United States versus Extreme Associates
November 1st, 2004 • General, Technology
Today I had the opportunity to testify at the Western District of Pennsylvania Federal Court which is a part of the 3rd Circuit Court System. I was there as an expert witness/subject matter expert for the US Attorney in the case United States versus Extreme Associates (PDF file of the indictment).
The defendants in this case said that they know of no way to know where someone is logged into the Internet and, because of this, they have no way of controlling the geographic distribution of their content on the Internet.
Unfortunately, the claim is pretty absurd in today’s world. My company and I have been working with our clients for over five years to solve these issues. For the Internet to become a more successful medium a lot of things must be automatic or easy for the user. Would you be willing to provide your zip code to your TV just so advertisers could send you the most relevant ads? Some people would, others wouldn’t, and people like me would just get a Replay and avoid the whole issue. The point is, people don’t want to be bothered with providing information just so marketers can do things with the data especially if there isn’t a tangible benefit for the consumer. In the TV example, they just want to watch some television. Providing a zip code doesn’t make the programming any better. When I go to Toys R Us, I never provide my phone number or zip code. What benefit do I get by doing so? None? Then no thanks, I’ll pass. And so, all businesses must resort to other methods to achieve consumer information for analysis and action.
In this particular case though, the defendants didn’t attempt to identify the location of the users. This is amazing since the information was just begging to be used by them. They charge money for access to their site and so they collect credit card information and billing information. By using this information, they could have possibly avoided prosecution if they blocked access based on geography. In fact, the US Attorneys showed that the defendants had a list of zip codes where they used UPS instead of the US Postal Service so as to circumvent US Postal Inspector scrutiny. They seemed to know about the geographic areas that could get them into trouble even though this misguided attempt doesn’t get around the law. Even if they weren’t going to block access based on geographic location, they could have used the data for marketing purposes. One lack of use got them into legal trouble, the other was just bad business/marketing sense.
During my testimony, we went through various techniques to identify the location of users including: user registration, credit card information, calling the user, sending unique passwords in the mail, and IP intelligence/geolocation technology. Clearly, some of these methods are more accurate than others (you wouldn’t believe how many people are rumored to register in 90210 [Beverly Hills, CA] and 12345 [Schenectady, NY] on sites that require free registration). User registrations where the user has no incentive to tell the truth are of even more dubious value because of services like bugmenot.com (which, by the way, I’m a fan of). But looking at the other techniques, or a combination of the other techniques, a site could achieve a very high degree of assurance that a user is where they say they are.
We’ve been doing this for five years now. Heck, we even have a patent on our technology. The fact is, nearly every Internet user somehow interacts with my company’s technology nearly every day. I’m not sure when we’ll turn the corner and people can’t say they’ve never heard of our technology before. I just hope we turn the corner on the education portion of IP intelligence soon because there really is no reason to not know about us now.
Finally, I must say everyone involved in this was, to me, very courteous, helpful, and thoughtful. My thanks go out to Mary Beth Buchanan (US Attorney), Steve Kaufman (Assistant US Attorney), and Judge Lancaster. Heck, I’ll even thank the defendant’s attorney for being courteous even though he immediately objected to me appearing as a witness. No offense taken, I know this is only business and not personal. ;-)
Update: Here is the first news article I can find of today’s hearing.
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