Lawsuit

On today’s social media edition of the Morning Media Menu, GalleyCat editor Jason Boog discussed new rules for a changing world.

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YouTube viewers in Germany will have to wait for access to certain songs. GEMA, a large music royalties collection agency, has decided to suspend negotiations over its contract with YouTube after more than three years of arguments over copyright liability, the company announced yesterday.

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Zynga has filed suit against a former employee. When “CityVille” general manager Alan Patmore left Zynga for a rival gaming company in August, he apparently took sensitive documents from his work computer along with him.

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Is Spotify’s Business Model Broken? (CNET)
Spotify’s financial performance in 2011 was abysmal. As revenue increased 151 percent from 2010, the on-demand streaming music service saw losses widen 60 percent for the same period, according to documents posted by PrivCo, a company that sells data on non-publicly traded companies. BetaBeat Virtually every new dollar of revenue went directly to music companies as royalty payments, evidencing the fact that the more members Spotify adds, the more money the company loses. This is a clear indication that the online licensing fee/royalty model is increasingly restricting Spotify’s ability to generate sustainable margins using its freemium model. The Next Web Spotify’s 311 employees grew salary costs 173 percent year-over-year in 2011, outpacing revenue growth, according to PrivCo. Business Insider Unlike Groupon, Spotify can’t just trim its marketing spend to cut its losses. It either has to completely change its business strategy, or get much better at its business. TechCrunch In related news, Warner Music Group’s owner Access Industries and previous investor Idinvest are investing $130 million into music streaming startup Deezer. Even though the company is doing well in its country of origin, France, it is still at the very beginning of its international expansion. Read more

It’s not illegal to watch live content from television networks on a mobile device, a New York judge ruled on Wednesday. Television networks Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC and others had sued the startup company Aereo for copyright infringements after learning that the company was using remote antennas to give viewers access to their content on iPhones, iPads, and computers for $12 per month.

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There are a whole slew of sites out there that let users download YouTube videos and convert them to MP3s or other formats. One of the largest of these sites is YouTube-MP3, self-described as “the easiest online service for converting videos to mp3.” But it looks like Google is trying to put a damper on these types of sites, threatening legal action.

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Facebook users are afraid of change, according to a USA Tod ay poll released in mid-October, which revealed that 56% of Facebook users did not like Facebook’s latest changes. With that being said, Facebook users are constantly growing by the day. What keeps current users with the social networking platform, and what drives new users towards it? The answers are endless, but we should not be looking at what brings users to the platform, instead we should be looking at what drives users away. Timeline, Facebook’s “new kind of profile,” could be the underlying answer to the question at hand.

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A group of nearly 27,000 South Koreans have filed a lawsuit against Apple for a whopping $26 million, claiming privacy violations on the collection of iPhone user location information. Apple spokesman Steve Park in Seoul has declined to comment on the situation.

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Oracle is seeking major compensation i.e. around 50% in terms of ad revenues Google generated via Android mobile operating system. These hefty demands were made in the recent filing made this week by Oracle in conjunction with the companies’ ongoing intellectual property dispute with Google.

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Google’s Android smartphone has become a Big Brother and knows more about the users, than their family and friends does. A federal class-action lawsuit filed by a Charleston attorney, has alleged Google and Android phone apps of keeping track of user’s personal information and selling them to advertising companies. According to the lawsuit, Android apps keep track of customer’s personal information ranging from his physical location, to his sexual orientation and monthly income.

Aaron Mayer, the lawyer who filed the suit is representing three men, two from Texas and one from Florida. Mayer’s client learned form an article in Wall Street Journal that their phones could collect and sell their personal information. Mayer’s case is the first ever lawsuit nationally related to Android’s privacy concerns. Mayer said.

If you’re using a map application, then yeah, its going to get your location. If you’re using a map application and it’s also collecting your gender, your sexual preference and your income, users don’t think they’re consenting to that.

Mayer filed the case in Florida against Android’s owner, Google; Internet radio provider and Android app maker Pandora; and advertising companies AdMob and Traffic Marketplace. According the lawsuit, Google engineers the OS for different smartphone models to retrieve the user information from the phones back to the company’s databases. The smartphone apps gather information even when the users aren’t using their phones. Mayer also told that since the news of lawsuit outbreak, nearly 10 similar cases are filed around the country and all of those cases will eventually be consolidated into a single case in California. According to the lawsuit, 67 million Android based phones were shipped worldwide last year alone.

The lawsuit also alleges that Pandora collects location data and other information from phones and shares it directly with third parties. Officials with Pandora, Google and Ad Mob, has refused to comment on the pending litigation.  However, Traffic Marketplace has made a brief statement saying that the company “does not collect or buy any personal data or information pertaining to mobile devices”.

The lawsuit asks compensation for the price of the smartphones and the value of the data collected and shared with the advertisers, plus disciplinary damages. Imagine if Google and its partners lose this lawsuit and they are asked to compensate all the Android users. Even worse, imagine what is it that Google potentially does not know about you.

U.S. Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, has asked via letter the CEOs of Google and Apple, for transparent privacy policies in the online marketplaces where customers buy apps. Franken wrote;

Although I believe there is a greater need for transparency and disclosure for the collection and sharing of all personal information, at a minimum, I ask that you require all location-aware applications in your app stores to provide privacy policies that clearly specify what kind of location information is gathered from users, how that information is used, and how it is shared with third parties.

According to Mayer the next six months are significant to determine the direction of the lawsuit. If the case shows any progress, other Android users would likely receive notice of the lawsuit.