Cingular filed suit today against the investigation agency used by HP in its prextexting search for board leakers, marking the second telecom provider to bring suit for violating its customers’ privacy in the burgeoning mess. The wireless carrier accused CAS Agency Inc. and one of its employees, Charles Kelly, in the U.S. District Court in Atlanta for obtaining customer call records under false pretenses.
Cingular’s suit comes on the heels of a similar suit filed yesterday by Verizon Wireless, which accused 20 unnamed individuals for accessing an HP Director’s records under false pretenses — Larry Babbio, Vice Chairman of Verizon, a partner in Verizon Wireless, is on the board of HP. In at least one case, the unnamed individual posed as a Verizon Wireless customer service representative to gain the private information.
In addition to naming 100 “John Does” as defendants, Cingular got more specific and named CAS and Kelly in particular after learning during congressional hearings yesterday that the defendants obtained the records of CNET reporter Dawn Kawamoto in the HP probe.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:17 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The Washington Post’s Frank Ahrens has this article about a study on film piracy that claims that 38% of all movie piracy occurs on the Internet, with the rest coming from illegally copied DVDs. Financed by the movie industry and prepared by Repubican group Institute for Policy Innovation, the study will be released today by NBC Universal’s Bob Wright at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce lunch.
The study also seeks to produce a more comprehensive estimate of the dollars lost due to both physical and digital piracy. It applies new techniques to measure the potential ripple effect of not only lost sales but also lost jobs, worker earnings and tax revenue when films are pirated. Earlier estimates pegged the price tag of piracy at $6 billion per year, but the new study says that the true cost is $20.5 billion per year. Added to that is the thwarted creation of about 140,000 jobs and more than $800 million in lost tax revenue.
A counterpoint to these scary numbers if the fact that money saved on movies ends up going toward other items, so the bottom-line impact on the economy is not as severe as the motion picture industry suggests.
“In other words, let’s say people are forgoing paying for $6 billion in movies by downloading or consuming illegal goods but end up spending that $6 billion on iPods, computers and HDTV sets on which to watch the movies, which leads to $25 billion in job creation in the computer/software/consumer electronics field,” Jason Shultz, staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in an e-mail.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:53 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Business Week’s Olga Kharif has this piece on an issue that is becoming a sore point for Skype: it’s inability to work on mobile phones and delays the VoIP provider is experiencing in getting its mobile application to work. CEO Niklas Zennstrom has been quoted as saying the company is running into technical obstacles in getting Skype to work on cell phones, a drawback for the eBay-owned company, particularly now that other providers, such as Jajah, are hitting the mobile market hard.
Not that Skype isn’t already available on some cell phones — those that use Windows Mobile, for example, can use Skype, but that’s only 10% of the market. Plus, most of the world outside the U.S. is far more dependent on mobile telephony that landline or PC-based voice service, so Skype is missing out on a lot of opportunity.
And, as Kharif point out, Skype could charge a lot more than its $.02/minute for calls to mobile or cell phones if users could call from their cell phones; maybe five times as much given that most mobile phone plans now charge at least $1/minute for international calls.
Update: Another big competitor in the VoIP-over-mobile space is Rebtel. Jeff Pulver so happens to have an interesting item about Rebtel today. He says that
Rebtel gets to deliver the call and avoid having any mobile connection charges for at least one leg of the call. This becomes the next phase of mobile disintermediation.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:35 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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