Tag Archives: legal

How the TV / Film Industry can take advantage of P2P

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If you are a frequent Internet user, you have undoubtedly watched a video online somewhere.

No?

Ok here, watch this:

That video happens to be from Youtube, but as you may or may not know, there are many other places to watch videos online. Some of them are questionably legal. The legitimate sites, however, show advertisements before, during and/or after the videos they display. A 30 minute show typically has 2-3 minutes of commercials — a far cry from televisions 8-12 minutes!

You can also walk the wild side and attempt to find your shows using BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a terrific distributed model for dispersing media across the Internet. But the television and film industry just don’t get it. Well I’ve got a solution. Continue reading →

In Which I Go Sleuthing: Postscript

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A few weeks ago, I checked my voicemail because the box was full. (As an aside, if you ever have an urgent message to get to me, voicemail is not the way to do it. Send a text message or email me — I am quite frequently very remiss in my voicemail checking.) One of the messages was from my contact at the Palladium-Item.

She said (paraphrased): “Because the person was an independent contractor, we will be unable to reimburse you for the $14. You’ll have to get it through the courts.”

If you recall in the Epilogue, I had been told that they would take care of it and reimburse me. So why the sudden change of heart? Continue reading →

In which I go sleuthing… (epilogue)

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I have the phone back. Life is good.

Yesterday, I visited the Police Station and the Palladium-Item about the theft.

I spoke with the carrier manager (circulation manager?) about it. She said that the Palladium Item would reimburse me for the overages, and dock it out of the thief’s paycheck. The thief was, apparently, an independent contractor and had already lost a couple other routes for undisclosed reasons. From the sound of it, she may be losing her job now too.

But the overages are covered, so that’s good.

The person I spoke to at the Police station said that since I have the phone back, they probably won’t do much with it now, aside from keep it on file. If anything else develops, I’m supposed to call them (I guess if the thief revisited or something). The thief probably won’t be charged with anything, but I guess employer punishment is good enough?

I felt this strange compulsion to find out more about my perpetrator. Googling her name turned up nothing; Neither did searching myspace or facebook. Who else would know this person?

Continue reading →

In which I go sleuthing… (pt. 3)

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(When we last left, our hero, he was making some headway in the search for the missing Phone / MP3 Player. Faced with a hiccup in progress, he had a sudden epiphany…)

Back to Verizon Wireless’s website.

View current usage.

Bingo! Two more pages of calls made, some to Louisville, one to Atlanta, and one to New Hampshire (Kemco Industries, an 800 number). And even better: a slew of fresh Richmond numbers.

As I plugged those new numbers into the Reverse Lookup tool, I finally got a few successes. One of them had the same last name as the first name I found; but a couple other seemed entirely unrelated. Most of them were labeled as residents that were 50+ years old.

The phone rang again, it was the woman from the Palladium-Item again. She mentioned a name and asked if it was familiar. I told her that whomever stole the phone did so anonymously, and that I doubted I knew the person myself. I started reading off a few of the new names I uncovered from the Reverse Lookup tool. Two of the names she definitely recognized, and said she thought she knew who it was. Continue reading →

In which I go sleuthing… (pt. 2)

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(in part 1, our hero has lost his fancy communications / music-playing device. With no end in sight, will it ever be found?)

Second day back at work since “vacation”. Typical day. Meetings, notes, quiche.

*Jarring Chord* An email. From Verizon Wireless. “blah blah blah monthly bill blah blah blah $101.xx, blah blah blah pay online blah bla–” wait.. $101.xx?

Normally, our cell phone bill is about $84. Considering we have two lines and two phones, that’s really not that bad. We share a bed, a house, and handsoap; Why not share minutes? But $101? Something is fishy in the state of Denmark.

Continue reading →

In which I go sleuthing… (pt. 1)

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So last week we took a “vacation” to see my family. I’ll post more about that (along with videos) later. Right now, there is treachery afoot!

We were about 72 miles into Ohio, almost to Columbus. Mel said she was going to try to take a nap, I thought “Great, I’ll listen to some music on my Cellphone / MP3 player”. I groped around my pocket where I normally keep it; surprisingly there was nothing there.

Check the other side; Still nothing.

Uh-oh. Continue reading →