September 2009 Archives

Internet giant Google today won the latest round of a legal tussle over trademarks in which luxury goods retailer Louis Vuitton is fighting to prevent search engines using protected brand names.

Louis Vuitton has already won a French court action, successfully claiming that Google acted illegally by allowing other companies to use the Vuitton names as a key search words for adverts on Google.

But today, in an interim legal "opinion" in the EU's highest court, an Advocate-General said Google had not infringed trademark rights by allowing advertisers to buy keywords corresponding to registered trademarks.

I blogged below on Lily Allen's campaign against fie sharers.

As she rightly points out, in the final analysis people will be stopping new artists from emerging, as record labels, starved of sales, are unable to fund recording and even hunt for new talent.

As people have commented on other blogs too pc gaming is really under threat, with console ports likely to be the only thing to be released in the long term because of the prevalence of piracy.

After all why should a developer put cash into great bespoke strategy games (for example) for the pc if people just rip them off?

Anyway Lily's campaign took a knock today when it emerged fellow stars Gary Barlow and James Blunt have backed her.

There goes public sympathy then...

So what would a website with the above title be all about then?

You'll be amazed to know dedicated to something which gets very little coverage in the media today - the craze for erm skinny girls to enjoy ahh big sandwiches.

Why you may ask? Who knows? I certainly don't but it's weird, seemingly pointless, and sums up what the internet is there for.

According to the site http://skinnygirlsbigsandwiches.com/ it has been "Appreciating skinny girls with big sandwiches since 1984" which is a lot of girls, and a lot of sandwiches I'm sure you would agree.

And there are categories! Like girls eating bacon, lettuce and tomatoes? You're in luck.

Have a weird obsession with fine fillies munching on 'cold cut combo' (whatever that is) - yep it's there. (along with comments such as 'gold star for getting that hot sandwich internal').

Readers can rate their sandwich experience and er that's it. More web weirdness!

In a move just as cunning as some of The Joker's wackiest plans, Batman: Arkham Asylum's developers have thrown a deliberate glitch into the game, designed to catch out software pirates and those downloading a 'cracked' version of the title.

The bug was revealed this month after a user posted a query on an Eidos forum asking for help, because his Batman's glide function failed to work properly.

Publisher Eidos responded: "The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection to catch out people who try to download cracked versions of the game for free. It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."

Lily Allen has hit out at Pink Floyd's Nick Mason and Ed O'Brien of Radiohead for condoning the sharing of music on the internet.

The 24-year-old singer launched a rant on her MySpace blog against file-sharing yesterday, branding it "music piracy" and claiming it was turning the British music industry into "nothing but puppets paid for by Simon Cowell" as it made it "harder and harder for new acts to emerge".

Allen, left, wrote: "I think music piracy is having a dangerous effect on British music, but some really rich and successful artists like Nick Mason from Pink Floyd and Ed O'Brien from Radiohead don't seem to think so."

Mason and O'Brien contributed to a recent article in The Times, along with the Featured Artists Coalition, endorsing file-sharing.

I suppose it's more of an up-to-date Oprah effect, or in the UK the Richard and Judy result.

In both cases authors who had their books featured on the respective shows saw sales rocket.

This time a similar happening took place on the micro blogging site twitter, after national treasure Stephen Fry endorsed a book of short stories about the afterlife.

Sales of David Eagleman's book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives soared by 6,000 per cent after Fry, who has more than 750,000 followers, tweeted that "You will not read a more dazzling book this year than David Eagleman's 'Sum'.

"If you read it and aren't enchanted I will eat 40 hats."

It rose from nowhere to number two, and has also been endorsed by former Roxy Music member Brian Eno and author Philip Pullman.

Now Stephen, if you'll just give the Birmingham Mail a plug...

It's worth pointing out that the twitterati aren't exactly queuing up to buy the great man's own works: For example Fry's Moab is My Washpot currently stands at 1,162 in the sales chart at amazon in books, and The Hippopotamus is at a somewhat less than stellar 23,000!

More than 200 European websites selling electronic goods were warned today they face fines or closure unless they clean up misleading consumer information.

The European Commission said a "sweep" of 369 websites selling cameras, computers, mobile phones, DVD players and games consoles had revealed that 55% - 203 - were breaching EU consumer rules.

The unnamed sites include six of the UK 14 and six of the Irish 15 which were included in the "sweep", which was the third carried out by national authorities and co-ordinated across the EU by the Commission.

Staff at PC World and Currys are the latest to come a cropper for mocking their customers on social networking sites.

The workers used Facebook to post discussion boards about 'really stupid customers' and branded many people who use their stores as 'ignorant'.

According to some of the posts, some customers deserved to be 'punched' and others should have cattle prods shoved into tender areas.

It is, of course, not the first time something like this has happened.

Virgin sacked 13 staff after they branded passengers 'chavs' on Facebook, and posted comments questioning the airline's safety record.

In the case of PC World, the comments of their staff are somewhat thrown into context by a survey which arrived in my in-box today.

Which? Computing found that people should avoid stores like PC World when buying computers, and the countrywide chain received a very poor 42 per cent customer approval rating.

Currys and Comet fared little better with 45 per cent, with Staples only managing 51 per cent.

Customer score is based on a combination of overall satisfaction and endorsement - the likelihood of purchasers recommending the supplier to a friend.

DSGi, the company which owns PC World and Currys, said: "We are extremely disappointed with these results, especially as we have a programme in place which focuses the entire business on the customer and on improving customer service."

So who's to say the workers aren't right? Going by the satisfaction survey, you'd have to be stupid to buy a computer there!

Music videos are to return for YouTube viewers in Britain after the website struck a royalties deal to end a six-month dispute.

YouTube blocked thousands of videos to UK users in March after its parent Google failed to agree a fee with songwriters' association PRS for Music.

But the video-sharing website has agreed to pay an undisclosed lump sum to PRS in a deal will last until 2012. It is reportedly worth tens of millions of pounds.

YouTube is expected to take around a week to reinstate the thousands of deleted music videos back on the site.

Sometimes the antics of journalists can leave you shaking your head, particularly in the reporting of health issues by certain national newspapers.

We all know the types of stories (usually in the right wing media) putting forward some kind of 'miracle cure' or saying that some obviously unhealthy activity is, in fact, good for you.

So where can you go to find out if you should, in fact, be eating more pies, rubbing whale fat on yourself, or pouring bottles of turps down your throat to combat cancer risks, or if, er, eating healthily, drinking in moderation and exercising is the key to long life?