First thing I thought of in reading this article is how much of my professional life is up on Dropbox. Since their model is to mirror onto my own devices, I don't think I'd lose much if they went down without warning, but it would be mighty inconvenient.
My sense is that whomever is making these decisions at ICE or DoJ isn't very clued in to work2.0 at all.
56 months is more like it! But I agree with the comment in the other thread that different media or type may merit different copyright lengths. Be aware, though, that type and media boundaries are blurring. And these boundaries will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future.
This comment (c) Daniel Mittleman, 2012 for way longer than is reasonable.
Re: Re: How about a short note or page for the subject to annotate?
I don' think this is so bad: the subject of an article ( (exercised perhaps by its PR agent) can flag or badge a rebuttal in the main article to link to the rebuttal content on the talk page. Nice compromise.
Follow up to myself. Look, if the talk page is ignored one of several things is going on:
1. The "correction" by the PR person didn't contain sufficient documentation to sell an unbiased person that it is correct;
2. The error is not important enough to correct;
3. No one but the subject of the story cares. And Wikipedia is not a vanity glossy. If no one cares, the tree didn't make any noise (if you get my drift.)
There already is a solution for this. It is called the "talk" page. And that is where the PR person should ID him/her self and correct the errors (with documentation). Then the unbiased readership and/or volunteer editors can confirm and make the changes on the main page.
You say that no reader or editor stumbles on the correction in Talk? Then it is unlikely much of anyone is reading the main page (and why is this main page subject paying PR fees in the first place?)
Unrelated aside: I can't believe how short the Techdirt page is on Wikipedia! Mike ought to hire one of these PR guys to build it out :-
There already is a solution for this. It is called the "talk" page. And that is where the PR person should ID him/her self and correct the errors (with documentation). Then the unbiased readership and/or volunteer editors can confirm and make the changes on the main page.
You say that no reader or editor stumbles on the correction in Talk? Then it is unlikely much of anyone is reading the main page (and why is this main page subject paying PR fees in the first place?)
Unrelated aside: I can't believe how short the Techdirt page is on Wikipedia! Mike ought to hire one of these PR guys to build it out :-
Id like to know where my (IL) reps stand. can someone point me to a link showing congressional supporters and opponents? I emailed my congressman and asked, but got nothing back from him.
You know what would be fin? An OWS style protest outside of the Oscars this year.
It would drive AMPAS crazy as they are all about image control and news media picking up on the protest and interviewing many people about how Hollywood is anti Internet, anti (fill in the blank) would confound their own tightly managed image control. So they likely would lean on the local police to impinge on the protests, and that would make them anti First Amendemnt. It would all make for very effective street theater; and it might help some in Congress to see there is popular movement not aligned with Hollywood.
This is just stupid. The studio has placed the trailer up in Apple's iTunes site for viewing and is encouraging--right there on the page--people to tweet links back to that page.
The only financial harm done by linking to the rogue trailer is hat you aren't driving traffic to the iTunes store.
It wasn't Oracle, it was proprietary. But you are right that it was circa 1970. DB2 and others were also similar, generally, in structure. Since this was proprietary, there were less DBA tools, and a very specific internal structure to the data.
Yeah. TM was slow to move to the Internet in the 1990s and several small firms emerged as online competition. I've read that TM sells less than half of all eTickets today, but I can't confirm that ratio. It really depends on how you define the boundaries of the market. TM isn't interested in doing charity event sales. I was the consultant a few years back to a small museum that was looking to contract for a ticketing system. We shopped about six of them; TM's bid came in by far the highest of the six.
I am pretty sure that many of the MLB clubs that used to be with TM have moved away to a different system in recent years.
Aside: I recall a conversation I had with the founder of Ticketmaster in 1995 when I tried to explain to him what this new WWW thing was and why he should set up a channel for online sales. His response to me was: "I already pay overhead for retail outlet sales and telephone sales; if I spend the money to build an infrastructure for WWW sales I will increase my costs, but I won't sell any additional tickets."
The key to this is that TM's contract as ticket agent was with UTEP (owner of the stadium), and the promoter had a separate contract with UTEP. There was no contract between the promoter and TM.
So, TM made all their audit and sales reports available to their client: UTEP; but apparently did not make their reports available to the promoter.
It sounds like, from reading the report and the legal document, that TM stopped cooperating with the promoter when the promoter hired the video company to estimate attendance.
Not stated, but I would be curious to know:
1. Were blocks of tickets pre-printed for hard ticket sales by retail outlets?
2. Did promoter employ agents to sell hard tickets in El Paso or in Mexico?
3. If either of the above were true, how did TM account for these hard tickets in their system?
4. If either of the above were true, how did the promoter account for hard tickets that were in its hands?
5. Was the event reserved seating or general admission? If GA, did anyone check for counterfeit tickets among the ticket stubs (it is fairly easy to commit fraud at a GA event if you know what you are doing)?
6. What, exactly, did the TM Audit and Sales reports say?
The legal proceedings provided do not address any of these questions. Any good data audit would get at this information.
This is an opening for my to offer my theory (insert Anne Elk joke here) about Ticketmaster and why they are hated so much.
As I said above, TM competes for business at the level of getting promoters and arenas to choose them. They often win that competition by offering really good (legal) kickback deals to clients, and raising the cash for those deals by milking the retail customer with very high "convenience" charge fees. In olden days, ticket services used to charge arenas X cents per ticket sold. TM made their name in the industry by turning that around and saying to arenas "we will give you X cents for every ticket we sell for you; and we will charge you X cents for every ticket of ours you sell at your box office."
The outcome of this is that arenas realized that ticketing, something they used to consider an expense, could now be a new revenue stream--and they made more money if the severely limited local box office sales. This change happened in the 1980s.
Pre-Ticketmaster, service charge used to be 25 cents or 50 cents a ticket; you know what it is today. And that is because the retail customer is providing the revenue stream through TM to the TM client (and TM nets a good deal of money from this as well.)
A side note: the details of each contract are secret, so the promoters (music act promoters usually, but in this case we have a soccer game promoter) don't get to see them. So the promoter has a hard time taking a fraction of this arena kickback (the industry term isn't kickback--it is "inside charge"). This (and concessions, of course) is how arenas make enough money to stay afloat.
So, how high can service charges go before this model falls apart? Well the model isn't going to break because arenas move to a competitor. Arenas like the big kickbacks on service charge. The model only breaks when the charge is so large that people stop going to shows.
That leads to my theory. It is simple micro-economics. They way TM finds how much people will pay before they stop going to a show is to continue to raise service charges to the point people are screaming bloody murder about Ticketmaster, but are still buying tickets. If the charge is too high, they stop buying. If people aren't screaming bloody murder about how Ticketmaster is a bunch of thieves, then the service charge can still go higher.
This works from a "brand" point of view because it doesn't matter how much the retail customer hates Ticketmaster. They still have to buy tickets through them if they want to attend an event where the arena has selected TM as its ticket agent.
Of course in real life the model is a bit more complex: there is ticket scalping, the TM contract is sometimes with the promoter--not the arena, and TM has gotten into promoting events itself recently. But the general idea holds.
I should point out, no one in TM management has ever said this to me--it is my own theory, it belongs to me. But it is consistent with everything I know about the company and the industry. And it is, as far as I can tell, completely legal. Ethics? Your mileage may vary.
So to the poster above: you can call this greed. But nothing in this model suggests fraud. Nothing in my personal experience with Ticketmaster ever suggested fraud was occurring. And, in fact, part of TM's brand with arenas and promoters is scrupulous accuracy and honesty in their event audit reports--so both sides know the data is truthful. Any fraud at all severely damages that brand.
I am a semi-regular at Techdirt, and I was Director of Systems Support at Ticketmaster back in the 1980s; my knowledge of TMs systems and business practices is definitely dated. Nevertheless, I may be able to add some light.
Who knows what business practices are at TM today, though I would be very surprised if those practices included outright fraud at high levels. Low level fraud, if it existed, would be caught fairly quickly by the audit controls inside of the database. High level management wouldn't tolerate low level fraud as it would damage the brand--not with the general public (TM, I think, only marginally cares about this brand as it skates just on the legal side of monopoly for any given client event), but with promotors and arena managers who have the ability to shop competing ticketing systems.
Occam's Razor suggests the more likely cause of many less ticket sales than people at the event are: people crashed the event; the promoter sold tickets off the system; the promoter issued comps and didn't register them in the system.
Nine of this explains how the sales would have dropped 3,000 just before the event. But, again, this could be as simple as someone misreading or misunderstanding a report. The TM Audit report is like a balance sheet in that it is a snapshot at any given point of time. The TM Sales report breaks down sales by seller over a given period of time. The first step in auditing the event would be to reconcile the two -- and there are tools within the TM system to do just that.
When I was at TM, the data was stored in B-trees in a hierarchical database. It would have been impossible for someone without extremely deep database knowledge to hide sales without leaving an audit trail of their behaviors. I don't know what the current database system is.
There is a Friendly's; they sell many kinds of sandwiches--I am partial to their patty melt. There is a Five Guys Burgers & Fries; burgers are meat in between buns. There is an IHOP; leaving aside their pigs in a blanket, they offer a full sandwich menu. There is a KFC, which offers a tasty--tho not too healthy--chicken sandwich. And there is a Dunkin Donuts, which offers several breakfast sandwiches and paninis.
So, what's the beef with the Qdoba?
Actually, what this case really proves is that Panara paid good money for not very good lawyering. If they wanted a non-compete in their lease, they had to spell out very carefully what the boundaries of non-compete were. They didn't do that.
Tim and you all are coming down way too hard on the father. He IS trying to keep his daughter off the Facebook. Nowhere in this report does it suggest he is taking no other actions and punting responsibility to Facebook. What he seems to be doing here--my read of this--is engage Facebook as part of his own Campaign of action.
Blocking domain, restricting computer access, etc. Only works when she is at home. It doesn't stop her at friends houses and other locations. Granted she is only twelve, but his ability to constantly look over he r shoulder is limited and will grow less as she ages.
Can someone who knows contract law explain how this can be binding? As a volunteer, what consideration am I receiving for donating my time to them? I can understand how they can terminate a volunteer relationship if they don't like a volunteer's behavior, but I don't see how they can imply any sort of extended contractual relationship.
On the post: File Sharing Drones Proof Of Concept Already Built
Two thoughts
2. I'd trademark the name Misquito for this project.
On the post: Why Does An Unpatentable 'Abstract Idea' Become Patentable If You Add 'On The Internet'?
I got this great idea... in bed
It will also claim copyright to the derivative phrase.
And I will submit for patent, as I am going to put this code... On the Internet.
On the post: How The Megaupload Shutdown Has Put 'Cloud Computing' Business Plans At Risk
Drop box?
My sense is that whomever is making these decisions at ICE or DoJ isn't very clued in to work2.0 at all.
On the post: Another Interesting White House Petition: Reduce The Term Of Copyright
Re:
This comment (c) Daniel Mittleman, 2012 for way longer than is reasonable.
On the post: Should PR People Be Able To Edit Otherwise Ignored Wikipedia Pages Of Their Clients To Correct Errors?
Re: Re: How about a short note or page for the subject to annotate?
On the post: Should PR People Be Able To Edit Otherwise Ignored Wikipedia Pages Of Their Clients To Correct Errors?
Re: Talk amongst yourselves...
1. The "correction" by the PR person didn't contain sufficient documentation to sell an unbiased person that it is correct;
2. The error is not important enough to correct;
3. No one but the subject of the story cares. And Wikipedia is not a vanity glossy. If no one cares, the tree didn't make any noise (if you get my drift.)
On the post: Should PR People Be Able To Edit Otherwise Ignored Wikipedia Pages Of Their Clients To Correct Errors?
Talk amongst yourselves...
You say that no reader or editor stumbles on the correction in Talk? Then it is unlikely much of anyone is reading the main page (and why is this main page subject paying PR fees in the first place?)
Unrelated aside: I can't believe how short the Techdirt page is on Wikipedia! Mike ought to hire one of these PR guys to build it out :-
On the post: Should PR People Be Able To Edit Otherwise Ignored Wikipedia Pages Of Their Clients To Correct Errors?
Talk amongst yourselves...
You say that no reader or editor stumbles on the correction in Talk? Then it is unlikely much of anyone is reading the main page (and why is this main page subject paying PR fees in the first place?)
Unrelated aside: I can't believe how short the Techdirt page is on Wikipedia! Mike ought to hire one of these PR guys to build it out :-
On the post: Sad Statement: Senators Behind Two Largest Tech Communities In The US Support PIPA Against Those Communities
Re: The Problem is...
On the post: As GoDaddy Deals With SOPA Fallout, Hollywood Wants To Punish GoDaddy For Enabling Infringement
An idea...
It would drive AMPAS crazy as they are all about image control and news media picking up on the protest and interviewing many people about how Hollywood is anti Internet, anti (fill in the blank) would confound their own tightly managed image control. So they likely would lean on the local police to impinge on the protests, and that would make them anti First Amendemnt. It would all make for very effective street theater; and it might help some in Congress to see there is popular movement not aligned with Hollywood.
On the post: Did You Embed The Leaked Trailer For Dark Knight Rises On Your Blog? Under SOPA, You May Face Jail Time
Poison fruit
The only financial harm done by linking to the rogue trailer is hat you aren't driving traffic to the iTunes store.
Very Hollywood
On the post: Did You Embed The Leaked Trailer For Dark Knight Rises On Your Blog? Under SOPA, You May Face Jail Time
Re:
On the post: Does Ticketmaster Undercount Tickets Sold To Underpay?
Re: Re: Auditing is possible
On the post: Does Ticketmaster Undercount Tickets Sold To Underpay?
Re: Re: Auditing is possible
I am pretty sure that many of the MLB clubs that used to be with TM have moved away to a different system in recent years.
Aside: I recall a conversation I had with the founder of Ticketmaster in 1995 when I tried to explain to him what this new WWW thing was and why he should set up a channel for online sales. His response to me was: "I already pay overhead for retail outlet sales and telephone sales; if I spend the money to build an infrastructure for WWW sales I will increase my costs, but I won't sell any additional tickets."
Turns out he was wrong.
On the post: Does Ticketmaster Undercount Tickets Sold To Underpay?
Counting ticket stubs
So, TM made all their audit and sales reports available to their client: UTEP; but apparently did not make their reports available to the promoter.
It sounds like, from reading the report and the legal document, that TM stopped cooperating with the promoter when the promoter hired the video company to estimate attendance.
Not stated, but I would be curious to know:
1. Were blocks of tickets pre-printed for hard ticket sales by retail outlets?
2. Did promoter employ agents to sell hard tickets in El Paso or in Mexico?
3. If either of the above were true, how did TM account for these hard tickets in their system?
4. If either of the above were true, how did the promoter account for hard tickets that were in its hands?
5. Was the event reserved seating or general admission? If GA, did anyone check for counterfeit tickets among the ticket stubs (it is fairly easy to commit fraud at a GA event if you know what you are doing)?
6. What, exactly, did the TM Audit and Sales reports say?
The legal proceedings provided do not address any of these questions. Any good data audit would get at this information.
On the post: Does Ticketmaster Undercount Tickets Sold To Underpay?
Re: Re: Auditing is possible
As I said above, TM competes for business at the level of getting promoters and arenas to choose them. They often win that competition by offering really good (legal) kickback deals to clients, and raising the cash for those deals by milking the retail customer with very high "convenience" charge fees. In olden days, ticket services used to charge arenas X cents per ticket sold. TM made their name in the industry by turning that around and saying to arenas "we will give you X cents for every ticket we sell for you; and we will charge you X cents for every ticket of ours you sell at your box office."
The outcome of this is that arenas realized that ticketing, something they used to consider an expense, could now be a new revenue stream--and they made more money if the severely limited local box office sales. This change happened in the 1980s.
Pre-Ticketmaster, service charge used to be 25 cents or 50 cents a ticket; you know what it is today. And that is because the retail customer is providing the revenue stream through TM to the TM client (and TM nets a good deal of money from this as well.)
A side note: the details of each contract are secret, so the promoters (music act promoters usually, but in this case we have a soccer game promoter) don't get to see them. So the promoter has a hard time taking a fraction of this arena kickback (the industry term isn't kickback--it is "inside charge"). This (and concessions, of course) is how arenas make enough money to stay afloat.
So, how high can service charges go before this model falls apart? Well the model isn't going to break because arenas move to a competitor. Arenas like the big kickbacks on service charge. The model only breaks when the charge is so large that people stop going to shows.
That leads to my theory. It is simple micro-economics. They way TM finds how much people will pay before they stop going to a show is to continue to raise service charges to the point people are screaming bloody murder about Ticketmaster, but are still buying tickets. If the charge is too high, they stop buying. If people aren't screaming bloody murder about how Ticketmaster is a bunch of thieves, then the service charge can still go higher.
This works from a "brand" point of view because it doesn't matter how much the retail customer hates Ticketmaster. They still have to buy tickets through them if they want to attend an event where the arena has selected TM as its ticket agent.
Of course in real life the model is a bit more complex: there is ticket scalping, the TM contract is sometimes with the promoter--not the arena, and TM has gotten into promoting events itself recently. But the general idea holds.
I should point out, no one in TM management has ever said this to me--it is my own theory, it belongs to me. But it is consistent with everything I know about the company and the industry. And it is, as far as I can tell, completely legal. Ethics? Your mileage may vary.
So to the poster above: you can call this greed. But nothing in this model suggests fraud. Nothing in my personal experience with Ticketmaster ever suggested fraud was occurring. And, in fact, part of TM's brand with arenas and promoters is scrupulous accuracy and honesty in their event audit reports--so both sides know the data is truthful. Any fraud at all severely damages that brand.
On the post: Does Ticketmaster Undercount Tickets Sold To Underpay?
Auditing is possible
Who knows what business practices are at TM today, though I would be very surprised if those practices included outright fraud at high levels. Low level fraud, if it existed, would be caught fairly quickly by the audit controls inside of the database. High level management wouldn't tolerate low level fraud as it would damage the brand--not with the general public (TM, I think, only marginally cares about this brand as it skates just on the legal side of monopoly for any given client event), but with promotors and arena managers who have the ability to shop competing ticketing systems.
Occam's Razor suggests the more likely cause of many less ticket sales than people at the event are: people crashed the event; the promoter sold tickets off the system; the promoter issued comps and didn't register them in the system.
Nine of this explains how the sales would have dropped 3,000 just before the event. But, again, this could be as simple as someone misreading or misunderstanding a report. The TM Audit report is like a balance sheet in that it is a snapshot at any given point of time. The TM Sales report breaks down sales by seller over a given period of time. The first step in auditing the event would be to reconcile the two -- and there are tools within the TM system to do just that.
When I was at TM, the data was stored in B-trees in a hierarchical database. It would have been impossible for someone without extremely deep database knowledge to hide sales without leaving an audit trail of their behaviors. I don't know what the current database system is.
On the post: Why Some 'Easy' Legal Questions Aren't Always So Easy: Is A Burrito A Sandwich?
Panara's doesn't have a chicken leg to stand on
There is a Friendly's; they sell many kinds of sandwiches--I am partial to their patty melt. There is a Five Guys Burgers & Fries; burgers are meat in between buns. There is an IHOP; leaving aside their pigs in a blanket, they offer a full sandwich menu. There is a KFC, which offers a tasty--tho not too healthy--chicken sandwich. And there is a Dunkin Donuts, which offers several breakfast sandwiches and paninis.
So, what's the beef with the Qdoba?
Actually, what this case really proves is that Panara paid good money for not very good lawyering. If they wanted a non-compete in their lease, they had to spell out very carefully what the boundaries of non-compete were. They didn't do that.
On the post: Father: Why Isn't Facebook Keeping My Kid Off Its Site?
Re:
Blocking domain, restricting computer access, etc. Only works when she is at home. It doesn't stop her at friends houses and other locations. Granted she is only twelve, but his ability to constantly look over he r shoulder is limited and will grow less as she ages.
On the post: Would You Volunteer For An Organization That Makes You Sign Away Your Right To Ever Say Anything Negative About It?
Is this a contract?
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