Getting punked: Will your old website images be the source of an expensive lawsuit?

A good blog article just came out, talking about how the big stock photo companies are using sophisticated software to find their images across the Internet. Even if the images have been manipulated, this software can sniff them out. When it does, it checks the owner of the website, where it find the images, and compares it to any license that may have been sold. The problem is, this software doesn’t care how old a website is. They are going after websites that are over 10 years old, as well as new websites. How many people have their receipts from 10 years ago, let alone the individual copies of licenses to use certain pictures they (or their www designer) purchased so long ago?

The blog article is located here: http://www.l4sb.com/2011/ip/images-or-photos-on-your-website-copyright-infringement/

It’s a good and scary read for anyone that has a website. It pays to start thinking about acquiring images more carefully.

Top 10 Suggestions for Businesses Entering the 2012 New Year

There is a great blog article that was just written for business leaders, owners and entrepreneurs, that provides a “top-10″ list for business owners to consider, as we get close to January 1, 2012, which represents a new fiscal year for most businesses. By thinking about this now — before the New Year is upon us — businesses have a chance to prepare their businesses to save on taxes, change the legal status of their company, change accounting methods, save on expenses, and much more.

This is an easy read, and should be valuable for most small businesses. The article is located at: http://www.l4sb.com/2011/ip/starting-the-2012-new-year/.

Free seminar for business leaders in Albuquerque, NM: Beyond the brick-and-mortar …

Two legal experts in Internet law are putting together a seminar on April 18th, in Albuquerque, from 10am to 12pm.

The topic is “doing business on the Internet,” told from the perspective of your typical brick-and-mortar business. The latest, cutting-edge topics will be discussed, including cloud computing and on-demand computing. Practical advice on how to reduce legal, financial and reputation risks will be discussed.

Learn more at: http://www.l4sb.com/2011/business-law/free-seminar-announcement-moving-beyond-brick-and-mortar/.

Comcast may receive financial penalties for managing its TCP/IP traffic

The Sacramento Business Journal had an article today discussing how the FCC Chairman is recommending punishment to Comcast for “violating commission principles meant to protect consumers’ access to the Internet.” In particular, Comcast started regulating BitTorrent Inc. file-sharing traffic in June 2008, and has been accused of creating network changes that have disrupted some users of Vonage VoIP phone service.

I’m both a Comcast and Vonage user, and I’ve never experienced any trouble with Vonage myself, although I’d raise hell with Comcast if they tried to interrupt the ports or connectivity associated with my Vonage use. Vonage is a great service, and I cannot recommend it enough. Internet VoIP is definitely the wave of the future. It’s inexpensive, flexible, highly configurable and most importantly, portable. I can keep my old phone numbers, no matter where I am on the Internet. I can also have phone calls routed just about anywhere.

What this points out, though, is that ISP’s must be ever more careful how they define services for their customers, as well as how they manage their networks. In the past, ISP’s have often had to make hard decisions in impacting one or more users’ access to the Internet, in order to save or protect the overall network. For example, in Comcast’s case, they are trying to manage overall network performance by reducing BitTorrent filesharing traffic.

In today’s ISP market, we market the value of the service by how fast it is, like when an ISP advertises “6 megs.” Consumers don’t appreciate the different between upload versus download speeds, although there are signs this is changing. ISP professionals will tell you that “6 megs” is really not telling the whole story, since it’s a measure of throughput not overall data transfer. If all customers on an ISP’s network fully utilized their full throughput (i.e. all “6 meg” customers transferred a full “6 meg” upload and download all day and night, 24×7), their networks couldn’t handle it. Every ISP’s network assumes customers utilize only a tiny fraction of their overall bandwidth allocation.

The better approach for an ISP, would be to state upload and download speeds, as well as put a monthly or daily cap on data transfer. This would help ISP’s manage their network, when you have heavy users, as well as provide a mechanism to tier access, therefore providing an ability to charging more for the “heavy users.”

It’s all a matter of prioritization

Many businesses — including some I’ve been involved with — suffer from endless firefighting. What gets worked on (i.e. fixed) is what is the most urgent at the time, usually associated with some serious customer complaining, or financial or legal risk. Ultimately, the business becomes a team of heroes, burning everyone out and not really making serious headway in what is really important: growing the business and its revenue base. The “hero model” is very dangerous for a business, because there is so much reliance on individuals. If a key individual gets sick or leaves, it creates serious disruption to the business.

I’ve found, whether we’re talking about the business priorities as a whole, or managing a software development team or project, it helps to identify priorities and focus on the highest priority issues first. By focusing on what’s important, you move the business forward and you will naturally move away from the hero model. By staying focused on the key drivers of your business (assuming you know what they truly are), your processes and systems should become more robust, fault tolerant and less reliant on key individuals.

There are many ways to devise a priority schedule, but here’s one I’ve found that is simple, easy to use and quite effective. It’s a simple “sev system” or severity scale.

How many people or businesses do you know, that have a tendency to focus on SEV3’s or SEV4’s? We get caught up on how things look, versus how they perform or what they mean to our business, our customers or our employees.

My advice is to create, revise and maintain a list of your business tasks and priorities. Everything on the list has an assigned SEV code, and you devise a corporate policy such as “No SEV1’s will be on the list for more than a week” and “We won’t work on lower SEV issues, when higher SEV issues exist.” Devise a system of accountability, and assign your heroes to the important SEV tasks.

One other suggestion is to keep a corporate journal, wiki or help system that serves to document all your processes, functionality and systems. Make updating this system one of the components of every task. Make sure a different employee or department “tests” the functionality or issue, before its removed from the task list.

By objectively tracking the severity of the issues in your business, you will add accountability and ensure the most important and strategic issues are confronted and resolved in your business, thereby helping to maximize revenues and contain costs within your business.