nutMac

Today is the date of the original deadline served to the Internet radio broadcasters for paying up retroactive royalty payment totaling in the millions for some broadcasters. This date has been moved to June 15th 2007, but a few days back, in a bid to deal a small but political blow to the RIAA, I started the movement to stop the buying of music on the original deadline date, May 15th (today).

The movement met with criticism, stating it was pointless, useless, not sending the right message, hurting the wrong people, etc… The point I think the nay-sayers are missing is that this issue is localized to the United States. Other, obviously freer countries don’t suffer under the thumb of such organizations as the RIAA and the MPAA and so on. So this movement was more to show our American friends that we feel their pain and offer our support.

Living outside of America we have little way to impact the situation on any governmental level but we can always speak with our wallets. And that’s what today and this movement is all about. Will it change the overall outcome? Probably not, but a petition doesn’t sting nearly as much as lost revenue. Consider us and all the other international supporters on American Internet Radio, the constituency who vote with their wallets.

So I stick to my guns; DON’T BUY MUSIC TODAY, MAY 15th, AND STAND UP FOR INTERNET RADIO.

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Technorati Tags: RIAA, Internet Radio, boycotte, May 15

“The day… the music… died… and they’ll be singing, bye-bye miss American pie…” On July 15th, internet radio as we know it will end. That’s the new date (it was May 15th) that the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has set for internet radio broadcasters like Pandora Media to pay up on retro active royalty payments (increased from 0.0008 to 0.0019), which will see many web casters owing in the millions.

This is another example of how the RIAA and their fossilized business moedel is so flawed, they can’t even see how they are hurting themselves and those they represent. To effectively put an end to internet radio is to put another nail in the coffin of legitimate music trade. Internet radio already pays their dues, more so than terrestrial radio and I would be so bold as to state that the number of listeners to internet radio might even be on par with terrestrial radio.

I think the power of internet radio is greater than terrestrial radio. Here is my reason, plain and simple: people who listen to internet radio do so because they made a conscious decision to do so. They went online, sought out a suitable stream and started listening. That’s not always the case with terrestrial radio. How often do you get in your car and the radio is already on… background noise, right? You go to the store, radio is on… do you notice? At the office, the radio is pumped overhead… are you paying attention? But internet radio you are listening to because you chose to find it.

If the RIAA and the CRB want to hurt internet radio, let’s hurt the industry they are trying to protect. Symbolic of the original deadline issued by the CRB I urge all people worldwide to refrain from buying music on May 15th. Don’t buy from iTunes, don’t buy from Amazon, don’t buy from your local brick and mortar store… DON’T BUY MUSIC ON MAY 15th!

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Technorati Tags: RIAA, Copyright Royalty Board, pandora, internet radio

So after two routers, endless firewall configurations, three DDNS services… It is now clear to me that Rogers is going to block me from using my home computer as a server by any means necessary. This will not do!

I need VNC connectivity to do the work I do! I need FTP access to my system! I need to be able to serve a clients website on a local environment that I have complete control over during the development process and I need to be able to share that with them! But every time I get these systems in place and running, Rogers shuts me down in under 24 hours! Is this possible or am I losing my mind?

How is that I can pay close to $60 dollars a month for premium service and be able to do nothing more than view static HTML? Is anyone else being completely choked like this?

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Technorati Tags: Rogers, VNC, FTP, blocking

Bandwidth shaping… heard of it? Well if not, you should at least be aware of it. Bandwidth shaping is where your ISP (Internet Service Provider) indiscriminately chokes your bandwidth to a near trickle… no matter how much you actually pay for. This is a practice that many of the ISP’s feel is their right; they don’t want you using their bandwidth for their competitors VOIP service for example. Michael Geist writes in the Toronto Star about how bad it’s getting with Rogers in particular. Amber McArthur of City TV even did a story on it.

As a small business owner I am outraged that this is even allowed. I have a legitimate need for VOIP as my means of customer support. I have a legitimate need for P2P networks and torrent networks to pass around documents and programs in the open source world. The main form of distribution for Linux is over bittorrent and Rogers (my ISP) has all but disabled the Gnutella network and crippled bittorrent so bad it’s nearly unusable. And my VOIP (Skype in my case)? After a few minutes my calls are dropped and redials are often futile. All this from a company who states “Blistering speed, for sharing large files and much more.”… BULLSHIT!

What can we do? Blog about it. Blog often and link to every article you can about it. Make this a well known phenomenon and raise awareness so the government and ISP’s alike can no longer ignore this gross injustice.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, bandwidth shaping, ISP censoring, bandwidth limiting

Isn’t karma a bitch! How many of us are guilty of Microsoft bashing? How often did we poke fun at the long delays for the release of Vista? And now we eat humble pie? That’s the bast way to describe Apples latest official statement concerning the release of Leopard that is now slated for October.

What went wrong? For the first time since Jobs return to the throne, it looks as though the Apple has dropped the ball on it’s normally concrete marketing model; tease, rumor, fake-out, release on time (or release early)… This has been the way of things for so long, it almost hurts to see Apple fumble like this. More often then not, we are not even aware of a potentially earth moving product release until “Boom!”, it’s upon us like the Sunday chores.

Growing pains. Apple is becoming a big, big company with many devisions and many responsibilities; they are now a multi-media conglomerate with big ambitions. They have iTunes, they have hardware, they have software and they are pushing for the iPhone (blamed for this particular delay). They are certain to feel the same speed bumps that their counterparts in the industry have felt for so long. As the statement so eloquently remarks, “Life often presents tradeoffs…”, so we had better get used to seeing life-just-happen to Apple like it has been to the rest of the industry.

Technorati Tags: Apple Inc., Leopard, OS X 10.5, iPhone

For years the recording industry (RIAA) has had us shackled when it came to digital music. If I buy a real CD at a brick and mortar, I can play it in my car, I can play it in my friends car, I can play in my house, on my computer… I can copy it to tape, I can copy it to another CD, I can copy it to DVD, I can copy it to VHS if I really wanted to… I can sell it to my friend, I can trade it with the creepy man down the street for some moonshine if I want to… But buy it on line? I can stick it in one library and play it on one stinking mp3 player. WTF! It’s a criminal tax in reality. It assumes that because you’ve procured your music with a computer, you are in fact a criminal who will do unlawful things with that music as though music in digital form is SO much easier to move about in underground circles than that impenetrable fortress of shinny, disk-like encryption they call “CD”.

Well one brave, forward thinking company, EMI, is braving this front and committing to be the first to go naked into this realm. For the first time, a big record label is putting up their entire catalogue up for sale DRM free. Ahhh, I can feel the relief… free at last… no more DRM… What’s this? Apple wants an extra 35¢ for this freedom? Taxed again!

The moral of the story… nothing in life is free.

Technorati Tags: Apple, EMI, DRM, RIAA

So I am on my way to PUMP Communications this morning listing to my usual tech-geek podcasts (which are usually a week old by the time I get to them) and made note that a number of the tech-news shows were repeatedly making mention of NBC and News Corp gearing up to take on YouTube. Stop the fricken presses! WHY?! Why would any self respecting, money making company, build a business model that is designed to take out a competitor who MAKES NO MONEY!

YouTube has lived off of venture capital for two years and now they’ve got themselves a sugar daddy with deep pockets, but they still don’t earn their keep. The current YouTube model is hard to monetize. Who better to do it than Google, I agree, but NBC and News Corp will have a tougher time at it since a) people watch YouTube to escape the commercialism of TV and b) I doubt NBC intends to run an Adsense campaign on their proposed video streaming venture.

If you’re going to try to take on any internet media giant, why take on one that actual has a financially viable business model like iTunes? Lets not just look at YouTube and mistake internet traffic for dollar signs.

Technorati Tags: podcasts, NBC, News Corp, YouTube