Sony says they have suffered many lost sales, suffered damage to their goodwill and other damages to their market.

Henrik Pontén from Svenska Antipiratbyrån (Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau) said that their position is very similar to that of the IFPI. Their claim for damages is based on what it would’ve cost for The Pirate Bay to have acquired a global distribution license. This value was doubled to account for an alleged “loss of goodwill”.

Sorry Sony. The loss of goodwill has come from a lot of places, but not through any fault of the Pirate Bay's. It's come from your unauthorised installation of rootkits/spyware onto your customer's PCs. It's come from providing an uninstaller for you spyware which is worse than your spyware. It's come from doing things like suing your own customers for making copies of songs they bought. And further loss will come from suing Pirate Bay. How you could possible think otherwise is beyond me.

What did Captain Picard say when he proposed to his wife?

Engage!

1. Logging company X chops down a tree which is home to an endangered bird.
2. This is not liked, blogosphere goes nuts.
3. Company X blogs "well we had to do it".
4. Equally not liked, more craziness.
5. Company X then opens up a wildlife preserve, apologises and promises not to do it again.
6. Company X is now the most famous logging company in the world, and by now your thoughts on them are neutral - "Yeah, they did a bad thing, but they did a good thing to make up for it". But the important thing for Company X is that they are now much higher profile than before.

It's a dangerous game to play (your "good thing" has to be enough to cover up the "bad thing"), but get it right and there's money to be made. Not all press is good press, but bad press can be turned into a "good thing".

Today, my iPhone died.

No idea why, but whilst developing an application for it using Xcode, I lost the ability to deploy my application to my phone. Xcode told me to try restarting my phone... I did, and my perfectly working phone never managed to make it back to my normal home screen. After staring at the "Emergency calls only" screen for a while, I tried the various things one does at this point.

1. Restore the phone using iTunes - except that iTunes couldn't see the Phone.
2. Remember that Xcode can do restore and use that... the restore fails halfway through "BBand update error".
3. Try restoring with Xcode again. This succeeds, but the iPhone needs to be "activated through iTunes.
4. Open iTunes, which offers to restore the phone from a backup. After trying this, I return to step 1 with a broken phone again.
5. Bang phone against the desk a few times. Didn't help.

Carphone Warehouse (where I got the phone) won't be able to do much more than send the phone to Apple, so I'll probably make a trip to the Apple Store instead. In the meantime, I'm trying to restore the phone from XCode again, and merely activate the phone through iTunes, rather than restoring a backup. Let's see if that works... UPDATE (2 minutes later): No it didn't. Phone is asking for emergency calls only, iTunes says "There is a problem with your iPhone". I'd guessed this.