Men wiser than me always said — “Use Plan A as you must, but make sure Plan B absolutely works!” Somebody should have told that to the RIAA. –

Two weeks after the Recording Industry Association of America announced it had struck deals with top internet service providers to cut off unrepentant music sharers, not a single major ISP will cop to agreeing to the ambitious scheme, and one top broadband company says it’s not on board.

The RIAA’s announcement came as it revealed it was closing down its massive litigation campaign, which has targeted more than 30,000 individuals for allegedly sharing copyrighted music on the internet. Instead of federal lawsuits, the RIAA claims it would now rely on a series of accords it had reached with “leading” internet service providers, in which the ISPs have agreed to terminate customers the RIAA catches uploading three times, the association said.

But when contacted by Threat Level, none of the leading ISPs acknowledged any such deal. “We are not working with them on this,” Verizon spokeswoman Ellen Yu said in a telephone interview. Verizon, based in New York, has 8.5 million broadband subscribers, making it the fourth largest ISP by customer base.

They give up on their continuing effort to sue the hell out of people to move to a ISP based monitoring threat system in concert with the ISP’s themselves. Now common sense would have dictated that the RIAA get something in writing first. Look, the ISP’s would have skin in this game in regards to their brand and customer base. Considering the track record of the RIAA to date on winning suits (0 for those that went to trial), if I were an ISP I would be somewhat concerned about who I was getting in bed with here.

When the like of Verizon and AT&T put on the corporate flim-flam shoft shoe you know they ain’t buying it. At least not in public.

If this be Plan B the RIAA is in trouble.

Linky.

Central Park and other parks in NYC are now without WiFi. The provider lacking an extension of their contract with the NYC Parks Dept can’t go it alone –

Logging onto the Internet for free at many New York City parks has become another casualty of the financial crisis.

The vendor, WiFi Salon, which won the contract from the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation in 2004 to wire 10 parks in four boroughs, including Central Park, quietly shutdown in October due to lack of financing and is in the process of removing equipment. The contract expired Sept. 30, and it wasn’t financially feasible for WiFi Salon to continue on its own.

This of course is where the Google biz model should have kicked in to bridge such issues. Had Google been serious about 700mhz this kind of model might have been able to assist here.

Linky.

So much for the change we were told would come by most of the tech media after the November elections. The RIAA’s favorite attorney will have a significant role in running Justice, or more accurately, the department that decides how laws are selectively enforced. It’s safe to say that there will be more draconian DMCA enforcement, and with Hollywood’s party of choice in charge, don’t look for that law to change either. In a Third Pipe world, smaller government will encroach less into our lives. A Third Pipe government will return copyright to a statute that is not likely to incriminate the common consumer for fair use of media such as ripping a CD to play on a portable device.

As president-elect, one of Obama’s first tech-related decisions has been to select the Recording Industry Association of America’s favorite lawyer to be the third in command at the Justice Department. And Obama’s pick as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position, is the lawyer who oversaw the defense of the Copyright Term Extension Act (Cnet)

The Clearwire half of the Sprint / Clearwire Merger has activated its first citywide Mobile WiMAX network in Portland. With two cities done there’s still 70-80 to go before the major markets are covered. Maybe Samsung will actually start selling mobile MiMAX devices like those pictured  in the US some day.

Today, Clearwire unveiled the WiMAX network in Portland, Ore., that we covered last month. Portland is the first city to get WiMAX service under the Clear brand since Clearwire closed its WiMAX spectrum merger with Sprint last month. Portland joins Baltimore, Md., as Clearwire’s only pure WiMAX network in the country. (Gigaom)

2009 may very well prove to be the year of the old media dead pool. Book publishers are following dailies and monthlies in going down the path to oblivion as the Third Pipe world passes them by. Joining them will be most of the mass market bookshops.

Just two weeks before announcing staff cuts and a substantial corporate restructuring in December, the publishing giant Macmillan gathered its sales and marketing staff at the historic Hotel del Coronado in San Diego — where Billy Wilder filmed Tony Curtis wooing Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like It Hot” — to talk about titles on the spring lists. Between marathon meetings to discuss plans for new books, the sales reps were invited to take part in wine tastings and spa treatments.

This year the meetings will be held via Webcam. In a memo to staff members announcing the layoffs on Dec. 15, John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, said the company would hold only one of its three annual sales conferences in person, and the other two would be conducted on the Web and by telephone.

Amid a relentless string of layoffs and pay-freeze announcements, book publishers are clamping down on some of the business’s most glittery and cozy traditions. Austerity measures are rippling throughout the industry as it confronts the worst retailing landscape in memory. (New York Times)

Cost cutting means the end of big advances, tour sponsorship and press parties for 15 minute celebrities, and A list authors. Most of them will soon be joining a growing group of B and C listers who are self publishing. New A listers  like Cory Doctorow built their audeince entirely on the web and have never needed a publisher. As the ebook threatens encroachment, publishing on demand has already taken hold. Anyone who can create and upload a PDF can make their interpretation of the great novel available on Amazon. No approval from an egotistical editor in New York City needed. To make things worse, Google did a deal to make the longest of tails available back in October. At least there will be a little royalty revenue from the copyrights that the big houses wrangled away from the original authors.

The big houses could change up and remain relevant, but that includes the pain of no longer being among the elite. My dead pool bet says at least big publisher will fail this year, while more books than ever will be made available without them.

No so long ago, there was a hard limit on the amount of spectrum a single operator could control in a geographic area. Conventional wisdom (or lack of) at the FCC in recent years has been that capping spectrum holdings would stifle the innovation and delay new offerings. Contrary to that line of thought, with the bulk of wireless communication spectrum being held by four conglomerates there has been little innovation and competitive price pressure. The big four have formed more of a cartel with their greatest innovations to be found in plan contracts and creative billing rather than the rapid deployment of new technology, falling prices or open networks that we were promised in return for removing the spectrum caps.

Small- and mid-size carriers insist they — and by extension consumers — have been hurt by industry consolidation. They say reinstating the spectrum cap could help alleviate a competitive imbalance that has been exacerbated by lack of small licenses in major spectrum auctions in recent years.

“The nation’s largest carriers have systematically absorbed dozens of small, rural and regional competitors,” Leap Wireless International Inc. told the FCC. “In place of the vigorous competition that had flourished in this industry, which drove market participants to reduce prices and explore innovations in technology and service, a few carriers now dominate the landscape. These supercarriers have both the incentive and the ability to foreclose entry to new competitors and to engage in other anticompetitive behavior to protect their market position.”

Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility, the big winners of the 700 MHz auction earlier this year, together account for about 159 million of the nation’s 269 million cellular subscribers. (RCR Wireless)

The old guard of rock’s A-List artists have been fleeing their labels. Not for a new label, but to  direct distribution. The latest to shun RIAA’s jaded membership is the artist once again know as Prince.  Why do it? Complete creative control, control of distribution, including when you release what, and if you make any money, it’s yours.

Prince is planning to release three new albums in 2009 without the assistance of a record label, according to an interview with the Los Angeles Times. A “major retailer” is in talks with the artist to release the music physically, while a new Prince Web site will sell it in digital form.  (Billboard)

This will be the real problem for the big labels going forward. The more success the A listers have going it alone, the more it will become the norm for their peers.  The net and electronic distribution are the great equalizer. Going deeper, every part of a physical CD can be outsourced in fairly small quantities on demand and manufactured, packaged and drop shipped to retailers in a matter of hours. Big music’s advantage is all but gone.

To survive, the labels need to discover how to deliver value to both artists and perfomers instead of shaking them down. Will they change soon enough to survive? My dead pool says no.

The folks in the town of Glastonbury, England have received a new WiFi network. Think they are happy about this turn of events? Evidently not. –

Ever since the town’s free municipal wireless broadband network went online in May, people have been complaining of, as an online petition puts it, “headaches, dizziness, nausea, severe tiredness, brain fog, disorientation and loss of appetite, loss of balance, inability to concentrate, loss of creativity” — all ailments an examining physician would find it difficult to prove or disprove.

“This place is not appropriate for a Wi-Fi trial,” resident Linda Taylor tells the local Fosse Way magazine. “People are complaining of headaches, tingling skin among other symptoms. This makes me wonder what is it doing to the children.”

Thought by many to be the burial place of the mythic King Arthur, Glastonbury’s year-round population of 9,000 swells to about 150,000 every June when the mammoth Glastonbury Festival three-day rock concert occupies a nearby field. “I don’t want my son exposed to risk 24 hours a day, including at his primary school, which is within the Wi-Fi zone,” yoga teacher Natalie Fee tells London’s Telegraph. “I would be failing in my duty as a parent if I did.”

One man has even begun making orgone generators, which use crystals, semi-precious stones and gold to purportedly put out positive energy to combat the negative vibes flooding the town from the Wi-Fi base stations.

Seriously, I guess they don’t use electricity and cell phones in this town either. At the RF densities that the typical WiFi transceiver puts out you might as well ignore it. It would be interesting to poll these same people to see how many of them have microwaves in their homes. What’s worse, these folks might disprove the William Buckley Jr. saw — “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University. ”

[To our US readers. Don't be too smug. I can take you to towns in California just as looned out.]

Linky.
HT: Ace of Spades

The tip jar is out on hundreds of thousands of sites and blogs with no way to measure how well the donor supported model works. For at least one venture visitor support is working in a big way.  In tough times Wikipedia has reached its funding objective through massive numbers of donations. This validates the donor supported business model if you’ve done something a large number of people value.

With the help of over 125,000 donors from around the world, the Wikimedia Foundation raised a total of $6.2 million, sustaining Wikipedia for the foreseeable future. The money will be used to maintain and grow the foundation’s technical infrastructure.

“This campaign has proven that Wikipedia matters to its users, and that our users strongly support our mission: to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising,” Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote in a thank you letter posted on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Web site. “We deeply appreciate the generosity of our supporters.” (Cnet)

While we lag behind most of developed world in both bandwidth and penetration, we pay the most. Kind of makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

According to data compiled for the report, Global Fixed and Mobile Broadband Outlook, the U.S. generated more than $32 billion in broadband revenues in 2008, a long way ahead of second-place Japan, which generated $23 billion in broadband revenues.

Germany was third in the chart, with more than $11 billion in revenues, followed by China with $7.9 billion.

China, however, still beats the U.S. in terms of the number of fixed broadband connections, with 81.9 million as opposed to the U.S.’s 78.5 million. Japan and Germany come in third and fourth places with 30.3 million and 23.3 million lines, respectively. (Light Reading)

We have a bunch of people in Washington DC who want us to pony up more for better connections by spending unfathomable debt dollars on “broadband stimulus”. If our representatives are really acting our interest, they would open the market to competition. There is no reason why we should fund upgrades for a duopoly that is already the world’s richest. Make them compete and they’ll fund upgrades themselves or they’ll be trampled by competitors.