What are the chances you'll get killed by terrorists?

Time for some perspective.

The terrorist attacks of 2001 were horrible. They need to be guarded against. BUT.. this is getting stupid. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars (if you count 'the war on terror') on this 'threat'.

I've gotta ask.. in relation to other things that can kill us... what threat? I mean.. really. For some perspective, look at these odds:

Chances of dying in:

A Natural disaster (earthquake, tornado, etc.) 1 in 3,357

An Airplane crash: 1 in 6.4 million

A Terrorist attack 1 in 9.3 million (AFTER 9/11)

So, what's going on here? Why all this constant 'war on terror' talk? What actual war? What Terror- in comparison? All the wars I see we started.

I see a president who ignores common and constitutional law in the 'name' of the war on terror.
I see a country divided. I see individual rights being trampled on. I see freedoms being taken away. I see fear; a lot of fear.

I'm an independent. I vote based on the issues, not a party line, but I've never seen anything like this in my life. Even the criminal acts of Nixon don't compare to what's being done today and, effectively, ignored by our press and our elected officials.

It's disgraceful.

Warning: You shouldn't talk, at all, in a car.

Now this is interesting:

Study: Hands-free phone not safer on road
Detroit Free Press - Jun 30, 2006
Drivers talking on cell phones are just as inattentive or likely to get into accidents as drunk drivers, even if they're using hands-free devices, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Human Factors.

I'm certainly not condoning it. I've cursed my fair share of people turning in front of me because they're on the phone, but, if this is true... doesn't it also mean if your just TALKING to someone.. anyone, like someone in the passenger seat or back seat, it's just as bad?

Patents spooky side

Ahhh.. Patent trolls. It takes one of the big brains who've made millions and left MicroSoft to do it at this level. I had a very interesting experience from my time at Motorola that was similar to this. I'll go into more detail after you read this

From TechDirt (www.techdirt.com):

Nathan Myhrvold's Bait And Switch Plan On Patent Hoarding

from the can-you-say-greenmail? dept

We've written about Nathan Myhrvold's dangerous plans to put hundreds of millions of dollars into hoarding patents many times before. Business Week is now running yet another article that tries to get to the heart of Myhrvold's plans -- though his company, Intellectual Ventures is being quite secretive. The article does discuss his "invention sessions" where he brings together a bunch of smart folks to brainstorm -- where the whole conversation is recorded and monitored by patent lawyers looking for anything they can file patents on. However, what's much more interesting is the story of how Myhrvold pulled a total bait-and-switch on the many big tech companies who represent his investors. The original business plan for Intellectual Ventures was to create a "Patent Defense Fund." The idea was to buy up all the available patents from the bursting dot com bubble and offer to license it to companies to protect them from patent infringement lawsuits from others using the typical nuclear stockpiling defense. However, these days, the company no longer discusses the patent defense fund. Instead, it refers to many of its own investors as "the patent infringers lobby." As the article suggests, it seems like the company basically convinced these companies to fund it based on this "defense fund" plan, by making it clear if they didn't invest, they would be the first targets for future lawsuits. In the meantime, would you trust any company that insists the patent system is just fine -- but doesn't seem to understand the history of innovation?

Spooky eh? But interestingly, this is alot more common than you might think. I worked for Motorola back in the 90's for a few years and had an experience similar to what's described in the businessweek article.

A group of us, mostly technical, a few marketing, went to a remote hunting lodge in Wisconsin. About 50 people with 3 Motorola patent lawyers. We spent an entire week doing nothing, all day, but coming up with ideas related (and many not related) the area we were working in (high speed wireless internet.. what we called at the time 4G). I think we walked out with about 400 potentials of which 150 were already written up by Friday afternoon when we left.

And that was one group of engineers out of a company with 10's of thousands. This was a regular practice. The reason for this was Motorola is a patent machine. As is IBM and several other technology rich companies in the US (and, interestingly, Japan.. who participates in this ritual in a similar way).

They don't actually build any of this stuff. They just apply for the patents so they can own the intellectual property.

These companies use these patents as a form of capital. They use it to get other companies with patents they want to cross license at no charge. To shut down competitors (especially little ones). And to protect themselves from people who might come up with new ideas (and actually implement them.. making them real) so they can't compete with the 'big' company and it's unused patent library. And, of course, they license the patents producing big money for the company. Last time I looked- late 90's timeframe, Motorola was collecting a little over $1 Billion (with a b) ayear in license fee's. Just for the patents they'd filed.

What Myhrvold's doing is really no different. He's just acting like the big guys have been for many years, and he's trying to turn it into a standalone business.

What makes it distastful to people is that he's being pure about his purpose. The big guys who do it are mostly focused on protecting other lines of business and, oh yea.. there's a billion or so of pure cashflow here.. let's grab it. They aren't 'trolls' And I don't see any other way to look at Myhrvold's actions here.

Our patent system (and don't get me started on software and process patents) is in desperate need of being overhauled. This is just one example of why.

Raising Money for an internet startup...

This should be interesting. Our company, ClickCaster, has taken a slightly different route when it comes to how we fund outselves.

We looked at going the venture capital route late last year and talked to a couple of dozen VC's. We even had some indepth talks with 3 or 4. The conclusion we came to was, it just didn't make sense to take VC money.

Much has been written about this by various bloggers, but experiencing it first hand was particularly interseting. We looked at what it would take to build a Web 2.0 type company, in our case, a podcasting business focused on directory services and creation tools with a social networking wrapper and we decided that we'd have a hard time spending $5M (or $3M) of VC money. At least, if we were being responsible.

It just doesn't take that much money to do this anymore.

And once you take that money, you start to trap yourself into high valuations to get the kind of returns those VC's are looking for. That, in turn, limits our options down the road (if you have to sell for $200-300M vs. $30M to provide a decent return, well, you get the idea).

So it turns out that, as an early stage technology company, VC money was available, and tempting (very tempting) but.. was it smart?

Not so much.

So we decided to lay back and build the service out more. We opened a public beta in late 2005 and just kept building it. We'd take user feedback, and add it. We'd take our users bug reports (everyday average users are WAY better at finding bugs than a formal test team) and fix them. And, interestingly, the customers started coming to us.

So we're in the process now of building a pipeline of business that uses ClickCaster, our service, as a platform that many other businesses can use. Small independent folks looking to promote a service, or a type of music, or an idea. Professionals with valuable information people are willing to pay for (which drove our creation of a commerce engine for people to charge for a single podcast, or a subscription to a series of podcasts over time).

And now we find ourselves with several contracts either signed, or about to be signed, and some pretty interesting businesses ahead of us.

And NOW, we need some money.

But not alot of money. Just enough is really all we want. The amount we think we can do it with is less than $1M. Now, for us at this stage, that's real money, but to a VC, it's not really worth their time.

So, we decided Angel Investment was the way to go.

I've been talking to a local VC here in Boulder named Brad Feld for over a year now. Great guy, very smart, get's the space, fair, open and tough. Exactly the kind of guy you want involved in an Angel round.

He offered a couple of months ago to lead an angel investment round if it looked like we really had a business and told me to come to him if I was convinced this was something we could really make fly.

So we continued development and we watched our usage numbers grow. From a few thousand users in Jan to almost 100,000 in May with over a million page views. OK.. we've got something here.

And that's where we are now. About to start a round of Angel financing. This is a first for me. Raising the money directy, in chunks, from wealthy individual investors.

I'm going to keep a sort of running story on the progress of it here. I'll change names to protect the innocent, and, hopefully, learn something about the process.

Will a spiky-haired, camera-toting super-heroine... restore decency and common sense to the world of creative endeavor?

A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? “Eyes on the Prize,” the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this new comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary, and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture. This book is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.


I'm all for intellectual property. People that create should be compensated. But what the hell? I mean CHARGING FOR A RINGTONE IN A DOCUMENTARY? Are you kidding me?

This is essential stuff. Everywhere we look, more and more things are being removed from the 'I can do that' list of life. Read this (comic) book. It's substantially more dense then Spider Man, but it's a much better read.

Download this comic book here:
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/pdf/cspdcomicscreen.pdf

Listen to an interview with the author (James Boyle) here: http://www.ibiblio.org/wunc_archives/sot/index.php?p=684

All Your Data Are Belong To Us... -AT&T

From today's Wall Street Journal, stalwart of the business elite of America, comes the news that AT&T is changing it's privacy policy to explicitly allow them to share your private data with the US Government (or anyone they damn well please, thank you very much).

See http://online.wsj.com/home/us (subscription required)

• AT&T Revises Privacy Policy,
  Says It May Share Personal Data
• By DIONNE SEARCEY
  June 22, 2006
• 
  
• AT&T Inc. said it clarified its privacy policy for Internet and television customers to state explicitly that subscriber information is a business record belonging to the company and may be turned over to law enforcement in some cases.
• AT&T also indicated that under its revised policy, which takes effect tomorrow and is being emailed to its more than seven million Internet customers, the San Antonio company plans to track customers' TV viewing habits. Some privacy advocates said they were troubled that the new policy appeared to be an attempt to give the company broader control over customer information.
• The policy revisions come as AT&T, as well as other phone companies, come under criticism and as it faces lawsuits claiming AT&T had inappropriately assisted with government surveillance of customers. AT&T has denied wrongdoing.
• AT&T's new policy states: "While your account information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T. As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others or respond to legal process."
• AT&T's old policy wasn't as explicit, saying customer information may be shared "to respond to subpoenas, court orders or other legal process," but not specifically calling them business records owned by the company. The new policy also states that customers must agree to it before using the broadband and TV service. AT&T's old policy didn't include such a requirement.
• AT&T said the revisions had been in the works since December and were aimed at clarifying legal wording for customers. The new policy is aimed at covering Internet subscribers as well as those of AT&T's new TV service, which it plans to expand in numerous markets later this year, said spokeswoman Tiffany Nels. AT&T regular phone customers, who make up the vast majority of its business, won't be affected by the updates to the policy for Internet and TV customers. The lawsuits didn't prompt the revisions, she said.
• Some privacy advocates objected to the new policy. "The public needs to be deeply concerned that AT&T is asserting proprietary ownership over a record of what they do by calling it a business record," said Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation of America.

Seeing a pattern here?

Kill network neutrality.
Musings from Scott: Do you care about Net Neutrality? You should.

Promise low cost high speed internet, charge for it, then don't deliver
Musings from Scott: Yes Virgina.. the Telecoms are screwing you

Now this. Your data belongs to us.

So first they promise a low cost fast network, charge you for it, but keep the money to fatten profits and buy million dollar routers that allow them to create specific levels of service on the public networks, then they make the net something they can productize and charge tiered service fees for and to top it off, they make sure you 'agree' (or they won't give you service) that all your data, usage, and information is something they own and that they can use as they see fit.

I doubt it was planned so blatantly, but I doubt they aren't aware of the benefits of these actions as well. I spent several years in the telco world as an executive in charge of strategy for services. This is not beyond them. And, based on my experience with many of the other executives that ran these companies, it's very much intended. These are businesses that view the telco space as a battleground. Fiercely competitive. They don't consider the internet a public utility and they most certainly don't consider us, the users, as anything other than revenue generation points.

Call me cynical, but you can also call me right.

Another reason DRM is a bad idea

This quick tidbit, from TechDirt, outlines yet another reason DRM, in it's current incarnation(s) is a bad idea.

Besides locking people into hardware (iTunes/iPod) and making it difficult to USE equipment you own (try moving a DRM's .WMA file to your MP3 player sometime), what if the store that 'validates' your DRM files goes away?

And Coke ain't no little company. It's just dropping this 'particular' business.

• Latest Entertainment Digital Strategy: Incidental Obsolescence

• from the hmmmmmmm dept

• One of the Guardian blogs has a post involving the demise of the MyCokeMusic download store, at one time the biggest download store in Europe. It raises an interesting question, though not one the post actually hits on -- what happens for consumers when a seller of DRMed media files shuts down? With things like cassettes, LPs or CDs, their obsolence can really be determined only by a lack of available playback equipment. But for locked-down digital files, particularly those using a mechanism that has to go out and validate a license from a content provider or another authority, the closure of such an entity could render files unplayable. One of the downsides of current DRM implementations is a lack of interoperability. It's hard to imagine that those interoperability problems won't get worse, particularly as some of the music download sites that have popped up go out of business. Of course, with so much of modern entertainment strategy revolving around getting consumers to pay for the same content multiple times, it's hard to see Big Content really caring.

Check out the www.techdirt.com guys for stuff like this daily. VERY insightful group (if you don't mind a little vinegar with your news and opinions).

The lesson here? Don't buy DRM'd media, period.

How? Buy the CD (or DVD) and rip it. At least, then, you have control over your digital file and you've (legally) obtained your media.