Archive for October, 2007|Monthly archive page
Tiffany v. eBay trial slated to begin November 13th
Filed under: DMCA, Google, Tiffany + Co., eBay, litigation |
Leave a Comment I got fed up with the 2 week delay on the SDNY Pacer system and called Judge Sullivan’s office today to find out what’s going on with the Tiffany v. eBay case. Trial is slated to begin on November 13th. The latest round of settlement conferences were a result of the case being switched from Judge Karas to Judge Sullivan last spring.
Considering the timeline thus far, I’m not holding my breath.
YouTube and the Napster trajectory, Part II
Filed under: DMCA, Google, Tiffany + Co., eBay, litigation, regulation |
Comments (1) Back in May, I compared the pending Viacom suit against Google/YouTube to the trajectory seen in the infamous Napster litigation.
Recent developments: Google has introduced “YouTube Video Identification” to help rights holders monitor infringing content. Predictably, Viacom has stated that this is an inadequate step and they are still being harmed by YouTube.
Thus far, the Napster trajectory has been followed. To continue on the same path, Viacom will ask for an injunction against YouTube alleging irreparable harm and will ask the court to order Napster-esq 100% compliance…which is what caused Napster to shut down before the case made it into a courtroom. Only time will tell whether the injunction will be granted, what level of compliance is deemed adequate, and what level of compliance YouTube can maintain.
Interestingly, the YouTube Video Identification technology is extremely similar to the Proactive Fraud Protection service created by eBay in response to the Tiffany & Co suit they are battling (or have settled on the sly). Both systems are “tools” that IP rights holders can use. Neither system puts any responsibilities on eBay or YouTube to proactively filter content or identify improper material. Tiffany & Co. and Viacom argue that the service providers are profiting from the infringing material and should carry the burden of monitoring it. YouTube and eBay argue that there is no way for them to tell what is a real Tiffany’s ring or Friends video clip.
Fake Steve on Business School
Hilarious post by Fake Steve on business school:
Some dude in B school wants to “shadow” me
I think this must be the scariest blog in the world. Or the saddest. Much love to Rob for sending in the link. See here. Some kid from London Business School wants to “shadow” me as part of some B school assignment. He really believes that if he just keeps writing this blog and leaning on any connections he can find that eventually I’ll be shamed into letting him follow me around so he can learn how I operate. Groan. First of all, kid, I have no shame. Second, you’ve already made the biggest mistake you ever could have made. No, not attempting to correspond with the Great and Powerful Jobs without official permission, though that indeed is a very grave offense. No, your biggest mistake is simply this: You’re in fucking business school.
Good God, man. Could there be anything less creative, less imaginative, less valuable than going to business school? Is there any surer way to become an absolute conformist frigtard than to spend two years being coddled and pampered and fed worthless pablum by failed businesspeople? The mind reels. And don’t think you’re all super cool and extra special just because you’re in a “programme” instead of a program. My theory is that education in general only serves to clog your creativity and shut down your brain. I imagine the brain is like this giant honeycomb, with all these open cells, but every class you take just fills some of those holes and seals them shut. Getting an MBA is like going back and double-sealing those doors with cement.
Business school dude, listen up. Forget shadowing me. You’ll never be like me, because I’m one of a kind. I came out and they broke the mold. But if you want to learn how I operate, do the following. Quit business school. Go work at some shitty electronics company and learn how to source components. Travel to India and seek enlightenment. Grow your hair down to your ass. Take LSD. Smoke pot. Live on a commune. Sell your van and start a company. Put yourself in danger. Create a situation where if you fail you’ll be unable to pay your rent and you’ll be out on the street. Struggle to make payroll. Get screwed by suppliers. Learn to screw them back. Bounce checks. Run out of money. Go hungry. Be scared.
Ready? Good. Start today.
Pandora: 350 VC rejections
There’s a great article on Pandora on Inc.com that chronicles the company’s 8 year history, spanning multiple business models, CEOs, lawsuits, VC rejections, and rate battles. It’s a must-read for music fans and entrepreneurs. I used to use Last.fm but have found Pandora to stream a bit better. Thanks for the heads-up Justin!
Braintree Payment Solutions
Braintree Payment Solutions, winner of this year’s New Venture Challenge at the Chicago GSB, has bravely entered what is, as far as I can surmise, one of the murkiest, confusing, and frustrating industries out there: credit card processing.
I spoke with Bryan Johnson, CEO of Braintree, early on in my search for a web based credit card processor but decided to grind it out and investigate all of my options. I was pretty thorough in my research. I spoke to five or six of the most legitimate providers I could find, including the major national bank I use for personal and business banking. Before I even started looking into the product and service differences of the various providers, what I found over and over again was convoluted rate structures, hidden charges, and mysterious fees. Bryan tipped me in our early discussions that all processors face the same interchange fees from the backbone of the credit card processing system, so when a processor offers you a deal that is too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Specifically, processors quote you attractive “flat” rates and hope you base your decisions on them alone. But since all processors face the same charges from the underlying interchange, these processors have to either be hiding costs or losing money on your contract…and you can bet the chances of that are slim to none.
One of the most common tricks I saw is processors quoting you a flat rate without giving you any additional details. Well, if you investigate and ask them if that the ONLY rate I will pay, you’ll find that the rate is generally only for “qualified cards”. Then most folks that are selling legitimate products who get this far then think “Great! My average consumers have jobs and pay their bills on time. They must be ‘qualified’, so I’ll get this rate.” Wrong. Many, many commonly used cards, like corporate cards and rewards/mileage cards are actually “non-qualified” and face much higher rates, which are never mentioned unless you specifically ask about non-qualified rates. Even then, sales reps will try to brush off non-qualified cards, hoping that you have no idea that the majority of the cards you’ll be processing, and even the cards you use yourself, are actually non-qualified. In the end, I figured I’d be better off with a company that didn’t try to mislead me from the get go.
Some other things Braintree had going for them is that they have products and services for everything we were doing. I needed a merchant account for credit card processing, electronic check processing (ACH & EFT), a payment gateway, virtual terminal, and an easy and flexible API to integrate everything. With some of the other providers I had to piecemeal a solution together myself. I like the fact that I have one company doing all of this for me. The other thing that I thought was significant was that Bryan made me aware of the industry security standard: PCI Compliance. Businesses that process credit cards must meet the 12 security requirements to securely protect credit card information. If businesses get breached, they can face some pretty significant fines. Bryan has some nice write-ups on this for large and small businesses on the Braintree Blog. To help us with that security threat, Braintree has tokenization technology that allows us to remotely store all credit card information so we have nothing onsite that we need to worry about. We simply submit the cardholder information once and receive a token in return that we can then use to remotely initiate transactions. In short, we are able to let our customers create accounts, provide their credit card information once, and never have to do it again. It makes things easier for them, which makes our business a better one.
Braintree was not only clear and above board with their pricing and fees, but have also been incredibly responsive to our technological needs, providing nearly instant support and solutions for all of our problems every step of the way. If you’re like me you’ll spend a couple weeks pulling your hair out trying to figure out all the terminology and tricks of the industry. I recommend talking to Bryan at Braintree before you begin. He’ll fill you in on what to look out for, and then when you find mysterious things along the way or deals that seem great, ask him what’s really going on. Then, after you’ve lost a couple of years off your life, you’ll end up back at Braintree and I’m guessing you’ll be very happy with their honesty, flexibility, technology and price.
Facebook: Reach and Saturation by Country
Updated here.
Facebook’s recently launched Flyer Pro advertising platform offers a phenomenal, albeit manual, mechanism for targeting advertisements on Facebook. It also shows some interesting statistics about Facebook’s reach. I ran some quick numbers to see which countries were most saturated with Facebook’s +48M users. The winners:
Canada: 22.12%
Norway: 18.68%
UK: 10.58%
Sweden: 9.09%
Australia: 6.64%
United States: 6.57%
Tiffany v. eBay: Round 3 of settlement hearings?
Reading about eBay’s record quarter coupled with their $900 million Skype write-down inspired me to check in on the status of everyones’ favorite piece of prolonged DMCA trademark litigation, Tiffany v. eBay. Now I’ve fallen for SDNY settlement hearing documents in the past (twice), so I’m not going to get all worked up about this one either. Instead I’ll just upload a screenshot of what I see through the Southern District of New York document management tool below and you can be the judge. No documents have been linked to this round of hearings yet.
VoIP lag test
Joe and I have been working with some very powerful VoIP stuff recently. One problem often encountered with VoIP is an awkward lag time (aka “latency”) between data going from the mouth of one caller to the ear of another. This used to be common in trans-oceanic calls. There is nothing worse than an artificial 2 second lag between every back-and-forth in an important conversation.
We created a test using two cell phones and a microphone. Phone #1 was put on speaker with the volume turned all the way up. The microphone was placed on the speaker of phone #1 and set to record. Phone #2 was held in the air. This is what we got:
This is the lag on a normal cell phone to cell phone call. It’s ~.34 seconds (dinner is being chopped in the background).
This is the lag on a cell phone to cell phone call hosted on the VoIP platform we have running out of Joe’s living room . Only ~.55 seconds! We’re excited to see what it gets down to when we move it to a high end hosting facility.
Pretty cool stuff.
MediaTemple meltdown
We’ve been using MediaTemple‘s grid server for several months and until recently had been generally pleased with them. Our pages took ~.5 – 1 second to load, which is not great, but not awful. Additionally, we hoped that by being on the grid server, we would be protected from spikes in traffic that could bring a single server down. Last Friday load times started getting slower (~10 seconds) then over the weekend they got up to 45 seconds to over a minute. I called MediaTemple and asked them what the issue was. The rep stated that we were probably just making too many database calls. I then directed him to a page we set up that had zero database calls. The rep responded with a panicked “OK we’ll call you back!” and hung up. This was Monday morning. It’s now Tuesday night and they are still a mess. Our pages were alternating between taking over a minute to load and serving up errors. That’s over 36 hours of a professional hosting service being totally jacked. Unbelievable. We’re now on M5 Hosting and won’t ever be on MediaTemple again.
If they truly have had a massive “spike in demand” recently, I wonder if some Facebook apps that were hosted on their grid took off over the weekend. These are the updates that they have been posting on their site:
Web and email latency on Grid-Service Cluster.2
Incident Tracker status: HIGH
Monitoring system updated, AccountCenter maintenance
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 1:26 pm
By internal metrics Grid Cluster.2 is performing much better than before this incident began. No latency issues were detected today, given that we doubled the amount of RAM and increased the number of servers used as cluster nodes by 25 percent this was not unexpected. Our teams will continue to re-distribute storage load across the new resources to further reduce I/O related latency. (mt) Engineers have come up with new ways to measure Grid performance and will be adding them to our monitoring systems over the next few days, increasing the likelihood that we will detect symptoms before they affect customers. We have also changed our growth projection formulas so they will better predict when we need to add hardware to the clusters, avoiding issues like this in the future. In the next few days we will be scheduling a maintenance window for the AccountCenter so we can eliminate the main cause of slow page loads in the customer interface. We are leaving this incident open for the next 24 hours while we continue to work on improving performance and monitoring for Cluster.2
Additional tuning
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 4:40 pm
After mitigating most of today’s latency issues our engineering teams are continuing to work on tuning Cluster.2 Areas where we’ve made changes include major hardware additions, firewall rules, load balancers, networking, service configuration, storage tweaks and AccountCenter speed enhancements. The symptoms primarily manifested as latency issues in web page load times, SMTP and FTP. Unsatisfactory performance was also reported in MySQL enabled applications and AccountCenter management features. We consider the service level of Cluster.2 over the last two days to be unacceptable and are doing our utmost to correct the situation.
Performance Improvements
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 1:46 pm
After making several more tweaks to Grid Cluster.2 including firewall configuration changes and filesystem tuning performance has improved dramatically. (mt) Engineers have seen vast improvement in basic PHP page load times compared this morning. All other services including MySQL, SMTP and FTP should see corresponding latency decreases. All nodes have had RAM upgrades and are performing well, even so the load across Cluster.2 is still higher than we’d like. Our teams are still hard at work on this issue, we’ll keep updating our customers with our progress. Thank you for you patience.
More new hardware
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 11:55 am
In order to combat this lingering issue (mt) system engineers have doubled the amount of available RAM in every Grid Cluster.2 node. Combined with the 25% increase in total nodes we are seeing major performance gains for the cluster and latency times are plunging. We are still working furiously on this issue and will update this thread as soon as we have news.
Progress made, some latency returns
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 7:50 am
As of 6:30AM PDT we detected latency increasing across some nodes of Grid Cluster.2, services like FTP, SMTP and web pages (HTTP) are affected. We have engaged several teams of engineers, data center personnel and third party vendors to bring a resolution to these issues as soon as possible. Again, we thank you for your patience in this matter.
Latency times back to normal
Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 5:47 pm
(mt) Engineers made several changes throughout the day to improve performance of Grid Cluster.2 These changes include the addition of more available nodes, reconfiguring services and various networking tweaks. Our team is closely monitoring Cluster.2 and AccountCenter performance to ensure that the latency issues do not recur.
Continued work
Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 2:27 pm
We are still receiving reports of sporadic latency across Grid Cluster.2 Our engineers are currently working to eliminate any remaining issues that may be causing slow response times. We have also implemented several fixes to the AccountCenter that will help eliminate slow page loads. We will update this thread as soon as we have more information. Thank you for your patience in this matter.
Nodes added, services coming back online
Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 12:32 pm
(mt) Engineers have determined that the latency issue affecting Cluster.2 was due to unexpected growth causing a general lack of computational resources. To resolve the issue (mt) data center personnel have added more machines to Cluster.2 increasing the number of available nodes by 25 percent. All services including FTP, Email and HTTP are coming back online. Recent demands for computational resources have jumped unexpectedly which caused degraded performance of Cluster.2 Our engineers are re-evaluating the projected growth formula used to determine when Grid resources need to be added. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Web and email latency on Grid-Service Cluster 2
Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 9:48 am
Some customers on Grid-Service Cluster.2 may be experiencing latency to web and email. There may also be some latency for all customers accessing the Account Center. (mt) Media Temple’s Systems Engineers are currently investigating and working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
