Online radio station threatens blogger over well-known browser workaround

[Valour]

A small Atlanta, GA-based Internet radio station is threatening to unleash its lawyers on a technology blogger. Internet radio station Atlanta Blue Skye LLC (http://www.atlantabluesky.com) has warned Radu-Cristian Fotescu, a Romania-based technology enthusiast and prolific blogger, that his Beranger.org (http://www.beranger.org) blog has been "copied" and turned over to its lawyers. The issue stems from Fotescu's posting of a widely known workaround for bypassing JavaScript functions that try to disable a mouse's right-click context menu functionality, and the posting of information gathered from the Properties function of Windows Media Player.

Online radio station threatens blogger over well-known browser workaround

[J.F.]

Good luck suing someone outside the US over telling people to hold Esc while clicking...

What is it with companies these days? They try to sue over EVERYTHING. They also wish to OWN everything. And charge for anything.

[Valour]

The guy even tried to threaten me, and we didn't even post the original article... how crazy is that?

The shift key autoplay workaround from a few months ago was all I could think about when I first read Beranger's post.

I feel genuinely bad for him because he doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on how to best monetize his streams, and doesn't seem to understand the technology.

[J.F.]

Yeah, that failure to understand the technology is partly why he's resorted to threats. If he understoof the tech, he'd just change his site to make the info useless. Since he can't he resorts to hollow threats.

[Valour]

He should do what broadcast stations do -- put ads INTO the streams to make money, then offer an ad-free version for a reasonable subscription fee. Require a private login to hear the stream. That would be innovative, useful, and profitable.

[J.F.]

Yep. That's what all the GOOD media folks do. Look at the Happy Tree Friends... it's free, but has ads at the start, and plugs their DVD at the end. I find it acceptable. I wound up buying one of their DVDs a few months back.

[Valour]

Magnatune does it right, too... they stream their artists' music, then after each track they tell you the name of the song, artist, and album. Every 5 songs or so there is an in-house ad done by one of the artists. I've bought 4 albums from Magnatune so far, and intend to buy more in the future.

[J.F.]

That's actually the thing I hate worst about most regular radio stations - you hear a song you like, but they don't identify it. Sometimes they'll just identify the group, but not the song or album. Then you have to guess the song from the lyrics and check which album has a song with that guessed title.