COPYCENSE

“For years, organizations of all sizes have suffered the hassles and unexpected costs that accompany deploying and maintaining a variety of traditional software applications that, ironically, were intended to make them more productive. Now a new breed of Web-based services are pushing legacy applications aside and finally giving users the business benefits they’ve been seeking.

“This new form of software-as-a-service, or SaaS, has been spearheaded by Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management and salesforce automation applications, and NetSuite’s “net-native” enterprise resource planning applications.

“These companies have recognized the inherent inefficiencies of the traditional software market, including the tremendous time, effort, and cost that organizations — especially large-scale midsize businesses — have to expend to install applications and keep them up and running.

“Despite the success of these companies, many people are still skeptical about the long-term success of SaaS. Others are concerned that recent Salesforce.com outages represent a fundamental fault line in the SaaS landscape.”

Jeffrey Kaplan. Software-as-a-Service Myths. BusinessWeek Online. April 17, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“Smooth-talking film distributors nearly robbed Kelly Schwarze of his love for moviemaking, he says. The Hollywood system offered him too many broken promises and too little creative freedom. So he asked himself, “Why not try the Web?”

“Schwarze is among a growing number of filmmakers and animators who once concentrated on feature-length films but are now telling much shorter stories on the Web. Insiders say that a mass migration of storytelling talent could someday put the Internet in a position to compete with television and theaters for the public’s entertainment dollars.

“The Net’s appeal to moviemakers has its roots in the rise of broadband adoption, technology upgrades in Internet video and white-hot demand for online films and user-created clips.”

Greg Sandoval. Filmmakers Flock to the Net. News.com. April 13, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“To say that AT&T was once the nation’s largest phone company is a bit like describing the Pentagon as America’s leading purchaser of guns and bullets. Until its government-imposed dissolution in 1984, AT&T enjoyed a market dominance unlike that of any corporation in modern history, rivaling only state monopolies in size and scope.

“Now — after a series of acquisitions and re-acquisitions so tangled it would take Herodotus to adequately chronicle them — AT&T is back, it’s big, and according to consumer advocates and some of the nation’s largest technology companies, AT&T wants to take over the Internet.

“The critics — including Apple, Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo — point out that AT&T, along with Verizon and Comcast, its main rivals in the telecom business, will dominate the U.S. market for residential high-speed Internet service for the foreseeable future. Currently, that market is worth $20 billion, and according to the Federal Communications Commission, the major “incumbent” phone and cable companies — such as AT&T — control 98 percent of the business. Now many fear that the phone and cable firms, with their enormous market power, will hold enormous sway over what Americans do online.

“Specifically, AT&T has hinted that it plans to charge Web companies a kind of toll to send data at the highest speeds down DSL lines into its subscribers’ homes. The plan would make AT&T a gatekeeper of media in your home.”

Farhad Manjoo. The Corporate Toll On The Internet. Salon.com. April 17, 2006.

See also:

James S. Granelli. Phone, Cable May Charge Dot-Coms That Want to Race Along the Internet. LATimes.com. April 9, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“To say that AT&T was once the nation’s largest phone company is a bit like describing the Pentagon as America’s leading purchaser of guns and bullets. Until its government-imposed dissolution in 1984, AT&T enjoyed a market dominance unlike that of any corporation in modern history, rivaling only state monopolies in size and scope.

“Now — after a series of acquisitions and re-acquisitions so tangled it would take Herodotus to adequately chronicle them — AT&T is back, it’s big, and according to consumer advocates and some of the nation’s largest technology companies, AT&T wants to take over the Internet.

“The critics — including Apple, Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo — point out that AT&T, along with Verizon and Comcast, its main rivals in the telecom business, will dominate the U.S. market for residential high-speed Internet service for the foreseeable future. Currently, that market is worth $20 billion, and according to the Federal Communications Commission, the major “incumbent” phone and cable companies — such as AT&T — control 98 percent of the business. Now many fear that the phone and cable firms, with their enormous market power, will hold enormous sway over what Americans do online.

“Specifically, AT&T has hinted that it plans to charge Web companies a kind of toll to send data at the highest speeds down DSL lines into its subscribers’ homes. The plan would make AT&T a gatekeeper of media in your home.”

Farhad Manjoo. The Corporate Toll On The Internet. Salon.com. April 17, 2006.

See also:

James S. Granelli. Phone, Cable May Charge Dot-Coms That Want to Race Along the Internet. LATimes.com. April 9, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“A prediction: the world of copyright law is about to collide with the world of digital indexing and search, and the collision will be among the most important digital copyright issues of the next several years.

“A few weeks ago, the major movie studios filed a lawsuit against the operators of TorrentSpy. Although the TorrentSpy suit has been characterized as just the latest chapter in the MPAA’s attack on BitTorrent file sharing, on closer examination it looks more like a wholesale attack against Internet indexing generally.

“In the complaint (.pdf), the studios level claims of contributory infringement, inducement, and vicarious liability against TorrentSpy for maintaining an index of “dot torrents.” These files are functionally similar to links, pointing to files hosted by others. Unlike some other sites, TorrentSpy neither maintains a “tracker” nor hosts any infringing files.

“In its motion to dismiss the suit, TorrentSpy puts the question crisply: how is TorrentSpy different from Google?

EFF Deep Links. Copyright v. Indexing, Part 1: TorrentSpy. March 31, 2006.

See also:

John Borland. MPAA Sues Newsgroup, P2P Search Sites. News.com. Feb. 23, 2006.

U.S. District Court, Central District of California. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. et al. v. Justin Bunnell, et al. (Complaint for Copyright Infringement). (.pdf) Feb. 23, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.