You regularly see people in the newspaper business, as well as some professional media critics, complaining about the terrible consequences of falling advertising revenues in the mainstream media. There seems to be a worry that as the Internet makes the news business more competitive, traditional media organizations won’t be able to afford to do “real” reporting any more. It’s not a crazy argument, but more often, the opposite seems to be true. Take the recently-completed Democratic Party convention. Ezra Klein points out that there were a ton of reporters who had to justify their presence at the convention, and so rather than focusing on what was happening on the stage (which they could have just as easily done by watching it on TV) they wandered around looking for trumped-up controversy to cover, giving undue attention (in Ezra’s view) to a few disgruntled Clinton supporters. Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias points out that CNN appears to have flown its stars to Denver, put them up in hotels, and constructed an elaborate new set for them, all so they could “cover” the convention in precisely the same way they would have covered it if those same stars had stayed at home in Atlanta or DC. Far from having inadequate resources, on the most high-profile news stories, the mainstream media seems to squander vast sums of money on things that only marginally improve the quality of their coverage. There are a variety of factors that may be undermining the quality of mainstream media coverage, but at the moment, a lack of resources doesn’t seem to be among them.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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This is hardly the first time we’ve seen such a case. In fact, the issue of whether or not companies can force their consumers to go to binding arbitration (which sides with the company somewhere around 95% of the time) over filing a class action lawsuit has been decided in favor of the consumers’ rights to file the lawsuits over and over and over again. So, it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that a court has told AT&T that it cannot force customers into binding arbitration rather than a class action lawsuit over bogus fees it charged.

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Earlier this year, in writing about a musician complaining about fans with mobile phones in the audience, we noted that he seemed to be overreacting, but did raise some interesting points about whether people get so focused on documenting an event that they miss experiencing it. Now a columnist at the Toronto Globe & Mail, Ivor Tossell, makes a similar point in worrying about the effort he goes through to capture “events” like beautiful sunsets, when he’s not even sure what to do with the photos afterwards. While much of the column focuses on the question of whether or not these digital momentos will last at all, an equally reasonable question is how many special moments are “lost” in the effort of trying to capture them with recording equipment.

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It really was just a month ago that we were writing about how super successful fiction author Stephenie Meyer was showing exactly how to embrace online fans, giving them free reign to build on her works and do more with them to build up her own popularity. As I was writing that post, I have to admit, in the back of my head, I wondered if I would later be writing a post about an anti-fan decision — but even I’m surprised at how quickly it happened.

Apparently, a draft of the fifth book in her Twilight Series was leaked online, and Meyer is so upset b the ordeal that she’s saying the book is on hold and may never be finished. Instead, she’s telling people to consider the fourth book to be the end of the series.

As a writer, you can certainly understand the sentiment. She wants the final release to be as good as it can be, and that means getting the chance to do full rewrites, edits and other things to make sure that it’s as good as can be. But, at the same time, she also has to understand that her fans are going to clamor for such a leak anyway. It shows how much they love her work and how badly they want to keep up on the latest story that they’re willing to either leak or download the leak. It’s just a sign of how strong their feeling is towards her work — and her response is to punish them for it? That seems wrong.

Her true fans will still buy the completed work, should it ever come out. They want the official version and the leaked version. Why do you think so many music fans rush to get “leaked” copies of demo tapes of bands they love? People like to see how these things evolve and change over time, as it gives them an even closer connection to the work itself. I can sympathize that Meyers is upset by this, and that she might be concerned about the impact on the final story, but she might want to rethink her initial reaction, and realize that this is hardly something to be upset about. It’s a sign of how much people care about her work.

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We’ve talked about the concept of a reverse Streisand Effect, where a company purposely pretends to be outraged and demands to take something down in order to generate more attention for it, and now there’s some evidence suggesting that last week’s DMCA takedown notices for the “fake” Mad Men Twitter accounts may have been part of AMC’s own marketing strategy. Buried at the bottom of a NY Times article about what happened, there’s a hint that the whole thing was planned out, as following a request from the Times reporter, Brian Stelter, to one of the “fake” users for an interview, that character “referred all questions to Deep Focus, a Web marketing agency that works for AMC.”

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Mike Arrington offers some unsolicited advice to Amazon about how to expand the market for the Kindle. In a nutshell, he thinks Amazon should aggressively license the Kindle hardware specs to third parties, and allow authorized vendors to use the Kindle brand. Amazon would require licensees to use the Kindle store, and would share the associated revenues. There’s a lot to be said for a plan like this. The key to long-run dominance of many high-tech industries is to be the platform around which other firms build their products. Amazon’s got a solid product with a fair amount of buzz at the moment, but that could easily evaporate if another company comes along with a more compelling product. Getting a lot of third-party vendors to build products around the Kindle ecosystem could help establish it as the standard e-book platform.

The difficulty with opening up the platform is that the Kindle business model—particularly the wireless aspect—depends on limiting the Kindle’s functionality. Amazon is able to offer free cellular access for the life of the product in part because it controls the applications that will run on it, and can therefore guarantee to cell carriers that users won’t start running bandwidth-hogging applications on it. And Amazon is willing to pick up customers’ bandwidth bills in part because it charges premium prices for content, some of which is available for free off the open Internet. So if Amazon licensed the Kindle name to third parties, it would have two choices. It could tell the vendors they’re on their own in terms of negotiating their own wireless plans, which would be a headache for the vendors. Or, if Amazon wants to bring third parties in under its own wireless umbrella, it will presumably need to impose some draconian restrictions on the functionality of the Kindle clones. And how many vendors are going to want to sell Kindle clones that have all the same limitations as the original?

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Earlier this year, we wrote about how a patent holding firm, by the name Sisvel, had German customs officials raid the trade show booths of certain CeBit exhibitors, having all their goods confiscated. At the time, someone in the comments noted that this is a recurring theme in Germany, as certain patent hoarders “target trade show exhibitors and demand what amounts to protection money to avoid being raided by the police in the middle of the show.” The companies just complain to customs, and get officials to raid the trade show booths in the middle of the show, even if the patents are bogus or don’t even apply to the goods on display. It seems like a huge protection racket.

And, of course, it’s happened again. Slashdot points us to the news that the booths of 69 companies at a tech trade show were raided by customs officials last week.

What’s still not clear is how this possibly could make sense? While German patent law apparently allows this, it’s hard to fathom why. Simply displaying a product, even if it infringes on someone’s patent, hardly seems like a reason to send in customs officials to confiscate the device. I can maybe understand suing — and even possibly suing for an injunction against selling the product — but getting customs to completely confiscate the products and shut down the trade show booth simply doesn’t make any sense, and clearly opens up the system to widespread abuse.

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It’s amazing to watch just how sensitive some companies are concerning the rather well-known security vulnerabilities associated with RFID tags and smart cards. We’ve seen time and time again, companies try to suppress such research from getting published — and every single time, those efforts to suppress the publication of the vulnerabilities backfires, often badly.

But that never seems to stop companies from flexing their legal muscles.

The latest example comes to use via the Consumerist blog, who dug out a clip of Adam Savage from the TV show Mythbusterstalking about what happened when the show tried to do an episode on RFID vulnerabilities:

Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else… They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it’s on Discovery’s radar and they won’t let us go near it.

Check out the video of him saying this (while admitting he’s probably not supposed to talk about it) here:

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In the past month, it has become clear that Apple, through their App Store, is going to exercise a lot of control over the programs that iPhone users download. The list of removed App Store downloads include Tetris clones, harmless but expensive novelties, movie listings and useful wireless applications. Although many have sung the praises of the new system, this trend of contingent generativity - Jonathan Zittrain’s term for intermediaries exerting control over new creativity - has some worrying implications. An ecosystem with perfect enforceability of rules will come to preempt the creativity which comes from the edge (and even piracy). If developers worry that their applications will be shut down by an overzealous enforcement organization (there is no evidence Apple is pulling applications after anything more than a third-party complaint), then innovation will stagnate.

Google seems to understand this. In announcing their competing service, the Android Market, the Android team notes “We chose the term “market” rather than “store” because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available.” Application creators will be as free to post information as videographers are to post to YouTube. Although the lack of review before posting doesn’t mean Google will not remove applications if complaints are made, their ethic of freedom suggests they see mobile applications in the same light as the Internet: creators will build unanticipated, useful applications if given the chance to experiment freely.

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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About four years ago there were all sorts of rumors that Google was getting ready to enter the browser wars with its own offering, most likely built on Mozilla’s code. However, after years of nothing (and an increasingly close relationship between Mozilla and Google), many had thought that idea was dead. Apparently not. After some leaks of a comic book (a comic book?!?) detailing the new Google browser found their way to the web, Google quickly admitted that it is, indeed, getting into the browser business, releasing a brand new open source browser, called Google Chrome.

Rather than being built on Mozilla, as many expected, it’s been built on top of WebKit, which is also the core of Apple’s Safari browser — but which Google was also using for its own mobile browser. In the end, this isn’t all that surprising. While many will interpret it as Google trying to take on Microsoft in the browser market, in reality, this is probably a lot more about Google trying to help everyone move beyond the operating system market. As we first suggested four years ago when rumors of a Google browser first came around, Google knows that the way to beat Microsoft is to become the operating system for the internet, and you do that by relegating the actual OS obsolete. And, these days, the path to doing that is through the browser.

So, yes, this is a shot at Microsoft — but not at Internet Exporer. It’s a shot at Windows.

That doesn’t mean Google Chrome will be successful, but a quick look at the features itself show that the features it highlights (being able to run apps separately, better memory management, etc.) are the sorts of things that allow people to make browser-based apps much more useful, rather than feeling the need to rely on client-side applications. People have predicted for years that we’re getting closer to a world where all computing can be done over the network, and it looks like Google is trying to push that process right along.

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Remember the Phantom? Depending on your perspective, this mysterious gaming console, first announced in 2003, was either a too ambitious product that could never get off the ground (living up to its “phantom” name in that it was almost never actually seen) or a big scam to part investors with money. Over the years, the company made many announcements, almost none of which it lived up to. The company was even sued by its own investment bank for fraud, and the company’s founder was charged as part of a stock scam. At one point, people were shocked when the company hired a real gaming industry veteran as CEO, but once he left pretty much everyone thought the company was dead.

But… not so fast. A few years back it announced that it was ditching the gaming console concept, but was still going to come out with a neat keyboard that could be used for gaming. Of course, it promised that keyboard would be out years ago, and in true Phantom fashion, many delays followed. To be honest, I had thought the company had finally gone completely out of business, but Wired is reporting that it really honestly has a keyboard in production — and it completely sucks. As Wired notes, it certainly wasn’t worth the long wait. The only redeeming factor that Wired can find in the keyboard is the chance to own a piece of vaporware history. Just don’t expect to actually use it, because you’ll be wishing you didn’t.

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A judge has ruled that online video hosting site Veoh is not guilty of copyright infringement for videos uploaded by its users. The judge made the proper ruling here, noting that the DMCA’s safe harbors protect Veoh. The lawsuit was brought by adult video entertainment firm Io, who was upset that Veoh’s users kept uploading clips from its films. As the judge properly noted, Veoh follows all the rules necessary under the DMCA to avoid liability (this doesn’t mean that the individuals doing the uploading aren’t liable, however).

While this may seem like a small case, it is quite similar to Viacom’s infamous lawsuit against YouTube/Google. Considering that YouTube follows the DMCA’s rules in a similar manner to Veoh, this ruling suggests that YouTube is also protected by the DMCA safe harbors, just as many had stated from the beginning. The key issues raised by Io (and also raised by Viacom) is that these sites lose their DMCA safe harbors because they take action on the content, often transcoding the content from one format into flash. However, the judge in the Veoh case trashed that argument pretty easily:

Here, Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users. Veoh preselects the software parameters for the process from a range of default values set by the third party software… But Veoh does not itself actively participate or supervise the uploading of files. Nor does it preview or select the files before the upload is completed. Instead, video files are uploaded through an automated process which is initiated entirely at the volition of Veoh’s users

The folks over at Google are, understandably, pretty happy about this ruling, which confirms their position that YouTube is protected: “It is great to see the Court confirm that the DMCA protects services like YouTube that follow the law and respect copyrights.”

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Usually, when you’re dealing with a bank, they encrypt your passwords so that no one else can read them. However, apparently that isn’t always the case — and this allowed an employee at Lloyds TSB to change the password of one member from “Lloyds is pants” to “no it’s not”. The customer actually found the story to be amusing — but it does seem slightly troubling that the bank, for whatever reason, was reviewing and changing a customer’s password. They also forbade him from switching the password to “Barclays is better” and “censorship.” Lloyds has apologized, and said the employee in question no longer works for the firm. It also explains why the guy was able to see the password in the first place by noting that on certain business accounts with multiple users, account reps can read the password. This seems pretty weak, though. If it’s a business account with multiple users, why not let each user set up their own username and encrypted password? Also, it’s still not explained why the guy was looking at users’ passwords in the first place.

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Back in June, we were bothered by the fact that the FBI was wasting its time investigating a blogger who had posted some unreleased Guns N’ Roses tracks on his site. Music gets leaked all the time, and it’s difficult to see why this is an FBI matter in any form. Turns out that the FBI takes its GNR leaks seriously. They’ve now arrested the blogger for posting the songs to his website. This seems questionable for a variety of reasons. First, why is the FBI involved at all in what should be a civil matter, not a criminal one? Why is it so important to track down this particular leaker, given how many music leaks happen all the time? And, how, honestly, is this going to hurt the band in any way? The music was going to get leaked sooner or later anyway. It’s not going to change who will and who will not buy the CD. And, most importantly, doesn’t the FBI have more important things to be working on?

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We’ve been talking about the variety of new and different business models springing up around investigative reporting, and here’s another interesting take on the matter. Wikileaks, the site that’s become rather infamous for publishing all sorts of leaked documents is experimenting with auctioning off the latest set of documents its received (in this case, emails from the Venezuelan government). Wikileaks will publish the emails itself eventually, but wants to offer a news organization a chance at the exclusive rights to publish the initial stories on the documents, seeing that as a way to raise money to keep Wikileaks going.

As the folks at Wikileaks point out, it’s not all that different than various tabloids paying millions of dollars for “exclusive” photos of some celebrity’s new baby. However, with newspapers struggling with their own business models, it’s unclear who’s really going to cough cash up to get exclusive access to these documents. Also, this model runs all sorts of risks: what if the emails don’t really reveal that much of interest? Then you’re going to have a pissed off buyer. Plus, the whole obsession with “exclusive” news stories is pretty silly. You can’t own the news, and while being first on a story may gain some initial traffic, other news sources will pick up the story pretty quickly themselves.

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