Franki reported on the MGM v Grokster case (official opinion on the Court’s website in pdf format) just decided by the Supreme Court. In that Opinion, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that peer-to-peer networks may be responsible for the illegal file sharing committed by users of the network if they intentionally encourage the sharing of copyrighted information. The specific language on the very first page of Justice Souter’s opinion for the Court says:

…”one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.”

Franki’s article has been criticized as “over the top” by a commentor for suggesting that this will shut down p2p services. One can certainly argue about the relative effects of the decision, but as the writer pointed out — and our prior article did NOT suggest to be the case — the decision did not address peer-to-peer sharing of non-copyrighted material by any stretch. The issue is, will peer-to-peer sharing be a successful business model absent the number of users there only for copyrighted material. The answer to that is unknown.

If you really want to be informed, don’t take our — or anyone elses – word for what the ruling means! Read it yourself on the Supreme Court site. But do not stop there, take the time to read the transcript of the hearing back in March to see the arguments made. (As an aside, I am amazed at the number of times the counsel for the Petitioner interrupted the Justices.) Anyway, the case presented these p2p networks as 90 illigitamate. If you take away 90 percent of the advertising revenue, would the system still make sense? Time will tell.

(more…)

Google’s share price has just topped the $300 mark and is currently sitting pretty at $307.86. That’s good news for Google, but what amazes me is that this is well over double the price they suggested as their initial share price (around $130) when they floated last year and yet they were forced to reduce the initial price below $100. Anybody that bought at $100 or less has no doubt made a tidy profit by this time.

In other Google news, apparently their share of the search market has grown above 50% in the US for the first time ever. Combine that with the even higher market share they hold in most of Europe and you have an extremely popular search engine with well over twice it’s nearest competitors market share. You can read Websidestory’s press release on Google’s growing market share here.

This snippet from the above press release sums up the reason for both the above mentioned results in my humble opinion:

“Google has become a staple for any serious online marketing operation and this data shows why: They generate more than half of all online search referrals in the U.S. and as much as 90 percent in other countries. Google’s early decision to focus on quality of search results has clearly paid off.”

Update: Please see this article as it appears this may have been an unintentional consequence of a faulty implementation of the on-click event in Firefox

In what appears to be another attempt to dissuade users from using non IE browsers, Microsoft has blocked the right clicking of links on the MSN web site when using the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Clicking on such a link in Internet Explorer pops up the normal right click menu. Right clicking on a link in Firefox or Mozilla results in the same effect as left clicking a link. This may be an attempt to cause problems for people using the tabbing features of Firefox which is usually done by right clicking on a link and selecting “open in new tab” from the menu.

I can’t see how Microsoft can claim this was accidental because there is no valid reason I can think of to remap a browsers right click and also it only affects Firefox browser (IE’s biggest competitor) I’ve tested in both Netscape 8.x and Opera 8.x and neither are affected. Try it for yourself, go to http://msn.com In Firefox and try to right click on a link. Then try the exact same thing in Netscape or Opera (or Internet Explorer obviously). They apparently do this using a JavaScript file specifically targeted to the Mozilla browser. You can find it here: http://hp.msn.com/scr/home/msnmoz1021.js

If this is yet another case of Microsoft trying to block out products that successfully compete with them, then they should expect to find themselves in front of another judge for yet more anti-competitive charges. They’ve been found guilty twice already, (US and EU) what’s another guilty conviction? I’m really starting to reach the point where I may pop-up a DHTML warning message informing users of Internet Explorer of all the reasons why IE is a lousy browser, you know, the usual stuff. Lack of standards, lack of security, lack of modern user features, invites Spyware and Virus infection, promoted by a company guilty of monopoly practises who abandoned it’s development until it faced stiff competition from a competitor after which it suddenly became their flavour of the month again, that sort of thing.

In the mean time, If you really must browse MSN, you can either block that script using the Firefox AdBlock extension, or just hold down the control key while clicking links to open them in new tabs. Blocking the script with AdBlock doesn’t seem to cause any other problems and it does return control of your right mouse button to you.

Update: It has since been revealed by the gentleman apparently responsible for the MSN script causing the problem that it is an unintended effect and could possibly be a bug in Firefox 1.0.4. I should note that I did not state it WAS an intentional effort to block alternative browsers, I simply implied it might be. I believe that that is a reasonable theory in light of the fact that such things have happened at MSN before.

AMD has filed a 48 page complaint [PDF] in federal district court (Delaware) accusing Intel of all manner of anti-competitive behaviour. Among the charges are that Intel pays huge sums of money to companies to limit their purchases of AMD processors and that it withholds rebates and marketing subsidies from customers who break the rules.

As anyone that reads the articles here regularly may have noticed, I’ve never had a high opinion of Intel, they always appear to be lead around by the nose by their marketing department and they took a step sideways (at best) when they swapped from PIII to P4 mostly because they figured being able to clock ever higher MHZ would help marketing. Clock cycle to clock cycle the old PIII is still a close competitor of the P4 despite being out of development for years. The P4 was just an exercise in marketing as AMD proved by outperforming it in power usage, heat generation and general performance and doing so at significantly lower clock speeds. And most of us fell for the Intel “MHZ is everything” spiel hook line and sinker.
Innovation and pricing should be the two factors determining market share, and if that was the case, AMD would have a handy lead on Intel. As we all know, this isn’t the case and even though Intel have been playing catch up in the technical stakes for some time now, they have lost hardly any of their market share. We may be about to find out why in a public and probably messy court battle.

AMD have created a page specifically for the purpose of detailing the relevant information and link to the relevant documents and you can find it here.

The net is alive with the sound of P2P proponents gnashing their teeth, and of record and movie companies rubbing their hands together in glee. The Supreme court has just ruled unanimously that peer to peer companies can now be held accountable for the actions of their users. In my previous article, I showed my disdain for companies that blame their bad performance on any external factor they can find. In this case that blame has been levelled at P2P networks like Grokster, and now these huge companies can use the legal system to put any of these companies out of business. In other words, we now have a Mafia style protection racket in the entertainment industry. Do it our way or we’ll make sure you don’t do it at all, or put another way, “make us money or we’ll make sure you lose all of yours”. The real effect of this ruling is that the previous Sony Betamax ruling of 1984 has just essentially been overturned, at least in part. This may result in opening the doors to widespread litigation of any company that offers a product that could possibly be used infringing copyright. That means the manufacturer of your MP3 player or even your mobile phone could be sued, and that means they will up the prices on such devices to cover the risk of litigation. To anyone but the record and movie companies, this is not good news.

The Judges stated that the P2P companies had invoked or otherwise advertised the use of their networks for the purposes of infringing copyright and therefore should be held accountable for such uses. Many think that this may protect MP3 player manufacturers and the like because they’d have to advertise “infringing use” to be liable, but consider that explaining in the instructions for the MP3 player how to rip a CD and copy the music to your player could be construed as an advertisement to infringe, so nobody that offers such devices is safe from the repercussions of this ruling.

More info on the troubling new ruling can be found at: news.com, Wired and TheRegister.

If the recent news that a couple of big record companies in Australia have gone after two sysadmins for not stopping a customers BitTorrent site are any indication, record companies may soon go after Tim Berners-Lee, the guy that invented the World Wide Web, because it’s illegal use has resulted in most of the record company execs living below the poverty line. Or Perhaps they’ll go after Robert Kahn who is one of the guys who created TCP/IP, better known as the protocol on which the whole Internet relies. Surely he is massively responsible for creating the technology that steals all their hard won money.

The main problem appears to be that these guys need something or someone to blame for the slump in sales they all seem to be having of late. It would of course just be wrong for them to blame their own outmoded thinking and their desperate holding on to past business practises. I actually find it surprising that they’ve all managed to swap to CD’s without trying to find ways to make them illegal, (Though they have proposed a tax on blank media because they claim much of it is used by nasty pirates.)

They claim that piracy is ripping off the artists, but what they really mean to say is: “We as record companies, should be the only ones ripping off the artists”. Just take a look at contracts of any of the Australian Idol winners to get an idea of who’s making the “real” money here. The fact that their blank media “tax” against piracy has thus far failed to impress anybody in a position to help them, is perhaps why they are now going after anyone they think they can extort money from. Don’t get me wrong, I feel bad for the struggling new artists when their songs are passed around the net with no revenue for them, but the record companies really need to look at who is really to blame here. I don’t pirate music or video myself, but by the same token I don’t buy CD’s anymore either, mostly because I’m sick to death of the record companies blaming everyone else but themselves for their lacklustre performance. Due to their inability to guide the online industry, you can’t buy a song and play it on any music hardware, or even most hardware for that matter. They have allowed the online music industry to fragment into a dozen non compatible propriety formats and that alone is one of the big reasons why online music sales haven’t taken off they way they could have. The other reason is excessive money grabbing. They are pricing online music at the same price (or more) as buying the actual CD, even though there is no packaging or distribution costs involved. What most people don’t seem to have considered, is that online music probably doubles the record companies profit margins by massively cutting costs. They’d prefer you didn’t consider that while listening to their stories about how the poor artists are starving.

The question remains, is a creator to be blamed for users that infringe using their creations? Are admins the world over responsible for every little thing their users do? If so, where will that stop? Because using that theory, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Kahn are guilty has “heck”. The Sony betamax case was lost because it was found that there were legal uses for such technology, but the record companies are now desperately trying to re-try that case in a modern arena, apparently because the need to blame people for their own poor performance has risen to new highs. Consider this though, record companies have sued children, and dead people, with that sort of indiscriminate unscrupulous litigation, can it be long before they go after Tim and Robert? Who knows, once they realise that most piracy happens on Windows computers, perhaps they will have found a target (Microsoft) with deep enough pockets to fund their ‘avoid taking the blame’ campaign for a couple more years. Truth be told, I think the real reason they are all worried, is because the Internet will eventually be capable of removing most of the reasons one would need a record company in the first place. The idea that they will one day have to work for a living must have them waking up in cold sweats.

In a further example of idiocy, the supreme court has just ruled that P2P networks can be held liable for the infringments of their users. The fact that such technical innovation will now probably disapear apparently doesn’t worry the judges.

Just stumbled onto this when visiting a local planning application website. The site plans were all in Tiff format which of course cannot be easily viewed in a browser.

The site directed you to an Alternative tiff viewer at Alternative tiff viewer

Its easy to install for both Internet explorer and other browers including Mozilla Firefox, and its free. You do however have to register.

I found it very useful, particularly as otherwise when clicking on the image to be viewed the brower went to Paint Shop pro my image program and was slower and much more difficult to view!

Take a look.

Hazel