawyer at the Motion Pictures Associaiont of America (MPAA), in which he was accused of downloading a film on BitTorrent, another file sharing network. He was given warning that he was to be taken to court unless he paid $2500.

Shawn denied any wrong doing, and has evidence that he had already purchased the DVD in question. After some careful thought, Shawn has decided to set aside a hundred thousand dollars to pursue the case through the courts. Shawn has to countersue and win damages so it sets a legal precident for a class action lawsuit against the MPAA.

The MPAA has responded, “Mr. Hogan has said, he is absolutely going to go to trial, and that is his prerogative” says John G. Malcolm, the MPAA’s head of antipiracy. “We look forward to addressing his issues in a court of law”.

If Shawn wins the case, the MPAA will have stop its terror campaign on the millions of file-sharers. Morever, they will have to pay damages to many of the people from which they extorted a settlement, typically children, students and pensioners. A heroic deed.

Wired article reported the case as Shawn Hogan Hero. Shawn insists on his blog that he is not a hero, and he directs the thousands of donation offers to the Electronic Frontier Foundation which fights the copyright abuse by the music and film industry.

Data Feed Standards Conflict Looming Between Google, Amazon and Shopping.com

The National Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) has embarked on the Unified Data Feed Standard Project. The standard aims to unify the data feed templates used by all the shopping comparator sites.

froogle

yahoo Shopping

shopping.com

kelkoo

The problem is that merchants looking to be included in these engines need to handcraft a data feed of product information and price for each shopping portal. The work adds a considerable overhead since each of the shopping portals has a widely different template for the data feeds.

But an overview of the data feed standards at Amazon and Google Base shows each has considerable investment in disparate systems. Unifying data feed standards will require considerable investment, and disruption of current partners and affiliate networks for all shopping portals, and price comparators.

In the mean time, many merchants are currently opting to outsource generation, optimisation and submissions of data feeds for their ecommerce site to specialist players like Enclick Online Solutions.

[Disclosure: EUCAP Partners is invested in Enclick Ltd – data feed provider and its shopping portal]

Scoble Reaches Mainstream Readers Finally

Robert Scoble, famous Microsoft blogger finally sees his book “Naked Conversations” selling in numbers. Published in January, with great blogosphere A-list support and promotion, it is only now selling in numbers, ranking 500th in Amazon. His explanation, I am reaching the mainstream

Back in January, our publisher, Robert and I were hearing a phenomenal amount of praise and we thought we had hit it out of the park. In fact, we were hearing the amplification of an echo chamber that we had warned about in Naked Conversations and we had merely made it to first base.

What’s happening now is that the word of mouth engine has motored past blogging’s inner circle. And that is helping us tremendously. What I also think is impacting us is a Long Tail factor, a book who’s strong takeoff is anything but long ail behavior.

From Naked Conversations: Naked Conversations: A Long Tail Case Study?.

Scoble’s book is finally reaching its intended audience the mainstream company PR teams who are starting to experiment with blogging as a corporate communication tool.


ADDENDUM CORRECTION: The blog entry regarding sales of “Naked Conversations” was penned by
Shel Israel (co-author), and not the-famous-one Robert.

(Sorry Shel)

Achilles Heel of Web2.0 and A-List Blogs: Attracting the Mainstream

Many web2.0 companies, blog networks, and even A-list bloggers are struggling to generate sales. But, being popular among bloggers is not generating the wished for revenues. Enthusiast bloggers are currently too few, notoriously fickle, and do not buy everything they sample.

The essentials to keep in mind for web2.0 ventures are three, in order of importance

  • Provide value to the Client: a value proposition for the client – makes or saves him money
  • Clients have money and an immediate need
  • Be Unline the rest – better than the alternatives in some way

Early adopters, unfortunately, do not behave like Clients with Money – often on a sampling spree as they delight in trying free samples of many different products


crossing chasm

A mainstream niche, shown in the figure, must be part of a startups vision right from the beginning. A startup’s initial clients will likely be early adopters who help bootstrap the company, and do the viral marketing, but at some stage the startup must cross into a mainstream customer segment, and leave early adopters behind.

Enthusiast blog readers and early adopters are essential for viral marketing, but are ultimately a means to an end, before maintream readers arrive.

Another much debated issue is uniqueness: Differentiation is essential for strong growth. But if demand outweighs supply, differentiation can be secondary. Many a life-style company makes a living, and provides employment for its staff, without significant differentiation.

A good breakdown of 11 Suggestions For Not Being a Dot-Bomb 2.0

Google to Locate its Mobile Innovation in London

London is to be the hub for mobile innovation for Google, Deep Nishar, Google’s director of wireless told Times Online. Mr Nishar has no doubts about the size of the global mobile market:

“You only have to look at the global trends for mobile use and PC use to see where our business is going,” said Mr Nishar. “In India, mobile-phone ownership outweighs PC ownership by a ratio of two to one. And there are five million more mobile-phone users coming online every month. By the end of this year there will be more mobile phones in India than in America.

In Britain there is one mobile phone for every person, while in some parts of Scandinavia mobile ownership is almost double that rate. “Looking at these numbers, it becomes very obvious that in the future people will want to access information on the web with a device they carry with them.

According to Mr Nishar, Google is reorganising the way it presents search results on the internet to conform better with mobiles. The research is badly needed as Google’s current mobile search service lags behind others in quality.

Google’s biggest problem is that the mobile search index is not populated with native xhtml (WAP 2.0), mobile content, but rather by wap 2.0 translations of normal web pages. The resulting mobile content served from Google caches is poor to the point of unusable.

Enclick provides mobile weather forecast service, which is one of only a handful in the world. Yet Google has trouble ranking and prioritizing a quality weather forecast in its mobile search, serving a cached translation of html content instead.

It is time to move onto the full WAP2.0 standard.

Make a donation to Yellowiki

Yell Limited have accused Yellowikis of “Passing Off”. The largest publisher of yellow pages directories in the world have written to Paul Youlten (co-founder of Yellowikis) saying they believe Yellowikis is

“plainly purporting to be associated with (Yell)” and “this amounts to a misrepresentaion… which may result in third parties associating (Yellowikis) with our client (Yell)” … “The continued presence in the market of your website will cause substantial damage to (Yell’s) good will and reputation”.

Yell’s solicitors are demanding that:

  • the Yellowikis site is shut down
  • control and ownership of the domain name is passed to Yell
  • compensation is paid to Yell for loss of profits
  • Paul and Rosa agree never to set up another competitor to Yell

In true creative commons style, Rosa & Paul Rousen are raising funds to cover the legal fees to fight yell.com’s cease and desist threat. As of today, they have covered over £1000 of the £1750 needed to cover.


Nick Denton Struggling to Monetise with the Early Adopter Market

Nick Denton’s closure of two of his blogs in his blog media network has caused outrage among some of the blogosphere purists. A classic response from early adopters, who often ignore profit-loss concerns in the object of their affection.
We have had similar responses among our online communities, for instace the enthusiast members of our online financial information forum.
Many web2.0 companies, blog networks, and even A-list bloggers are struggling to monetise their brand asset. But, being popular among the early adopter consumer segment rarely generates the wished for revenues. Early adopters are too few, notoriously fickle, and do not buy everything they sample.
Crossing the chasm between the enthusiast and the mainstream users is an exercise in targeting, sub-segmenting and lots of patience.
It may take a year or two for blogosphere early adopters to be outnumbered by arriving mainstream users. Then the blogosphere will cease to be shocked by the reality of a profit-loss statement. Even smartmobs need to eat.

Huge turnout at Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Talk

Over 80 people turned up to hear Chris Anderson talk on his “Long Tail” theme. A testament to how many people earn a living from the “Long Tail” – which includes several of our investment portfolio companies; i.e. product feeds to promote your long tail and dynamic page indexer for your product catalogue long tail.

Thanks to Ian Forrester for organizing the event.

Yell.com Threatens to Shutdown Yellowikis

David versus Goliath story; an example of monster corporation taking advantage of the current
pro trademark and copyright legislation to kill off a startup. Picked up from Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: Yell Threatens to Shut Down Yellowikis.

Yell.com is already under investigations for monopoly abuse of the directories market in the UK. Yell.com recently bought TPI, yellow-pages Spain, to maintain market growth in spite of Office of Fair Trading investigations in the UK. The architypal incumbent ex-state monopoly.

Yellowikis is a yellow page service in wiki format. Rosa Blaus suggested to her father, Paul Youlten, that they set up Yellowikis after she noticed small businesses were deleted from Wikipedia for not being “encyclopaedic”.Yellowikis has been growing at 8.7% month-on-month and has 494 editors and about 5,000 articles listed.

Yell is demanding that Paul and Rosa close down the website, transfer the domain names to Yell and agree to pay damages to Yell for loss of profits. Yell made $2.4bn in 2005, whereas Yellowikis had a loss of $500. The $500 was used to print T-shirts promoting Yellowikis at the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt.

Yellowiki can argue jurisdiction, since Yellow Pages is not a trademark in the U.S. It is, however, a trademark in the U.K. It would be interesting to see the verdict on geographic jurisdiction from whatever international court arbitrates this case. I hope WIPO does not get involved since, from past experience, they bias towards encumbents.

Given the dubious nature of the yell.com case, Paul and Rosa may survive the cease-and-desist and its subsequent arbitration with a little legal help from a Creative Commons institution, and digital rights activitists at the EFF.

Lifestyle Companies – The Scourge of VC Portfolios

In a moment of weakness marketing guru Seth Godin muses that “So, what’s wrong with small business?”. In VC culture, stable no growth companies – or lifestyle companies – are disaster investments little better than bankruptcies.
Barings Bank observed in a recent review of startup investments that 20% of companies developed into substantial profitable businesses, 20% failed and lost all equity, and 60% drifted sideways often regressing to life-style businesses for a small group of owner-managers.
The fact is that an investor, bank or VC fund, does not inject money into a business to improve the founders life-style and status. A VC fund usually has a 5 to 7 year window in which to realize the value of their investment. Investors want growth, preferably in multiples of 10. Life-style companies clutter up a portfolio, and require investors to negotiate a buy-out with managers. Not quite bankruptcy, but not much better.
However, ultra-growth comes at a price always. No pain, no gain. Or in financial notation, no volatility – no return. Startup owners have to suffer through extreme risk and volatility in order to accomplish growth. Life is easier and safer for the small business owner, happy with his place in the status quo.
But is safe not risky ? With increasingly dynamic markets, globalization, a stable life-style company can have some nasty surprises as competitors, with greater economies of scale, descend on its little niche. Everybody has to acquire an appetite for change, either gradual or in big lumps. Small companies are not what they used to be.