Overview: With the dollar to terabyte ratio decreasing every day, there’s no excuse for not having adequate digital storage space. The new Iomega ix2-200 Network-Attached Storage (NAS) unit makes adding storage to your home or business network about as easy as it can get. Its a very powerful, versatile unit that is quite nearly plug-and-play.  Let’s take a closer look shall we?

The Hardware: First off, this thing feels like it could survive being run over by a tank. And if tanks can’t destroy your data, what do you have to fear? Inside the metal enclosure is a 1.0 GHz Marvel processor, 256MB of RAM, and two SATA II platters. The disks are set up in a RAID 1 mirror, although you can disable the RAID and run it as JBOD instead. All of this is controlled by a Linux OS, EMC LifeLine. You also have three USB 2.0 ports, one in front, two in the back. Gigabit Ethernet jack, power input, and one of those nifty security lock ports if you have problems with people walking off with your hard drives.

Getting Connected: The setup for this thing was a breeze. Plug in power, plug into router, run install disc and you’re ready to start storing data like its going out of style. Instead of having to install some sort of UI software, you’ll be greeted with the above page in your web browser. From this control interface you can have full administrator access from any machine on your network. You can see the list of various settings below. I’ll go through and hit the big stuff.

Backup and Restore: The ix2 makes backing up your drives almost a fully autonomous procedure. Using what Iomega calls “Copy Jobs”, you can set the source and destination of the files, put the job on a reoccurring schedule, even tell it to only import new and modified files. You can set up multiple Copy Jobs for different drives or for different locations. Want to backup another external drive every week? Not a problem. Do you want pictures to be saved in one folder, and important documents in another? Just a few clicks away. The ix2 also has full Time Machine and Retrospect support to back up your computer.

One of the cooler features of the ix2 is the QuikTransfer button. You can assign one Job to the QuikTransfer button located on the front of the device. Now you can activate that Job, even if you’re computer isn’t up and running. Its really useful for downloading any new files you need very quickly. Just pop a flash drive directly into the unit, press the button, and a few thousand revolutions later, you’re up to date.

Disks: Here you can change the RAID configuration of the unit. Default is the mirror-protection mode. Essentially writing your data twice, so that in the event of one disk failing, all your data is on the other disk. The downside is that you have half as much space to work with. The Disks menu also has the option to securely erase your data, making it unrecoverable. You know, for sensitive material.

Email Notification: Pretty self-explanatory, but useful. Should any problems arise, the ix2 will send an email to you detailing the problem.

Event Log: Another straightforward feature. This log keeps track of which users accessed which files, when they did so, any errors that occurred, etc. It all downloads as a text file for your convenience! Useful for making sure your employees aren’t using your network to seed the latest season of Dollhouse.

External Storage: You can attach up to three external storage devices, and ix2 will make them available on the network.

iSCSI: More for business users, the ix2 has iSCSI, iSNS, and Mutual CHAP capability. If you don’t know what those mean, don’t worry about it. You won’t be needing it.

Media Service: Here’s another place where the ix2 shows some pretty cool innovation. First, this device is a UPnP and DLNA certified media server, allowing for streaming music, videos, etc. all over your network. But you can also wire in up to 5 security cameras into the ix2 and turn it into a surveillance station. The video streams can be remotely viewed, or recorded.

Network Service: More technical jargon to throw at you. The ix2 supports multiple file sharing protocols including, AFP, Bluetooth, NFS, rsync, SNMP, and CIFS. Whew!

Power Management: Designed to suck as little power as possible, the ix2 only activates the fan when the internal temperature gets to a certain point. This not only reduces the amount of power used, it keeps the drive from sounding like a freaking jet engine on your desk.

Printers: Just like with external storage devices, you can plug in a standard, wired printer, and the ix2 magically makes it wireless! No way! Or at least available to the network. Plugged in my HP Photosmart, worked like a charm.

Remote Access: If you’re out on the road, but still need to access important files you left back home you’re options are usually limited. The ix2 has a unique URL that allows you to access it from any internet capable computer. I like this option better than having my files “in the cloud”, hosted by some 3rd party.

Security: This one is another very useful tool. When you assign others on your network a user ID and password, you can also set the level of access the have on the drive. You can set read or write privileges for each individual folder on the drive, giving you a lot of flexibility in your security options. Keeping your video tech out of the financial records and the like.

Torrent Download: Quite possilby my favorite feature of the ix2. It comes with its own torrent client built in. Meaning you can set torrents to either leech or seed, and you don’t need to leave your computer on to do so. The ix2 will automatically download or upload the data independently. Brilliant!

Concluson: Well, we made it to the end. As you can see, the ix2 has a lot to offer personal and small business consumers. If you haven’t started using external or network based storage yet, I highly recommend you start. The ix2-200 comes in 1 TB, 2TB, and 4TB flavors, at $269.99, $369.99, and $699.99 respectively. Plus, external drives are easier to ditch when the RIAA comes pounding down your door looking for all of your pirated legally obtained, and properly licensed media.

More news about The Pirate Bay to bore you all! (Seriously, it’s not like people are still talking about the old Suprnova or Torrentspy anymore, yet the TPB has stuck around.) Some time ago, a Dutch court ordered TPB to delete a number of torrents and block Dutch IP addresses from being able to visit the site. Using a sledgehammer on a thumbtack, yes. Then TPB protested, as it does all the time, saying that it had no idea about the court case to begin with, so it couldn’t make a proper defense, etc. The Dutch court agreed to give TPB a a little bit of time to work out its issues, and has now reached another, similar verdict: remove the torrents, and block Dutch IP addresses. Fun all around, really.

Of course, BREIN is behind all of this. (BREIN is sorta Holland’s equivalent of the RIAA, and has been after TPB for as long as I can remember.) In a perfect, BREIN-approved world, TPB would just go away and never return. That doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon, no here we are.

The Dutch court gave TPB’s owners, whoever they are at this point, three months to comply with the ruling, lest they face a €5,000 (~$7,500) per day fine.

TPB is currently studying the ruling, which they may well appeal. I look forward to more courtroom shenanigans. Then again, I also look forward to the day when Hollywood, and its international equivalents, figure out a business model that clicks with the world in 2009, one that doesn’t involve trying to sue dumb Web sites into the ground. One day!

So when word came down that Apple had filed a patent for what appears to be an ad-supported version of OS X, my shock abated almost instantly. In fact, I only felt more justified in backing ad-supported products. There will be objections, some legitimate, some hysterical, but I think it will become increasingly clear over the next few years that this sort of thing is not only unavoidable, but ultimately desirable. As with other major emerging concepts like globalization, peer to peer connectivity, net neutrality, and device convergence, the evolution of advertising will be denied, debated, and championed in a million different ways. And that’s okay. Like those other processes (all of them still ongoing), you don’t have to accept them right away, but it helps if you realize that resistance is futile.

First, though, give yourselves a pat on the back. As a member of the vanguard of new media, next-generation services, and experimental technology, you should feel a certain pride. And I think you’ve also been justified in your various transgressions out here on the frontier — blocking ads, pirating media and software, and misusing or abusing other services (to a point at least) — because you moved faster than the rest of the world and it’s their fault that they didn’t see it coming, or weren’t fast enough to react in time. I don’t want to get all copyfight up in here, but the dinosaurs of media and communications deserve all the flak and failure they’ve piled up. I know it, you know it, they won’t say so but they know it too — but the time for sulking and suing is over. Instead, they’re piling into the wagons and hitting the trail. The latest Wild West on the internet is being clogged with settlers, and, at the risk of allowing this metaphor to overstay its welcome, there’s about to be a new sheriff in town (pictured at right). And the next few years will be the story of how the West was re-won — by corporate interests, as usual. Hey, it had to happen sometime.

Look. The fastest growing mobile platforms in the world are essentially trojan horses for new advertising (Android) and paid content (Apple). DRM is starting, thank god, to assume a form that isn’t instinctively abhorrent to even to the most seasoned of internet users. Digital distribution is no longer looked upon as an aberration, but an opportunity. And this positive change in new advertising is combined with, as Eric Clemons noted back in March, a failure on the part of traditional advertising to engage its audience on any level. Of course, his objections apply equally to a banner ad that’s in your browser as it does to a banner ad that’s on your desktop. Let’s talk about it.

Break yourself

So what can you do? Well, you can change the way you advertise. Ads these days are so bad that anybody who clicks one is guaranteed to be a sucker. And the supply of suckers, birth rates notwithstanding, is decreasing as techsavviness increases (along with AdBlock, torrenting, etc.). Even when you take an ethical stand, like Penny Arcade and others, and only advertise on your site for things you want you readership to support, ads simply won’t do any more. I wonder why? Let’s see. Tell me how most ads these days differ from the following:

(image from here)

Except for the fact that you no longer have to send a piece of mail to a physical address (usually, anyway), it is evident that the bulk of advertising hasn’t changed in 150 years. Interesting, that — and surprising that such a mind-bogglingly backward-looking strategy has survived so long. But luckily for us, advertisers are finally beginning to realize that the internet isn’t just a periodical with infinite pages. Innovators have, over the last four or five years, created a huge, rich playpen for marketers, and unsurprisingly those marketers have largely ignored it. Hence the trouble monetizing such obvious gold mines as Flickr, FaceBook, Twitter, and so on. “How will we make money on Twitter, there’s no place to put our gold-rush-era advertisements for Gammon’s Unctuous Ointment?” Sorry, but change comes from within, people. I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but if you can’t figure out how to take a hundred million eyeballs a day and turn it into cash, you should reconsider your profession.

That’s why I see all these troublesome embedded ads and sponsored services as non-threatening — even cute in a way. They represent the infancy of new advertising, and stuff like an ad-supported OS or office suite are their first wobbly steps. Photogenic in a way, but be ready to capture the first few falls as well. For instance: Apple’s potential system, while obviously just a rough sketch in more ways than one, has the troubling flowchart box “User pre-buys time?” Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Coin-op computing is not the way to go. Revisit Eric’s article for a few ideas on what is the way to go, but while I have you I’d like to add a few examples I’ve just thought up in the last few minutes, if I may. I doubt I’m the first person to think of these, but I don’t see any of them being implemented widely, so pretend I invented them for the purposes of this post.

Ads that aren’t anachronisms

When you say “ad-supported,” it conjures images of ugly banner ads surrounding the functional portion of the program or service. You and I see it every day in Gmail, after all, and who hasn’t seen worse? Nagware also comes to mind; I used WinRAR for a decade and clicked down its nag screen thousands of times before giving in. But that’s old school. These days, ads are rectangles filled with lies. Nobody clicks on those any more, or if they do, the numbers are decreasing at a rate which must alarm those who fill the rectangles. But what if the ads were to be invisible? Picture this: an OS-wide layer that detects searches, reads text on webpages, and scours all content for products and services. A Snap-esque pop-up or browser bar provides the lowest prices, latest blog posts, and a link to the official site. It provides trackable clickthroughs (bankable) and is, in fact, useful to the user. In a “normal” machine you could turn this off, and in an ad-supported machine you couldn’t (without some work anyway). Sure, it’s not a full solution, but honestly, would you mind having that on your machine if it meant saving a couple hundred bucks up front? Even if you say yes (and I might), I guarantee there are about a hundred million people who would say no. Can you say Wal-Mart? I knew you could. I’d venture to say that this is one of the driving ideas behind Chrome OS.

So that’s a kickoff point for ads in the OS: unavoidable yet unobtrusive, simple yet functional. What about in the browser? It’s more difficult because the user has more control over what they do and don’t see. But the same principles are at work, and at the risk of tooting TechCrunch’s horn, we’re already applying them (and have been before I got here; I’m not claiming any credit). Look down at the bottom of this paragraph. It’s a CrunchBase widget! Useful, embeddable, trackable, and customizable — mark my words, in a year or two these things (not just CrunchBase but similar items) will be everywhere. After all, who says an ad has to be produced by the company making the product? People don’t like those ads anyway. They’re badly designed, and frequently damned lies to boot. But in a CrunchBase or say GDGT embedded widget, you know the source, you don’t have to worry about spin, and it’s no skin off your back if TechCrunch gets a penny whenever you click through to Sony’s site through one. And here’s the fun part: payment, placement, and tracking are virtually identical to traditional ads. Sony doesn’t want to pay a website to advertise for them? Then no links to Sony. Users can figure it out by themselves.

If I’m honest, they should be a bit smaller if they’re to be everywhere. And have more stuff. You get the idea, though. …yeah, it’s me, so what?

But media, Devin, you’re forgetting the media! Billions are spent on television advertising. Or so I’m told — I only see TV ads at the gym and at bars these days, since I download or stream all my media. I’m not boasting of being some elite master pirate and internet jockey; the fact is that tech-savvy people do what I do, or rather I do what they do, because at the moment it’s easier and better. That’s all. And there are more people qualifying as tech-savvy every day. Media companies are realizing that, and TV ads, while not on their way out, are going to have to be heavily augmented with something else. What could it be? What did I say about the other ads — oh yes, unavoidable yet unobtrusive, simple yet functional. Okay, here’s one I just thought up as I typed this sentence. When you stream or download a show, have metadata or an on-screen menu or page (visible during the intro, ads, or whatnot) where you can buy associated items. But not just DVD sets. I mean, if someone’s watching episode 89, they either own episodes 1-60 already or will be buying them sooner or later anyway. You’re trying to sell God to the choir. Why not accessorize? The meta-page I theorize (an enormous advertisement in disguise) can have all manner of things: links to the coffee shop the characters were in. Prices and local availability for the clothes they wore. iTunes link for songs from the soundtrack. Related shows! Related books! Every time you provide an episode for free (if that continues) — with unskippable ad breaks for your regular ads! — you get to expose every viewer to a cornucopia of products that they are probably at least a little interested in. Can you say that about cable? And if you do say it, will people laugh?

How I learned to stop worrying and so on

But I seem to have wandered off from the original topic. Let’s get something straight. The world is already ad-supported. It always was. And it will continue to be. Don’t fight it. It’s like slipping into a warm bath. If Apple puts out an ad-supported version of OS X, or Google Checkout is built into Chrome OS, or Microsoft brings back Clippy to suggest sponsored websites, you can cry all you want, but know that advertising makes the world go round. For a brief, exciting time, you’ve been ahead of the curve, in a land where ad-men feared to tread. You hate advertising, and rightly so, because you’ve been subjected to it in its worst possible guise. For a decade at least, ads have been a lame, decrepit wolf in comically unconvincing sheep’s clothing. That’s changing — and while it’s too little, too late for some (the RIAA and MPAA for two, or their dignity at least), it’s a golden opportunity for others, and it means progress and improvement for the end user.

It’ll take some time, but the coming renaissance in advertising is going to happen whether you like it or not, just as the revolution in communications happened to the advertisers — who decidedly did not like it. They fancied themselves an immovable object, but the truly unstoppable force of progress has since relieved them of that idea. Users have been empowered to choose when, how, and from whom they will accept advertising. The race now is not to the biggest and flashiest ad, as it has been for generations, but to the very opposite end of the spectrum. The winner will be the one who best convinces the user that they are not being advertised to at all. Indeed, we are about to change the very definition of advertisement. Care to help?

The whole world was bullish on iTunes LPs when they were announced; I called it a black eye for the majors, whose CMX format has yet to be popularized. But the hype was curbed when it was discovered that there was a $10,000 fee associated with the service, putting it completely out of reach for less affluent artists and small labels who can’t afford that price for promotion.

Luckily for them, Apple was nice enough to make the format rather basic. It turns out anyone versed in a little HTML and Javascript can put together an LP that’s just as good as a “real” one. It’s not as simple as drag-and-drop, and without Apple’s proprietary TuneKit library, some functionality is difficult or impossible to replicate at this point. But iTunesLP.net is trying to collect all the information you need into a few tutorials and demo files.

The site seems kind of hammered now, but I can see from what I’ve read there that really, a day’s work or less is all it would take to put together a serious ITLP. They’ve already released one: Disney’s 1957 Fantasia record, complete with high-quality art and program. Of course, you’ll need to get the album yourself, but if a record was ever deserving of the ITLP treatment, Fantasia is.

At this rate, it won’t be long before music promoters and designers will put “iTunes LP production” on their list of capabilities. The legality of this will be debated, but the demand is such that, like jailbreaking your iPhone, it’ll catch on with Apple’s blessing or not.

The question is, will Apple take positive measures to lock out third party ITLP files? That would be a spiteful move and a fiercely unpopular one, but the RIAA and other media giants have a history of spiteful and unwise actions (in fact, they make them almost exclusively) and Apple might follow in their shoes. The $10,000 fee is proof of that.

One may hope, though without too much expectation, that Apple will open it up and give out an affordable toolset for putting ITLPs together. Perhaps this fee business is just to stick it to the early adopters in big media, and then they’ll rain down love and compassion and SDKs on the faithful. But I doubt it.

[via Hack a Day]

On the upside, we have a fabulous new quote on the level of Ted Stevens’ “series of tubes” that demonstrates how utterly out of touch people like Paramount’s COO are with actual Internet terminology and capabilities. Behold:

“We are uploading it essentially to a ‘cyber locker,’ which is nothing more than electronic locker on the Internet.”

Mr. Huntsberry, we are in your debt for this immortal chestnut of cyber-wisdom. That’s nothing more than electronic wisdom on the Internet, for those of you who don’t know.

Here is his presentation. It has an air of Reefer Madness to it.

It’s an excellent study in how the RIAA and MPAA are able to show a service solely in the light of illegality. I like to imagine them showing a picture of a hammer. “This is what’s called a hammer, it’s essentially a heavy rock on the end of a stick. This allows the user to beat people with said rock over and over without losing it. The stick portion can also be used to dig up other people’s gardens.” As far as they are concerned, there is no legitimate application for a site like Mininova or, incredibly, something as simple and practical as Drop.io.

Interesting that he’d look at something like Drop.io and not Megaupload or another such widely-misused site. Note that the free accounts at Drop.io are limited to 100MB. Frederick, if I may:

Clearly Drop.io is not at the cutting edge of piracy, however useful it may be for sharing home videos and other medium-sized files.

It’d all be the usual fun and games if this weren’t a public hearing, advising the FCC on broadband policy. It was neither the time nor the place for copyright issue grandstanding. As if that weren’t bad enough, Paramount decided that its own portion of the hearing, a public policy meeting you understand, would be private. Its explanation for asking for this was that the content of the presentation was unpalatable for public consumption. And, disappointingly, the FCC agreed to this ludicrous condition.

Luckily, the concerned citizens at Public Knowledge found a copy of the presentation and put it up on YouTube. They had to snip it from the FCC’s Real Video stream (!) and I’m sure they’re fielding takedown notices as I type this.

There’s a fairly obvious conflict of interest going on here, among other things. Public Knowledge has an excellent breakdown of the issues involved, and Techdirt has a nice follow-up as well, so I’d rather not duplicate their content here, even if I were capable and informed enough to do so.

I have to say, though, the bubble Huntsberry speaks from is pretty entertaining. “This is a site that is clearly an illegal website” indeed. I understand you have to speak for your company’s best interest, but you might want to take your foot out of your mouth first.

[Update: Title changed to have more Ps in it.]

It has come to my attention that the music industry now wants royalties for those 30-second clips of music you hear in iTunes. That, I think you’ll agree, is bullshit. Seeing as how we’re a solution-oriented blog here at CrunchGear, I want to offer a completely fool-proof way to save the music industry and put an end to the years and years of nonsense we’ve seen since Napster was first released: let’s ban music. That’s right, let’s pass a law that says “the creation or performance of music, in any form, is hereby banned. Any violation of this law will be punishable by death.” Problem solved, let’s all play Hungry Hungry Hippos.

It’s clear that there’s at least two sides to this argument: one, people who think music should be free, and that includes bands that give their music away or sell it for mad cheap, and kids who have grown up with Kazaa and BitTorrent; and two, people who demand to be paid for their work, which includes organizations like the RIAA and musicians like Lily Allen.

I say screw all of them. You like being paid for music? Too bad, it’s banned. Go work at the post office. You think you’re being altruistic by releasing a few songs for free? Too bad, it’s banned. Since both you guys can’t agree on whether or not you think it’s a good idea to sue a single mother for more money than she’ll ever see in her life let’s shut the whole damn industry down.

All music radio stations will be scuttled, and we’ll mine the Sirius XM satellites for the useful metals they contain. Instrument stores will be transformed into Chuck E. Cheese’s or Discovery Zones. All music gadgets—iPod, Zune, you name it—will be placed on a boat and sunken halfway into the ocean.

Anyone caught humming a tune or whistling melodically will be thrown into the nearest state prison. (That’s right, state prison, not the country clubs known as federal prison.)

This is the punishment for 10 years of the RIAA, its dunderhead henchmen and mollycoddled musicians. It pains me to do this, but it really does seem like these stupid issues will never go away. So it’s gone. Music is gone. Now nobody has to worry about “piracy” or “marketing” or any of that garbage. We’ll be a society completely devoid of music. No more lawsuits, no more rootkits, no more nothing.

It’s a perfect world. There’s no piracy, there’s no sons-of-bitches illegally listening to unauthorized 30-second sound clips—think of the lost revenue!—and no reason to sue single mothers because their dumb kids downloaded three Britney Spears songs in 2001.

You will all receive letters in the mail detailing our plans to ban music forever. I look forward to your cooperation, and I look forward to huge consultancy check from the RIAA. I literally just solved all its problems; pay me.

Let’s make one thing absolutely clear about the Pirate Party of the United States (PPUS): it has no interest in defending your ability to illegally download The Blueprint 3 from Waffles.fm. It just doesn’t. If you had the idea in your head that the PPUS would somehow work to legalize your bad habits, well, tough break, kid: it’s a legitimate political party whose goal is not to make it so that you can download the latest Lady Gaga release with impunity, but rather to effect change in the more general realm of copyright and governmental transparency. In other words, you may want to lower that skull and crossbones flag you’ve been flying.

This past week I spoke to not one, but two officers of the PPUS. Ryan Martin, the party’s Administrator, and Glenn Kerbein, the party’s Operations Officer. The conversations were illuminating. Like many of you, I was only vaguely familiar with the idea of a “pirate party” as a result of the antics of The Pirate Bay. (I’ve written, at wholly unnecessary length, about TPB in the past, and my opinion on it can be summed up like this: it’s time for it to go away.) The link between the PPUS and its international counterparts isn’t as close as you might assume. As Ryan explained to me, the parties are really only linked together as a “loose confederation” that’s known informally as the International Pirate Party Movement. It’s a bit like the International Green Movement insofar as there’s no central authority telling who to do what.

But while the Greens regularly send MPs to parliaments all over the world, the American political system, wacky thing that it is, isn’t exactly keen on third parties. These days, it doesn’t seem too keen on doing anything, either, but that’s a discussion for another day (if not another blog). And it goes beyond the notion that Americans are just not “used to” the idea of a politician without a (D) or (R) next to his or her name, but the way in which the system works. You see, unlike in unitary polities, here in the good ol’ US of A you don’t really need one, national political party to be an effective national voice, but rather 50 state-level parties. So imagine how difficult it is to get some sort of organization up and running—think of the paperwork!—and multiply that by 50. This, of course, assumes that states will grant you ballot access in the first place, which, as Ryan told me, isn’t always a guarantee. Long delays in processing paperwork, “missing” paperwork, esoteric rules that not even Harvey Birdman could figure out, you name it. No, The Man isn’t working against the PPUS, it’s just that the political system in this country is so convoluted that it’s damn near impossible for someone to run an effective campaign unless they’re backed by one of the two big parties. (Read: you need money, and lots of it, to stand a chance. Just look at how Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City.) It’s almost as if all political thought can be broken down into two, and only two, ways of thinking.

To the point, then: what does the PPUS want, and how does it plan to go about doing that? (You should have heard the passion in Glenn’s voice when he began to speak about this stuff!) It comes down to this: the PPUS is looking to reform the way we think about copyright and trademark in this country, while simultaneously bringing some transparency back the government. That’s it. To that end, it wants to elect as many local, state, and national politicians as it can. Who knows, in 10 years maybe you—yes, you!—can run for Congress in your local district, and try to modernize the ancient ways in which we imagine ownership.

The PPUS is a 100 percent legal, federally recognized political organization, one that’s funded entirely by “micro-donations,” as Ryan put it. There is no shadowy sugar daddy behind the curtain funding these guys. And money isn’t even the issue at this point. It’s early enough in the game that your time is just as valuable, if not more so, than your dollars. Do you have a legal background? Perhaps you’d like to donate your expertise to the party? Or maybe you have extensive experience in third-party politics, and know just what it takes to get on the ballot in New York or Florida or Indiana? By all means, send the party the party en e-mail and let them know what you know.

And if you’re wondering, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have contacted the PPUS. Not to take a peek at their platform and perhaps integrate a point or two, or to see how they can better articulate their positions (if they even have them!) vis-à-vis copyright in the year 2009. That’s to be expected, I guess, when you consider how much money certain entrenched interests give to the Democrats’ and Republicans’ campaigns. Is it “free speech” to donate money to a political candidate of your choosing? Absolutely, but I somehow doubt that when the framers were drafting the Constitution they thought there would ever be so much money being thrown around, pushing this interest over that one, smearing that idea over this idea.

And while we’re on the subject of who contacting whom: neither the RIAA nor the MPAA ever sent so much as a Christmas Card to the PPUS. Here I am, thinking that maybe someone at the RIAA would have the idea to contact the PPUS and say something like, “We look forward to a healthy and rigorous debate on the issues with you guys.” Not that the RIAA or MPAA are political parties (though they both seem to have an awful lot of influence over the two big parties), or course, but that maybe they’d have a working lunch one day and, in essence, shoot the shit. A sort of, “What do you think we’re doing wrong here, suing everyone under the sun for unlawfully humming Happy Birthday while on line at the Post Office?” Nope, as far as the RIAA and MPAA are concerned, the PPUS doesn’t exist. And if you don’t exist, you can’t possibly make any sort of impact on the national debate, which is music to the RIAA/MPAA’s ears. Fully licensed music, of course, with royalties that go not to the artist, but to the record label. America!

Getting into the specifics, just how could the PPUS change copyright in this country? First, we have to understand what copyright is before we can change it. In its most simplified form: when you create a work, you and your estate—right now, my estate consists of a 2006 era iMac and an Xbox 360—are fully entitled to all related monies for up to 50 years after your death. (It begins to complicate once you start involving other people, and copyright currently can be extended to as much as 120 years after the original creation.) Write a song today or play today, and you’re entitled to make money off it till 50 years after the day you die. To me that makes zero sense: why would I need to keep making money after I’m dead, to support my didn’t-even-earn-it progeny? (I have a weird relationship with money, I readily admit.) That time limit is pretty arbitrary, Glenn says, and should be lowered to something a little more reasonable. By all means, let the artist make his or her money, but after they’re gone we don’t need to keep paying his or her estate for dozens of years, and then see that time limit extended because some sympathetic congressman snuck a provision in an omnibus bill. Something that was initially designed to help out starving artists and promote good ol’ creativity has been bent and warped beyond all recognition. The system is broken, so let’s fix it.

I did ask Glenn where all of this is going. It’s one thing to call for change, and it’s another thing to actually bring it about. (See: this past presidential election.) And the PPUS is moving in the right direction: it’s about as organized as you can expect such a lightly funded, grassroots organization to be at this stage in the game. The long-term goal, obviously, is to elect PPUS members to national office, which is to say Congress. Considering how much it costs to run an election campaign, even at the congressional level, and considering how carefully etched out election districts are, and considering all the inherent advantages that incumbents have over challengers (and challengers from a “pirate party,” no less), and you understand why that’s not really a plausible scenario in the short term. What is entirely plausible, however: running for local school board.

Both Ryan and Glenn used the word “loophole” to describe the election of local school board members. That is, you don’t have to be a member of any party to run. In fact, party ID is totally irrelevant when it comes to school board elections. And you may be thinking to yourself, “What does a local school board have to do with copyright reform?” Anecdotally, I can say that it was brought to my attention that last year that my younger brother (age 12 at the time) had come home with an assignment from his computer class that ostensibly taught the Dos and Don’ts of using a computer. What was one of the most emphasized “Don’t”? That’s right, download music! No distinction was made between legal and illegal downloads, no effort was taken to actually teach anything even remotely related to copyright. Just the blanket statement: downloading music is bad, so don’t do it. Now, of course I don’t expect a teacher to get into issues of copyright, fair use, and whatnot in a class of 12-year-olds, but why not broach the subject in high school? I graduated high school in 2004, and the subject was never brought up. Why no take one or two days out of an economics class—really, what are you learning in high school economics beyond the demand curve and that communism means everybody is equal (which, I guess, is pure evil)?—and teach the kids about copyright law? If you’re a member of a school board, you very much have the opportunity to influence that kind of decision.

I guess I can end this long-winded nonsense with this: while the PPUS certainly stands for all the right things, it more than has its work cut out for it to “make it” in this political system. For better or worse, third-parties are just portrayed as being “odd” or, the phrase of the moment, “out of the mainstream.” As if your rights as a consumer are “out of the mainstream”! In a best case scenario, I see the PPUS playing the Ralph Nader (of the 1970s) role of forcing the candidates of the two major parties to at least broach the issues it believes in.

You probably already hate, for whatever reason, the MPAA (and its music industry cousin, the RIAA), but here’s another reason to do so. The group is asking, for like the zillionth time, for the FCC to approve something called selectable output control. In essence, this allows a video signal to be sent to your TV from, say, a video on-demand service, that prevents the use of certain, non-approved audio/video outputs. In other words, if you want to watch Terrible Movie 2: Yes, It Has Contrived To Be Worse Than The First on Comcast On-Demand, you won’t be able to record it using an old TiVo that connects via component cables.

You see, the MPAA is scared to death that you’ll buy the On-Demand version of said woeful movie, then won’t buy the Blu-ray when it comes out. It’s also afraid that you’ll take your DVR recording, and start bootlegging it at your local bowling alley. (Because people have that kind of time!) If you don’t keep buying the same movie over and over again (at the theaters, on On-Demand, on Blu-ray, along with a HBO or Showtime subscription), it’ll be Hell on Earth. And to be fair to the MPAA… actually, I can’t. The MPAA could disappear and I wouldn’t mind one bit.

One group, Public Knowledge, produced a video last year that, while slightly overboard on the Internet humor, gets the message across:

Of course, the MPAA will call the video nonsense, and insist that it’s merely trying to help the elderly or those without a babysitter watch the latest Hollywood blockbusters more easily. Sorry, I don’t believe you.

Then again, I’m sure the MPAA could give a Flying F what I, or any of you, think.

(That’s a 50 DKP minus for the rubbish picture here, I know. I couldn’t think of a clever way to illustrate Internet angst against the MPAA.)

Potentially bad news for you UK readers. An amendment to the big Digital Britain report would kick off “hardcore copyright pirates” from the Internet. The amendment would require ISPs to tell repeat offenders to knock it off, or else. The cost for doing this—it’s not exactly inexpensive to keep track of copyright infringement, mail out letters, etc.—will be burdened by both the ISPs and rights holders.

We all know why this is happening: rights holders there (the UK’s version of the RIAA and MPAA) are freaking out because they never bothered to update their business model, and now are seeing their business (standing in between musicians and their fans, “distributing” music) blow up. Ten years ago, all these companies should have seen the success of Napster, hired the best and brightest right out of college, and have them develop a service that would have limited the proliferation of Internet piracy. I’m thinking OiNK and What.cd: far and away better than what iTunes offers, in both selection and file quality. Now, if the record labels had introduced something like those sites in 2000, or 2001, charged a reasonable amount, they wouldn’t be in this position today.

Again, read Ripped for more on how the music industry screwed itself so, so badly.

But anyway, this UK thing. For their part, the Internet Service Providers’ Association claims to be “disappointed by the proposal to force ISPs to suspend users’ accounts.” It even referenced an earlier ruling by the European Parliament that called kicking people off the Internet a violation of people’s basic rights.

In a coup, I asked in a bunch of file sharing-related IRC rooms that I idle in all day—Linikus for Mac OS X is a great piece of software, even if the thought of paying for an IRC client is 100 percent bonkers—what UK users thought about all of this. They’re very skeptical, with one user claiming outright that “it’ll never happen.” He gets letters from Virgin (a big ISP in the UK) all the time, yet nothing ever comes from it. So if this whole campaign is there to scare people, well, it doesn’t seems to be working.

Hold onto your hats, everyone.

Flickr

And now, the 900th note on Internet piracy written in the past week. It would appear that the UK is inching closer to a law that would require ISPs to disconnect people who download music, movies, etc. illegally. The proposal, currently making its way through the back rooms of the British Government, could well be placed before the Parliament during its next session.

An MP there, Tom Watson, has written on his blog (apparently he was the first MP to have a blog) that people do have the opportunity to affect any such legislation. For one, people who’d be affected by the legislation—British CrunchGear readers; we’re huge in Sunderland for some reason—should contact the Department of Business Innovation and Skills.

Tell it this: how will it benefit the UK to target 6 million citizens and throw them off the Internet? Who’s to say how many of these people don’t improve British society on a daily basis? Doctors, teachers and professors, you name it. And for what, to appease the record labels, which are most concerned with improving their own bottom line? It’s just something to consider.

(In fact, in the book that I mentioned the other day, Ripped, the author estimated that if the RIAA truly wanted to “go after” everyone who’s ever downloaded a song, it would have to sue nearly 50 percent of the U.S. population. And if we’re treating copyright infringement as a criminal matter, then you’d have to build an awful lot of prisons to accommodate all those people.)

Maybe if the music labels had spent more time figuring this Internet thing out than it did suing single mothers? Because things like that wacky file format we mentioned last week are far too little, far too late.

Another day, another fun video. Today’s is “To Catch a Pirate,” a clever parody of the hit American TV show that’s “devoted to the subject of identifying and detaining those who contact people they believe to be below the age of consent over the Internet for sexual liaisons.” Only this time, we’re dealing with filthy pirates. Software pirates, to be exact. Makes sense: the BSA is behind the video.

My one concern with the video—it’s otherwise a silly parody that won’t harm anyone—is when the host accuses the pirate of “stealing” software. I know the BSA is in the business of stopping software piracy, but there is a difference between copyright infringement and wholesale theft. If I walk into Wal-Mart and physically steal a copy of Microsoft Office, that’s one less disc the store has on hand to sell.

And if there’s any underlying hope to this video, it’s that if the BSA can commission a video like this, then perhaps it’s not going to go the RIAA route of demonizing its customers. Rather, I don’t know, maybe it wants to engage them in a productive manner?

Son of a gun-diddily-un. Just as I’m about to leave the house to fix my uncle’s broken computer—doesn’t it suck being “the computer guy” in the family?—I come across this great interview. It’s from The Sound of Young America, a public radio program based in L.A., and is with the music critic of the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot. It’s basically about the state of music in America today, and how the RIAA screwed itself over the past several years. Good stuff. So good, in fact, that I just bought the guy’s book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, from that Barnes and Noble e-book store.

The basic premise is, that in the mid to late 1990s, the music industry started to promote the hell out of boy bands and the like, which necessitated that radio play that garbage nonstop. With the Backstreet Boys on constant rotation, there was no room for, I don’t know, actual talented musicians to get their music out there. In comes Napster, people start finding out that, whoa, there actually is good music out there, and I can download it more or less instantly, and the whole industry comes crashing down. Oh, well.

Giz gets bonus points for pointing out that OiNK was amazing, and that type of selection and quality should be what the RIAA strives for, but I’ll go ahead and say that What.cd is now better.

via O Giz

Another day, another RIAA trial victory. Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to cough up $675,000 to the record labels. It works out to $22,500 per song he downloaded off Kazaa years ago.

And while it’s so, so easy to say, “Boo, RIAA,” Tenenbaum sees the verdict as a sort of admission by the jury that his defense worked. (He was facing up to $4.5 million in damages.) He told Ars that he was “disappointed, but not surprised,” with verdict, recognizing that, yeah, things could have been much worse.

His lawyer, Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, wasn’t happy with it, noting that it’s a “bankrupting award,” because Tenenbaum doesn’t have a cool $675,000 to pay for a couple of songs.

I never did understand how you could walk into a Best Buy, physically steal a CD, get caught, and still not have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. My guess is that RIAA lawyers have convinced juries and judges that for every song you put in your shared folder, and for every person that downloads, that represents lost sales. Still, it seems excessive.

Tenenbaum will appeal, of course, so there’s no point in freaking out just yet.

And, frankly, RIAA stories have lost all heat.

You might like to know that The Pirate Bay has been ordered to shut down in the Netherlands. That is, courts there would like to prevent people from inside the land of orange from accessing the site. Of course, The Pirate Bay, when they found out* about the case, denied all wrongdoing.

Here’s what happened, nearest I can tell from looking around the Internets. BREIN, which is sorta the Netherlands’ version of the RIAA or MPAA, had taken TPB to court. What’s absurd is that, apparently, TPB knew nothing about the case, and didn’t send any legal representation to the proceedings.

The result of the case? TPB banned from the Netherlands, and TPB’s three public faces—Fredrik, Gottfrid, and Peter—slapped with a €30,000 per day fine for every day TPB is still accessible. (They have 10 days to block their site from the Dutch.)

TPB, when they find out about all of this, asked the court to dismiss all charges.

Man, anyone else think it’d be better if TPB just went away quietly? It really just seems like this, combined with all the other TPB news, is unnecessary drama, as the kids say.

Remember yesterday when I noted, by way of TorrentFreak, that the RIAA had all but considered DRM to be dead? Not true! Not true at all.

Long story short, and in the interest of protecting sources and so forth, the RIAA rep who supposedly went on record saying “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” didn’t actually say that. The rep, one Jonathan Lamy, had actually alluded to the fact that, yes, the big music download services (like iTunes) no longer have DRM. That doesn’t mean DRM is “dead” or anything—try watching a movie you buy in iTunes on Linux! (Not that the RIAA has anything to do with movies, mind.)

That is all.

The chief spokesman for the RIAA, one Jonathan Lamy, has gone on record to say what any normal, not-on-the-RIAA-payroll person has been saying for some time now: “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” Yes. Yes it it.

This phrase—“DRM is dead”—appears in an upcoming SC Magazine article. Mr. Lamy references things like the now DRM-free iTunes which, at least in the U.S., “is” downloadable music.

There’s really not too much to add here: DRM is great at getting in the way of legitimate users; pirates will always find a way around it. And not just music, either. In fact, in my opinion, it’s been the video game industry which has been most egregious with DRM. Games are DRM’d to no end, then legitimate users can’t get the thing to work. Meanwhile, someone like RELOADED will have cracked the game two days before its official release date.

I don’t know, good riddance, DRM.

The enemy of my enemy, right? Pandora, the Internet darling that lets users stream music for a newly nominal fee, has teamed up with record labels to get Congress to pass a law that would require regular radio stations pay the same music rights fee as that it has to pay. The labels want regular radio to pay up to help offset the losses connected with the industry’s transition from a pre-Internet music business to a decidedly post-Internet music business. (Maybe stop employing untold numbers of lawyers to go after mothers, hmm?)

So it’s pretty simple, actually. When a regular radio station plays the latest Katy Perry single, she and her record label (well, mainly her record label) get zero dollars and zero cents. When that same song is played on Sirius XM or Pandora, or any non-regular radio format, a nice bag of money shows up at the record labels’ headquarters. To that effect.

Regular radio, which isn’t doing too hot either, claims that it should be exempt from such fees because it is the primary conduit of mass popularity. You know, because your average 16-year-old stays glued to his boom box making All Request Lunch requests.

Flickr

You wouldn’t want to be isoHunt founder Gary Fung these days. (Note: That’s the best story about BitTorrent I’ve read in some time. Take a few minutes to read all of it.) He’s currently facing an MPAA lawsuit that could well result in fines in the millions of dollars. (TorrentSpy was ordered to cough up $100 million last year.) And even if Mr. Fung doesn’t have that kind of money, and he doesn’t, the MPAA is prepared to pursue any judgement “for the rest of his life.” The MPAA sounds like it means business.

So here’s what’s going on. The MPAA, on a high after being award $100 million in a lawsuit against TorrentSpy, is going after isoHunt, one of the biggest torrent sites out there. The site, which is for-profit, is run by Mr. Fung and a small staff. It makes money with advertisements, not by “selling” movies or whatever. But try telling that to the MPAA, which is prepared, apparently, to follow Mr. Fung to the ends of the Earth to get its pound of flesh.

Stephen Fabrizio is an MPAA lawyer, and a former RIAA lawyer. (Need a job? Go to law school and get hitched with the RIAA/MPAA; they’re always hiring, it seems.) He says:

The isoHunt site was founded and exists almost exclusively to profit from copyright infringement. Statistical studies we did—which are likely as accurate as those that anyone has done—show that over 95% [of torrents], or almost everything, and several percent we couldn’t identify, are infringing. This site exists for one purpose: to allow people to steal. That is why he started the website, that’s why he operates it and that’s what he profits from.

Is it theft, or is it copyright infringement? They’re two different things.

But the worst is this. What happens if Mr. Fung doesn’t have millions of dollars to pay. Says the MPAA lawyer:

But the judgment doesn’t go away. If Gary Fung creates a legitimate website, we’ll be there. If he sells that company for $100 million, we’ll be there. For the rest of his life we’ll be able to pursue that judgment.

In other words, unless Mr. Fung is prepared to pull a Brooks, from The Shawshank Redemption, the MPAA will make Mr. Fung’s life a living Hell.

Mr. Fung is trying to pull the ol’ “but isoHunt is just a search engine” defense, but considering the technological knowledge of the political élite, I’m not too sure it will work.

via TorrentFreak

There’s a new study that suggests that teens are moving away from illegally downloading music. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that teens are turning to iTunes (or whatever) en masse, but rather is a reflection of the way the Web works in 2009. Music blogs, streaming sites like Imeem and YouTube (note: not all streaming on YouTube is 100 percent legal), applications like Spotify, etc. are increasingly the destination for teens today.

The numbers, put together by Music Alley, say that only 26 percent of 14-to-18 year olds have admitted to illegally downloading music in the past year. That number was 42 percent the previous year. Of course, it’s one thing to “admit” to downloading music, and another thing to actually download music, but you’d have to assume that the study had all those question marks built into it.

Here’s what some music fan told the Guardian, who conveniently lies outside the age range of the above quoted number:

I didn’t even realise it was illegal for a long time, until I heard that the government were trying to stop it. That did put me off, but one of the big reasons I stopped doing it was because I would get viruses, more pop ups on my computer. While I was at uni I started listening to streamed music using MySpace. Bands would be friends with other bands and it was a great way of discovering new music. I don’t really feel the need to own all that music, I know it’s always there.

Yes dear, “the government” is going to smash into your house, smack your mother around, etc. etc. Well at least the RIAA’s tactics are working.

I guess it’s good news, though. I still insist that What.cd is better than anything else out there, and it’s not just the music available. The community will be really hard to replicate elsewhere, I think.

As I write this, I’m listening to The Raveonettes (that’s them up there) on Spotify. The more you know, right?

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