They will be sharing resources and information in order to come together and provide information to the government watchdogs. One of the more interesting facts in the article talks about one other ISP who is still planning to conduct tests of NebuAd that is a DSL provider.  They seem to think that since everyone hates the cable companies that they will be OK in doing the same thing that Charter just backed out of (or at least delayed until the hubbub blows over). The ISP, CenturyTel, completed a test run of this and are stating that they are still evaluating the results.

They are separating themselves because the legal issues have been linked to the Cable Communications Policy Act, and that “Charter is a cable company and we are not,” according to a CenturyTel spokesperson. That may be, but privacy laws are still out there - and so are the possibilities of Intellectual Property lawsuits as mentioned in my previous post.

Quick catch up since I’ve not written about this before: NebuAd makes deals with ISPs to serve ads to users based on the Web pages they visit. They use cookies on the users computer and monitor web-browsing habits using Deep packet inspection. This raises severe privacy concerns because ISPs know every Web site that users visit and all of their search queries. This clickstream data often provides enough information to figure out their identities.

Professor Grimmelman’s raises issues that go way beyond privacy and into the realm of potential lawsuits. Page content is copyrighted and many elements are trademarked. ISPs are shielded from copyright liability by law, but one of the conditions of this immunity is that “the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.” He even says that advertisers might be liable if they knew (imagine making a buy and not knowing how it’s being served - it’s probably in their sales pitch) what NebuAd was doing for them.

He compares the NebuAd process to serving some other cola to a customer who asks for a “Coke.” He argues that when the NebuAd cookie is injected by your ISP into a page they serve you, that the page is no longer the exact page you asked for. He says ” When your ISP delivers you a page with a NebuAd cookie injected, the statement that this is the page you asked for is false. The ISP is passing off the NebuAd cookie as being from Amazon. It’s not.” This seems like a bit of a stretch to me, but I’m not an intellectual property attorney. He argues that since the cookie is used to sell you goods that it would be close enough to be an issue.

Users can choose to block or allow cookies from specific publishers, but he says that NebuAd’s packet injection “blows away this safeguard. It tricks me into accepting a cookie I wouldn’t have otherwise wanted.” He calls this a “misuse” of the originating site’s trademark.

If NebuAd continues with this business model, there will some interesting cases to watch.

Check out this article’s coverage of the issue:

Jim Kennedy, the AP’s director of strategic planning, said Monday that he planned to meet Thursday with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, as part of an effort to create standards for online use of AP stories by bloggers that would protect AP content without discouraging bloggers from legitimately quoting from it.

The meeting comes after AP sent a legal notice last week to Rogers Cadenhead, the author of a blog called the Drudge Retort, a news community site whose name is a parody of the prominent blog the Drudge Report.

And here is where the AP article talks about the guidelines:

In response, the AP indicated it would seek to create guidelines, though even that idea triggered further protests. Michael Arrington wrote on his TechCrunch blog Monday that AP “doesn’t get to make its own rules about how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows.”

Wendy Seltzer, a legal scholar and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, said the news organization should not try to go beyond what’s legally permissible.

“If they were on the other hand to say, you may use 10 words only and any time you use 11 we’ll send a takedown notice, that wouldn’t be helpful,” Seltzer said.

AP worries that bloggers will dilute their content:

Kennedy said the AP had both a journalistic concern about preventing AP news from being quoted out of context and also a business concern about protecting the value of AP’s news from being diluted if its key elements are made available from places that aren’t licensed.“We need to protect our content, no matter who’s using it, but we also recognize that the bloggers perform a really important function on the Internet in terms of increasing the engagement of the audience online, and we want to facilitate that,” Kennedy said.

So AP, did I quote too much?  Let me know.

It’s interesting that the headlines for this have ranged from Adotas’ mild “Arbitrator Ends Media Breakaway, MySpace Dispute” to Wired’s harsher “MySpace wins another verdict against alleged spammer.” I saw the first headline and read the story, and when I saw the second headline I assumed it was a different case. Not that $6 million is chump change, but a judgment that is is reduced from somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million in damages to $4.8 million is noteworthy and to me, a big hit for MySpace and their claims.

All New York based affiliates could sign up with a company (in Delaware or Nevada perhaps) who could do a quickie incorporation and set
up a mailing address (PO Box) for them in the new state.  Then the affiliate edits their payment information to the new location.  The outsourced manager could charge a small fee to cover the incorporation and a monthly fee to forward mail and checks (or deposit them) for those who are not paid electronically.  You may need to change your address on your bank statements and other bills to the PO Box.

Tax that New York.

MySpace won when Wallace and Rines failed to show, which means that there will be some kind of appeal, dragging this out further. The pair was accused of using their own as well as other’s phished accounts to send 730,000 messages promoting ring tones and other money making schemes. CAN-SPAM authorized $100 per violation, which is trebled when the messages are sent “willfully and knowingly.” 730K messages at $300 each is $219 million, so I think the real number is actually 736,000 messages based on the actual award in the article.

What is most interesting to me was the short snippet at the very end of the article: “MySpace has another anti-spam case pending against a high-profile defendant, Scott Richter, who it claims gained access to MySpace profiles using stolen passwords and then sent spam bulletins from those accounts.”

It is patently obvious to anyone with a brain that the in depth reporting at the Times has uncovered a massive conspiracy that has been brushed under the rug for too long. Now we know why Wayne Porter lost all that weight and why so many ReveNews bloggers are no longer making posts - they are either dead or on medical leave.  According to article, bloggers have died from heart attacks, experienced weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies.

I sure hope they get this figured out soon.  I’ve gained about 10 pounds over the last few years and I’d love to blog just enough to lose weight and not have a heart attack.  If I do die, I’m sure it will be in the middle of composing a post, so please have the decency to publish my last words.

I’m not dead yet.

Since the settlement Azoogle has been working with Florida to assist other investigations and has been working to establish best practices in the mobile marketing arena.

So where does this difference come from? According to Jack Myers, TNS only covers six traditional media, while Jack Myers includes eighteen types. TNS uses their data to show that “the advertising market continued to sputter at the end of 2007,” which might be a bit misleading. Don’t you want to know the whole story?

Jack points out that TNS is missing a vital shift in spending from traditional media (which includes the Internet!) to the next new media of video games (+90%), cinema, satellite radio (+160%), mobile (+80%) and others that account for 13.5% of the total ad spend in 2007. Interestingly, TNS does not include paid search or broadband video advertising in the total Internet ad spend. But where is the growth in the online market? Video comes to mind.

For most of you reading this, I’m sure you will mostly want to look at the details of the data and see where your niche fits into all this. For that, check out JackMyers Media Spending 2006-2009 Estimates and you will see that we should be looking into mobile advertising to ride the next wave and ask “what recession?”