Monster Threatens To Sue Blue Jeans Cable, Blue Jeans Cable Bites Back

Monster, deserving or not, has developed a reputation in recent years for pursuing bully litigation against small fish in the pond, ostensibly to protect their trademarks.

Audioholics has a fantastic news post that prints, in full, the written response to Monster's Cease & Desist letter from Blue Jeans Cable president Kurt Denke who, as it happens, spent 19 years as a pitbull-type damages attorney before he got into the wire biz.

Audioholics: Blue Jeans Cable Strikes Back - Response to Monster Cable

In informal legal speak, his response is called a PFO letter, and while lengthy it's worth every minute you spend reading it.

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IOU Central Encounters Regulatory Hiccups

Microlending is not generally my beat, but this email from one of my regular correspodents caught my attention.

Check it out:
https://www.ioucentral.ca/iou_status
They aren't facilitating new loans at the moment - right after an article was published in the Globe & Mail reported that one woman had averaged a 14% return with only a 0.05% default rate. A conspiracy theorist would have fun with this one!

More information here, here, and here, if you're interested in the back story.

As I told my correspondent, I think that conspiracy theories are a tool of underachievers with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement to rationalize their own failures according to a complex web of the ways that "The Man" is keeping them down.

This is a case of a company brushing up against a regulatory structure that they weren't fully aware of. It happens all the time. A few years ago, HBC used to offer "balance insurance" on new account signups as well as existing accounts for their credit card: promising payment of your oustanding balance if you were unemployed, injured or dead. As an associate, you got a $5 "commission" for every cardholder you got to agree to check and initial the little box on the credit app. I think it was something like a two dollar a month premium, but it adds up.

This went on for years, until various provincial governments, including Alberta and Quebec caught wind of it, and landed on them like a sack of hammers. If you're selling "insurance" the people selling it need to be licenced and registered, which HBC retail associates most certainly weren't.

IOU Central is an interesting concept, and I don't think they're loansharking, but they certainly should have paid for more due dillegence on Canada's banking laws...

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RIAA drops the hammer on poor single mother

I know that's a real tear-jerker headline, but what else are you going to make of a case like this?

Yahoo!: 24 illegal song downloads cost US woman 220,000 dollars

"This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not OK," Richard Gabriel, the lead attorney for the music companies, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Don't forget that this happened in the USA, where the appeals process means that this is still not over, not to mention the other 26,000 cases that the RIAA still has on the docket.

And for what? I think the best sound byte today was the ever quotable Joe Wiesenthal from Dealbreaker who said

Labels Win Suit Against Song Sharer (NYT)

FInally, the scourge of illegal file sharing will be stamped out for good, now that someone has finally had the book thrown at them. This is all it took... now watch the profits roll in at the big labels.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

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Criminalizing failure

The brilliant and pseudonymous Equity Private has a short, crystal clear piece up on her blog commenting on the urge government has to enact heavy-handed legislation in the wake of financial failures.

Equity Private: The Crime of Losses
The bemused surprise that would formerly accompany a free lunch has turned into something like annoyed restlessness. Today, a free lunch is received with a look that says "what took you so long and where is desert?" Return is expected without the attendant risks.

I fail to understand why so many otherwise clever people put their head in the sand about risk and only ever look at potential return. It's not just investors and lawmakers, it's finance professionals too: people who should know better.

Risk is not some vague abstract notion, it's right there, breathing down your neck. If there was no risk, the payoff would be minimal. Of course, in return for the prospect of a high payoff, the chance you take is that there will be no payoff at all. "00" on the roulette wheel doesn't happen every time the croupier spins the wheel, that's why the payout is 35-1. Even with a Red or Black bet and a 2-1 payout, there's a 50% chance that you will lose.

Regarding the moves afoot to criminalize financial failures in the wake of investor losses at Bear Stearns, Amaranth, and others, if government was really able to criminalize arrogance and poor decision making, I would be in real trouble!

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Awareness group stands up to the tyranny of the networks

Okay, this is a little dry and convoluted, but it's important, so try to follow along:

TWICE: Appeal Sought For Remote DVR System

New York — A group of 11 industry and public interest groups have filed an appeal to overturn a recent lower-court decision last March that made cable TV multiple system operator Cablevision liable for copyright infringement if it proceeded to use a new digital video recording system that caches subscribers’ TV recordings at the cable head-end rather than on a resident hard drive.
Public Knowledge, a fair-use recording rights advocacy group and one of the organizations that joined in filing the appeal with 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, here, June 8, said, “Consumers should have the benefits of a new convenient way to record programs from a cable TV system.”
Public Knowledge said that if allowed to stand, the ruling “would establish an unprincipled legal bias against remote and network-based services.”

Short form:

There is no distinction between content stored on a DVR in your house and a DVR that is further up the network stream and services your house remotely.

The television companies disagree, and claim that Cablevision is violating copyright and "fair use" by offering to remotely host recorded content, and then play it back on demand to consumers.

Fortunately, prior unreasonable challenges to "fair use" have ultimately failed, and I have confidence that the courts will eventually see the light and refuse to stymie the consumers' right to watch what they want, when they want, how they want.

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Racketeering charges against Best Buy and Microsoft still won't die!

Perhaps in honor of the release of the sequel to the popular zombie horror movie 28 Days Later, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ressurected the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act charges against Microsoft and Best Buy.

NetworkWorld.com: Racketeering case against Microsoft, Best Buy revived
Microsoft and Best Buy are facing racketeering charges in a case first brought seven years ago that alleged consumers had MSN accounts activated and were charged for them without their knowledge when they purchased new PCs.

...

In the Microsoft/Best Buy case, plaintiff James Odom complained that during the purchase of a new computer at Best Buy, he was enrolled in a free-trial subscription to Microsoft’s MSN Internet service without his knowledge and then charged for the service once the trial period had expired. He says other customers paying with credit or debit cards also were enrolled in the same fashion.

The claims, if true, may or may not count as racketeering, but they are definetely bad manners. Then again, Best Buy doesn't exactly have a stunning track record of being concerned about their customer's feelings.

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Solengo Capital vs Dealbreaker.com Update: Not So Much Like Ferrets At The Moment

Judging by the search terms that Google Analytics tells me are being used to find this site, at least some of you are wondering about the status of the suit filed against Dealbreaker.com last month.

I asked one of the old media journalists covering the trial for an update, and he replied:

Hi, Lee. thanks for your inquiry. I cannot comment, of course. Not much happening, from Docket.

I guess no news is good news.

You can read past entries covering the Solengo Imbroglio here.

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