There was some news coverage last week of the UK's "equalities minister" (what the hell is that?), Harriet Harman, asking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to shut down a prostitute review site called Punternet. As many legal commentators pointed out, this was ridiculous for a variety of reasons -- neither Harman nor Schwargenegger had any legal authority to shut down such a site. However, the really ridiculous thing is that all this request did was give the site a ton of attention. In a press release response, Punternet took issue with many of Harman's claims about the site, and then at the end noted how much she had helped the site's traffic: How much extra traffic did you get on 30 September, the day the story first broke? Just over 2. Full story...
We've already pointed out how director/writer/filmmaker/entertainer Kevin Smith is a great example of a filmmaker embracing the model of connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy, even to the point of saying that unauthorized file sharing is just a way to get more fans he can "convert.
We've seen this before, with individual authors like Paulo Coelho and David Pogue, who both found that as more people were able to get unauthorized copies of their ebooks, their sales actually increased.
A bunch of folks sent over Jeff Jarvis' recent blog post entitled stop selling scarcity, which I actually think is slightly misleading.
In my experience, there is a group of photographers who are even more extreme in their copyright views than groups like the RIAA and MPAA.
With a new report coming out suggesting that Facebook sends more traffic to news sites than Google News, folks like Mathew Ingram are asking if Rupert Murdoch, the AP and others will be complaining about Facebook "stealing" their traffic and demanding to get paid.
TorrentFreak alerts us to an interesting case happening in Norway right now. Apparently, the most expensive movie ever produced in Norway was (shocking, I know) found on the internet soon after it was released.
We noted in the past how odd it was that AT&T blocked something like the place-shifting Sling Player from the iPhone, but allowed place-shifting streaming TV apps from partners like MLB.
This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.
Obviously, we've been covering various stories of content creators who are making use of new methods and new ideas to build a successful business model in a very changed world.
Last week, in discussing its attempt to settle its lawsuit with Google over the Google book scanning project, the Authors Guild posted a rather interesting public letter, entitled To RIAA or Not to RIAA, That was the Question.