ISP Copyright Liability Presentation – Communication Processes in Law

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The following work was undertaken by me on the 5th April 2011 as a presentation assignment for a brilliant subject I am undertaking at law school called “Communication Processes in Law”. I chose to do my presentation on the relatively new legal principles of ISP Liability for BitTorrent.

Matthew Beilby – Introduces the presentation

Ladies, Gentlemen and Chairperson,

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), as part of a global campaign of strategic litigation, launched a case against Internet Service Provider iiNet alleging that they ‘authorized’ the copyright infringement undertaken on their network through the BitTorrent protocol.

This case and subsequent appeal has lead to the creation of the area of “ISP Copyright Liability”. Tyler Wright has been an independent researcher in the area of online copyright law for the past 3 years and has undertaken a number of research projects into the area. He will now briefly outline this new niche area of law.

Tyler Wright – Speaker

Thank you Matt, Good Evening Everybody,

As some of you may be aware, two months ago the iiNet Appeal was handed down with a decision in favour of the ISP. This judgement has created a new derivative area of law known colloquially as ISP liability.

The key question is are ISP’s liable for the copyright infringement that happens on their networks via the BitTorrent protocol?
For those that aren’t aware, BitTorrent is the latest in a series of Peer-To-Peer technologies which enables file sharing between individual users (or peers) over the Internet. It is estimated to account for between 27% and 55% of all Internet traffic depending on location.

In a separate study it has been estimated that 89% of the non-pornographic content of this traffic infringes copyright.
Naturally, this figure is somewhat disturbing to big content industry groups such as the AFACT. So what they have done in an effort to curb infringement is used analytical software to actually track certain files through the BitTorrent network that infringe copyright. They have then issued notices to iiNet, stating that if they do not act to suspend the accounts of those responsible for sharing the copyrighted content, they themselves might be found liable for authorising copyright infringement. When iiNet refused to act upon this information, the constituent bodies of AFACT launched legal proceedings and this has lead to the emergence of the legal principles which I will now outline for you.

The key legal question to ask is found under s 101 of the Copyright Act; Have the actions of the ISP authorised, that is “sanctioned, approved or countenanced” the primary act of infringement. Before the iiNet case, there had been no Australian litigation regarding the liability of ISP’s for BitTorrent traffic. Consequentially, there remained uncertainty in the telecommunications industry about which provisions of the Copyright Act, if any, would protect ISP’s from liability for BitTorrent infringement. Since the appeal in February, these questions have been answered, with the first judicial application of s 101(1A) of the Copyright Act to the BitTorrent protocol.

Under these provisions, there are 3 key considerations in determining whether or not an ISP has authorised copyright infringement.

Power to Prevent

The first asks what is the extent of the [ISP's] power to prevent the doing of the act concerned. The court found that iiNet did not control the BitTorrent protocol which was the relevant means of infringement. The court used the metaphor of a library and photocopier to illustrate the distinction. The photocopier may be the means of infringement but just because the library provides the electricity to the photocopier, does not mean it authorises the infringement or has the relevant power to prevent it. The same can be thought of with the BitTorrent protocol being akin to the photocopier, and the Internet to the electricity that allows its function. Except in contrast to a library, an ISP has much less technical power to stop infringement via BitTorrent, than a library does with a photocopier.

Nature of the Relationship

The second consideration examines the nature of the relationship between the infringer and the alleged authoriser. The court found that the relationship between ISP and customer was a “direct relationship” in contract governed by the terms of its Customer Relationship Agreement. It was found by the court that, given the nature of the Customer Relationship Agreement, there was no ‘sufficient nexus between the profitability and commercial interests of the respondent, and the infringing activities of the customer to support a finding of authorisation’.

Have reasonable steps been taken to prevent infringement?

The third and final consideration asks whether the ISP took any reasonable steps to prevent or avoid the doing of the act. To answer this question, the court referred to its findings regarding relevant powers to prevent infringement. The court found the only relevant power that iiNet had to prevent infringement was to act on the AFACT notices. However these notices were merely allegations, and should iiNet simply act on mere allegations which turned out to be wrong, they would be breaching their obligations under the Customer Relationship Agreement and exposing themselves to civil liability for damages. The court considered this to be an unreasonable step to take in order to prevent infringement.

Consequently, the court ruled in favour of the respondent iiNet and established a strong precedent that ISP’s are not liable for Copyright infringement via the BitTorrent protocol.

To conclude, If your ISP ever sends you an infringement notice from AFACT, you can rest assured that it is merely an allegation and that it is entirely unnecessary. Perhaps you should also switch to an ISP that will stand up for its customers – like iiNet. – Thank you.

Durak! In Russia, Cards Play You!

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Durak, because Russian cards are awesome

Durak was first introduced to me in late 2007 by a Russian friend of mine. At the time, we were at his place playing texas hold-em (I was meant to be finishing my contracts 2 assignment that I’d started earlier that day and was due the next). Anyway, he had some other Russian friends of his over and they suggested we try what they called a “traditional Russian card game”. They called this game Durak (Russian for “the fool”) and explained to me the in’s and out’s of how it works.

Four years have passed and Durak has become something I introduce regularly to friends at parties or on train rides etc.. It’s a fantastic game that I highly recommend and so I’ve decided to dedicate this post to explaining how it works in my own words. Including some home rules we have established that sort of serve to adapt it to typical Australian reactions to the game.

Setup and Objective

The objective is to get rid of all your cards as quickly as possible. The last to do so is declared “durak”, the fool. So in this sense there are no winners in this game per se. When I explain that to most people it doesn’t occur to them why there would be no winners. But its not about winning, like anything truly Russian, its about vodka. The fool is typically required to drink a pre-determined amount of vodka, usually a shot.

Deck: Take a standard 52 card deck and remove numerical cards from 2-5 discarding them for the purposes of durak. This setup typically works for 2-5 players with about 10 minutes per game. If there are more players (and you can have almost as many as you want) you should find an identical deck, remove the numerical 2-5′s again and combine it with another deck.

Hand: Each player is dealt 6 cards. Players must at all times have 6 cards until all the cards from the deck are cleared. Players pick-up from the deck in the order in which they released their cards

Table/Surface: As mentioned above I have played this on seats of trains or pretty much anywhere, but it is best to use a flat surface wherever possible as it does require a bit of space with 3-6 people.

The “special” suit: In traditional card terms, this is known as the “trump” suit. But I’m assuming that the reason my Russian friend called it the ‘special’ suit was a direct translation from Russian. Anyway, the ‘special’ suit is determined at the beginning of the game randomly, just pick a card from the deck after dealing. The suit that is determined trumps all of the other cards in play, except higher cards of the same suit. This will be explained further later, for the moment, place the card underneath the deck so it is half facing out.

The Turn

The turn is based around an attack/defend principle that has proven somewhat counter-intuitive to social users used to poker. First of all however, you must determine who goes first. This is achieved by determining who has the lowest value special suit card in their hand. However, it is wise to do so without revealing exactly what card that is. So essentially you have to come to a group agreement about who has the lowest special card by looking at each other. This can lead to some interesting situations, or some people may just choose to let another go first. Either way, whoever goes first is typically given somewhat of an advantage, therefore if they are required to show one of their cards in order to prove they deserve this advantage, then it is somewhat mitigated. However you determine who goes first, its relatively unimportant as long as nobody gets too much of an advantage in your method.

Whoever goes first starts by launching an attack against the person next to him/her in a clockwise direction. This person is the defender. At this point (and at any further point in the turn) if any person has one or more cards of the same rank (number) as the attackers card, he/she may join the attack by placing it in a separate place on the table. The defender is then obliged to defend from both these attacks. However, the attack must at all times be possible to defend from, if the defender has only 6 cards, you cannot attack him/her with more than 6 cards.

The defender must then defend from each of these attacks individually by putting a card of higher rank from the same suit on top of each of the cards set out before him/her. If the defender does not have a higher card of the same rank then he/she can choose to use a card of any rank from the special suit to defend that particular attack. If the attack is a special card, then it can only be successfully defended with a higher special card. Therefore, Ace of special is unable to be defended.

If  the defender is unable to defend from the attack then he/she has to pick-up all the cards before them, including those added by people who were not the original attacker. If this occurs then the defender misses their opportunity to attack and the turn passes to the next player. If the defender succeeds then it is his/her turn to attack the next person and the cards involved in the attack and defence (i.e. the ones on the table) are ‘burnt’ and taken out of play.

The game continues until there are no cards left in the deck, the card which is used to indicate which suit is special can also be picked up when the deck is at its end.

In Russia, cards play you.

In addition to the above rules. I was instructed that one of the purposes of playing durak was to try and cheat. Typically this is achieved by doing something like passing off a heart for a diamond, in the hope that nobody notices your actually defending a 6 of diamonds with a 7 of hearts and thus avoiding the use of a special card to defend from the attack. However, if somebody notices this, then typically you are obliged to reverse your move and take a shot of vodka. So conceivably you try and cheat, get caught, get drunk, get stupid, try it again and the process repeats. So as you can see, it makes for an interesting party game.

I have had a heap of fun introducing this game to my friends, and I would encourage you to do the same. Many card enthusiasts know of durak but it is not nearly as well known as texas hold-em. I do however enjoy it much more in a social situation and it is my hope that you will too.

Google’s guidelines for SEO

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I came across these guidelines on the Google webmaster site that I think everybody should be familiar with if they aren’t already.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291

Further to this, and specific to the Australian marketplace common sense is often the best tool for making a decision about your online future. If an offer generally seems too good to be true, chances are it probably is.

Never hesitate to ask about the specific processes involved in SEO, they are not trade secrets or confidential, they are simply a series of best practices that when observed often lead to favourable search engine rankings and browser experience.

If you’re currently in the market for an SEO, check out paragonmarketing.com.au, its a project I’m currently working on to create a top-tier online marketing company.

Common sense is often the best tool for making a decision about your online future. If an offer generally seems too good to be true, chances are it probably is. Never hesitate to ask about the specific processes involved in SEO, they are not trade secrets or confidential, they are simply a series of best practices that when observed often lead to favourable search engine rankings and browser experience.

Copyright and the Digital Age – 3 Problems

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Copyright and the Digital Age – 3 Problems

When Shawn Fanning, a university student at Northeastern University in Boston, decided he would turn his hairstyle-based nickname into a business venture in June 1999 he probably thought he was just being a little innovative. After all, he was just taking his every day activities and streamlining them; that surely defines innovation. But Shawn’s innovation could turn out to be nothing short of a revolution in the long-term. Already what started as a garage business has spawned an entirely new culture the likes of which the world never saw coming. And certainly the likes of which the movie and music industries never saw coming. What I’m referring to is the birth of of peer-to-peer file sharing, theNapster.

I will address the Napster saga further down the track but in the meantime, I think it’s important to look at the history and the natural evolution of file sharing. Where it came from, why and how it started, and why it exploded into the phenomenon it is today.

It was Acceptable in the 80′s

What we now know as the “Cassette Culture” was the social norm amongst young adults and late teens in the 1980′s. With the invention of the cassette like the printing press before it, the general public were given the technical freedom to copy, distribute and remix published works, in this case music, and share them amongst each other. Recordings of live concerts, tracks from the radio and official releases from artists were shared freely and large record companies like Sony BMG or Universal Music did relatively little to campaign against this emerging breach of their copyright.

Instead of filing law suits against 16-25 year old’s and cassette manufacturers for breach of copyright they became innovators with the creation of the compact disc. The CD, as it became known, dawned the golden age of capitalist music enterprise with artists like Michael Jackson and Madonna riding the proverbial wave to wealth and taking their record companies with them. Innovation was rewarded with wealth and riches; and the “king pins” of the music industry bought houses in Highland park, Orange County and Hawaii.

In the meantime, technology continued to evolve. Property as a western, capitalist concept became less and less about the material, and more and more about the immaterial, the intellectual and the audio-visual. The issue then arises, how does the law governing property relationships adapt to this new dynamic in property. The answer takes us back to the jurisprudential writings of Marx and Engels.

Common and Capital Property

In a lecture at the European Graduate School in Switzerland in 2009, Professor Michael Hardt made a presentation which I think merits unique perspective to my emerging argument. In the era of Marx, there was a constant dichotomy between immobile property (such as land) and mobile property (the products of industry). Marx saw an inevitable triumph of mobile property over immobile property.

In his presentation, Hardt refers to a similar modern dichotomy existing between material and immaterial property. He identifies that given the fact that the immaterial form of property ignores the logic of scarcity, it will inevitably triumph over its material brother-type.

Being the Capitalistic society that we are, our laws of intellectual property essentially try to privatise what Hardt argues is otherwise common, and control it as property through Patents, Trademarks and Copyright. The inherent issue he identifies is the policing of such content when it is so easily shared or reproduced with others.

The second pertinent issue Hardt identifies is the productivity of property. Particularly, that property is more productive the more it is shared, common and the less it is regulated by the state. Sharing an idea will not reduce its productivity, but generally increase it. And in this regard ideas, images and affects should be common to increase societal productivity as a whole.

The laws of intellectual property in modern capitalist society are constantly forcing what is naturally common into privatisation; and the constant pressure of societal productivity is forcing the private back into common. In short, Hardt identifies the ultimate synthesis to capitalist society is that it will inevitably collapse in contradiction forming a new type of society where the common fundamentally undermines the relations of property; somewhat analogous to Marx’s original theory of communism.

Building on Hardt’s theory, I would point out that at what capitalists refer to as a more “primitive” point in our civilisation; songs, words, languages and images were all part of the common. Then along came capitalist society to privatise and commodify the common to benefit those in a position of superior hierarchy. So much so now that it flies in the face of creativity and productivity, the very thing copyright was created to protect. Consider the recent case of plagiarism against 80′s hit band Men at Work. A number one single in the US and Australia, Land Down Under, was earlier this year found by Justice Peter Jacobson in the Federal court to infringe the copyright of Larrikin Music. The infringement was for a 7-9 second flute riff that resembled the household Australian girl guides song Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree written in 1934 by Marion Sinclair. Larrikin Music had bought the copyright to the song in 1990 after Sinclair’s death in 1988.

So essentially what has happened in this case is a productive entity, Men at Work, is having 40-60% of their revenues from Land Down Under redistributed to a non-productive entity, Larrikin Music completely bypassing the original creator. And this is happening under a set of laws designed to induce productivity. Not only do I very clearly see the inherent contradiction highlighted by Hardt’s presentation but it positively boggles my mind how we as a society can let this happen. As someone who considers himself to be a creative person, it disgusts me, and it should disgust you too.

When reporters from The Age asked Norm Laurie, owner of Larrikin Music about the song he said “It’s earned a hell of a lot of money for us since we’ve bought it,”. This from a corporation that didn’t even know Marion Sinclair or even exist when she originally wrote the song; and yet here they are opportunistically profiteering over it. Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gumtree has been a household song for generations. I distinctly remember watching it performed on ABC’s Play School when I was a child. For all intents and purposes, this creative work by Sinclair had become a common. In Hardt’s presentation, he talks about real Pirates and posits that they have a relatively noble vocation; they steal property. Corporations on the other hand as he illustrates, steal the common, and transform it into property. I am more than inclined to agree on this point. It is not those who breach copyright that are truly stealing, it is those who wield it as a weapon to steal that which belongs to us all. If you are reading, Norm Laurie, congratulations… You are a pirate.

War on the common

In the preceding paragraphs I touched on the dichotomy of the productivity of the common against the law of the capital. One of the major forces of the common is undoubtedly peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing technology, the Internet and by association, globalisation. The easier it becomes for the common to be shared, the less power the laws of the capital have in policing it and, according to Hardt, the further capitalism is to imploding on itself.

Earlier this year (2010) Justice Dennis Cowdroy took what I consider to be a colossal step forward in Australian Copyright law with ruling in favour of Internet service provider (ISP)iiNet. The case solidifies as law that ISP’s are not liable for copyright infringement for uses of the BitTorrent p2p technology on its network.

However interesting the legal reasons behind the decision might be, I am not going to address them directly per se, that would be extremely verbose of me . The larger issue here is the technical, political and legal context which has forced 35 major film/record labels to sue iiNet out of desperation.

Make no mistake, this move illustrates just how desperate the record labels are. They should be, they are losing a war that they propagated. In the late 80′s when their copyright was being threatened, they chose to become productive, to contribute to the common, and now we have CD’s, a fantastically innovative technology. This time however, when a messy haired young uni student creates a technological innovation, they villianise him, accuse him of piracy and decide to start a war; a war that I predict will cost them their existence as an industry. Before I elaborate on why BitTorrent and the iiNet decision marks, and should mark the end of the record label’s war on p2p, It is necessary to revisit the (in keeping with the metaphor) “battles” that lead to this “victory”.

Napster was innovative because of the way it integrated a search engine (solely for mp3′s), a protocol for p2p transfer, and Internet relay chat (IRC) into one piece of software. These elements relied on the software and a central Napster server to keep track of where an mp3 (a music file) was located and to introduce the client searching for the music file to the client which contained the music file. The following is an accurate depiction:

In order to successfully defeat Napster, the record companies focussed on suing Shawn Fanning and his company which controlled the Napster server driving the two most essential features of the technology. At the time, it seemed like a victory for the record companies, who when grouped together in class action had colossal litigation resources in comparison to a small company like Napster. The service was forced into liquidation, its assets sold off to pay for damages paid to the record companies. The brand and identity was bought by US retail giant Best Buy and now operates as a subscription service paying kickbacks to the music industry.

However, like the result of a doctor over-administering antibiotics, the proverbial bacteria of the p2p sharing market mutated and was quickly renewed under a new model; theKazaa/Gnutella network. This technology eliminated the need for a tracking server instead hopping data packets through peers. The following is an accurate depiction:

In Australia, the Kazaa model had a slight technical difference but this is irrelevant to the legal argument. In this instance, the record companies (and also the film industry, because now the technology was not just limited to music files) focused on suing the company providing updates to the software. Without updates and cohesion in the network, they hoped that the service would fall apart. They were here also successful to some extent. Legal action overseas brought about a $100 million settlement with the record companies and in Australia Sharman Networks, the company behind Kazaa was ordered to convert the software into a legal music service providing copyright kickbacks to the industry.

Once again, instead of providing an injection of innovation into society, big film and music decided they would do what they do best; leech off the creativity of others for their own profit. And so far they had been successful.

In April 2001 programmer Bram Cohen invented the BitTorrent protocol. Unlike the two previous generations of popular file sharing protocols, BitTorrent centralised nothing. The following is an accurate depiction of how the technology functions:

The first thing you might notice about the differences between BitTorrent and its predecessor p2p technologies is what I like to call “The p2p Separation of Powers”. Nothing in this software model is centralised. The search engine takes the form of a separate website and anybody can economically and easily establish and run a tracking server.

In the US, Canadian-based BitTorrent search engine Isohunt has been sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). In that case, the judge ruled that because BitTorrent had legitimate uses, it would not be shut down, instead, Isohunt creator Gary Fung was ordered to strip the site of all but the bare necessities of a search engine so as to not endorse or “authorise” copyright infringement.

With this in mind, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) comprising of 35 Australian film industry giants launched a massive class action suit against the only remaining deep-pocket in the equation, the ISP. The strategy inherent in this action is to force the ISP to police copyright infringement for AFACT and essentially drop its own customers who were found to be using the BitTorrent client illegitimately.

As I have already touched on, Cowdroy J’s historic decision is the first step forward in sending the film and music industry a clear message. AFACT have exercised their right to appeal and will no doubt fight the decision. But what can they really expect to achieve through continuing this constant attack on the institutions surrounding p2p technology? I implore the High Court uphold Cowdroy J’s decision. Even if the appeal is successful and ISP’s are found liable to police their customers; I have no doubt that the forces of the common will find a new champion to continue the de-capitalisation of property and if so who knows what that might look like?

Does AFACT, the MPAA and other coalitions of media enterprise really wish to force the innovative common to come up with an even scarier obstacle for their already outdated and newly obliterated business model? The answer is to stop peddling frivolous law suits against those propagating and enabling breach of copyright and to diversify and innovate before as an industry, they cease to exist.

The collateral damage of war

Perhaps the most sinister side-effect of the constant media campaigning by AFACT and the MPAA is highlighted in a book by Professor Laurence Lessig of Stanford University Law School entitled “Remix”. Lessig ‘zero’s in’ on remix culture and identifies it as the “collateral damage” of what he calls “copyright wars”.

Lessig identifies that society cannot possibly halt this remix culture, but can only criminalise it. In doing so, you are telling younger generations that being creative through remix culture, downloading movies on the internet and in doing all the activities that their generation so dictates they should do, they are being “Pirates”, criminals. As Lessig points out, this has a corrosive effect on the very foundation of the rule of law as younger generations start to embrace rebellion and criminal activity as a concept. I found this particularly disturbing on an entirely new level and thus sought to find empirical evidence to analyse this issue.

In the latter half of the decade, AFACT in Australia and the MPAA in America launched a series of cinema and DVD trailer ad’s aimed at creating a social stigma and cultivating a blame culture for copyright infringement of films. The following images may be familiar from their campaign:

I started my search for evidence on what is now the worlds most popular social networking site; Facebook. As I typed in the words “You wouldn’t steal a car” the dynamic search feature instantly returned me a result which lead me to the following group:

“You wouldn’t steal a car” ; I would if i could download it!
1,304 fans as of 07/05/10

Aspiring for fairness I searched in vain to find a group which voiced the opposite opinion but all I could manage to locate was the following group:

You wouldn’t steal a bag… you wouldn’t steal a car… movie piracy is a crime!
1 fan as of 07/05/10

A ratio of 1,304:1 of people who were ok with movie piracy in my social network of 200+ friends is a fairly disturbing discovery in itself. However, I thought no better place to find empirical evidence that the younger generation embracing remix culture is content with being criminalised than the home of remix itself; Youtube. A simple keyword search of “You wouldn’t steal a car” spawned a multitude of parodies of the AFACT/MPAA campaign images with one very clear message:

Time for a change

In the above paragraphs I have identified and explained what I strongly believe to be the three biggest legal issues facing law in the Internet realm in Australia today:

  1. The increasing irrelevance of copyright in the digital age which is becoming a force against creativity, rather than for it;
  2. Ensuring the frivolous litigation of every possible angle on p2p sharing by the AFACT and the MPAA is brought to a decisive halt in the High Court; and
  3. Preventing the corrosion of the efficacy of the rule of law amongst the younger generations by preventing the criminalisation of remix culture and file sharing.

These issues as I have demonstrated above are all immensely complicated, interwoven and complex. But the greater issue that ties them all together is that the law that applies to the material world is too slow to change with technology. Thus what occurs is that in a substantial way, even with legislation like the DMCA in the US, the principles which have historically applied only to the material world, are suddenly being applied to the immaterial world and catastrophe is inevitably ensuing. It’s time for that to change.

What is a Landing Page?

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In this article series we will guide you through the “do’s” and the “definitely do not do’s” of creating effective online marketing campaigns through use of landing pages. First we look at what a landing page is and why they are important to you as a business owner and search engine marketer.

Landing Pages 101

In simple terms, a landing page can be classified as any page by which a visitor enters your site. While this definition is technically accurate, for most of the websites that we come across, this simply means the homepage.

While your homepage is generally considered the primary point of entry, We think its a mistake to treat it as such. Your homepage should serve as a gateway for the information contained on your site, but it is by no means the only point of entrance. Even so, the homepage is an important part of your online marketing strategy, so lets go over what exactly you should use your homepage for.

As a rule of thumb, nothing should be more than 3 clicks away from your homepage. Your homepage should also clearly and effectively communicate three things:

  1. That your visitor has come to the right place;
  2. That you are able to alleviate the visitors pain, in the sense that you can provide what they are looking for;
  3. The purpose(s) of your website; and
  4. How to get in contact with you.

Once you get past this information and associated design features you have little or no room left (without bombarding your visitor) to actually provide specific keyword targeted content to your visitor about a given topic. Imagine you run a plumbing business. On the homepage you have to provide your user with a number of things like:

  • Where you are located and what areas you service
  • your experience
  • your expertise
  • your unique selling proposition

Your keywords for your homepage might include things like: “qualified plumber plumbing service gold coast lowest price”. This would be perfectly acceptable for homepage content and is more or less exactly the sort of copy you are looking to include on your homepage from a usability perspective. But as far as search engine benefit goes, you will be trying to compete with every other qualified plumbing service that claims to have the lowest price – a particularly onerous task.

So from a search engine marketing perspective, if someone clicks onto google and types in “leaky drain pipe” your business is nowhere to be seen even though you have the exact information and can fix the problem that the searcher is after. To solve this problem, the best thing to do would be to create a page about leaky pipes and provide useful information about how to solve the problem. This is what we refer to as a campaign-orientated landing page; a point of entrance to your site other than your homepage. We do this because its much more likely that your searcher is looking for the solution to a problem, rather than to buy a product.

In the next instalment we will look at writing copy, and how to best appeal to your browser.

Open Licensing Means Productivity

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It’s no secret that the internet poses new challenges for conventional business production models. Like the industrial revolution before it, the technological changes of the internet age mean some industries are struggling to stay alive and compete with the new realities of the marketplace. The way we see this happening is two-fold. On the one hand you have those who are struggling to compete with the internet because it offers a technological solution for their customers that actually replaces their original product; newspapers, for example. And on the other hand, you have those companies which offered a digitally reproducible product in the first place, but are now finding themselves unable to control it out in the vast global economy; record labels, for example.

Well we see a third emerging category which is just on the brink of truly entering the fold; the collaborative community product. The best example we can think of is Mozilla Firefox. In 2004 Microsoft’s Internet Explorer held roughly 80-90% of the market share for web browser software; a true monopoly by anyone’s standards. In the six years since Firefox has managed to snatch a whopping 20-32% of market share that was squarely in Microsoft’s hands. What started off as a niche browser for tech-savvy developers is becoming more and more mainstream everyday. Why has this occurred?

Open Licensing promotes productivity and community

Corporate software giants spend endless sums of money on trying to hire the right employee to head their software development teams. Diversity hiring, as it is sometimes called, is the corporate way of trying to promote innovative ideas from free thinking individuals. The only problem with this strategy is that corporate culture is so competitive, the real free thinkers are often not considered for the  position for whatever reason; qualifications, poor people skills, or a poor reference from past employment. Some firms may simply feel like they can’t afford to pay a yearly wage to someone who doesn’t suit the corporate culture.

As a result, corporate software development teams are constituted from educated, well presented individuals that represent only a small demographic of the population. These individuals are then tasked with creating a universal piece of software that you and me may end up having to use on a daily basis. The result is often an annoying piece of software or set of unintuitive features or practices that we have to have a degree in software engineering just to figure out. Remember this little guy?

clippit is so annoying

Typical intellectual property laws and EULA’s (end user license agreements) mean that legally, only employees of whatever software company created a piece of software can legally modify it. So if you happen to be a software engineering student, or just your average Joe who has a good idea and knows how to implement it into the program, you legally can’t. Over time people have begun to realise this and in 2004 came the birth of a new concept in intellectual property sharing; the open source license. This allows the legal freedom for anyone and everyone to modify the source code behind a program and share or redistribute it to friends, relatives, colleges or anyone.

The results speak for themselves. Not only are all those people who got rejected for the software position now able to make their suggestions heard, but everyone and anyone can. Open source projects allow people from all walks of life or expertise to contribute ideas and innovations. “Social coding” is a term now coined on a number of collaborative sites. Mozilla Firefox is not just a web browser, its our web browser. Anyone can contribute in a number of different ways to the project, you don’t have to have any particular skill.

It’s no surprise that Firefox and other open source licensed browsers like Google’s Chrome are quickly eating up Internet Explorer’s market share. As the umpteenth floor of the Microsoft building in whatever city is working overtime trying to come up with new features and ideas, thousands of people all over the world are collaborating online to build software that works the way they want. And at the end of the day, why would you pay to use software when you can freely obtain it built exactly the way you use it.

The web is communal

By its very nature, the internet is really just one big international border-less community. To ensure that information is displayed correctly for everyone within the community, the World Wide Web Consortium has set in place standards for the technologies used to transfer web pages from computer to computer. In order for this to work, the web browser itself must adhere to the standards. Microsoft has previously been accused of trying to use its substantial market share to change some of these technologies and privatise them for their own use. While these attempts were largely unsuccessful, Internet Explorer versions 5-7 does have some inconsistencies with the  established standards. For this reason, it is necessary to road test a page across browsers to ensure there are no inconsistencies across platforms. Open source projects are built with these standards in mind and are often on the forefront of innovations by the W3C.

What else is open?

Firefox is just the beginning of the open licensing software world. It is possible to operate all the necessary software to run a business, do a university degree or work in any number of professions using entirely open licensed products. If you’re interested in going open, we would love to hear from you, why not contact us today and find out how your business can save, money, time, resources and stay up to day using open source software.

The Hats of Search Engine Optimisation

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In the Online Marketing world, there are two primary methodologies in marketing content-based websites. The first is a quantitative approach which essentially involves hoarding as much keyword-rich content as possible in an effort to stand out amongst search engines. The other is the more qualitative approach to search engine marketing which involves creative user-orientated pages optimised for search engines, but with less keywords and an emphasis on readability. The former is known as Black-Hat SEO whilst the latter is known as White-Hat. While the distinctions between the two styles of marketing are a lot more complicated than the definitions above, for the purposes of this discussion, they are adequate.

When the search engine was born it utilised what are known as “crawlers”; software designed to scour the internet for new websites and store them in a database. It did this in the search for “meta” tags. Website designers would then put keywords into their meta tag data to help the search engine place them in the relevant category to eventually be displayed in the results page. For example, meta tags for a page wishing to be placed in the search engine optimisation results page would have the following code on their website:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, SEO” />

This remained normal SEO practice for a number of years and providers like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN built databases spanning a considerable proportion of the internet based on this system. This system however, proved ultimately to be flawed. There were some content creators that became increasingly misleading with their keyword and meta tag descriptions and built websites that did not have anything to do with the keywords contained within their meta tags. This lead to the diversification of search engine algorithms; the software that determines exactly where a site should be indexed and consequently, what results page (and how far up the page) the website should appear.

Nowadays, particularly with the more advanced search algorithms of Google, the meta-tag keywords and descriptions can be almost entirely irrelevant to a search engine placing. The technology has become increasingly sophisticated to consider not only factors such as the content, size, location and html structure of a website, but also off-site factors such as incoming links from other websites.

Because of these innovations, many search engine marketers are of the belief that the best way to gain favourable search engine results are to run a quantitative keyword campaign. These black-hat search marketers create content with as many keywords as possible, they submit to as many online directories as possible and they create reciprocal linking systems to generate as many incoming links as possible.

While public knowledge of the factors that search engines like Google consider when ranking a page  is very limited, in the last few years we have seen increasing penalties for users of black-hat SEO techniques. Content pages with too many keywords are beginning to be penalised within the search engine rankings. What have become known as “link-farms”; a series of sites linking to each other purely for search engine benefit, have also become increasingly penalised in the search engine rankings. More and more are we seeing a trend towards sites that embrace usability over sheer number of keyword’s and incoming links, and we think this is a good thing.

At Paragon Online Marketing, our Online Marketing Strategy is built fundamentally around the concept of creating a user-orientated website that simultaneous ranks well within search engine results pages. We advise everyone to avoid websites offering “1000 visitors for $100″ or any gimmicky black-hat search engine practices. As a rule of thumb, if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. The increasing trend is to create quality, readable content and genuine incoming links which actually recommend your site and contain keywords within the incoming link. The catch with this of course is that it takes time, which black-hat search engine marketers simply do not have.