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80k Per Song, Fair? Give me a break

2009-06-23T08:18:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) In the original trial, the fine was only $222,000 and this time around it is now $1.92 million ($80k a song). Talk about the punishment not fitting the crime.

Let’s break it down shall we.

24 songs is the equivalent of two CDs. This sort of crime would be considered petty theft and a maximum penalty of $500. But wait, this is distributing not simply stealing for one’s own amusement.

So what happens when we get normal teenager type behavior and put it on a forum of millions of users? We get distribution of copyrighted material.

In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000.

-US Code: Title 17,504 Remedies for infringement

I am no lawyer, but it seems like the law is quite specific on this. Distribution of copyrighted material if the perpetrator has knowledge that it is against the law is punishable of up to $150k…. $1.92 million… $150k. The RIAA argued of course that each song is a separate entity under this law of course instead of lumping them together each was treated separately.

Give me a break. If I steal a CD from a music store I don’t get fined $500 per song, per page of music liners, per piece of plastic that goes into the case, etc. But for the sake of argument lets treat them separate.

A single song’s street value is $1.29 at iTunes (this as good a measure as any I figure). So for there to be $80k damages sustained by the RIAA, each song would have to be distributed 62,015 times… each. What is more likely (though still high) would be 1,000 times each and that would come to $30,960 for the lot. Add court fees and an extra sum on top of that (emotional accountant distress, repayment for time spent agonizing over the problem, etc), and you still don’t hit nearly $2 mil.

Maybe I am over simplifying this (I probably am), but I do not see a reason for a 1.92 million dollar fine to someone who could not ever dream of paying such a high amount.
Tags: copyright infringment, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, Kazaa, RIAA

About David Dunlap
Over the past ten years David has been a prolific author of hundreds of blogs, commentaries and reviews found here on WebHostBlog.com , as well as WebHostMagazine.com and other sites around the Internet. David manages the daily operations at both WebHostBlog and Web Host Magazine & Buyer's Guide, and as the head editor, David uses his unique analytical skills to ensure that both sites maintain their integrity and tough, but fair minded, reputations. Prior to his active career analyzing the Web Host industry, David specialized in networking and communications for the U.S. government. David's expertise in traditional marketing and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has helped boost companies both inside and outside of the Web Host industry.
http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/80k_per_song_fair_give_me_a_break.html

Dasient, Filling in the Gaps in Online Security

2009-06-18T09:26:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) Do we have a womb to tomb product line for every part of a Web site? Prior to yesterday I could say yes, but I would also have to say with equal measure, no. Let me explain.

In the second half of 2008, 57,000 phishing attacks that target specific brands or organizations were launched from some 30,000 sites. Of these sites, only around 5,500 were from phishing sites. Roughly 81% of the attacks came from legitimate sites that had been hijacked by phishing schemes.

To put this in even greater perspective, VeriSign recently released a report stating that 88% of US web users can’t identify phishing sites.

To help combat this, browsers, search engines, and security companies have been creating blacklists to prevent people from getting infected. So this of course is where I say there was a tool to secure this part of the daisy chain. However, if you are one of those legitimate sites that got blacklisted… well it doesn’t help, really, does it?

What’s more, those who find that there sites were blacklisted by Google (and by FireFox through proxy) can see a huge loss of traffic.

So the solution to the problem is to blacklist the site and keep users from getting infected but does little to help web developers. What is a web dev to do?

A new security company, Dasient has an answer. Well three answers.

â– Free Blacklist finding tool
â– Premium Monitoring Service
â– Quarantining Service

The first two can be found at their web site Dasient.com, the last is currently in private beta.

The Blacklist tool is fairly straight forward. Put your URL into the online tool, or sign up for alerts and monitoring, and Dasient checks your site to see if it was blacklisted. This is a free service and I don’t see why you wouldn’t. The alternatives can be loss of all trust, loss of traffic, and in the end, loss of money.

The second tool is a monitoring service that crawls your site and looks for malware content such as iframe and javascript. It then gives your a report that tells you what pages are (if any) infected and what is the code being used so you can remove it. I will talk more of this later once I have had a chance to fully explore it.

The last one is an interesting service and I think it will really make a splash at this year’s HostingCon.

I have more information on these services so stay tuned!

About David Dunlap: Over the past ten years David has been a prolific author of hundreds of blogs, commentaries and reviews found here on WebHostBlog.com , as well as WebHostMagazine.com and other sites around the Internet. David manages the daily operations at both WebHostBlog and Web Host Magazine & Buyer's Guide, and as the head editor, David uses his unique analytical skills to ensure that both sites maintain their integrity and tough, but fair minded, reputations. Prior to his active career analyzing the Web Host industry, David specialized in networking and communications for the U.S. government. David's expertise in traditional marketing and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has helped boost companies both inside and outside of the Web Host industry.

http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/dasient_filling_in_the_gaps_in_online_security.html

Bundling Competitor Products for a Better Tomorrow

2009-06-16T09:32:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) Sorta weird and somewhat against the whole competitive market theme isn’t it?

Now let’s take Microsoft and the EU. The web browser market is an extremely competitive market where the number 1 product (IE) is loosing market share in vast quantities. How vast you may ask? In other industries the differences in market share are the types of shifts that occur in a decade or longer (Microsoft lost 11.5% market share in less than two years where as a number one product like Coke took 10 years to lose 15%).

This is a market very much under the grasp of capitalism and is in fact running the way it should. The products are presented and the CUSTOMERS, not the companies, not the EU, not the US, not governments, and principalities, but the CUSTOMERS have the say in what is good and what isn’t. What customers want they have been getting, tabbed browsing, the ability to add plugins, dynamic bookmarks, RSS feed browsing, etc. The customers show they want these features by, oh my gosh, telling the companies and backing that up by market share.

There is no antitrust going on here, period.

Microsoft was found guilty of antitrust… of course they were, the panel wouldn’t even assemble for an appeal. Microsoft was guilty before the first gavel fell. So Microsoft has to either remove IE from their product or bundle their competitors.

A browser is a fundamental part of computers. How can you download competitors browsers without one? The corollary, how does a company justify bundling the competition with their product?

Lets put this in more real terms. You buy a car. It has a steering wheel. You could go to the local auto store to buy a steering wheel if you like, perhaps you want one with more cushion, go for it. Buy that steering wheel. But without a steering wheel you can’t take the car you bought to get that steering wheel from the auto parts store.

The car, and rightly so, comes bundled with a steering wheel. Would you expect Ford or Honda or Austin Martin or Mercedes to have 10 steering wheels in the trunk so you can pick and choose which ones you want? Don’t be absurd. Or maybe 20 shift knobs, or 100 hubcaps, etc. And yet there are more than one thousand companies who make a living off of custom car accessories.

EU, I have found your new target. Sue the pants off of every car company for antitrust against the custom car accessory industry!

About David Dunlap: Over the past ten years David has been a prolific author of hundreds of blogs, commentaries and reviews found here on WebHostBlog.com , as well as WebHostMagazine.com and other sites around the Internet. David manages the daily operations at both WebHostBlog and Web Host Magazine & Buyer's Guide, and as the head editor, David uses his unique analytical skills to ensure that both sites maintain their integrity and tough, but fair minded, reputations. Prior to his active career analyzing the Web Host industry, David specialized in networking and communications for the U.S. government. David's expertise in traditional marketing and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has helped boost companies both inside and outside of the Web Host industry. http://www.gawkwire.com/web_hosting/bundling_competitor_products_for_a_better_tomorrow.html

Irony: Customer Service and Telecoms

2009-06-11T00:33:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) In the bottom 5 for customer support, four are telecommunication companies. Let’s take AOL for instance. 44.8% poor rating. Even Walmart, a store noted for its poor customer service, did stunningly well in comparison and even increased their satisfaction index.

But let us face facts, the above is misleading. How can a telecom call center staffed by 100 or so people compete with a company that has 5-20 reps per store and roughly 7,000 stores worldwide. Its really not possible. For one both get a lot of customer support volume, but Walmart has is spaced across thousands of locations and people, while telecom call centers basically funnel all the customer problems to a few hundred (and that’s being overly generous). Most of Walmart’s customer support is handled face to face as well and people are less likely to be confrontational in that situation. Where as over the phone or in an email you can be as abusive as your heart desires.

Although we cannot compare (or I should say should not compare since we can compare them all day if we want biased information) a face to face customer experience to an over the phone one, the telecom industry’s support is still pretty poor.

A great deal of people blame this sort of thing on outsourcing and I disagree. I don’t think outsourcing is the main problem behind poor customer service in many industries. I think the problem comes from not be able to gauge a proper ROI for customer support.

We all know you need customer support and we all know that all things being equal great customer support builds loyalty. The problem is we don’t know how much loyalty you get from each dollar invested in customer support. If a business who is faced with a shrinking budget has to choose between putting their money into something like customer support (we know its needed, but have no idea how much is needed) or something like security (to ensure they have a product to sell in the first place), the money will go to security.

The average business will also choose volume over quality. Volume gives tangible results. We spend several thousand in advertising we see the amount we sell go up. By the same token we spend several thousand in customer support, you really don’t see anything.

Personally, I think the best way to solve the customer support issue is for someone to really show the ranges you get with investments and to put customer support in analytical terms for our industry (web hosting and everything associated with it, telecoms for example). The problem of course is that on the surface, customer support is a wholly subjective field, but I think with a little work in can be quantified. Until then, we will continue to see low customer support rankings.

About David Dunlap:
Over the past ten years David has been a prolific author of hundreds of blogs, commentaries and reviews found here on WebHostBlog.com , as well as WebHostMagazine.com and other sites around the Internet. David manages the daily operations at both WebHostBlog and Web Host Magazine & Buyer's Guide, and as the head editor, David uses his unique analytical skills to ensure that both sites maintain their integrity and tough, but fair minded, reputations. Prior to his active career analyzing the Web Host industry, David specialized in networking and communications for the U.S. government. David's expertise in traditional marketing and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has helped boost companies both inside and outside of the Web Host industry.

http://www.gawkwire.com/business/irony_customer_service_and_telecoms.html

Corpses, Giant Clams, and Kinky Puppies not Epic Enough for You?

2009-06-03T16:44:00-04:00

You Say, What is it?

(WebHost Blog) Let’s face it, the average web surfer doesn’t have time to read… go figure. Instead we browse titles, and look at the first few sentences of the first paragraph. If the article holds our attention, we continue, if not we press on. The tweet was to this blog, entitled, “Thank You For Clicking! Part One: Corpse Found In Internet Guru’s Gym Locker.”

Corpse Found in Internet Guru’s Gym Locker, how cool is a that title. So going back to what I non-too-subtlety alluded to in the first paragraph. As an exercise we use to pass articles around that were sans title and create our own titles for each article. The point was to get a title that sums up the article and captures the imagination.

If you have a blog or you do article writing on any level I would recommend trying out the exercise. Its best to do it with a group of people and with articles that you are not familiar with. For instance go to some site print out several copies of random articles with the titles removed, pass them around and have some fun with it.

Not only is it a learning experience it can also be quite fun… no really… honest. http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/corpses_giant_clams_and_kinky_puppies_not_epic_enough_for_you.html

VMware denies banning competitors from VMworld

2009-06-02T09:48:00-04:00

(WebHost Magazine) VMware had to reassure industry observers this week that it will not ban competition from the VMworld conference after bloggers took the company to task for releasing a policy change that appeared to prevent competing vendors from demonstrating products at the virtualization trade show.

Although hosted by VMware, the twice-yearly VMworld has become one of the primary venues for vendors to display new virtualization technology. Even rivals Citrix and Microsoft maintain a presence at the show and have made product announcements the same week as VMworld. ... Go to source

http://www.gawkwire.com/business/vmware_denies_banning_competitors_from_vmworld.html

Anti-U.S. Hackers Infiltrate Army Servers

2009-06-01T09:58:00-04:00

(WebHost Magazine) A known computer hacking clan with anti-American leanings has successfully broken into at least two sensitive Web servers maintained by the U.S. Army, InformationWeek has learned exclusively.

Department of Defense and other investigators are currently probing the breaches, which have not been publicly disclosed.

The hackers, who collectively go by the name "m0sted" and are based in Turkey, penetrated servers at the Army's McAlester Ammunition Plant in McAlester, Okla., and at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Transatlantic Center in Winchester, Va. ... Go to source

http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/anti-u_s_hackers_infiltrate_army_servers.html