We may not be in a recession but we are facing tough times, primarily at the gas pump. Families are having to cut back on nonessentials, like entertainment. AT&T, Verizon and now Sony have indications that the consumer has tightened the belt. –

TOKYO: Sony posted a bigger-than-expected 47 percent drop in quarterly profit Tuesday, hurt by losses at its mobile phone joint venture with Ericsson, while Matsushita Electric Industrial reported 86 percent profit growth as a result of rising sales of flat-screen televisions.

Sony raised its forecast for full-year operating profit to reflect a change in its accounting method; Matsushita, which owns the Panasonic brand, reaffirmed its annual outlook, which surpasses market expectations.

By the way Toshiba has been hit as well.

All you broadband providers better listen up, even you wireless guys. If you want to survive this downturn you HAVE to provide a no frills, transport only tier. If you continue to lump yourselves as a ‘entertainment medium’ you are going to lose customers by the fistful. The consumer sits here and looks at all that is before them — cable/FIOS, 500 channel wasteland, pay-per-view, digital phone, cellular phone. Bills running probably up into the $300 a month range. For what?

Many Americans, being forced out of homes by foreclosure are cutting the land line phone for good. Those that are on a solid footing for the housing still have to make choices. So if its a choice between the cell and landline or VoIP they are choosing cellular. They sit there and ask why am I paying $25/mo for premium channels when I don’t have the time to watch them? I am wasting money so out it goes. Besides they could do better with NetFlix or Amazon IPTV. Pay per View the same thing.

So what’s left? Transport, maybe digital phone if one of the breadwinners works out of the house and basic cellular service. That is Basic Fat Pipe. One last angle to consider AT&T, Comcast, Verizon. It is better to assist the consumer with that BFP now. That way you retain a relationship with the customer. When the economy comes back, and it will, that customer will be amenable to adding additional services. If they just cut you off, then you have to compete all over again for their dollars when they get the itch to buy. They just may decide to NOT pick you.

Linky

Full screen because I want you to get the flavor of it.

This is a sign in a Subway sandwich shop in Idaho. How they enforce i don’t know but personally I like it. If somebody can’t live without the phone in their ear for just a couple of minutes so as not to hold up the line then they deserve to be kicked to the rear. I run across this in WalMart the most. Some woman fumbling for her checkbook, a pen, and she all chrunched over yapping on the phone not thinking one wit about what she is attempting to do. All the while the lines keep piling up.

There is not much in this world that is so damn important that you have to be on the phone 24×7. Observe, Engage, Execute. Then please get the hell out of the way.

HT: Consumerist.

Yes Dear Reader, another round of RIAA vs The People. This time with a twist. Usual routine has been admit no guilt by the defendant. But challenge on the basis or proof of distribution. Well this time, in Elektra v. Barker, the defendant is admitting guilt. The defendant is also willing to pay the fine at $3.50 per song!! –

1. Plaintiffs’ damages theory, which argues for statutory damages of from 2,142 to 428,571 times the actual damages, would lead to an unconstitutional result (Parker v. Time Warner Entertainment Co.,331 F.3d 13 (2d Cir. 2003); UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Lindor, 2006 WL 3335048 (E.D.N.Y. 2006); In re Napster Inc., 2005 WL 1287611 (N.D. California 2005)), so that the complaint should be construed as alleging that the use of an “online media distribution system” to infringe plaintiffs’ copyrights constituted a single act of infringement, warranting a total recovery of $750 if defendant is liable.

2. In the alternative, the statute should be considered unconstitutional to the extent it could be construed as authorizing more than ten time the actual damages, and recovery should be limited to $3.50 per recording as against a single noncommercial user for a single upload or download of an MP3 file for personal use.

Why would this tact be worth a hoot? Well first, it appears that federal courts have held that any penalty beyond 9x the actual damages is unconstitutional under the ‘cruel and unusal’ provisions. yeah I know so what?

Well think a minute. Can you think of anytime in your life where you could get 4 lawyers in a room for less than a $1000? The RIAA watchdog group is selffunding. They use the proceeds of one successful pay off to fund the next round of suits. Well if the best they can get is $3.50 per and have to prove number of copies distributed, they are toast from a financial perspective. Watch the judge in this one! He in a preliminary reading of the briefs suggested the alteration and amended response. This one could go appellate on the constitutionality of it.

Linky

Back in May we had this to say in regards to BCRA and how technology is gong to invalidate the Act. Well folks is looks like it is going to happen. Sadly not against BCRA but against the wiretap provisions in the latest update to the Patriot Act.

The best laid plans of the Pols have yet again been placed asunder. That bipartisan effort to ‘cure’ campaign finance, BCRA, will be totally destroyed by this. BCRA puts a gag order 30 days before an election. It was generally targeted at 527 groups and other financially well healed political groups.

Here’s what is happening –

The grassroots group Get FISA Right has created a 30-second spot critical of the surveillance bill passed by Congress earlier this month. It’s placed the spot with a Los Angeles startup that buys ad time in bulk from cable providers and resells off slivers to individuals willing to pay for airtime in markets around the country.

The mashup means anyone who supports the repeal of the controversial law can pay online with a credit card to run the advertisement in any of eight cable TV markets around the country. By August 15, 22 markets will be available. The cost of spots varies from six dollars for placement on CNBC between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. in Cleveland, for example, to $1,856 to run on CNN in New York City between 6 p.m. and midnight.

The wiretap protest movement started life as a group on Barack Obama’s social networking site My.BarackObama.com. The group was dedicated to deterring Obama from voting for a measure that legalized President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program and granted retroactive legal immunity to the phone companies that cooperated with the spying when it was illegal. Membership swelled to more than 24,000 ahead of the July vote, but it still failed to deter Obama from supporting the unprecedented expansion of U.S. domestic spying powers.

Put aside your political leanings for or against Obama. In fact don’t even worry at the message either as us ole Baby Boomers are want to say. In this case it is the vehicle that is important. Imagine being able to fund a political ad of any stripe for any purpose. I whip out my credit card and fund an advert in Dallas for McCain. Who is going to stop me? The Feds? Hell I won’t even appear on their radar scope. Nor would thousands of others. Spread the message via email and IM’s. The funds trickle in by the individual thousands.

A revolution ensues. Thomas Jefferson would be proud

The point to all this of course the singular observation that BCRA is dead. But I have one other as well. Though mass marketers are dead, the mass market medium may not be. When I can narrow cast on cable to a specific audience for pennies that is a sea change in the marketing medium.

Linky

Well it looks like the Verizon folks got hit too. Broadband that is. We mentioned that AT&T 2Q take rate dropped to 10% of last year’s numbers. Well it looks like Verizon has the same problem –

Just a week after AT&T dropped a stink bomb — a pitifully low 46,000 new broadband subscribers added in the second quarter — Verizon said it grew its subscriber base by a grand total of 54,000 broadband subscribers. (As it turns out, the company lost 133,000 DSL subscribers during the quarter, but added 187,000 FiOS internet subscribers.)

Hey, at least the subscriber base is growing, but that’s certainly not brag-worthy growth. To provide a little perspective: The company added 266,000 new subscribers in the first quarter, and added 288,000 in the year-ago period, which makes the 54,000 figure appear outright sickly.

“Although cable will likely benefit from the DSL declines, we’re concerned about the overall data broadband growth,” said Tom Egan, an analyst at Collins Stewart, in a research note.

Now Verizon probably did marginally better than AT&T as they hade conversions of DSL users to FIOS. But still. The other factor for Verizon is that they need a given take rate in a neighborhood or the their roll out turns into a house of cards.

So yet again we say — Give Us Fat Dumb Pipe! So long as you are considered Entertainment you are vulnerable.

Linky

Open source for business implementations in OS, applications, and services has been a very popular topic lately. Tight budgets could be part of of the reason, and the one most often touted by the closed software industry. Another reason could be that business is weary of investing in large collections of high priced work arounds that rarely work as presented by sales people.

The survey by OSA which was conducted in late June, of over 100 member organisations, found that 83 per cent expect a year-over-year increase in revenue in 2008 from Open Source software and related services.

Respondents’ replies suggested, “the market from Open Source software and services is growing and growing fast,” the Alliance said.

Seventy-nine per cent of respondents said that price is the number one driving factor for this growth. (The Inquirer)

Texting-on-the-go is just the latest tech-created public nuisance, one that’s spreading quickly across a world still grappling with cellphone-addled drivers and wireless-headset users who appear to be speaking too loudly to no one in particular. Like driving cellphone users, mobile texters typing furiously into their cellphones, BlackBerry devices or iPhones can be safety hazards.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, several high-profile accidents may have had a role in prompting states such as New Jersey and Washington to outlaw texting while driving. Among the accidents the group cited: a cyclist killed by a texting teen driver in 2005.

But most of the time the victims are the texters, who wind up with bumps and bruises. Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s emergency room has been ground zero in Chicago for texting goofs. Located downtown near shopper-clogged Michigan Avenue, the emergency room is also close to the exceptionally busy lakefront path, where pedestrians and joggers share a lane with bikers.
[Mike Munoz]

James Adams, Northwestern’s chairman of emergency medicine, says he has treated patients involved in texting incidents nearly every day this summer. He says fallen texters are more prone to facial injuries: They tend to hold their devices close to their faces, so their hands are less likely to break their fall. “By the time their hands hit, their face immediately hits and they smash to the ground,” Dr. Adams says. The common outcomes are scraped chins, noses and foreheads, along with broken glasses.

I could pontificate for hours about TextFreaks. But I’ll just cut to the chase — Lemmings.

Linky

No, no. Not like in Stoned out of his Mind. More like Stoned to Death. EMI just lost one of their biggest artists — The Stones. Yeah those guys. Just goes to show, turn 65 and eventually something sinks in. Like your record publisher has been stealing you blind. –

Hedge fund Terra Firma Capital Partners’ corporate name feels like a misnomer these days, standing as it is on shaky musical ground.

Before taking over major-label behemoth EMI last year, the private equity player got the gas face from top-shelf British acts like Radiohead and Paul McCartney, who walked away from EMI the minute they could. On Friday, Terra Firma scored the humiliation hat trick when The Rolling Stones, the planet’s highest-earning act of 2007, defected to Universal Vivendi.

McCartney and crew defected last year from the label to go private. I am surprised that Jagger did not do the same. But hey, at 65, he’s going to be going buggers on the royal pension eh? But it just another trend that the record labels are becoming irrelevant.

Linky.

Senator Patrick Leahy has been getting lots of attention from big media. Now he’s leading a crusade to do their bidding with even more copyright legislation. It seems the DMCA didn’t go far enough to satisfy the MPAA, RIAA and IP trolls.

Big media has every right to plead their case. Their lobbying continues to reshape copyright law in a way that is completely at odds with its original intent. Unfortunately very deep pockets of special interests working overtime on an increasingly isolated and arrogant Congress has left the common citizen completely unrepresented. Senator Leahy’s new bill has some particularly troubling features that could expose anyone to unreasonable persecution:

 Some of the strongest criticism of PRO-IP has been directed at a provision, replicated here, that would allow for the seizure of “property used, or intended to be used, in any manner or part to commit or facilitate” a copyright or trademark infringement. While this language is presumably meant to target the equipment used by commercial bootlegging operations, it would also appear to cover, for example, the computer used to BitTorrent a movie or album.

The new bill also incorporates the idea at the core of the PIRATE Act, by permitting federal prosecutors to bring civil suits against copyright infringers. (While these suits would not preclude action by the copyright owner, any restitution to the owner under a government suit would be subtracted from the damages that could be obtained by private action.) Since 1997, prosecutors have had the authority to bring criminal copyright charges against large-scale infringers. But that power remains little-used, in part because of the high evidentiary burden prosecutors must meet in criminal cases; civil suits employ a less stringent “preponderance of the evidence” standard. (Ars Technica)

For the record, we encourage to fullest prosecution of those who blatantly steal and profit from the intellectual property of others. Criminal prosecution insures that a significant amount of evidence is assembled before hauling a citizen into court.  Giving federal prosecutors the power to engage in civil suits is a very dangerous precedent. It opens the door to harassment and extortion in our legal system where enforcement is arbitrary and random. Anyone concerned with the rights of the common citizen would never propose such a law.

Lets hope voters in Vermont send Mr Leahy into retirement in the next election cycle before he can do any more harm.

Verizon ends up in the top of the list of companies associated with consumer fraud. This is according to information gathered by the School of Law, Berkley California. The data was obtained from the FTC for he period 2006-07, the latest available. To be fair, lets make one thing clear — Verizon itself is not doing the defrauding.

In 2007, fraud events where the victim could identify the institution associated with the incident, were concentrated among a relatively small number of companies. Just ten companies accounted for 30% of events. Verizon was identified by victims more than any other company as being targeted by impostors to commit fraud. AFNI, a collections agency, was next in total number of events. Bank of America improved dramatically over its 2006 numbers, while ING Bank and American Express remained top performers among large institutions.

If Verizon is not doing the defrauding then how are they associated with those that are? Lack of caring in a sense. There are many ways to be a conduit. Social Engineering attacks are most preveleant. Party X says they are moving, gives new address which is theirs, promises to request disconnect at old address once moved. They receive the latest billing at the ‘new’ address. The thief now has all the data they need to scam like a bandit. The real phone holder won’t know for a month or more till the miss a billing cycle. By then it is too late. Open systems are another. We’re all human and even Sys Admins get tired and make mistakes. A system gets compromiszed on the DMZ and wham all sorts of data is disclosed. Gateway traffic in the clear is another. Having a laptop stolen that is not encrypted is another. 12000 laptops get stolen every WEEK in this country. Many carry sensitive data when they should not.

Keep one other item in mind. VZ has cut POTS network services to the bone. So there is not a lot of incentive right now to improve security in that area. Verizon is another of those companies that ‘take seriously’ (God I hate that line!) the missives that occur. The fact is they need to try harder. A trashed brand is a tough thing to get out of, ask Comcast.

Linky.