Canadians may soon get a license to steal, if songwriters have their way.

For $10 a month, Internet users will be able to beg, borrow, or openly steal as much music as they want, from anywhere they want, without legal reprisals.

The apparent “cry uncle” tactic against piracy comes from the Songwriters Association of Canada.

Eddie Schwartz, president of the group, says the monthly fee would be automatically tacked onto every Internet access account, raising more than $800 million annually.  Consumers who don’t want to pay the music sharing tax can “opt out,” if they notify the Association and agree not to engage in any online music sharing activity.

“The surest and swiftest way to dramatically reduce infringement is to give consumers an authorized way to music-file share. Once such an authorized system is in place, consumers who refuse to pay a reasonable license fee will clearly be choosing to infringe and can be dealt with accordingly,” reads Schwartz’s proposal.

Proceeds raised from the monthly tax will be diverted to songwriters, but not record companies — a matter the latter has taken notice of, claiming they have not been involved in the discussions.

This is not the first time the group has proposed a “music license fee.”  In 2007, the group tried to amend the Canadian Copyright Act to force service providers themselves to pay a tax on behalf of their file sharing customers.  The effort never made it out of Parliament.

This time, the group is talking directly with several unnamed Internet Service Providers about implementing the fee without seeking advance approval from the government.

Schwartz argues his proposal will monetize file sharing and eliminate enforcement headaches, because the group would only target individual infringers that refuse to pay the monthly license fee.  Schwartz says the majority of Canadians would support it.  He quoted recent studies that claim as many as 80 percent of all file-sharers would consent to a monthly fee if it eliminated their risk of prosecution.

But the government may take a dimmer view.  Many provinces forbid automatically billing consumers for services without their direct consent.  The so-called “negative billing” proposed by Schwartz would require a consumer to specifically opt out of the monthly charges.

Consumers are also likely to question higher charges for Internet service at a time when regulators are still reviewing usage-based billing schemes.  Considering the fees only cover songwriters, more than a few consumers are likely to wonder when Hollywood studios, television networks, software publishers, and record companies will come for their piece of the action — all have suffered to a similar degree from the underground trade of their products.

[Thanks to our reader Alex for sharing this news tip.]

Gov. Scott Walker’s administration in Wisconsin is under fire today for being allegedly caught blocking access to a website popular with protesters fighting the governor’s position on public unions.

Democratic party officials said that the website, www.defendwisconsin.org, run by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Teacher Assistants, was accessible after its launch last week until at least Friday.

But by Monday, the website organizers discovered the site was blocked for those using the state’s free Wi-Fi network available inside the Capitol building.  The website is used to coordinate protest actions and keep volunteers informed about the pushback campaign against the Walker Administration.

Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate says that the site was put on a blacklist typically used to filter out pornography sites so that protesters inside the Capitol could not access the site.

Former Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Charles Hoornstra said that, if Walker is blocking the website, it could be a violation of state and federal laws concerning free speech laws.

This isn’t the first time the state government has been accused of cutting off Internet access.  The Teaching Assistants Association earlier accused state authorities of cutting off Wi-Fi access to a room they had taken over as a headquarters inside of the Capitol.

Some of the activists in Madison used the occasion to draw comparisons with Internet shutdowns in Egypt and Libya. CNN picked up the story, taking it nationwide, and Sachin Chheda, a Democratic activist and former IT employee at the Capitol, said someone inside the government would have to consciously add the website to a blacklist for the software to block access.

The Walker Administration offered its own explanation of the blocked website, claiming the state’s software initially allows access to all websites until it is updated, then blocks sites until they are manually reviewed.

Department of Administration spokeswoman Carla Vigue said, “DOA’s security software automatically blocked the site, as it does all new websites.”

“No one here at DOA decided to block it or took action to do so,” he said. “The website is handled like any other website.”

Activists at the state Capitol tested Vigue’s explanation today, visiting newly registered domains with new websites, and had no trouble accessing any of them.

“The state got caught censoring and now they are making up stories to distract and deflect,” Paul Jeson tells Stop the Cap! “Since when does net nanny software require the manual review of every website in the world to unblock access — the whole point of the software is to arrive with a blacklist filter pre-installed and programming that checks content in real-time looking for triggers.”

Jeson says unless a protester exposed themselves in a photo republished on the site, there is no reason it should have been blocked.

“I doubt Gov. Walker himself ordered the block, but some of his associates treat the 1st Amendment as something worthy of defending only when it protects their point of view,” Jeson opines.  “Imagine what would happen if the Capitol Wi-Fi blocked Fox News or one of several anti-union, pro-Walker websites that popped up at the same time defendwisconsin.org was launched; I am not surprised none of those sites favorable to the governor’s position have complained about similar blocks.”

The governor’s office late in the day tried to change the subject.

“The Democratic Party should spend less time lying about Gov. Walker, and more time trying to get their AWOL State Senators back to Wisconsin,” said a statement released by the governor’s office.

CNN covered this statement from the Wisconsin Democratic Party on a poor telephone line. (1 minute)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

Shocked onlookers moments after the earthquake struck downtown Christchurch

A major magnitude 6.3 earthquake has devastated the Canterbury region of southeast New Zealand, particularly the central business district of the city of Christchurch, knocking out power, water, sewer, and several telecommunications networks across the region.  The wireless networks that remain have been so overburdened, government officials have declared use of those networks limited to emergency use only.

Two aftershocks — one magnitude 5.6 and another 5.5 — shook Christchurch within hours of the initial 6.3 earthquake, causing damaged buildings to crumble, including parts of the 130-year-old Christchurch Cathedral. Its spire toppled into the city square, falling onto throngs of tourists who ran from the building in terror as the temblor struck.

Dozens are dead, with scores more injured, particularly in the Christchurch city center, where the quake struck just after lunch.  Shocking raw video has appeared on national television showing bloody bodies strewn amongst the rubble, and hearts are broken over stories such as the death of nine month old toddler who survived the quake, but not the large flat panel television that toppled down on him during an aftershock.

Telecommunications services were reduced to a state of virtual unusability following the quake because of cable cuts and congestion, as Prime Minister John Key informed Parliament the government was forced to initially rely on a sketchy satellite link to speak with civil defense officials in the city of 376,000.

The city’s local television station — CTV, was reduced to rubble as the seven-story building pancaked, tossing some employees working on the fifth floor into the middle of Madras Street below.  They were the lucky ones, surviving as astonished onlookers ran up to help.

National media has described the Canterbury earthquake as “New Zealand’s darkest day,” and most radio and television stations still on the air have ceased regular programming to relay the country’s National service from Radio/TV New Zealand, or the country’s national news-talk network Newstalk ZB.

New Zealand’s Internet services are functioning, but sporadic in many locations.  The national public broadcaster, Radio/TV New Zealand, is relying on its international shortwave radio service Radio New Zealand International to get its signal out to the rest of the world as its live Internet streams initially failed.  Many other broadcasters in Christchurch have lost their links to transmitters, or temporarily lacked power to stay on the air.

The region’s landline telephone network remains functional where cable cuts have not interrupted service, but since many New Zealanders rely on cell phones, the country’s wireless networks quickly were overwhelmed with worried callers.  Large parts of New Zealand’s cell phone network in the south is now completely reliant on battery backup power, due to widespread power disruptions.  Keeping those sites operational is critical, as scores of office workers in Christchurch are texting messages indicating they are still alive, but trapped in damaged or collapsed buildings.

Emergency generators are being pressed into service as providers recognize their wireless networks are often the only reliable link residents now have with the rest of the country. Some cell sites operated by Telecom New Zealand (TNZ), Vodafone and 2Degrees equipped with solar or battery backup systems began to fail last night.

“We’re asking our customers in Christchurch to have patience if they lose service. Although we can’t identify which sites will lose battery power or when, we know that they are generally in good shape so can be placed back in service once power becomes available,” says 2degrees CEO Eric Hertz.

TNZ and their biggest competitor Vodafone have set aside their rivalry and are coordinating efforts to keep the country’s networks up and running.  Staff of both companies have been largely ordered to remain home, as technicians on duty at the time of the quake pull overtime duty.  Emergency 111 service, today answered by operators in Wellington 190 miles away, is now prioritized and customers have been told by government officials that cell phone use in the affected region should be limited for emergency calls only.

All public payphones in Christchurch discontinued paid service as of this morning — all calls are now free.

Vodafone reports SMS text messaging service between networks is not functioning at this time.  That means Vodafone customers cannot send or receive text messages to anyone outside of Vodafone’s own network for the time being.

All three carriers are recommending wireless customers across the entire country use text messaging rather than calling to keep congestion to a minimum.  Text messages rarely overload wireless networks.  Most providers are also waiving contract cancellation penalties for customers whose homes or businesses were heavily damaged or destroyed, and will forward calls to functioning phone numbers at no charge.

Cable modem service in Christchurch is disrupted wherever cable cuts exist.  DSL from TNZ is also sporadic for the same reasons.

While power is expected to return across Canterbury as daybreak now arrives, officials warn outages in essential services will persist for days, if not weeks, in some particularly hard-hit areas.

Live Coverage

• NewstalkZB – broadcasting on all FM frequencies in Christchurch controlled by “RadioNetwork”
• Radio Live
• Radio New Zealand (streaming is sporadic/non-functional at this time)
• TV New Zealand (Choose “Live International Stream” when available)

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/TVNZ Quake Damage 2-22-11.flv[/flv]

TV New Zealand presented coverage moments after the quake occurred.  Some of these reports and raw video contain extremely graphic and disturbing imagery.  (30 minutes)

CanadianDownload fills the marketplace niche of delivering websites that are now too big to download under Canada’s Internet Overcharging schemes.

America, the home of the free and the brave… and the unlimited use Internet service plan, is coming to Canada’s rescue.

Want to watch the latest CRTC hearing about broadband or download a Linux distribution, but don’t want to blow through your puny usage allowance?  Let a new website do the downloading for you.

American-based CanadianDownload.com is part mission of mercy, part online embarrassment for Canadian officials who have allowed the country’s broadband to lapse into a highly expensive, slow, and irritating mess.

Justin Bowman and his business partner Matthew Neder Laden are behind the website, which fielded 130,000 visits on its first day of operation.  The two run a security camera outfit that has nothing to do with Canadian broadband, but considering their headquarters are in the mountains of North Carolina, one of the hotbed states for Internet Overcharging experiments south of the Canadian border, they strongly sympathize with the plight of ordinary citizens paying too much, for too little service.  And because many of their customers want to remotely access the cameras they sell, their business could ultimately be impacted by paltry usage limits, too.

“The initial idea was just a protest of the ludicrous bandwidth caps that [Canadian ISPs] have placed on their customers,” Bowman told the Financial Post. “But the other part of it was just to provide a service.”

“We had no idea it would actually catch on and that people would actually give a rat’s ass about [the site], but they did,” he said.

Considering most Canadian cable and phone company Internet service plans are limited to 60 or fewer “rat asses” per month (and dropping), their surprise might be unwarranted.

Visitors are invited to enter the URL of the website they want shipped north, and the service will mail the discs at no charge using the cheapest possible shipping method, which you learn more from ArdentX.

Bowman and Laden

The two have spent countless hours burning DVD’s for consumers across Canada since the site launched earlier this month.  But there are limits.  Nearly 90 percent of the requests are “not serious,” according to Bowman.  Requests for “Google” as well as racy online content can’t be fulfilled, and the service is careful to avoid running afoul of copyright law.

“I don’t want to mess with that, having the FBI on my ass because I’m shipping bootleg items across international lines, I’m just not going to do that,” Bowman said. “Basically we’re keeping it to open source software, a lot of those data files are pretty massive.”

All in all, CanadianDownload.com exists to make a point — that broadband service in Canada can never be a success story with Internet Overcharging schemes hanging over its head.  Just as a carrier pigeon in South Africa proved it could deliver faster service than the overpriced broadband incumbent, an American website has called out the current Canadian broadband nightmare of high prices and usage caps.  The scariest part of the story is that mailing DVD’s with web content could eventually become financially viable.

At least the United States Postal Service and Canada Post, who will reap the revenue delivering all those discs, hope so.

“We’ll [continue] for as long as we can,” Bowman told the Post. “So long as we can still make rent and feed ourselves… yeah we’ll keep on mailing you guys stuff.”

From CanadianDownload’s blog:

The metered bandwidth decision was and always has been about Netflix, iTunes, torrents, and other threats to dying media business models. From CRTC to Comcast, here in the states, the international business community must fight back against the monopolies who (for the most part) ran their cables on the back of public subsidies and now want to dictate how these pipes are used. We broke up big-Bell, it’s time to do the same here.

Here at SCW, we have been very concerned with bandwidth caps. We’ve been called [innovative] for our work with CanadianDownload.com, but we aren’t; we just hearkened back to old school business models. Bandwidth caps reduce innovation; they don’t increase it. Also for all the talk of “smarter way to ship data,” we have to state that we want this business model to fail. Although there is a need for this type of service in places like South Africa, Australia, and many other parts of the world, more innovation will be possible with an open and accessible Internet than with the “innovation” associated with bottling it up and shipping it.

The actions by ISP monopolies puts all online business at risk – and not just services like Netflix, imgur, and iTunes. In a world of metered bandwidth, low bandwidth versions of sites will have to be created — which squashes rather than creates innovation. Furthermore, this puts any site that serves online advertising at risk. If you bandwith is metered, who could blame someone for using tools such as ad-block-plus to take more control of your bandwidth allowance. This translates to a direct reduction in revenue for sites that support themselves via advertisement. The saddest part of this is that even the portal sites for ISPs, (where you can see your bandwidth usage), show ads.

Gary McCallum, a Shaw customer in Edmonton, Alberta, has received word his broadband service is about to get more expensive — a lot more expensive.

“Holy crap, it’s like text messaging [bill shock] all over again when your broadband bill arrives and you are now looking at hundreds of dollars instead of the $40 or $50 you used to pay,” McCallum told CTV News.

McCallum, and other designated “heavy users,” are receiving letters in the mail from Shaw notifying them they have been exceeding the company’s declining usage limits imposed on its broadband service.  If they exceed the limits again, they may be subject to penalty fees of as much as $2 per gigabyte.

“I’m upset about the backdoor tactics,” McCallum complains.  “They keep it secret and then lambaste you later.”

Most Shaw customers will be forced to confine their usage to 60GB per month, the limit on the company’s most popular broadband plan.  If they don’t, after some warning, they’ll pay a stiff fine.  Just 20GB of overlimit usage will more than double the average customer’s broadband bill, currently around $37 a month.

A house full of teenagers watching Netflix or downloading files could cost far more than that.

Company officials deny the potential revenue bonanza is unjustified.

Customers who use more will pay more, admits Terry Medd, vice-president of operations for Shaw Communications in Calgary.

“It’s video over the Internet that’s driving a lot of this cost,” he said. However, most Shaw Internet customers won’t hit their caps, Medd claims, suggesting it should affect fewer than 10 per cent of customers.

“The average user consumed about one-third of what the cap is. In other words, we’ve set the caps at three times the average usage. For the average user, there’s no concern here,” Medd said.

However, Shaw recently reduced their usage caps on virtually all of their Internet plans, making it more likely customers will be snagged by overlimit fees.

Some customers want to know what they will get if they use far less than their plan allowance.

Don McGregor believes Shaw’s plan to charge Internet users for the data they use is fair and equitable, so long as those who use less than the allowance get a break on their bills.

“Shaw should plan on refunding fees for any use of data below the contracted amount,” the Edmonton resident wrote in a letter to the editor published in the Edmonton Journal.  “Since 90 per cent of Shaw’s subscribers use less than the full GB capacity they pay for, I am sure these subscribers’ refund cheques are in the mail.”

Don, like other Canadians, is about to learn Internet Overcharging is never about fairness or saving customers money.  It’s about charging customers more for the same service they used to receive for less, without any improvements.  ISPs will not provide true “usage pricing” for consumers because it would slash revenue from their broadband service.

But western Canadians need not be victims of Shaw’s overcharging.  Telus, which sells landline-based DSL service in British Columbia and Alberta says it has upgraded its facilities to accommodate usage demands and won’t expose customers to overlimit fee bill shock.

Telus offers a way out of Shaw's Money Party hangover

Although Telus’ website does show usage limits, company officials claim they are rarely enforced, and not at the subscriber’s expense.

Telus could make a significant dent in Shaw’s customer base by dropping them altogether, which will save the phone company from these kinds of  silly legal gymnastics in their FAQ:

Why do you call your service unlimited, when my monthly usage is limited?
We refer to TELUS High Speed as being unlimited because you get unlimited hours of monthly access.

If you do not want to play Shaw’s Internet Overcharging game, perhaps spending time with a new Xbox 360 would be better?  Telus is giving them away to qualified new customers signing up for service.

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CTV Edmonton Shaw Internet Overcharging 1-7-11.flv[/flv]

CTV News in Edmonton informs Alberta’s Shaw customers their broadband service could get a lot more expensive.  (2 minutes)