TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington says his company’s tablet computer, the CrunchPad, is officially dead. We take a look at what the Web is saying about it.

Continue reading →

An update to the desktop Twitter app, TweetDeck expands to support a LinkedIn column, old and new retweet styles, and Twitter lists, among other additions.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

Continue reading →

The economy still isn’t doing so great, and that impacts everyone — even lawyers. So what are they to do in weak times? Eric Goldman points out that in the past, they’d become bankruptcy lawyers, but this time around, it looks like some are realizing a more lucrative strategy is to get involved in patent trolling — though they prefer to call it “IP monetization.” This is, of course, just a continuation of the whole ridiculous focus on squeezing cash from unused or ignored patents, following the publication of the book Rembrandts in the Attic, which kicked off this effort.

From an economic standpoint, this activity is a pure dead weight loss on economic activity. There is nothing good that comes from it. You basically have companies that have ignored a patent they got for whatever reason, suddenly rediscovering it and using it to go after totally unrelated companies who actually innovated and brought products to market (almost always with no knowledge whatsoever of the questionable patent in the first place). And suddenly the actual innovators have to pay up to a company that did absolutely nothing with the invention.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

We recently wrote about how filmmaker Rhett Reese was somewhat misguided in lashing out at fans over their claims on Twitter that they had downloaded his movie Zombieland. Of course, both of the fans that he lashed out at noted they had seen the film in the theaters (one of them multiple times) and the download was a repeat viewing — and they still planned to buy the DVD, since they loved the film so much. Still, the Twitter message from Reese that got the most attention was the claim that all this downloading would greatly impact the likelihood of a sequel. A few days later, Reese decided to further elaborate his stance on “piracy” and it is a bit more nuanced — he admits that his messages were fueled more by emotion than by rational thought, though he is still upset about people downloading his films and is worried about where it “inevitably leads.”

From this, Captain Kibble alerts us to an accurately described “rant” at ScreenRants.com about how this is “indisputable” evidence that piracy harms movies. The basis of that claim? Reese’s heat of the moment claim that this could impact the making of a sequel. According to the ScreenRants folks, this suggests it’s a fact that movie piracy is harming movies. Of course, there’s no actual evidence that there is any decreased interest in making a Zombieland sequel. In fact, since the highest grossing movies almost always correlate to the most shared movies online, it seems that being a top pirated movie also likely has extremely high correlation with movies that get sequels.

Could file sharing be harming movies? Yes, it’s possible. But there is scant evidence that it’s a huge or serious threat that can’t be dealt with through better and smarter business models. As we’ve seen with smart filmmakers who embrace file sharing as a way to gain more fans and “converts,” it can actually help them make more money by building up more people who want to support the filmmaker.

That said, the latter half of the ScreenRants rant actually does make a few good suggestions, noting that part of the issue is Hollywood’s slothlike pace in offering movie fans what they want in terms of online services and video on demand. One of these days, the movie industry will figure this stuff out, and the answer isn’t freaking out and complaining about “piracy,” but finally putting in place the business models that we’ve seen are working already.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

Hulu introduces new advanced search functionality that makes it easier for users to quickly find exactly what they want to see.

Originally posted at The Web Services Report

Continue reading →

A new study has found that people are more likely to speak their minds online than offline. More importantly, they believe online socializing is just fine.

Originally posted at News – Digital Media

Continue reading →

We’ve been absolutely stunned by the Italian attempt to prosecute Google execs over a YouTube video. If you don’t recall the story, apparently some schoolboys taunted a disabled boy by throwing a tissue box at him. They filmed the entire ordeal and posted it to YouTube. Because of the video, the kids in the video were actually held liable for the taunting. It actually helped bring those kids to justice. Meanwhile, Google took down the video as soon as they were alerted to it by the authorities (within a couple hours of finding out about it). But Italian prosecutors insist not only that Google should have blocked the video entirely, but the fact that they left it up means that its execs are guilty of criminal violations and deserve jailtime.

In pressing the case forward, prosecutors are claiming that Google must have known about the nature of the video because there were comments on the YouTube video expressing disgust over the video. It’s as if they believe that Google execs read all the comments posted to YouTube and use those to pick and choose which videos should stay up and which should be taken down.

In the meantime, I’m still wondering why Italian prosecutors are not trying to push the tissue manufacturer in jail as well, as I would argue that those who made the package of tissues thrown at the boy are at least as, if not more, responsible for the actions of those kids as Google.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

CNET learns that the Series A round, which closed late last week, was led by First Round Capital and includes contributions from prominent Valley angel investors.

Originally posted at The Social

Continue reading →

The File interface, a draft standard, is designed to give browsers better uploads. Firefox 3.6 beta 4 supports the technology.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Continue reading →

Well, here we go again. Reports are coming out of India about new draconian copyright law changes that were apparently decided on between the government and the recording industry with little to no input from everyone else the new laws would impact. Among the concerns? The new law would significantly strip fair use (fair dealing in India) rights, to the extent that they are effectively useless. This seems to happen over and over again in different countries. The recording industry and copyright maximalists of course will all claim that it’s in an effort to “harmonize” the rules between countries, but harmonization is a codeword for a big game of leapfrog, whereby the industry pushes for more draconian laws in one country, and then demands that other countries need to “harmonize.” Of course, somewhere along the way, they also convince one or more of those countries to make their “harmonized” law even more draconian than others, and suddenly everyone else has to “harmonize” again, leaving open the opportunity to ratchet the laws up even more.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →