I just did a quick Stilgherrian Live Alpha (episode 5.2) from my hotel room in Canberra. The recording stopped after about 10 minutes, so it’s in two parts called, oddly enough, part 1 and part 2. Topics covered include the Politics & Technology Forum, Internet and telephone coverage along the Hume Highway, and what happened to my beard.
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When the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) decided to investigate eBay Australia’s plan to force its sellers to use PayPal for their “protection”, there were more than 700 public submissions. eBay has responded by dismissing the objections.
I’ve written about this at length previously, both here and in Crikey [1, 2], with plenty of interesting comments from readers. And I’ve just written a piece for Crikey today, to be published around 2pm Sydney time.
Meanwhile, you can read some overview pieces at Auction Bytes and The Sheet. And you can see eBay’s full 15-page response at the ACCC website: it’s the second submission on the page, from “Applicant”.
To make things just that little bit more interesting, yesterday Telstra’s Sensis division announced a free auction site at Trading Post.
[Update 1250pm: The story will now run in Crikey tomorrow (Thursday). Busy news day, apparently.]
Here’s how “Telecom Australia” (now Telstra) in 1992 envisioned the broadband revolution of far-future 1996. Have you watched this, Senator Conroy? Why doesn’t my laptop make those noises?
On 19 January I wrote about Sensis’ lawyers sending legal “nastygrams” to small website owners. Professor Roger Clarke has received a response [PDF file], which we can’t copy and paste because it’s a scan of a printed letter.
Professor Clarke reckons the response is “reasonable enough (as far as it goes)”, and he won’t be taking the matter any further. His article on Lawyers’ ‘Nastygrams’ re Trademarks reminds us that lawyers’ letters often make inappropriate demands on behalf of trademark-owners.
It’s vital that people stand up for their rights, and resist corporations getting away with claims that go beyond the already excessive rights that corporate welfare laws in the ‘intellectual property’ arena grant them.
So, we all should say “the Yellow Pages® directory” to help Sensis prevent their trademark turning into a generic word. Sensis is our friend.
The funniest bit, I think, is that the lawyer’s response reckons the original letter was intended to “encourage the proper use of Sensis trademarks”. Lawyers must have a funny idea about “encouragement”: their “nastygram” was a three-page letter in pompous legalese containing veiled threats [PDF file].
Sensis, the Telstra subsidiary that owns things like the Yellow Pages and Trading Post, has kicked off a legal attack on small websites for “trademark infringement”. Why? Because they haven’t got an ® after every mention of “Yellow Pages”.
Apart from the daftness of attacking little fish, which only makes your company look like a bully, you’ve got to wonder why they’re doing it.
- They’re re-branding as “Yellow” anyway. yellowpages.com.au identifies itself as “yellow.com.au”, and their new logo just says “Yellow”. Here’s a screenshot of their site as of a few minutes ago.
- There doesn’t seem to be any actual trademark infringement. At least not by my reading of some material I’ll mention shortly.
I found out about this yesterday when Professor Roger Clarke posted to the Link mailing list. I’ve become more and more astounded at the stupidity of it all as I’ve read people’s comments…
OK, I’m meant to be clever, so here are my predictions for 2008. The Snarky Platypus didn’t help me with these, as we decided we had better things to do on New Year’s Eve (gin and tonic, for example). So blame me alone.
- The Joy of Chairman Rudd’s Iced VoVo Revolution will be dulled by the end of January when they take some stupid actions which demonstrate that they are, after all, politicians like all others. Actually, this has already happened with the announcement of mandatory Internet filtering by ISPs. I’ll write more about that soon.
- At least one member of the (former) Howard cabinet will be charged with a criminal offence over something they did in office. I’d like it to be Brendan Nelson, because that deal to buy $6 billion worth of Super Hornet fighter aircraft stinks — mostly because the air force doesn’t want them and the process was, erm, rushed to say the least. However I suspect it might be something to do with the AWB scandal.
- Channel 7 will continue to win the Australian TV ratings. Channel 9 will fail to reinvent itself now that its owned by an investment vehicle and not a media proprietor.
- Telstra will be forced to separate its wholesale and retail businesses. Meanwhile the Sol Trujilo-led management team will continue to play nasty with the government, causing them to be increasingly sidelined — especially over the Rudd government’s new broadband rollout.
- Barack Obama will win the US Presidential election. I know Hillary Clinton is currently the favourite, but I have the gut feeling that the Oprah factor will be important, and that Hillary’s dirty washing will be aired.
- When former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra returns from self-imposed exile on 14 February the new government, which is a coalition led by a Thaksin-supporting party, will somehow drop the corruption charges against him. Another military coup will follow.
- At least one Australian company will suffer a major leak of its customers’ private data, prompting new laws on dealing with such things (like they already have in California).
- We’ll finally figure out what the Storm Botnet, the world’s largest network of hacked computers, is for. My guess: whatever the hell the designer’s paying clients want it to be for.
You might also like to read the interesting predictions from The Australian (not really predictions, but obvious events following on from their news calendar), advertising agency JWT, Peter Black and Rachel Polanskis, and predictions about toy names for 2008.
What are your predictions for 2008? And how do you think mine rate?
As mentioned last week, Friday morning I’m having breakfast with the ICT minister Senator Helen Coonan and her ALP counterpart Senator Stephen Conroy — along with some many members of the ACS.
That’s Senator Coonan on the right. In every sense of the word.
While the discussion will be chaired by some bloke from Channel 7, I’m assuming there’ll be a chance for questions. When I asked on Link last week, here’s what popped up. What would you add?
Last Wednesday 11 April, a Telstra chap called to discuss my telephone account. I happened to be at a client’s office so couldn’t talk, but told him Friday would be good to call because I’d be at my desk all day. That was last Friday. He hasn’t called. Which is a shame. Because I was wanting to tell him that Telstra’s crappy service and support was why I’d already moved my mobile phone to Vodafone and I’ll be moving my landlines away from Telstra as soon as I’d figured out how to do that and retain my phone numbers.
There’ll be free wireless Internet access throughout the Sydney CBD by early 2008, says the NSW government — and the reactions from leading telcos Optus and Telstra were chalk and cheese.
Optus: “Optus congratulates the NSW Government on its innovative plans… Optus looks forward to seeing more details of the plans and to participating in the expression of interest process.”
Telstra: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch anymore so it will be interesting to see how it is proposed to be paid for.”
I don’t understand why it’ll take so long to set up a few Wi-Fi access points though.
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