Posts Tagged: "Internet"

The new reality is that content creators are getting squeezed all around. Increasingly many want things to be free and don’t care whether they copy a public domain work or whether it is something that is copyrighted. They don’t see it as wrong, but this makes it difficult to make a living for content creators. Truthfully, for some content creators it is darn near impossible. Yet everywhere you turn content creators are getting the short end of the stick. If it isn’t blatant and wanton copyright infringement online (which I have to deal with all the time), it is authors getting pennies on the dollar for eBooks or musicians who worked with Pandora to help the company get off the ground taken to Congress so the U.S. government can step in and take from creators for the benefit of the company they helped create. Even the name of the bill supported by Pandora — the Internet Radio Fairness Act — is insulting and misleading.

An online advertising company agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it used “history sniffing” to secretly and illegally gather data from millions of consumers about their interest in sensitive medical and financial issues ranging from fertility and incontinence to debt relief and personal bankruptcy. The FTC settlement order bars the company, Epic Marketplace Inc., from continuing to use history sniffing technology, which allows online operators to “sniff” a browser to see what sites consumers have visited in the past.

In the end, Voter Verified reached the correct result that the Benson article was a “printed publication” bar. But the “publicly accessible” doctrine relied upon by Judge Lourie’s opinion was not the best (and most direct) pathway to get to that result. Even more distressing, the important Cronyn requirement of “meaningful indexing” of the electronically posted document was again discounted by Voter Verified. Put differently, if you can’t readily find the electronically posted document by doing a reasonable search (with appropriate search terms) via the Internet, how can you say that the document is “publicly accessible” to be a “printed publication” bar?

The Federal Trade Commission will host a workshop on December 6, 2012, to explore the practices and privacy implications of comprehensive collection of data about consumers’ online activities. Entities such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs), operating systems, browsers, social media, and mobile carriers have the capability to collect data about computer users across the Internet, beyond direct interactions between consumers and these entities. The workshop will bring together consumer protection organizations, academics, business and industry representatives, privacy professionals, and others to examine the collection and use of such data, its potential benefits, privacy concerns, and related issues. The workshop is free and open to the public.

Though they are unlikely to take center stage during the truncated session before elections or the post-election lame duck session, lawmakers will have to contend with several key copyright issues during the 113th Congress. Thus, no matter who wins on November 6, IP leaders in the House and Senate are likely to use the remainder of this calendar year to set the stage for next year’s copyright agenda. The priority copyright issues for the remainder of 2012 and 2013 are: (1) Anti Piracy Initiatives; (2) Internet Issues; (3) International Agreements; (4) Music Licensing; (5) Book Licensing; and (6) TV Broadcast Issues. Each is discussed more fully below.

If your organization identifies generic or geographic terms relevant to your industry or consumer base, such as .bank, .kids, .music, or .nyc, consider registering second level domain names reflecting your brands (e.g., suntrust.bank, hasbro.kids, ladygaga.music or wendys.nyc), particularly during the sunrise period available to brand owners. Do not overlook the potential for utilizing generic or industry-focused gTLDS to synergize your organization’s branding and marketing strategies once the new gTLD strings go live. A well-known industry term such as .bank for the financial sector or .sport for athletic associations, sports franchises, and sportswear companies may become the “go to” place for consumers interested in these topics. If so, these gTLDs may be important vehicles by which to promote your company and its brands.

Over recent years, online advertising has been a driving force in the growth of the Internet. As business owners, you never stop hearing about the benefits of having your own website and advertising your services on-line. I am guilty of preaching this sermon myself! However, because of the ever-increasing existence of badware, it has become increasingly difficult to know what ads or websites we can trust. Thankfully, tech giants such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, PayPal and others have joined forces with StopBadware.org and formed the Ads Integrity Alliance (AIA) in order to combat Badware, protect users from bad ads and maintain the integrity of the “online advertising ecosystem.”

Criminals on all levels — from opportunistic, small-time thieves to major drug cartels — are finding that the penalties for intellectual property crimes pale in comparison to the penalties they would receive for trafficking drugs and engaging in other illicit activities. At the same time, the profit margin for counterfeit software, as well as for other counterfeit goods, is extremely high. So the combination of great riches, relatively low penalties and a low likelihood of being caught and you can see why criminal enterprises, including terrorist networks, are becoming major players in the counterfeit software black-market.

With the advent and rise of the Internet, digital property rights have become an increasingly hot-topic in the Board rooms and Executive Offices of major companies, particularly those in the hi-tech industry. Much like the information protected under intellectual property rights, digital products provide their creators with certain protections under the law. The problems and legal challenges facing major companies like Yahoo and Facebook will help better define the laws surrounding digital property rights, and likely present opportunities as well as a whole host of new legal questions.

AP’s common law misappropriation claim has its origins in a remarkably similar suit AP brought against a competing news service almost a century ago. In INS v. AP the Supreme Court, in 1918, enjoined INS, a competing news service, from free-riding on the work product of AP. The misappropriation action was based on INS re-distributing information to its customers which AP had previously released into the public domain. INS was enjoined from using the information for a limited time period while it was hot news (i.e. while it had commercial value as news). The Supreme Court’s decision was based on two rationales: (1) preventing unacceptable conduct in the form of a commercial enterprise free-riding on the investment of time and money by a competitor; and (2) avoiding the resulting ruinous competition that could result from a commercial enterprise free-riding on the efforts of a competitor.

Simply stated, the OPEN Act would be completely and totally ineffectual and, therefore, it must be opposed. There is simply no point in enacting more pointless legislation, we have enough pointless legislation already. Content creators cannot create in a vacuum devoid of economic reality. If you take eyeballs away and/or provide things for free that are supposed to be paid for you are causing injury and making it all the more difficult to be a content creator. Think about it for a second. The content that you most value, is that created by commercial enterprises or people just doing it for free as a hobby in their spare time? If you are honest with yourself we both know the answer.

We must find reasonable ways to stop infringement of intellectual property on the Internet. Such a solution must be fair to the victim of the infringement. It must uphold the principles of the Constitution of the United States. And it must not break the Internet. SOPA and PIPA may not be perfect implementations of such protection, but they meet all of these requirements. There may be better strategies that can be reached through measured and thoughtful debate, but not through excessive hyperbole and misrepresentation.

As for the particulars of SOPA, perhaps there are some who are against the legislation for valid, thoughtful reasons and would like to see something better. That, however, seems to be the substantial minority. Those who are against SOPA seem to want to protect online piracy as if they are entitled to access the creative works of others for free. In economic terms those who steal intellectual property are freeloaders. These freeloaders are just like the many non-productive members of society who only take and give nothing back, expecting those of us who are productive to pick up the tab for them. There are certainly people in society who need and deserve help, and we should be there to help them, but by any fair estimate the entitlement mentality is running amok. No one “needs and deserves” free access to the latest blockbuster movie the opened just yesterday in theaters.

Just like people, all brands have their own personality. Brand personality is defined as a set of human characteristics that are associated with a brand name and is determined by consumer interactions with your brand. It is essentially, how your brand behaves in the public light. Your brand personality is determined mainly by your own personality and identity. There are many influences on brand personality including profession, industry, age, gender and emotional characteristics, to name a few. But your brand personality should also reflect what you want others to think of when they hear your name.

Frustration with registration and login isn’t limited to mobile devices, of course. As the web has become more participatory and an integral component of our lives, the average web user has accumulated dozens of accounts at different websites — each with a distinct username and password to remember. Even more problematic, many people try to cope with this problem by recycling the same password across multiple sites, thereby jeopardizing their online security. Social login alleviates this “password fatigue” problem and offers up benefits both for online users and online businesses and other websites.