Archive for the 'Podcasting Legal Briefs' Category

Podosphere vs. Apple

This morning, 17 boiler workers at the Ford plant in Oakville went off the job, essentially closing down production of the one of the largest manufacturing plants in Ontario and preventing thousands of assembly line workers from starting their shift.

The reason? They found out that 4 of their colleagues were going to lose their jobs. Instead of seeing those 4 jobs go, all 17 boiler workers stood in solidarity, walked off the job and created a visual distraction from the QEW, one of Canada’s busiest highways, and grinding it to a crawl.

Blogosphere has already flexed its mighty muscle and can be a nasty beast if you rub it the wrong way. Podosphere has yet to show how powerful it can be.

Apple’s cease & desist letters to Podcast Ready is others is podosphere’s first test. How will it rally around those companies who have received these letters from Apple? Will podosphere be like those 17 boiler workers - small in numbers, mighty in spirit - and finally show that it’s the David to Apple’s Goliath?

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Apple Flexes “Pod” Legal Muscle

Apple has started its quest to hand out cease & desist letters to anyone using the word “pod” in their company name. Some of the casualties are:

  • Tightpod - A company that markets a line of decorative, patterned laptop protectors.
  • Podcast Ready - A company that helps the user download podcasts to their non-iTunes podcast player.
  • Profit Pod - (not even related to podcasting) A device that tracks arcade machines for money and then wirelessly transmit the information to a PDA or notebook computer.

When money’s no longer an issue and your legal team is struck with boredom, hit the very people evangelizing your products and services with lawsuits.

Hmmm…this reminds me of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Napster. Instead of looking at the reasons why people want to download music for free and developing a paid model with Napster, RIAA instead takes Napster to court, gets it shut down, then starts to sue individual downloaders.

Absurd. Apple is fighting the very thing making its products and its company a success. Utterly strange.

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