Recent Headlines
October 2, 2009
Be Sure to Read Part One: Astroturf Overload — Broadband for America = One Giant Industry Front Group for an important introduction to what this super-sized industry front group is all about.
Members of Broadband for America
Red: A company or group actively engaging in anti-consumer lobbying, opposes Net Neutrality, supports Internet Overcharging, belongs to an astroturf [...]
October 2, 2009
Astroturf: One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is “Astroturf lobbying” – creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s to [...]
September 27, 2009
Hong Kong remains bullish on broadband. Despite the economic downturn, City Telecom continues to invest millions in constructing one of Hong Kong’s largest fiber optic broadband networks, providing fiber to the home connections to residents. City Telecom’s HK Broadband service relies on an all-fiber optic network, and has been dubbed “the Verizon FiOS of [...]
September 23, 2009
BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better be [...]
September 23, 2009
Stop the Cap! reader Rick has been educating me about some of the new-found aggression by Shaw Communications, one of western Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, in expanding its business reach across Canada. Woe to those who get in the way.
Novus Entertainment is already familiar with this story. As Stop the Cap! reported previously, Shaw launched [...]
September 22, 2009
The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, may be forced to consider American broadband policy before defining Net Neutrality and its role in Canadian broadband, according to an article published today in The Globe & Mail.
[FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's] proposal – to codify and enforce some general [...]
September 21, 2009
In March 2000, two cable magnates sat down for the cable industry equivalent of My Dinner With Andre. Fine wine, beautiful table linens, an exquisite meal, and a Monopoly board with pieces swapped back and forth representing hundreds of thousands of Canadian consumers. Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw drew a line on the western Ontario [...]
September 11, 2009
Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them.
This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their investment of [...]
September 7, 2009
I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes.
Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized by the [...]
September 1, 2009
In 2007, we took our first major trip away from western New York in 20 years and spent two weeks an hour away from Calgary, Alberta.
After two weeks in Kananaskis Country, Banff, Calgary, and other spots all over southern Alberta, we came away with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
The Good
Alberta is like [...]
August 31, 2009
A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down, for a second time, a rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission to limit the size of the nation’s largest cable operators to 30% of the nation’s pay television marketplace, calling the rule “arbitrary and capricious.”
The 30% rule, designed to keep no single company from controlling more [...]
August 27, 2009
Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider.
PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community.
The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, checking their actual [...]
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Megaupload and its sister site, Megavideo, has been shut down by federal prosecutors in Virginia for copyright infringement.
SOPA was never necessary, they just completely eliminated any due process or protection for consumers and businesses operating online, they don’t even make any logical sense when compared to the same laws that apply to brick and mortar business in the same situations.
Even the current laws have documented cases of abuse by the MPAA/RIAA and the government.
I hope the megaupload shutdown gets enough press to show what we have now is more than adequate and effective.
How does SOPA apply to stuff outside the US? People forget that the internet is global so I believe various govt agencies should come up with a global approach to dealing with problems.
any law made in the US is international law
This is sadly true, due to the official government wires released by WikiLeaks communication between US and Spain, Spain was threatened with sanctions if they didn’t implement a IP Protection law similiar to SOPA/PIPA.
http://socialbarrel.com/us-government-forced-spain-to-enforce-sopa-like-sinde-law-report/29854/
You can bet that’s been going on with other countries being forced to adopt similiar censorship laws to protect US Corporate interests if they don’t have the political and economic backbone to stand up to the US government.
This why you do not want SOPA/PIPA to pass. Megaupload is word-of mouth advertising for your product. Leave these sites alone. After all, if you cannot compete with free, you cannot compete.
Sadly they had servers in both Virginia and DC apparently, but SOPA is still a crock of poop.
[...] Then today, the news came through that various governments around the world participated in a concerted action to shut down a file sharing site called Megaupload (which lead Stop the Cap to ask, We Need SOPA Why?). [...]
SOPA would require US Internet companies to block the domain names (through DNS blocking) of foreign website accused of hosting or promoting copyright infringement, and thus prevent them from being accessed by Americans (well, those who don’t know how to circumvent the blocks, anyway). It targets foreign websites that are beyond the reach of US law enforcement.
Megaupload, having servers hosting millions of files in Virginia, was not beyond the reach of the FBI, and thus has been indicted directly. SOPA was not necessary. Time will tell if the charges will stick, but having read them, I suspect there’s enough evidence that Megaupload wasn’t sincerely implementing the DMCA “Safe Harbor” rules (indeed, they were probably deliberately subverting them in order to keep the money flow) that they are in a lot of trouble.
I think it is pretty clear after this global-wide takedown of Megaupload, there is absolutely no reason for new laws when the ones we have right now work just fine when they are enforced.
If $500M is a lot of money to worry about, how about going after the big banks and investment firms that tanked the economy to the tune of a lot more. After all, they cost us hundreds and hundreds of billions, and not a single perp has been charged or prosecuted.
Exactly, and the finance industry deals in REAL money, not hypothetical lost sales due to digital piracy. That’s something that cost every tax payer in america thousands of dollars, and we’ll still be paying as those banks pass on their losses onto us in the form of new fees to recoup their money and continue with their excessive executive compensation.
The type of piracy being claimed against Megaupload are copies of music, movies, or software that have been uploaded to their servers and hosted/shared by their customers. Trying to extrapolate that to lost sales of physical DVD’s, CD’s, or streamed/downloaded works is pretty weak as you have to assume all those consumers that likely had no need/interest or disposable income to buy those goods would have actually bought them had the pirated works not been available in the first place.
You won’t find any independant economist who has studied the issue to ever back up the losses and exaggerated numbers that the affected industries put out which often exceed the GNP of entire countries.
Here’s a interesting analysis of the evidence the US Government claims it has against Megaupload:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120120/00373617487/megaupload-details-raise-significant-concerns-about-what-doj-considers-evidence-criminal-behavior.shtml
It’s still fairly likely they will be found guilty of something, but perhaps the case isn’t the slam dunk it first seems to be.
Regarding SOPA, I think the proponents claim it is still necessary, even if Megaupload is successfully stopped by criminal prosecution, because the DoJ is unlikely to have the time, resources, or even the ability to go after every source and every enabler of copyright infringing material. This is especially true of distributed torrent files and web sites that host links and not the files themselves.
SOPA also shifts the burden of proof for claims of copyright infringement from something that took the FBI two years to painstakingly compile (against MU) to some kind of speedy but ill-defined non-court-driven process that can essentially shutdown a site within weeks or even days. Given how quickly the Internet evolves, this is what the MPAA and RIAA claims they need in order to stamp out widespread copyright infringement.
Thus the MU case really doesn’t prove that SOPA (or something like it) is unnecessary. Given the panicked reaction of the cyberlocker companies since MU was shutdown — most have shut down their rewards programs, performed mass-deletions, and some have even started blocking US IP addresses entirely — then the MU case has certainly helped have the desired effect of making these companies more compliant with the DMCA, but I think it is unrealistic to believe that widespread copyright infringement won’t be able to continue just because of the threat of prosecution. The Pirate Bay is still very much in operation.
I don’t agree with SOPA — it puts too much power in the hands of too few people — but I agree that if you’re ever going to stamp out widespread copyright infringement (and that might never be possible) then you do need some mechanism for blocking sites whose only purpose is to enable access to such material.
The question is, how much collateral damage are you willing to inflict on the internet as a whole in order to stop mass copyright infringement, and how willing should the producers be to meet people half way? (e.g. maybe if Showtime and HBO offered Internet-only subscriptions their most popular shows wouldn’t be top of the most pirated list).
I don’t know the issues well enough to know all the answers, but I do agree that criminal prosecution alone is going to be ineffective in what is a worldwide phenomenon.
In the case of the failed bank derivatives, investigations show there were some government officials who received millions of dollars. In the case of MegaUpload, there are no people in political offices who received money. You finish the math.
How is piracy a problem when Netflix can spend 600k per episode for Gossip Girl?
The site founder sounds like a nice guy:
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/318247
You won’t get me to defend those who raked in the big bucks effectively peddling a copyright-infringing distribution mill. I don’t like people stealing others’ property or pitching counterfeit goods.
However, with the past track record of overzealous “enforcement” from the MPAA and RIAA, which often was “prove you are not guilty or else we will bury you with legal fees,” SOPA and PIPA put far too much power into the hands of an industry which has tried to restrict people from fair use of copyrighted material they purchased legally.
With a high profile case like Megaupload, the rest of the file storage community is rushing to verify their own compliance, which extends the impact far beyond this single case.
I think history has proved the best way to curtail piracy is to make plentiful content available at a fair price. Netflix and Hulu alone have made seedy download sites for TV and movie content far less popular. Legal music downloading has also had a major impact on peer to peer networks that specialized in distributing that material.
If you look at what is being distributed on a lot of torrent and other download sites today, a good deal of it is content embargoed by studios.
When the deep pocketed content industry gets additional powers and ordinary consumers are faced with what is effectively an extortion “settlement” offer that is cheaper than trying to hire lawyers to defend oneself, we are handing over too much power to an industry that has shown it doesn’t even believe home recording of over the air broadcasts should be legal, much less downloaded content.
The MPAA and RIAA are the industry groups that have had their heads buried in the sand for over the last decade trying to pretend the internet never happened and that they can continue business as they always have while blocking or killing off anything that threatens their old models.
These industries have NEVER created any innovative or useful technology or services that have benefited consumers, and when they do they only half-heartedly attempt to copy innovators while making the use of said services so onerus a average consumer is unable to actually enjoy their paid for content.
As much as they hate to admit it, Apple saved the music industry with iTunes bringing it into the digital age.
Revolutionary services like Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, and other streaming services have also brought music, video and TV to consumers in a way that consumers love, are more than willing to pay for, and finally found a way to enjoy the media as they see fit for a reasonable cost.
The more common and visible form of piracy perpetrated by average consumers is the best example you can get of law abiding citizens rejecting the industries efforts to curtail their rights to fair use and common sense. If you buy a song or movie you should be able to play it in your DVD player, on your iPhone, on your iPad, without having to pay 3+ times for each copy or having to have a live constant internet connection on to verify you have a license and your device doesn’t exceed some arbitrary set # (good luck in a family of 4-5).
These industries want MORE control, if they can’t roll back the clock before the internet, they for sure are going to use their lobbyists, vasts amount of money, and market dominance to pressure the government, content producers, while using the internet to the best of their ability to restrict and control access.
Now you also have the Cable Companies with a vested interest in fighting the internet and services like Netflix to protect their old business schemes, who combined with the movie and TV industries have absolutely NO intention to ever offer their media in a consumer friendly fashion such as ala-cart via on demand IP delivery such as Netflix.
Legislation like SOPA/PIPA and how close they were to being passed before the rally by internet users and companies just show how outrageous and disconnected its become, for our government to give that kind of control to sieze and shut down any online business for claimed IP violations with no due process. Guilty until proven innocent.
It looks like they finally seized the domain: http://i.imgur.com/ayHqq.png . It refused to load up on the day the servers were seized and shut down.
This would be one of those cases I would say that would require several, well trained minds to analyse. Many sites I’ve seen indicate that Megaupload knew they were trafficed a lot for pirating materials, besides legitamite uploads that I used them for (game mods mostly), and didn’t take active measures to stop piracy. I feel the problem lays with the fact that such sites were made to make uploading easy. By nature, this makes the site not as easy to moderate as say, YouTube where video and audio can be analysed. Files uploaded to Megaupload can be encrypted or differ from file to file.
As far as SOPA goes? Stick with the DMCA process and Safe Harbor processes. SOPA and PIPA are terrible pieces of legistration, and while OPEN initially is a better bill, all three bills still have no reason to be passed. The laws exist and are in place already to get after those who are doing wrong. Government and Big Business just need to understand why people pirate material, not seize and ask questions later just to have everything go to the wastebin, where pirates continue to spawn at an exponential rate.
*EDIT* We really need to fix the comment editor! It is very buggy.
SOPA and PIPA are assholes.