May 9th, 2008 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

I received a strange phone call yesterday afternoon. It was from a local courier company, they had tried to deliver a package and were going to redeliver it again last night. That was a first, it’s normally next day at the earliest. It must have been very important. Hmmm, I was struggling to think of anything that I’d ordered, I couldn’t think of anything at all. I asked the wife, she hadn’t ordered anything either. I was intrigued and started to think things through, what could it possibly be that has been sent UPS recorded delivery? Was this how Google post their 6 figure cheques, possibly? Perhaps a benefactor had decided some of my free software was worthy of a present (it’s happened in the past, the most generous so far was £1,000), again a remote possibility? Was this it, was I now Mr McRich from the planet Rich? Not with my bloody luck! My mind switched from dreams of wealth to the other side of the coin. What if it was something bad?

One of my most successful niches for the last 3 years has been to do with watching TV online. This is one of those areas of the internet that is a legal mine field and I’ve had to change the way I play several times in the past. I started of bold as brass, embedding media with not a care in the world. I then changed to direct linking to the media with still images instead, I always knew I was bordering on what was acceptable but then again thousands of people are doing the same? After the recent case in the UK where somebody was actually arrested (although not charged) for doing a similar thing (linking) I decided to change the way I work completely, instead providing users with a way of searching for the media, I was sure this was OK (Fingers crossed, touch wood and all that), BUT there was always that niggling doubt. I know that several very popular sites have received take down notices and been excluded from Google’s SERPS, but they were still embedding and direct linking, surely I’d be fine? It didn’t matter, yesterday evening, waiting for my package I was very nervous. Was it a legal take down notice? Was it a summons? Was it an official warning from a TV company? Had I forget about some content and was now blatantly breaking the law? As it got later and later I was really starting to shit myself. Had I finally ran out of luck?

About 7:30 there was a knock on the front door, I hesitated to answer. Nobody else was in, looked like I was going to have to go. As I slowly opened the door I was greeted by the beaming smile of a young girl, “here you go, can you just sign this at the bottom?”. What the hell was it, it looked and felt like an empty box? Maybe it was a box with the legal paperwork I was fearing inside? There was only 1 way to find out, rip of the tape and open it up.

At this point I was literally sweating, stomach doing loops, how could it all end like this…it wasn’t going to. A quick glance inside the box revealed foam and some paperwork from Microsoft. WTF? It was then that I remembered, I’d phoned Xbox support a few weeks ago because one of my 360s had developed the 3 red rings of death. This was the box they’d sent for me to return it in. Doh! I felt like such a tw@, all be it a much relieved tw@.

This did get me around to thinking though, when it comes to making money online how far would you go? How much would you risk? All countries have their own laws and I suppose what you can and can’t get away with is very much dictated by where you live. I see so many people running dodgy websites that I know would be shut down in an instant if they were hosted in the UK. The trouble is you’re competing on a global playing field that is totally stacked against the countries that actually do enforce their laws. Would you put up with living under the veil of “what if” just to earn that little bit more money or would you rather live a totally squeaky clean life? A friend of mine once told me that nobody ever made their first million by not bending the rules a bit, I wonder just how true that is?

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