For those of you waiting for the Google/YouTube vs. Viacom et al case to settle out before pro-actively searching your site for copyright violations added by members, here’s a name to remember: BayTSP Inc.

While many of us who work in the online community industry have known about BayTSP, a great article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal “YouTube Magic: Now You See It, Now You Don’t” gives a fabulous peak into the world of the copyright police. A couple of really interesting points in the article:

• BayTSP charges clients between $100,000 and $500,000 per month to help them protect their copyrighted materials
• Employees are paid minimal wages to do this ($11.00/hour or so)
• They don’t reveal their clients in their publicity or on their website

Doing a quick Google on BayTSP reveals that their clients include Viacom, Fox, Paramount, Columbia Pictures (Sony), and many other of the major entertainment companies.

While the article makes it appear that BayTSP is concentrating on the big major websites such as Google’s YouTube, the search shows that they go after both big and small web sites. After all, a violation is a violation. There are many posts in the communities for Peer-to-peer (file sharing) networks about members getting the cease and desist letters from BayTSP on behalf of their clients. Some of those who received the letters are only downloading or uploading music and movies to the networks. Seems that Limewire is a favorite target….

So what is the business upshot to all this? Simple. If you are going to allow users to upload content to your site whether its pictures, videos, or even news articles you need to be proactive in reviewing it and deleting it before a company like BayTSP finds it. Why? Because with the fees that they are charging, BayTSP and others are not a free moderation service helping your organization to remove copyrighted materials. Multiple violations and letters will surely bring a lawsuit to your office.

How much will it cost your organization if there is a lawsuit? Let’s take a shot at figuring it out:

1. Cost of BayTSP service over the course of a year for a media company to find violations on your site and send letters to you: $50,000/month (only a portion of the total fees to BayTSP) for a total of $600,000
2. Legal Fees: $100,000 for attorney review, paperwork costs and time, as well as filing costs
3. Lost royalties: Tricky, but figure that if you have 100 clips that violate copyrights each month and on the copyright holder’s site, those clips generate $1,000 in ad revenue (PPI) per month on the media company’s site, then you have a lost royalties amount of $1,200,000.
4. Your organization’s legal costs: Internal General Counsel - 100 hours of time at $125/hour or $12,500. Outside Legal Counsel - 100 hours of time at $300/hour or $30,000. (And this is just to respond to the initial lawsuit and answer the initial complaint, not perform discovery or file any counter suits.)

While this is a very simple analysis, on a combined basis, you might be looking at an amount of $1,900,000 plus before damages for a single copyright holder (media company). Perhaps you’ll be able to settle for $1,000,000 and enter into an consent agreement to remove copyrighted materials on your own in the future. But what of the other media companies that learn of your violations? Because you know that your members are not going to only put Comedy Central clips on your site, they are also going to use copyrighted songs for their own videos, news clips from CNN and others, as well as photos and articles from major newspapers. Over time, the failure to manage and moderate these contributions gets very expensive…

Put these costs against the costs of hiring a moderation firm or staff to pro-actively remove copyrighted material in advance of anyone reporting it to you through a cease and desist letter and it really shows the risk/reward of not being proactive is off the charts.

Good moderation can range from $60,000 for small sites to over $1,000,000 for large sites annually. When you put the costs of moderation against the possible costs of a lawsuit (and the corresponding negative publicity for your brand and your career), what would you choose?

Do you want to learn more about this topic? Post a comment here or Contact us. With over seven years in moderating user generated content for large organizations, we are well versed in protecting your company from these types of issues while providing an excellent online experience for your site’s customers, members, and visitors. Impact Interactions can review all the user generated content placed on your site by members, whether it’s blog entries, comments, message board posts, photos, or videos.

(Cross posted to our blog.)

Following up on the success of the Community 2.0 meeting in Las Vegas, is there any interest in an event this Fall?

If so, what topics are you interested in learning more about?

What success or failure can you share to help our members?

Who’s doing the cutting edge work that you’d like to meet?

We have plenty of time, let’s see what we can put together. Please comment on this blog with your interest (and if you’d like to help organize the meeting with us…).

Thanks,

Mike

Impact Interactions is expanding again…

We are actively seeking people interested in online community to join us as associates, both in our online moderation group and in our online consulting group. These entry-level positions are based in our offices in Maryland. These are not virtual positions, you must be able to work in our offices.

For associates in our online moderation group, we have both full time and part time positions available for all days and shifts. The basics of the job are:

• Familiarity with online communities, MMOGs, Virtual Worlds, and other interactive web based destinations
• A college degree with an emphasis on writing skills (English, Creative Writing, Education, Marketing, or Journalism preferred)
• The ability to work as part of a larger team, while independently meeting your client’s needs for reporting, moderation, and facilitation
• Proficiency with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• Basic understanding of web traffic metrics
• Ability to travel to client sites around the globe as dictated by our clients

For the associates in our online consulting group, you should possess all of the above and additionally:

• A strong understanding of web metrics including experience in using at least one of the major analytics packages (WebTrends, Omniture, Hitbox, Google-Urchin, etc.)
• A basic understanding of SEM, SEO, PPC, and PPA and how to measure results
• The ability to create blog entries for our blog to provide our view of the online community world
• At least one year in a web-oriented position
• Fluency in a foriegn language (German, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Russian, or Polish) is a plus

We are an equal opportunity employer. Disabled and older workers are encouraged to apply. Proof of eligibility to work in the United States is required.

To learn more about these positions or to apply, please send a current copy of your resume in Word, a cover letter, and your salary requirements to Jobs at Impactinteractions.com. Due to the anticipated volume of responses, we will only reply to those candidates who meet our needs.

Thank you for considering Impact Interactions!

In case you missed it, there is a great explanation of the two views of the world of online copyright being fought over right now by Viacom and Google. At the All Things Digital Conference held a couple of weeks ago, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman gave his outline of what is covered and not covered under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) regarding copyright and how he views Google’s YouTube violations of that Act. Giving equal time, there is also an interview with Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, the founders of Google’s YouTube.

Summing it up, Viacom believes that YouTube is violating the DMCA because YouTube is a media company that has knowledge of the copyright violations. The DMCA is written to protect companies involved in the building blocks of the internet such as routing, ISPs, etc. not media companies such as Google and YouTube. Mr. Dauman also states that his company, Viacom was spending large sums of money on a team that was manually going through YouTube (and probably other sites as well) looking for Viacom content which was posted/uploaded to the site by users in violation of the copyright. Those costs in addition to the money that YouTube was making on the ads shown on the site are real money that is coming out of the revenue stream of Viacom.

Google and YouTube on the other hand argue that the DMCA applies to them and that they complied with the law because when notified by copyright holders, they removed the copyrighted materials. Eric Schmidt goes so far as to state that the dispute is about “whether there is a shared responsibility around the take down provision or not.”

The folks at Google understand and clearly state that this is about money… but they want to make the money at someone else’s expense. The DMCA is going to be tested here and hopefully through case law, clarified as to exactly what constitutes a hosted site allowed to store copyrighted materials and what is a media site. Common sense would say that if a site is making money from unlicensed copyrighted content, they should have to pay for it or remove it themselves. In our opinion, it does not make sense to allow sites and companies to earn revenue on copyrighted content for which they don’t own or license the right to show.

Your local cable access station cannot let you sign up for free air time and then show an episode of the Colbert Report you recorded at home, why should the internet be any different? As companies such as Apple and Microsoft work to bring television to the web and help define the industry, sites allowing video uploads should be held to the same standards as local cable access television stations. The principles are the same. It will be very interesting to see how the courts rule. Of course, given the money involved, there will most likely be a deal announced in the next couple of months between Viacom and Google so the law will not be examined as it should.

In terms of the uncertainty right now over the DMCA and online user generated content, we advise our clients to scan their site and remove blatant copyrighted materials uploaded as they find them. For example, message board posts that contain images from Warner Brothers or Disney cartoons are edited. Videos and photos from television shows or movies are edited or removed. When community managers make a “best effort” to remove copyrighted materials, the firm has a defense against the inevitable lawsuit. With copyright confusion, the best defense is a good offense.

Want to learn more about protecting your company and keeping your members happy? Contact us or post a comment here, we’d be happy to discuss the successful best practices we’ve developed in this area.

There is an interesting lawsuit working it’s way through the courts right now in New Haven Connecticut that may impact everyone who runs an online community. The case and arguments are detailed in the article “U.S. Internet defamation suit tests online anonymity” from Reuters on June 16, 2007.  The issues are similar to what many of us in the online community/social media business deal with every day:

• Member A attacks Member B
• Member C, D, E, F & G join in the attack on Member B
• Blogger Z and Y post entries which repeat the attacks on Member B

The question becomes, if what Member A posts is a fabrication and defamatory to Member B’s reputation can Member A be held responsible? What about the other members and the bloggers? And more important to the organization who owns the community…are they responsibile and/or liable for damages?

If the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs in this case, the owners of the community may be liable for not taking action to prevent or remove the offending content. From the article, it is clear that the site is not well run nor does it follow any clearly defined rules of use or terms of service which spell out how the site will be run. That won’t protect them in this case. Here are a couple of the excerpts from the case which were posted and left on the site:

1. According to court documents, a user on the site named “STANFORDtroll” began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit, entitled “Stupid Bitch to Enter Yale Law.” Another threatened to rape and sodomize her, the documents said.
2. Some posts made false claims about her academic record and urged users to warn law firms, or accused her of bribing Yale officials to gain admission and of forming a lesbian relationship with a Yale administrator, the court papers said.

It’s pathetic that a company employee did not think that a threat of rape or sodomy was inappropriate on a site for law school students. 

Many people getting into the industry now would say that the First Amendment covers speech on the internet… but I would reply that there are limits and defamation of character is not covered in the case of private persons. We are still in the infancy of the case law which will be applied to user generated content. From the article:

• The two, who say they suffered substantial “psychological and economic injury,” also sued a former manager of the site because he refused to remove disparaging messages. The manager had cited free-speech protections.

What I find a little sad is that a site manager allowed comments about threatening another member to remain on the site. There needs to be a zero tolerance policy regarding threats in any online community.

This case and the company being sued represent a text book case study for how not to run an online community. Any organization that is going to offer an online community needs not only a clear terms of service/rules of use agreement but also a well trained team to moderate the user generated content. Moderators must fairly enforce the rules and be quick to act when the level of discourse sinks to the threat stage. 

We’ll see how the court rules on this. It’s impact could be widespread.

Mukund Mohan has published an interesting survey, with a punchline that might go like this: “IT reports to marketing.” The survey — which canvassed 112 high-tech companies — found that 30% of developer communities “belong” to marketing. Fascinating stuff, for several reasons. First, one might expect — as did Mukund — that most of these communities would report to engineering. Second, there’s the challenge that marketing folks will face in “managing” people with whom they have little in common. The key theme here is the resocialization of the enterprise, a theme that I am hoping to tackle at the INBOX conference in June.

In the meantime, more food for thought: a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (the study was sponsored by FAST Search & Transfer, a Hubbub client) found that while many CEOs favor the adoption of Web 2.0 tools, people throughout the rest of the enterprise — CFOs, CIOs, and middle managers — are often out of sync. It’s time we all get along, and learn enough to speak the same language.

We conducted a 23 day survey of 112 high technology (mostly software) companies in March & April 2007. The primary intent was to understand their use of developer communities so we could help companies benchmark against each other.

· 61% of respondents replied via email and the rest were available to talk on the phone.

· 93% of the companies provide commercial software and the remainder were open source providers.

· 39% of companies have over $500 Million in revenue, 35% $10 Million and $500 Million and the rest were less than $10 Million in annual revenues.

Survey Highlights

1. ¾ (75%) don’t provide ROI information for their developer communities and don’t see the need from management to do so. One participant put it “Its so obvious what the ROI is that we don’t see the need to justify it”.
2. Nearly ½ (47%) of the communities are run with open source software and another 29% were in house developed. Most participants are looking for alternatives, but don’t see any “comprehensive provider” based on their needs.
1. “Everyone has a little bit and it is tough to figure out who’s the best, so we used open source to get started”.
2. “When we started there was no one, so we built it ourselves, now we are looking at alternative options and have budget for it”.
3. Biggest challenge of running a community still remains finding the right resources. 57% of the people claimed inability to get the right people to facilitate the community
1. “You pretty much need the right level of technical depth, customer-centric support, part trainer, part evangelist. I cannot think of more than 2-3 people in the company and outside that can do this well”.
2. “It’s a very fulfilling role, but very demanding in knowledge. We interviewed over 40 people to find out that the right person does not exist”
4. Some of the key benefits they get from the developer community:
1. “Our community created extensions and ported the software to other environments”.
2. “We get development support for our product 24X7 because of our Australia developer community”.
3. “At our user conference we had 4-5 developers get together and put a demo of the new offering and how it can integrate to Adobe Flash, which our product team did not even consider”.
4. “They were spreading the message to our customer base about the new SDK before it came out. We had a huge up tick in downloads when we released the product”.
5. “Our management wanted to find out where the holes were in the API before we published it. Our community gave 43 bug reports in the first 3 hours of us putting it out – Awesome”.
5. While we expected most (if not all) developer community owners to report to Engineering or R&D over 30% said they reported to Marketing (fewer than 25% reported to Support).
1. “Our Marketing team looks at this as an addition to their user group meetings and annual user conference”.
2. “Our budget comes from the customer outreach & reference program, since we view developers as our customers. They are the ones that recommend our bug tracking tool”

We will start to share more of the details of the entire survery in the next few days at Best Engaging Communities.

In this interview, John talks about the impact of community on publishing.

(cross posted from the Community 2.0 Site)

 John Winsor [30:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1049)

The Pharma industry typically tends to be a good leading indicator for things about software and enterprise software in particular. So I was naturally inclined to read this piece on CNNFN about Pity the poor pharma sales rep.

Here is a synopsis:
“It’s hard out there for drug sales reps—particularly if they work in places where gaining access to doctors is becoming increasingly difficult.”

“Sales reps are facing massive layoffs and falling incomes as commissions drop. Drug companies, meanwhile, are scrambling to come up with new ways to get their medications in front of the doctors who would prescribe them.”

“Increasingly, however, doctors are slamming the door on such visits. Doctors who work in group practices don’t have the freedom they once did to listen to sales pitches: They have to adhere to company policy, which nowadays can bar sales reps from doctors’ offices. Compounding the problem for sales reps are managed care policies that favor low-cost generics over reps’ name-brand drugs.”

“Jennifer Norton Wilson, clinical pharmacist for Everett Clinic, said the 250-physician group instituted a closed-door policy against drug reps in 1998 out of concern for the increasingly aggressive tactics that drug sales reps were using.”

“Kindler did not explain how the rep would win this coveted half-hour with the doctor. But Joseph Tooley, analyst for A.G. Edwards & Sons, said the best way for a rep to get a doctor’s attention is to have a new product that’s demonstrated, through credible clinical tests, to have an edge over its rivals.”

So lets review:
1. Sales reps use hard sell tactics - Same for software
2. Generics are preferred by many - Open source movement in software
3. Doctors are slamming their doors on pushy sales reps - Same for an enterprise sale rep

The one interesting thing is that new products that have demonstrated success and have a good product.

That is the easy part. But the other part is to get that information to doctors from other doctors.

That’s where you community comes in. Assuming you have a great product (big assumption) and your “problem” is getting the message about it to potential customers, the biggest champions would be your existing customers.

So if you are talking to the VP of Sales and want to get him to buy into online communities (especially if you are in an enterprise software company) the value of the community as a great door opener (based on the content and based on referrals from other customers) should be obvious.

It is very well known that great content always wins at the end. So if you are a media company and have invested heavily in reporters and journalists, with the advent of social media - blogs, RSS, etc. how do you ensure you still have great content not only from your own company, but also user generated content.

USA Today, CNN (I Report) have all attempted to engage their audiences by allowing user generated content within their site.

The interesting part is that now with RSS, you no longer have to be at the “website of the provider” but read and access that content within Google reader or My Yahoo or Newsgator. So, then the obvious point is the only thing that a subscriber sees is your content - NOT your BRAND.

Some interesting questions ?

Does the community with the BEST content (self generated and user generated) win?

Are companies going to take ownership and responsibility for user generated content - since its going to be “syndicated within their brand”?

If content will define the brand, then most marketers will figure out that they have to incent users and make it easier for users to express their creative and unique side. What are the best ways to do that?

What do you think are other questions that marketers will face regarding communities and User generated content?

PALO ALTO, Calif. — March 31, 2007 — Hubbub, a provider of collaborative communication services, is taking the wraps off a new wiki that’s dedicated to helping Silicon Valley companies improve their April Fools jokes. The wiki — dubbed the “PleaseBeFunnier Wiki” — will go live late in the day on April 1st, or anytime after Hubbub receives a critical mass of nominations.

[UPDATE: The PleaseBeFunnier Wiki has gone live, with the following pre-set categories for indexing and collaborating on April Fool jokes:

People Who Actually Fell for Silicon Valley April Fools Jokes

People Who Actually Fell for Silicon Valley April Fools Jokes But Won’t Admit It

Incredibly Grouchy People — Other than Us — Who Are Tired of Lame April Fools Jokes

“If we have learned anything over the past few years, it’s that the ability to execute a good April Fools joke is critical to a company’s exit strategy,” said an anonymous Silicon Valley venture capitalist. “That’s why so many startups spend so much time and money working on them. We hope to enlist many of our portfolio companies on the PleaseBeFunnier Wiki in the hopes we get a faster return on our investment. We also hope the jokes get funnier.”

Hubbub will also provide a suite of professional services for companies who need special help — the severely comically challenged — at various stages of the joke-creation process. For these competively-priced services, the agency has enlisted a deep bench of Silicon Valley cut-ups and funnymen, including Intel CEO Paul Otellini, HP CEO Mark Hurd, and Google co-founder Larry Page.

“Have you ever spent an evening with any of these guys?,” asked Guillermo Bernini, community manager for the PleaseBeFunnier Wiki. “They’re a total riot, and that’s why they are where they are today. Hire us now and we can get them to scope out your 2008 joke today. But you better sign up early — our B-list is not quite as impressive.”

Big news today is that Dell will begin shipping Linux on desktops and laptops. Bloggers are noting that the idea got lots of play last month when Dell launched its IdeaStorm site, but not much has been written about what this means for co-design. The concept, popularized by Patty Seybold, is that a company can set up a customer site to collaborate on product direction and design. That’s the driving principal behind IdeaStorm. And what’s really interesting is that the first newsworthy result from this project is “Linux on Dells,” something that many people have been clamoring for, long before IdeaStorm. But it appears that co-design has legitimized this inevitable move for Dell … and that it has legitimized it with numbers. As Dell noted today, an IdeaStorm survey found that more than 70% of the respondents said they wanted Linux on Dells. Never mind that polls like this are biased through self-selection. The 70% was, perhaps, just what Dell needed to rationalize this move, and — of course — disarm its long-time partners at Microsoft. What can they say? Recommendation to MSFT: let your customers do the talking.

Original post.

Tom Evslin (via Kevin Werbach) has a great post on the success of Facebook. The bottom line: “Facebook is not for FORMING new groups in cyberspace; it’s for serving EXISTING groups.” He goes on explaining that “Facebook is a tool for creating entries about yourself and then RESTRICTING the information in those entries to the group or groups you identify with.”

According to Evslin, the key to success for Facebook is that the are not a “group forming network,” but a “group enhancing network.”

Much of this is true for business communities as well. Those who are most successful tap into existing groups of people and give them an opportunity to better function as a group. Many who try to create a community where none exists do fail.

This is a great interview where Jon Spector, Vice Dean and Director Wharton’s Aresty Institute for Executive Education interviews Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. The interview took place at the Community 2.0 Conference a couple of weeks ago. Topics include the origins of Craigslist, customer co-development and the future of community.

 Spector - Newmark Interview [20:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1157)