Targeting of Television Advertising
NYT article on new technologies allowing more precise targeting of television advertising. I think this sentence captures the evolving environment: “The television commercial – a blunt instrument that often reaches as many disinterested people as desired ones – is beginning…
The Portalization of Google
What’s left to complete the portalization of Google? It seems like in the past couple of months, they have significantly expanded the number of times I see Google-sourced content at the top of the search results list. Search for “Milwaukee…
Liability for Labeling Software as Spyware
Ben Edelman’s latest research describes various efforts by software vendors to curtail characterizations of their software as spyware (or a synonym). These bigfoot letters often attempt to distort the information marketplace by forcing the removal of unflattering but potentially accurate…
DoNotCall.gov
Tonight I looked through donotcall.gov, the FTC-operated website where people can register telephone numbers for the Federal do-not-call list. Two observations: 1) There is zero authentication that the person registering a phone number actually is the subscriber for that number….
Dot EU Approved
ICANN finally approved the .eu domain. When I joined Epinions in February 2000, a board member suggested that one of my top priorities as general counsel should be to secure the epinions.eu domain. Over five years later, does anyone even…
An AFP Licensee Tells His Story of Being Kicked Out of Google News
I mentioned before that content licensors in practice cannot prevent licensees from indexing the content in search engines. There are two reasons why this is true. First, content licensees may depend on search engine traffic to pay the bills, and…
Who Gets Indexed in Google News?
I still have no idea how Google decides which news sources are among the 4,500 indexed in Google News. Google News’ FAQ has the following: “What if I don’t see my favorite news source in Google News? We’re as shocked…
Q Pasa?
Who owns the letter “Q” in connection with autos? Nissan claims it does and Audi doesn’t. Update: Detroit Free Press story (quoting Schwimmer) [but I’m pretty sure that Apple does not own the prefix “i”, so I’ll chalk that up…
Guilty Plea for Spimmer
Anthony Greco, allegedly the first person arrested for spim/instant message spam (but it was really just email), pleaded guilty for his deeds. Not clear exactly what crimes he was charged with—there were a number of good contenders.
“Spammers are criminals, plain and simple”
Ridiculous article in BBC lamenting that 1/3 of email users have responded to spam and 10% have bought products from spam. The article portrays this as “bad e-mail behaviour” because, as every anti-spam scaremonger is quick to assert, responding to…