In what I think the MPAA and RIAA industry insiders will regret, the cat kinda slipped out of the bag. The DRM mavens don’t think you should have forever use of your copyrighted works you paid for. –

“We reject the view,” he writes in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office, “that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so.”

Now here is the sham of that argument. First of all I DO expect a motherboard on a computer to work for the lifecycle of the product. Which in most cases is not hard to see 10 years go by. (I have seen some, like a few Bell 3b2’s and PDP-8’s approaching 40yrs of life.) The problem for the MPAA/RIAA type is that they deal in expressions not a container. That is the essence of a copyright.

Why is that different? Well lets say you bought the cassette version of Neil Diamond’s ‘Stones’ album from back in the 70’s. Now lets say you did the same in 1995 because you wanted it in CD format and Wally World had in in the $2.99 bargain bin. The cassette and CD are different ‘containers’ but the expressions in form of music is the expression. So lets say your original version of the cassette wore out. So you copy the tracks off the CD to a new cassette. You’re covered right? Not in the eyes of the RIAA. They would say you infringed and should have bought a cassette version (good luck one has not been available for a decade.)

Here’s where the RIAA/MPAA argument falls apart. How would the RIAA sue you? They will make the argument in court you stole the expression that represents the content and denied the artist revenue. Yet they will for economic purposes maintain the container is the thing and is what they protect. Sorry you can’t have it both ways. Copyright is about the expression.

I would take one more step, vis a vis the hard goods comparison. Suits, you knew going in that this was the lay of the land legally in regards to content. If you don’t like those rules then find a new line of work more suited to the hard goods - patent mindset. Live with it.

Linky.

The first Texans to have access to mobile WiMAX will be in the DFW area according to our source who attended a Clearwire recruiting event in Dallas today. The company will be switching on some 700+ north Texas towers tomorrow with a marketing blitz to beginning on October 1st. The same source tells us the company’s Chicago network will also be launching in October.

You heard that right. What’s the use of passing a law if the main source of that proposed income will just withdraw from the field? Eh? –

Earlier this month, Governor Linda Lingle vetoed the unconstitutional tax collection scheme passed by the Hawaii legislature in HB 1405. Because the effective date of that bill preceded both her veto and the legislature’s veto override session, we had little choice but to end our advertising relationships with all Hawaii-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program. Now that the override session is over, and the legislature did not override Governor Lingle’s veto of HB 1405, we would like to invite all Hawaii Associates whose accounts were closed due to the pending legislation to re-enroll in the Associates Program.

To do so, please click here. When asked to sign in, please use the same account username and password that were previously associated with your Associates account. To make your return to the Program as seamless as possible, when you re-enroll, your account information (login, store-ID, etc.) will be the same as it was prior to termination. For further information about re-enrollment, please click here for FAQs.

— From the Amazon presser.

So Hawaii affiliates can now resign-up their accounts and get cooking again.

Linky.
HT: Instapundit

The Suits from Hollywood and Vine are all gaga to get Pirate Bay shutdown. They are going after the site which is still up not the individuals involved. –

Although the owners of the notorious BitTorrent tracker face prison time and hefty fines, the sentence handed out in April did not include an injunction forcing the site to close down.

Now a coalition of studios including Columbia Pictures, Disney, NBC, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, and Viacom is demanding that the website be shuttered to protect the illegal distribution of roughly 100 films and television programs. A writ to sue for closure was presented Monday to the Stockholm District Court.

“They’ve been sentenced to prison for criminal activities but haven’t stopped carrying out those activities,” Monique Wadsted, the lawyer for the studios, told Sweden’s The Local.

Sadly this is like Napster round 2. Rather than embracing the opportunity they would prefer to just destroy it and move on. The opportunity of course is to monetize the sharing rather than destroy it. The destruction route just ends up being a game of whack-a-mole. If they could leverage the P2P framework MLM style they could profit beyond belief. But then that’s not their style, so no worries there.

Linky.

Outside of AT&T and Verizon who are still in denial, mobile carriers are discovering that voice has peaked and 3G service is soon to follow. Battered #3, Sprint, bet big on low cost prepaid wireless leading the pack with its Boost wireless division’s $50 unlimited offering - the first of its kind with national coverage. The only thing wrong with he plan is that it is on the old IDEN network and customers are stuck with pricey unattractive handsets from Motorola as their only options.

While it probably hasn’t made any money, Virgin Mobile has amassed a significant group of subscribers and resold access on Sprints CDMA network, arguably the best or second best in terms of coverage and signal quality. Virgin polished marketing, trendy website, and most of all attractive handsets as fair prices contrast sharply against the current offerings from other prepaid providers. While it could get enormous benefit from the marketing savvy, It looks to me like Sprint is buying subscribers. For the sake of it’s shareholders, it couldn’t hurt to try hanging onto Virgin’s marketing and customer care people who consistently do a better job that it’s own group has.

On Tuesday morning, Sprint, the No. 3 nationwide U.S. wireless operator, announced plans to buy Virgin Mobile USA in a deal that is valued at around $483 million. At first it might seem strange for Sprint, which went into a tailspin after its last big acquisition of wireless competitor Nextel in 2005, to buy another wireless operator. But with a strong cash position and a management team determined to turn the company around, it looks like Sprint sees a big enough opportunity in the prepaid market to risk the pains of consuming another operator.

The strategy shift comes at a time when Sprint is still losing high value “postpaid” customers, who typically sign lengthy contracts and pay for service on a monthly basis. During the first quarter of 2009, Sprint lost nearly 1.25 million of these postpaid subscribers. Sprint reports its second quarter earnings on Wednesday, which should provide a clearer picture on where the company currently stands in terms of subscriber gains or losses. (Cnet)

I’ve long predicted that wireless would largely become a month to month prepaid business. the industry itself is to blame. It’s long standing tradition has been to serve its customers one gotcha after the next, while a contract rather than good service holds the customer in place.  It could be Sprint is the first of the big 4 to understand that no one really trusts them to offer a fair contract.  On a month to month, basis if the handset is cheap or can be used on another network, it’s OK to make a bad choice, and carriers will have to become much more service oriented. As prepaid catches on, we’re going to see open handsets everywhere. I’m predicting it will be nearly impossible to sell a locked phone within two years.

Well it is getting closer to the spin off of AOL. Google’s stake in AOL was bought out by TW just this week. Makes sense at is help’s package the company out there in the marketplace –

Google wrote the investment down by $726m in February.

The buyback is a necessary step in Time Warner’s long-stated ambition to spin AOL off as an independent company.

It hired Tim Armstrong to head up the new and improved AOL.

The merger of AOL and Time Warner cost somewhere in the region of $160bn at the height of dot-com lunacy in 2000.

AOL started out as an internet service provider distributing millions of promotional CDs. It sold its UK dial-up business to CarphoneWarehouse and is now trying to redefine itself as a content provider and ad sales organisation.

The bigger question of course is does anybody really need AOL these days? Back in the heady days of the dial up internet their rates/services made them viable as an aggregator of disparate data connectivity. But that time has long sense passed. The Majors are providing their own portal services in-house. The US urban centers are heavily covered by broadband.

It will be interesting to see how a virtual service provider survives in the current environment.

Linky.

First, let me say that there are individuals who really do believe that their biology is effected by Wifi signals. I’ve worked along side more than one of them. Their suffering is real, but the bulk of physical evidence shows that they have a phobia rather than an allergy. If any well meaning reporter  really wanted to ease the suffering of these individuals, they’d help them get appropriate treatment rather than fan the flames of hysteria.

It seems that the old media has an allergy when it comes to fact checking stories about Wifi phobia as well:

….reporters just seem to love the story about people being allergic to WiFi. The latest is in the Daily Mail over in the UK, which has an entire article all about a guy who lives in “agony” because of all the WiFi around. Not once does the reporter look into the evidence of the “allergy” but does claim that 2% of the population suffer from this. The guy travels around with a WiFi detector to protect him… but it’s not protecting him from whatever is causing his problems (as the study found). You would think that a reporter would actually check the facts on such things, right?  (Tech Dirt)

I beleive that the old media has internet phobia. They think that thier slow decline is because Wifi enables bloggers to write in their pajamas in the basement without connecting a wire. Therefore, it must be unhealthy. Most of these old media folks also believe they have  superior wisdom that lets them selectively fact check with impunity. That could have more to do with loss of audience than any blogger in the basement. Most of us are not as stupid as manstream journalists think we are.

The connected world is advancing human knowledge at an amazing pace, and that pace is accelerating. From marketing data to volumes of boffin fodder from labs, we will create and gather more data this year than we had in all of the the prior years of recorded history.

The abundance of free or nearly free knowledge is shaking the foundations of  institutions that existed to distribute information. They no longer control access and what was once scarce is a commodity. We’ve seen major shifts in media, entertainment and knowledge work. Traditional higher learning is also losing it’s control of access to knowledge. While prices at traditional universities are spiraling out of control, learning on the cheap is exploding in the cloud.

…. that means is that for many people, college is out of reach financially. But what if social media tools would allow the cost of an education to drop nearly all the way down to zero? Of course, quality education will always have costs involved — professors and other experts need to be compensated for their time and efforts, for example, and certain disciplines require expensive, specialized equipment to train students (i.e., you can’t learn to be a surgeon without access to an operating theater). However, social media can drastically reduce much of the overhead involved with higher education — such as administrative costs and even the campus itself — and open source or reusable and adaptive learning materials can drive costs down even further. (Mashable)

Count Barry Diller among the clueless suits who believe the reason they are not even richer than they already are is because we don’t pay his kind for even more for web content and services.

Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, said Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, joining the refrain of media moguls who say an era of free Internet content is ending.

The media and technology executive, whose company runs the Ask.com search engine and the Match.com dating service, said it’s “mythology” to view the Internet as a system of free communications.

“It is not free, and is not going to be,” Diller said today at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Pasadena, California. In addition to IAC, he is chairman of Expedia Inc., the online travel service, and Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. (Bloomberg)

OK Barry, we agree the net isn’t free. In America we grossly overpay for crummy bandwidth that delivers your content. Not free. We watch ads to view “free content”. Not free. Companies like Netflix that deliver a great online experience have MILLIONs of subscribers who PAY to subscribe. Not free! The pay per view business is exploding on Amazon and iTunes. NOT FREE!!! If you’re offering a service that charges a fee and you competitor kicks yout butt because he monetizes his offering differently than you do, then it’s you who doesn’t get it and it’s still NOT FREE!!!!!!!

So it’’s agreed that net content isn’t free and we really are are used to that idea. Nothing new for Third Pipe world inhabitants to learn here. We freely chose to pay for content if we value it.  We do not willingly pay tribute to Oligarch wannabees.

I think it’s actually you that needs to learn. What doesn’t work is you showing up on OUR NET and demanding we pay more for the worthless crap you are trying to peddle.  If you can’t get advertisers or you can’t get subscribers you failed  because you didn’t deliver value, not because we’re cheating you.

By the way, you’re not in charge here. We are. We pay for the net and you can’t dictate policy here.

Initial post: Jul 23, 2009 12:16 PM PDT
Jeffrey P. Bezos says:
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

With this Amazon issues an apology. Readers how would you rate it? Good, Fair, not worth the electrons?

Here’s my take. Amazon should have ate it. The cost I mean. They should have worked out whatever deal they could with the publisher for the customers to be able to keep the books. Another words Amazon should NOT have inconvenienced the customers and ate the costs. Absurd? Well what if it had been a physical book? You think Amazon would have gone through the pain and shipping costs for something that would not have been successful? Of course not. The fact they had the delete key was the only reason they went that route. Oh and every version of Kindle made in the future should have the remote delete feature removed. Period.

So the apology was NOT ENOUGH!

Linky.