CBS Radio filed suit today against Howard Stern for $500 million for breach of contract and fraud. CBS is claiming that Stern used on-air time at CBS to enrich himself via a Sirius stock deal if he reached certain subscriber numbers. In essence, CBS accuses the Stern and Sirius guys of a conspiracy to use his CBS radio job as a free advertisement.

CBS will lose this lawsuit for these reasons:

1. CBS heard Stern discuss Sirius but did not fire him. If it was so damaging to give this free advertising to Sirius CBS should have demonstrated this by a dismissal of Stern. Claiming damage months later is obviously sour grapes.

2. Stern was invited on two CBS franchise shows, 60 Minutes and David Letterman which focused on his move from CBS to Sirius. So CBS thought of Stern’s move as both news … and entertainment fodder. For CBS to win their suit they will have to convince the jury that Stern’s discussion of Sirius was not news worthy on his show, just their other ones. Hmm…

3. Additionally, when Stern announced his move to Sirius he received an onslaught of publicity from all forms of media including radio, the internet, cable and network TV, newspapers and magazines. This publicity continues to this day. Stern’s own talk of his Sirius move on his CBS radio show paled in comparison. CBS has a sirius credibility gap by asking $500 million in damages for free advertising when 99 percent of the publicity came from general press and entertainment coverage including their own!

4. CBS hinges most of their argument on their lack of knowledge that Howard could accelerate his stock compensation to January 2006 if subscriber targets were met. Unbelievably, Howard met these subscriber goals and did accept an early payment of stock valued at approximately $220 million. They claim that this led Howard to discuss and promote his move to Sirius on their air … and that is CBS’ legal dilemma. Everyone knows Howard would have discussed his move to Sirius regardless. It was big news … the audience wanted to hear about it. Howard Stern’s show has always been about what’s on Howard Stern’s mind and often that is a current event. Clearly CBS via Letterman and 60 Minutes agree that it was worth on-air time.

The Internet has embraced blogs as both an individual and business revolution. For individuals it is a way to be heard and spread your point of view. For business it is both a way to foster customer loyalty and also a hip method of creating consumer buzz.

I hate to put a damper on all of this but … the truth is blogs are nothing more than websites. Since the beginning of the Web individuals and businesses have used websites to express themselves and market their products. So why all the hullabaloo about this new concept called blogs? My feeling is that it is simply what the Internet through its history does … create fact out of fiction. It is really noise about nothing.

Can anyone say PointCast? Back in its day (1996) it also revolutionized the Internet with push technology. There were literally thousands of articles written about the concept of push technology and how it was changing the Web … very similar to the blog hype we see today.

Netscape and other browsers integrated “push” into their software. Hundreds of new companies sprouted up offering variations related to push technology. Push was featured on magazine covers and national television. However, when push came to shove … push faded into obscurity.

If your new to this game, you may not clearly see how push relates to blogs. What many say makes a blog a blog is RSS and RSS was a development that spawned from push. Originally, RSS was thought of as a “pull technology” where the user would invite a few feeds in. However, with the advent of simple RSS readers, RSS integration into email software and RSS (and blog) search engines … RSS is actually content pushed to the user similar to PointCast.

RSS has become mainstream and is probably here to stay in some form but it is hardly a blip on the radar screen of internet triumphs. The reason is because RSS is neither a marketing or advertising medium. There is no money being made and no business leads generated via RSS. Unless this changes, RSS will forever be just another useful internet tool … not the blockbuster that is changing the way real people use the Web.

So how does all of this relate to blogs are just websites? RSS technology started as the backend to the blog revolution. However, RSS actually syndicates content from any website not just blogs and non-blog content syndication is growing rapidly … so there is no real distinction. Yes, blogs offer comments, but not all blogs do and to complicate things further many news websites such as ZDNet allow comments after every article.

Another common item cited by blog evangelists is that simple to use software allows the average person to create a blog and gain a web voice. That is true but it is far from unique. WYSIWYG software for creating web pages has been around for ten years and there has always been free web hosting.

Blogs are simply websites. What is special about blogs is that they have caught fire with the average person as a way to utilize the Web via tools such as Blogger and MySpace.

I predict an eventual blurring of the distinction between a blog and a website that isn’t a blog. If a website has RSS and allows comments but is produced via standard HTML tools is it not a blog? If a blog is produced via TypePad blog software but allows no comments is it no longer a blog?

The word blog is now part of the language but what does it mean? It’s a little blurry to me.

The recent announcement by AOL and Yahoo that they are going to use a pay to play email system called Goodmail raises an interesting question.

Should any ISP have the right to alter content in an email if they have no evidence of spam or fraud? With the Goodmail announcement AOL stated that opt-in publisher who don’t pay risk having their links and images disabled. Many ISP’s make loading images a choice of the user but I know of none that disable links.

It could be argued that altering content of an opt-in email newsletter libels the sender. If a publishers links don’t work the reader is likely to blame the sender not their ISP. This damages the reputation of email publishers. Similarly, if an ISP puts an email publication in the spam folder when it has no evidence of actual spam isn’t this itself making a potentially false statment to the recipient.

Obviously, none of this has been argued in a court of law but as the publisher of the iEntry Network I’m predicting it will be. If ISP’s adopt the Goodmail system and require publishers to pay or risk an ISP moving your opt-in content to the spam folder and then possibly disabling links and images many publisher will begrudgingly pay.

I believe this may be the tipping point where publishers may force a test of whether ISP’s can legally alter email content and even lable content as spam when they themselves cannot produce evidence that justifies these actions. An ISP’s need for money cannot justify this in my opinion.