EMERYVILLE, Calif. - The air apparently is clear between mobile content delivery platform MobiTV and mobile phone community resource HowardForums, after an Internet service provider battle and cease-and-desist litigation.
The mobile streaming TV company in charge of Sprint's cell-phone TV service was irate about a HowardForums discussion in which posters criticized the company's security for not being able to preventing users from bypassing carrier subscriptions and viewing MobiTV content free of charge.
HowardForums founder Howard Chui and MobiTV President Paul Scanlan apparently have discussed the issue and settled the matter.
"Howard, great catching up today," Scanlan wrote in a letter to Chui. "Again, we're big fans of the site, and our intention was never to bring your entire site down or to censor the Internet, like we're being accused of. The irony is that our companies are quite different, and as one of the leaders in new media, we couldn't be more supportive of the rights of sites like yours. Please know that our first priority is always to fix any security issues with our system, and we're doing that.
"Additionally, we also have a responsibility to our content and carrier partners to reduce the impact of any breaches to the system once they occur, and that was really the basis for the correspondence you had with our legal team. I look forward to continuing to find interesting and vibrant insights from HowardForums."
Scanlan said shutting down HowardForums was never an option.
