MLB players association
reaches fantasy deal
America’s
second-favorite pastime, fantasy sports, just got a little more exciting
thanks to a new deal with its first-favorite. Major League Baseball
Advanced Media LP has inked a five-year, $50 million deal with the Major
League Baseball Players Association to exclusively license players' names
and likenesses for use in online games, including fantasy baseball. The
new deal will offer more options to fantasy baseball followers who select
players in a fictional draft and follow their statistics until the end of
the year. The winning fantasy team has the best-performing hitters and
pitchers at the end. Most fantasy baseball sites didn’t have the game
video and audio the new site will offer, in part because the rights were
split. The league licensed the content and the players association
licensed player statistics.
Teen targeted by Apple gets free counsel
Nicholas Ciarelli,
the 19-year-old publisher of www.ThinkSecret.com, can relax – he won’t
have to face Apple alone. The Harvard University student couldn’t afford
to hire legal counsel to defend him against Apple, which has sued him for
revealing its technology secrets on his web site. Now he’s got some
help, and pro bono at that. The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier
Foundation has persuaded Terry Gross to take Ciarelli’s case for free.
Gross, who works for the San Francisco-based firm Gross & Belsky, is a
lawyer specializing in freedom of speech and the internet who has defended
civil rights organizations, including EFF. EFF and other groups declined
to take Ciarelli’s case but wanted to help him in some way. Gross plans
to file a motion to dismiss the lawsuit because
he claims Ciarelli
used legitimate newsgathering methods to get information and
thus deserves First
Amendment protection.
Study: Holiday email way
up, and it's annoying
This
past holiday season, most people’s inboxes were not filled with warm
holiday wishes but rather marketing pitches. According to a study by Return
Path, a New York e-mail marketing firm,
most web users found the extra holiday email a nuisance. Ninety-nine
percent of the 723 respondents said they received extra email during the
holidays and 14 percent said they were exhausted by it. Sixty percent said
they deleted the added pitches on permission-based email, 27 percent said
they unsubscribed from email lists, and 23 percent said they reported the
mail to their service provider as spam. Only 9 percent said they spent
more time reading e-mail because of the extra messages.
New device allows hands-free tune toting
With
the advent of tiny MP3 players that can carry thousands of tunes, music
lovers may be getting spoiled. They're about to get more so. ScanSoft
and Gracenote are developing voice-recognition technology to give people
access to their digital film and music files via voice control.
Users will be able to speak songs and movies into play mode, giving busy
folks hands-free access. Users can also ask, "What
is this?" to get more information about a song being played. The
companies aren’t revealing what media playing device they have in mind
to use with the technology. There
is also no word yet regarding whether the technology,
which will be available first in Japan in the fourth quarter of 2005, will
be available in languages other than English.
Credit
quandary? Try disputemycharge.com
If you don’t remember charging that particular item to
your credit card, there’s now a web site that can help. That is, if
you’re willing to take a loss on the disputed purchase. From Glen
Borofsky, the man behind ParkingTickets.com, comes disputemycharge.com, a
site designed to help settle credit and debit card disputes. Here’s how
it works: users log on, describe the situation in question, pay an initial
fee of 50 percent of the questionable amount owed, and disputemycharge.com
does the rest. If the company isn’t able to settle, the initial fee is
refunded. If a charge is lowered but not slashed entirely, users pay half
of the total savings. And if users choose, they can pay a flat charge of
$29.99 and not pay half of the savings, though that payment is
nonrefundable. The site is designed for those who question their credit
card bills but don’t want to deal with the hassle of phone call after
phone call to the offending company, talking to people who just pass them
on to the next person.
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