Being a torrent site is pretty rough these days as Canadian torrent site isoHunt can readily attest to. Not only did they lose a recent legal battle in the United States but is seems that 26 major record labels in Canada (wow, didn’t know we had that many) have launched as massive lawsuit, $4 million, against the site.

Of course the Big Four labels: Soney, EMI, Warner and Universal, are leading the charge against Gary Fung and his company, which also run Podtropolis and TorrentBox, claiming these sites facilitate copyright infringement on a massive scale.

“The isoHunt Websites have been designed and are operated by the defendants with the sole purpose of profiting from rampant copyright infringement which defendants actively encourage, promote, authorize, induce, aid, abet, materially contribute to and commercially profit from,” the court filing reads.

“The defendants and users of the isohunt websites act together, in and part of a file-sharing community, to reproduce and distribute plaintiffs’ sound recordings and other copyright content,” the record labels add.

Through this lawsuit the labels hope to permanently shut down isoHunt and Fung’s two other sites. In addition they are asking the British Columbia Court for statutory damages for each of the listed recordings (over 200 in total), which adds up to well over $4 million.

via TorrentFreak

To say that this sucks is an understatement and while Fung’s chances of prevailing are pretty slim I, as a fellow Canadian, wish him all the luck in the world.

Torrent site gets slammed with multi-million dollar lawsuit is a post from: The Inquisitr

This article was written by Jemima Kiss, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 5th July 2010 10.14 UTC

Virtual worlds might have been an entertaining diversion for big media a couple of years back, but for a massive swathe of web users these are a powerful and important part of their online lives.

Far from being a flash in the pan, sites like Habbo Hotel can claim both longevity and profitability – both often elusive qualities for social web institutions.


Photo by pixelsebi on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Habbo Hotel has just joined the exclusive club of websites that can claim ten years online. The public beta of the first incarnation, Hotelli Kultakala, rolling out on 28 August 2000, followed by the English-language beta on 16 January 2001. The combined platform now claims 170 million users in 11 countries.

Some Habbo stats, as of last month:

• 172m avatars created
• 3m new characters created each month
• 120m user-created rooms
• 15m monthly unique users
• Average user session is 42 minutes
 
In this video interview, co-founder Sampo Karjalainen describes creating the first incarnation of Habbo, the ‘Mobile Disco’ chat site with the familiar Habbo blocky pixel look. After extending the concept into a snowball fight for an ad campaign in early 2000, the pair launched the Finnish Hotelli Kultakala a few months later. The official bio says this was built with the micropayments business model in the plan from the start, though chief executive Timo Soininen admits in this video interview that in the early days Habbo was more  ‘hunch and creativity driven’ than the multi-million dollar, metrics-driven organisation it is today.

However early on those micropayments were written in to the business plan, Habbo can claim some success. Parent company Sulake reported $20m revenues for the first quarter of 2010, up 25% year on year. The site has a not insignificant 150 payment channels set up across 31 countries, maximising their chances of encouraging players to upgrade their avatar and Habbo spaces by making it as easy as possible for them to pay in multiple ways. Soininen adds that a significant amount of transactions take place between users in the form of gifts and so on – to the value of $600m per year.

Success, says Habbo, is down to “keep the service fresh and relevant by frequently introducing new features and gaming elements, arranging engaging campaigns, enriching the virtual economy and payment models and nurturing the community“. So no secrets given away there, exactly. But the combination of a distinctive style and an environment where users feel more committed to a service they have invested in is an important factor.

An overview provided by Nielsen gives a glimpse of user behaviour. In the virtual worlds category, Habbo notches up and average 2 hours 16 minutes each month per user and, though Nielsen estimates Second Life has less than half as many users, the average time spent is more like 9 and a half hours each month.

No surprise that web addicts’ favourite World of Warcraft scores an astonishing 29 hours 42 minutes. Step away from the screen, gentlemen!

Actually that’s not a sweeping generalisation about WoW, because Nielsen estimates that 72% of players are male. That contrasts sharply with habbo, which has a female userbase of 63%. Second Life is 55% male.

WoW’s users are also older, with 41% between 18 and 34 while Habbo is 42% under 17. Second Life is older still, with 47% aged 35 to 49.

Habbo’s own annual survey of 49,000 teenage users confirmed some more user behaviour. 32% said they never pay for content online, though that varies by country with 21% of UK teens saying they never pay compared to 48% in Spain and Italy.

55% said newspapers will die out soon, compared to 18% who think they will continue to exist in some form. One fifth said they often feel unsafe in online environments and nearly a third learn the most about online safety at school.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Ten years of virtual worlds: Habbo hits a decade is a post from: The Inquisitr

But what if there were an alternative path that might save even more newspapers? Not all newspapers, but some that would otherwise have died out.

We know that one of the main problems today with newspapers is the death spiral to the end. Classified advertising in newspapers is nearly dead, and general advertising continues to shrink. As newspapers lose money, they can only respond by cutting costs, and the leading cost at a newspaper is writing staff and support services (editors etc). The end result is cyclical: newspapers lose money, they cut staff, the quality and value of the paper declines, this results in less readers, which reduces advertising revenue, and around the cycle goes again.

We accept as a norm that newspapers cover a wide range of news. Everything from local, national and international news, sport, finance, celebrity news and gossip, and even offer comics and crosswords. The economies of scale created publications that had something for everyone, and it has worked well for a long time. But it doesn’t today. The internet has driven specialization, and advertising that efficiently targets customers. What if the answer to saving some newspapers was to use their diminishing resources to be the masters of specialized content, instead of going wide, and mastering nothing at all.

Former journalist Philip Meyer, currently the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina and author of the 2005 book “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age” thinks that specialization may save some newspapers.

He quotes Robert Picard, a media economist from a June presentation:

Newspapers “keep offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of content, and keep diminishing the quality of that content because their budgets are continually thinner,” he said. “This is an absurd choice because the audience least interested in news has already abandoned the newspaper.”

Meyer’s case is one of narrowcasting: newspapers trim down to a specialized product and survive by serving a narrow market well. The key is to “narrow your focus to the area that is the least vulnerable to substitution,” and Meyer believes that influence is the key:

the product least vulnerable to substitution is community influence. It gains this influence by being the trusted source for locally produced news, analysis and investigative reporting about public affairs. This influence makes it more attractive to advertisers.

Meyer notes that by news, he does not mean the “stenographic coverage of public meetings, channeling press releases or listing unanalyzed collections of facts,” but “processed information” based around “evidence-based journalism, something that bloggers are not good at originating.”

Not all readers demand such quality, but the educated, opinion-leading, news-junkie core of the audience always will. They will insist on it as a defense against “persuasive communication,” the euphemism for advertising, public relations and spin that exploits the confusion of information overload. Readers need and want to be equipped with truth-based defenses.

Newspapers might have a chance if they can meet that need by holding on to the kind of content that gives them their natural community influence. To keep the resources for doing that, they will have to jettison the frivolous items in the content buffet.

Meyer also argues that a shift to quality may also suit a shift in frequency, a less is more approach where newspapers shift away from daily publication, but deliver strong content when they do publish.

It’s an interesting take, and the argument of specialization has a strong economic case at a time of disappearing revenue in the industry. It won’t save thousands of newspapers, and many simply will refuse to go down this path, but if some existing players do shift focus, the chances of more surviving may increase. Where I disagree with Meyer is on the end result: he still talks of physical newspapers, where any natural end point must end up online, because the notion of news on paper is going to die no matter what anyone does to save it. But that doesn’t take away from the specialization point: newspapers narrowcasting, with a focus on being the best at what they do, become a more appealing product to a core of readers, and perhaps enough readers that they have a sustainable business well into the future.

Could some newspapers be saved by specialization? is a post from: The Inquisitr