ECW4

Office Futures

Home page > Reference pages > eComWatch archive > ECW4

ECW4

Issue 4 October 26, 1999

+++How not to be a corporate bully

+++Music industry napping

+++Bill Stickers will be Prosecuted

+++Pretentious, elle?

+++About eComWatch

+++ How not to be a corporate bully

The World Wide Web gives traders a shop window that is on view to millions of people, twenty-four hours a day, every day. It can be transformed as often as the organization likes without having to cope with petulant window dressers, even to the extent of presenting itself differently to every caller. And, of course, it is cheaper than employing a round-the-clock salesforce to deal with those attracted in by it.

What is not often remarked on, though, is that this virtual shop window is not as easy to keep unobstructed as in real life. The reason for this lies in nature of the Web. Despite the worst efforts of trade bodies and complaisant governments, it is still largely a democratic technology, worked by the people for the people. This fact sits ill with the controlling urge of many large corporations, who seem to see the role of the individual as being that of a credulous, compliant and ceaseless consumer.

At first sight, one would think they are succeeding in this, given the popularity of identikit fast-food 'outlets' (a word formerly applied mainly to sewage outfalls), sportive 'leisurewear' of surpassing ugliness and almost anything decorative sold on QVC. Despite this contrary evidence, there are many people keen to exercise their right to make trouble for overbearing corporate entities in pursuit of what they think they should be sold, not the company. In Britain, the exemplar for this has been CAMRA - The Campaign for Real Ale - which humbled the big breweries in the 1970s and has been active ever since (see www.camra.org ).

Regular fries and a large refresher, please

An even more dramatic illustration of consumer resistance has been the "McLibel" case, which began in the early 1990s. Protesters had been standing outside the windows of various McDonald's establishments in Britain, handing out leaflets critical of the food company's policies and activities. The company's eventual response was a libel lawsuit against the pamphleteers that was not only costly (estimated at about £30 million), it turned into the longest case of any kind in British legal history.

What was worse from McDonald's' point of view was that the judge found for the defendants on several major points and awarded only a small amount of damages to McDonald's. The protesters high-minded and courageous activists or welfare-scrounging little troublemakers, depending on whether you're one of nature's Guardian readers or a Daily Telegraph type are even now appealing against the size of the award.

Not only was the trial result damaging to McDonald's, the fallout from it has been even more destructive. Newspapers and other media all over the world have carried details of the case and there have been a book and a television programme produced about it. In addition, numerous other anti-McDonald's factions have been encouraged to publicise their views more vigorously (see www.meatstinks.com, for instance).

Salt has been rubbed in the wound by the creation of a Web site about the trial by critics of McDonald's. Called McSpotlight (see www.mcspotlight.org), it was produced largely by volunteer labour. The site acts as a constant reminder of the case and as a jumping-off point to other areas of anti-corporatism.

Whatever one's opinions of the company's products and demeanour, its decision to go to law on this matter was indubitably a public relations disaster. In trying to keep clear the frontage to its real shop windows through recourse to English libel laws a favourite weapon of the rich and powerful McDonald's has now to contend with pamphleting on the Internet.

Here the rules are different and the numbers involved many times greater.

The McSpotlight site gets, it says, around 1.3 million hits a month. In other words, every month at least a thousand times the number of people who ever read the original leaflet are now able to read not only it but also the full story of McDonald's humiliation, including the transcript of the trial. And, unlike the original readership, this is now worldwide.

Another characteristic of Internet campaigns is that they are very hard to stop. The activities of house lawyers are easier to nullify in the online world. For instance, the McSpotlight Web site is hosted in the Netherlands, "where it is believed pressure on the host will be greatly resisted". Duplicates of the site exist on 'mirrors' in various countries and there is a downloadable kit of the documents on the site, so that anyone with 'Net access can make a copy. On top of all that, as the site contends, "Any attempt to shut down McSpotlight would result in massive media attention and outrage by the Internet community and concerned people everywhere".

Malice without forethought

One would think that, having seen what happened with McDonald's, other large organizations would take great care not to follow its lead. Alas, the corporate mind doesn't seem to run along such lines. News of similar bullying by large companies are to be seen in online newscasts at almost any time. Here are two recent examples:

3Com, makers of the Palm Pilot, has an advertisement for it based upon the daily timetable of, the probably fictitious, "Kate Hunter, dancer". The ad, labelled "Simply Palm", showed Kate naked. It was first released in the USA, coming to Europe later.

The advertisement which is rather ridiculous, it must be said was slated by women's groups in the USA. It was also found irresistible by Jason Kottke, a Web designer with an eye for the absurd. He produced a series of spoofs on it, called "Simply Porn", which he showed on his Web site.

3Com responded by threatening Jason with a lawsuit for trademark infringement. Now, the relevant legislation in the USA, the Lanham Act, is not designed to prevent lampooning. It is there only to protect against another business's use of "a designation" in a way that causes a likelihood of confusion. No sane person would believe that Kottke was actually selling a "handheld platform", as 3Com describe their gadget. All the same, he felt obliged to give way. His Web site now points to other places where his parodies can be found and to news coverage of 3Com's actions (see http://web.0sil8.com/episodes/99/03/29/index.html).

Result: even more bad publicity for 3Com, and the offending designs are now on several sites, not just one.

2. Ford Motor Company is doing battle in the courts with Robert Lane, a Ford Mustang enthusiast. He runs a Web site devoted to problems with the company's products and with the way it is run (see http://blueovalnews.com ). Not only does it carry messages and questions from unhappy customers, the site has been displaying company documents sent in by disgruntled employees.

It is the last that is the basis of Ford's attack. It has argued in court that doing this is in violation of state laws against disclosing trade secrets and has asked for an injunction against Robert Lane. In what is seen as an important decision, the judge agreed that, although Lane was in breach of those laws, the right to free speech under the First Amendment overrode them. (The US constitution is like software in this regard it took a second release to get it right.) Having said that it accepted the decision, Ford is now appealing against it. Lane has filed countersuit and is claiming $15 million in damages.

Result: Ford may have helped create a precedent that limits its future actions, and those of other companies. Also, not only is it getting adverse national press coverage, more visitors than ever and more informants are using Lane's Web site.

Sweetening the pie

Not all interventions produce such unwanted and harmful results. In this last example, we can see how protests can be nullified or, at least, diminished.

Dunkin Donuts is another large, international fast-food company. Despite its All-American image, it is British-owned, by Allied Domecq. Two years ago, one of its regular customers became displeased with the way his complaints about its coffee had been shrugged off by his local branch. He set out his grievances on a page on his Web site.

The page was indexed by Yahoo! and began to draw a lot of traffic. The aggrieved one, a David Fenton, therefore created a new Web site for other customers' complaints as well, at www.dunkindonuts.org. At the time, the company did not have its own Web site and had left the ".org" version of its domain name available to anyone willing to pay the standard $70 charge. (Another important lesson to be learned.) Even though Dunkin' Donuts itself used his site to answer some emails online, the company asked Fenton to close it down. When he refused, it threatened him with a lawsuit, a threat he countered with an offer to sell the site and name. Eventually, the company offered him a sufficiently large sum of money and, in June this year, Fenton agreed to let the company take over.

Naturally, there have been protests at this from some of the site's visitors, who include company employees warning of unsanitary conditions (see www.foulfood.com/foulfood/listings/17.html for an example). Probably rightly, people believe that the company will stop the publication of complaining emails online. Instead, these now are likely to go directly to the customer services department, as already happens on its official Web site, at www.dunkindonuts.com.

Result: Dunkin Donuts has silenced a focus for discontent, and can now deal with complaints more discreetly. David Fenton, meanwhile, has made a few bob and is obliged to keep quiet. As for unhappy former visitors to www.dunkindonuts.org, neither party seems to care it's a result.

What to do?

There are, I suppose, three main lessons to be learned from these cautionary tales:

Even well-run and well-intentioned companies have their critics. Those that are neither will have even more

Attempting to silence these critics by legal force can backfire With the advent of the World Wide Web, this traditional method of coercion is even less likely to work

Craftiness and adaptability are needed. Being pleasant and reasonable doesn't hurt, either.

As the old Johnny Mercer song puts it:

"Accentuate the positive

Eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

And don't mess with Mr. in-between."

-oOo-

+++Music industry napping

Of all the sectors vulnerable to the Web technologies, the music industry and by extension the recording, publishing and broadcast of music must be close to the top of the list.

The writing has been on the wall for years. In the early days of the graphical Web, Vocaltec's I-Wave (http://www.vocaltec.com) was a popular, simple and cheap way to put music on the Web in file sizes which were manageable at typical modem connection speeds. RealAudio now dominates and its RealJukebox is a revelation of just how large the challenge facing the music industry is. Using RealJukebox, you can play normal CDs and MPs and transpose a friend's CD into a collection of MP3s. Using a CD burner (now under $200 on this side of the water), you can cram some 100 or more MP3s onto your own CD.

If that weren't nightmare enough for the average music company executive, you can buy a Walkman-like device to play MP3s away from your computer (though with the quality of soundcards and speakers now available it is almost puzzling why anyone would buy a stereo system. I can even plug my portable into my car lighter for entertainment on the road).

But it gets worse. People have rightly become a bit leery of making copyrighted music obviously available for download on their websites.

After all, it is piracy and grim faced lawyers with deep pockets and insatiable greed have been known to come calling. So buddy list FTP products like HotLine (http://www.hotlinesw.com) are used by MP3 fiends (and the warez folks, of course) to create distribution channels on the fly. HotLine, for example, is capable of almost infinite daisy-chaining and users can also protect themselves from strangers by passwords. The HotLine client is free the now ubiquitous banner ad and a modest fee for a server are there to create a modest revenue stream for the owners.

But if HotLine is the message/ftp client approach to distribution, what are we to make of Napster (http://www.napster.com)? Napster is MP3 distribution on steroids. When you download the free software (it, like HotLine, works on an advertising based business model) it asks you a few basic questions and asks you to nominate directories for sending and receiving MP3 files. When you then log on to the server, you have access to a central database of MP3s on the upload directories of everyone else logged in. On a typical evening, that might be 180,000+ songs; slow times might see a pool of 20-odd thousand. You can search by performer or title.

Inevitably there is a lot of duplication and, annoyingly, when a song has several versions (Dire Straits' Sultans of Swing, to choose a name totally at random), you would have to know the run length to know which version you were getting. However the information available includes the quality selected for recording, and the download speed available (or, rather, the connection speed). Interrupted downloads can be resumed and multiple selections can be queued. There is also a chat function, segmented by musical interests.

The choice available is extremely wide-ranging: there is a PhD thesis for someone in analyzing the databases and relating song/performer information back to demographics.

The other end of this chain, of course, is the potential for market entrants. If free distribution of MP3s is a copyright nightmare for the established music industry business people and performers alike the other side of the same coin is that the entry bar has been lowered to close to zero for new acts. Anyone who can get access to a basic multimedia computer has access to more sophisticated tools than were available to The Beatles. They can produce a CD for less than the cost of a pint and distribute, via MP3, for an effective cost of zero.

Their huge problem, of course, is how do they make money. For many performers, the initial real task is building a following rather than making money: if Web distribution serves to get bums on seats at shows, the question of actually selling the recorded music can be deferred.

It has been an article of faith for true webheads that "information wants to be free". Much of the market has already decided that its definition of information includes music. The music industry faces the challenge of a losing battle to maintain control of the main means of distribution, or finding an alternative business model which makes it possible to make money while giving the product away free.

-oOo-

+++ Bill Stickers will be Prosecuted

"Poor Bill", as the old joke goes. Flyposting, especially on shop windows, is not only illegal in several countries, it is hard to get away with while the shop is open. On the Web, as we said earlier (see How not to be a corporate bully), things are different.

Shooing people away from your online shop window is likely to become even more difficult with the arrival of what might be called metaWeb software.

This runs on its own server, communicating with an applet on the user's browser. Content from the server appears alongside pages from other Web sites as a kind of commentary layer about those sites and their owners.

Since it is not hosted on those 'target' sites and does not use their content, the software and the messages it carries infringe no laws. Moreover, it is, at least for the moment, not defensible against.

The best-known of these virtual bill-stickers is Third Voice. When running in expanded form, it occupies the left one-third of the browser window, presenting messages in a familiar folders and files arrangement. People with the software can post messages, read those from other users, post replies to them or rate them for usefulness. The result of this is a kind of peer-reviewed heckling another new Web concept.

Because it is a store-and-forward system, Third Voice messages take a time to arrive. A newer competitor to it, Gooey, is more like online chat and is quicker to respond. A third contender, so new it isn't even available yet, is Zadu. Its makers say that this will "combine the best of Third Voice with the real-time interactivity of Gooey" and also provide instant messaging. "By making it possible for Zadu to run on content partners' servers," says their Web site, "Zadu also adds a revenue and trust dimension that are missing from the other two technologies."

Details of these three products can be seen at, respectively, www.thirdvoice.com, www.hypernix.com and www.zadu.com. The software is available, free, at the first two sites; you can register your interest at the last.

Not surprisingly, opinion is divided on the value and morality of these programs. A number of people and organizations are against their use and, in a nice example of post-modern recursion, we now have Web sites commenting on commentary software.

One of these is the Say No to Third Voice campaign (see http://www.saynotothirdvoice.com/), which describes itself as "a group of concerned Netizens who work diligently to provide good, clean information about ourselves, families and businesses." This group, whose members are unidentified, objects on several grounds. One is their belief that these add-ons circumvent parental controls on what children and pupils see (something I reckon most Web-savvy parents could remedy with little effort).

Nevertheless, interested to see who this group of euformaticists count as allies, I explored the "Say No..." site. Among its supporters is SCOOP Stop Cases Of Online Plagiarism whose pages carried the nicely neutral headline, "Has Your Site Been Sullied by Web Graffiti?" (see www.thescoop.net/). Also, there is a link to The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive (www.ohhla.com), none of which appeared to include any five-letter words except "bitch", of course. How such effluvia could count as "good, clean information" was hard to see. Sullying that particular site would presumably involve posting messages about Cole Porter and Noel Coward.

The search for a more rational view led to an article by Janelle Brown in Microsoft's Salon magazine. Rather than rehearse its arguments here, I'll just direct you to it: www.salonmagazine.com/tech/feature/1999/07/07/third_voice/index.html [don't forget to unwrap the URL]). The subtitle "Can Third Voice's approach to Web community evolve beyond drive-by scrawls and spam?" sums up the problem.

Some site owners dislike the idea that things are being said about them that they have no control over, a reflex already discussed elsewhere in this issue. These people can, of course, use the software themselves and some companies are doing so to answer messages either on line or by another channel (both of which definitely counts as latching on to the affirmative).

Another approach is to use detector software on the server. One of the first to do this is @watch (see www.atwatch.com) which has added this ability to its site monitoring product. "Know who's talking about you.

Address public TV [Third Voice] posts immediately and watch activity every day to see what and how much others are saying about you." The @watch hard sell neglects to say what one then does about it. Perhaps a free copy of The Little Book of Calm is included with each CD of software.

It's clear that, as Janelle Brown points out in her article, Third Voice, etc., are currently more fascinating as concepts than as products. They are also more fascinating as channels than as products. These tools are all designed to carry advertising as well as content, so there could be some interesting tussles when, say, an advertiser finds uncomplimentary messages about itself carried on a metachannel it is sponsoring. This will also add a further level of complexity to the debate on the battle between freedom and control on the Internet. We'll let you know what we hear.

-oOo-

+++Pretentious, elle?

Carol Vorderman - omnipresent media personality and queen of the numerati - is interviewed in today's Guardian (25 October 1999) about the need for computers for schoolchildren. In an otherwise sensible response, she describes her husband as "an e-business soldier". What on earth could that be, we wonder? A 'road-warrior' with a desk and a registration to Amazon.com perhaps?

How very silly.

-oOo-

About eComWatch

eComWatch is edited and published by Roger Whitehead and Christopher Ogg. Copyright Roger Whitehead and Christopher Ogg, 2002. eComWatch may be circulated freely in its original format with copyright notice intact. For permission to reproduce any article,