Knoxville Tennessee Blog

ATTENTION LAW FIRMS: Please heed this warning and save yourself some embarrassment by hiring a technology consultant to advise you of the potential consequences of writing cease and desist notices to website owners and/or bloggers.

By now it is likely that everyone in Knoxville and many people in other parts of the country have been made aware that JL Kirk & Associates has a reputation for using less then honest business practices thanks to their certified cease and desist letter to Katherine Coble from the law firm of King & Ballow.

I am not going to go into all of the details which you can read from NIT, but the letter was sent to provoke Katherine to take down an earlier post she made on her blog, which at the time probably had a readership somewhere in the range of 100 visits/day. After the firestorm that was sparked in the local blogosphere, and as a direct result of the cease in desist letter sent to Mrs. Coble, her blog was linked to over 700 times and the news went from a local story to a national story.

Fast forward 3 weeks and read this article from Brittney at Nashville Is Talking . Guess who made the same mistake? Yep, using the proven technique of the technologically ignorant cease and desist letter, the AACS just made the world aware of the encryption key for HD DVD and of their own accord generated more news articles, blog posts, and images that divulge the key then they could censor in 10 years and millions of dollars in legal fees.

Moral of the story: Don’t write a cease and desist letter to a blogger or website owner unless you have a legitimate case and have every intention of backing it up with costly litigation. Further, if you do decide to pursue legal action, don’t be surprised when the information you were trying to keep very private becomes very public.

Finally, if you are a law firm and you need advice from an experienced technology consultant, I happen to know a few lawyers that are also technology experts. Feel free to use the contact page and I will put you in touch with them (a free service provided by the Knoxville Tennessee Blog).

In the April 16th meeting of the Knox County Commission a speaker in the Public Forum created a bit of a stir. In fact before it was all done voices were raised, apologies were given, and it became very clear that Knox County government doesn’t really care much about local people’s property rights.

The speaker that triggered this passionate discussion was Laura Cole. Betty Bean covered what happened in this Knox County Commission here in the Halls News Shopper News. What you couldn’t see in Betty’s story is the damage that has occurred to Ms. Cole’s property because of inadequate stormwater ordinances, pitiful development practices, and incompetent code enforcement from Knox County engineering. If this sounds bad then you should hear the excuses from Chris Granju of the Knox County engineering department. The only thing he did not say was that the sun was in his eyes. He did say he felt he was being “compelled to investigate myself”.

To make a long story short Mr. Granju had his hat handed to him by Knox County Commissioner Phil Ballard. Commissioner Ballard told Mr. Granju he had written the county engineering department three weeks ago about Ms. Cole’s problems and had heard nothing. Mr. Ballard asked Mr. Granju, “Is it a normal practice of your department not to report back to a commissioner?”

Commissioner Tony Norman apologised to Ms. Cole. The frustration he felt was clear in his voice.

So you might ask yourself what happened to Ms. Cole’s property that was so severe that she says, “My farm will be destroyed within a year, and I have few options. I can sell or I can sue … this is not a balance (between development and environmental concerns). This is destruction of one person’s property for another person’s profit.”

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a movie must be worth much more.

The Laura Cole story via “Farmer” James McMillan and YouTube:

Part 1 and Part 2

The Knox County Commission meeting Public Forum featuring Laura Cole via Publius9 and Channel9 of YouTube:

Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV

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Rikki Hall of the Metropulse has written an important and revealing column on the challenge of stormwater in Knox County. This follows Mondays Betty Bean column in the Halls Shopper News that also confronts Knox County Commission on the new stormwater ordinance.

The simple issue at hand is whether developers should put in stormwater pipes that will last for many decades or put in pipes that may only last a few decades. 

When stormwater piping is replaced either property owners or taxpayers have to pay the tab. Developers like Victor Jernigan express their viewpoint that putting in concrete stormwater piping cost too much. In last months Knox County Commission meeting  Jernigan said that a $1000 cost for the developer would result in a $5000 expense for the homeowner. Seems like a high profit margin but not only did Jernigan use this example but so did another developer in this past Monday’s stormwater workshop. 

In fact this has become the manta of the development community. I think the example is all wet as there is no way developers make a 80 percent profit margin. But it does reveal the mindset of the development community in Knox County. 

Toothless ordinances are merely a subsidy for developers that create a transfer cost to property owners and taxpayers. Complicating the matter are Knox County Commissioners like Lumpy Lambert that are trying to preserve the materials like corrugated metal piping and plastic piping that simply do not last as long as concrete. In Monday’s stormwater meeting Commissioner Lambert incorrectly told the audience that mandating concrete stormwater piping would create a monopoly. He was quickly corrected by Joe Simpson of Sherman Dixie Concrete Industries in Chattanooga who informed Commissioner Lambert that their competitor in London, Ky gets plenty of business in East Tennessee. 

This is simple, do you want to continue the subsidy for developers that requires taxpayers and property owners to pay for stormwater pipe replacement 15 years down the road or do you want Knox County Commission to require concrete piping for stormwater? 

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Google is always coming out with cool gadgets, toys and otherwise useless applications. Occasionally they hit a sweet spot and build something that is fantastically useful. One of their latest labs project is just such an application.

I present to you Google Voice Local Search. Google Voice Local Search is Google’s experimental service to make local-business search accessible over the phone. I have tested it out several times for searches in the Knoxville Area and it works very well.

If you want to try it out simply call 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone. The service will list out the name, phone number and address of the business you are interested in finding information about. I tried this for a search for local restaurant’s and then I tried it for a specific restaurant. Both searches worked very well.

Give it a try and make sure to read the cheat sheet before you get started.

Chelsea Conn is the 19-year-old University of Tennessee sophomore who recently dished out $3,000 to settle with the RIAA rather than face a lawsuit as reported by the Knoxville News Sentinel last week.

I wish Chelsea would have read my previous posts on this topic before settling. It is my firm conviction that the RIAA is simply using scare tactics to try and recoup a small portion of the millions of dollars they are losing every year. They give the “guilty” party this easy to access settlement website which cost them very little to setup and maintain and then send out thousands of letters counting on a certain percentage of letters to successfully scare their customers and/or potential customers into paying a settlement fee.

I honestly feel bad that Miss Conn had to borrow the money from her parents and will now need to work to repay them.

“That’ll be all summer,” she said. “I don’t mind paying it back. It was my fault.”

So here are 5 reasons not to settle with the RIAA:

1. Lack of Evidence: Chances are the RIAA doesn’t have anything to prove that you were actually downloading or uploading music via a file sharing application. This point is made stronger if you have uploading disabled.

2. Cost of Lawyers: Lawyers for big companies and organizations like the RIAA charge a hefty hourly rate, probably around $200-$300/hr if not higher. It would be very unlikely for the RIAA to try to come after an individual when the cost of litigation is so high and the lack of evidence (1) is so great. Hire a lawyer for a couple hundred dollars and have him/her write a letter that asks for further correspondence to go through his firm and chances are you won’t hear back from them.

3. Legality of Copying Music: Several court cases have determined that music owners are allowed to make copies of their files in order to protect from loss or damage. If you have previously purchased a copy of the files on your hard drive you are entitled to have more than one digital copy legally. You could probably make this argument for downloading files that you already own

4. Ignorance of Software: Usually ignorance to the law doesn’t get you vary far, but ignorance on the particulars of a given piece of software (like KAZAA) is probably fairly arguable in court. Software applications have become increasingly more complicated and harder to understand for common users as technology has advanced. It is conceivable to think that many of the folks using file sharing software like KAZAA have no idea that they are actually allowing others to download music from their personal library. In reality, the end user might have installed KAZAA to download open licensed music and accidentally or unknowingly allowed others to access their personal music collection.

5. Customers Don’t Pay For Mistakes Of Corporations: This last reason isn’t a legal point (although I could think of a hundred more) as much as it is a personal complaint. The RIAA and the companies it represents failed to address or chose to ignore the changes in technology and are losing money as a result. Most of the money they are losing is not because of people downloading music illegally (at least in the US), but rather it is from people using technology to be more selective in their purchase. Instead of buying Beyonce’s latest CD for $15, they are buying the 3 songs they like off of the CD for $.99 a piece. Why pay for 8 songs you don’t even like?

The reality is that you don’t find many artists trying to sue their fans because the RIAA takes 90% of the money from CD sales. The artists make most of their money touring and selling merchandise. Further, I don’t know a single person who doesn’t support their favorite bands by buying their CD’s. I have every DMB CD ever created by the band because I want to support their music and their families.

Bottom Line: Illegal downloading of music is a much smaller problem then the RIAA claims. Companies like Sony are wasting millions of dollars researching useless DRM solutions like the one that installed a root kit on your computer. Their decline in revenue in recent years is of their own doing, but they want to blame it on you the consumer and loyal customer. Don’t fall prey to their scare tactics, hire a lawyer. RIAA sucks, so says FoxTrot.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this post should not be considered legal advice.

In the latest news that appeared yesterday from the Knoxville News Sentinel, seven Tennessee residents have been named in the most recent lawsuits from the RIAA against music pirates. The Tennessee lawsuits include a Sevierville woman, two filed in the U.S. District Court in Nashville, two in Memphis, one in Knoxville.

This is a new lawsuit separate from the suit that offers a settlement to UT students who must agree to the settlement by Monday or face a lawsuit. If I were accused of illegal downloading I would not settle with those bottom feeders known as the RIAA because of the numerous technological and practical ways to proof innocence in court. I would take them to court, win the case and counter sue them for millions of dollars. Consider the following quote from the News Sentinel article:

At UT, the university’s network administrators compare the IP address and time stamp with their own records to determine the offending user. But the system is far from foolproof.

Maybe we can get one of our crazy politicians to write some ridiculous piece of legislation that can keep Tennesseans from getting sued by the RIAA.

What does Nashville have that Knoxville doesn’t? There are certainly a number of ways to answer this question, but since I filed this post in the Technology category I am going to answer with Google Traffic Maps.

Nashville is lucky enough to be one of the 30 cities that Google has selected to create a traffic layer mashup. The traffic layer, which is denoted by the querystring variable layer and a value of t (&layer=t) is how you can request the presence of this added layer. Unfortunately for Knoxville, Google has no traffic data, but I am going to figure out what needs to be done to request being added to the list.

To view an example of what the traffic layer looks like live, here is Nashville’s traffic overlay. Notice the extra button at the top right which allows you to toggle the traffic layer on or off. Now that is neat stuff, and while this is a week or so old, I haven’t heard much chatter about this neat new feature. Hopefully Knoxville TN will make Google’s list soon. And my next Google Maps prediction is that we will soon see a weather mashup. Imagine Knoxville TN weather on a Google Map, now that would be cool.