WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Greed Watch: The Two Tier Internet

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a nice article on the telco industry’s latest idea for a good money making venture: two tiered access to the internet. The idea here is that as companies like Google, Yahoo and other corporate titans like WFMU provide more video and audio for consumers on-line, “someone has to pay for it”. Vonage and other VOIP providers also might fall into this bucket.

To drive this point home, a Bellsouth spokesman in this WSJ article complains about Google’s freeloading ways as follows: “During the Hurricanes, Google didn’t pay to have the DSL restored. We’re paying all the money.”

If like me you thought that the $30-$80 you send to your phone company every month for basic service constitutes “paying for it”, think again. What telcos want to start doing is charging people like Google and Vonage big piles of money so that their content gets to consumers in a fast carpool lane while the content providers that don’t pay up (and their customers) gets stuck on a less glamorous road with more traffic, fewer lanes and perhaps a few potholes. Needless to say all these costs eventually will get handed down the consumers, effectively making them pay twice for service.

Yngwie

               

Move over Stevie Nicks.... There's a new rock  n' roll muse in town: Yngwie!

(If you don't want to click all the images you can view them all on one page through the magic of opendirviewer)

Do as I Say, Not as I Do

I apologize for reminding everyone about the horrific election we had here in the states last year, but you may recall that roughly a year ago the people at JibJab made a hoakey video about President Bush and John Kerry set to the tune of "This Land is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie. As you also may recall, Ludlow Music, who owned the copyright for the song, filed a ridiculous lawsuit against JibJab for not obtaining proper permission to use the music. JibJab ended up hiring the wonderful people at the EFF to help defend their right to fair use and argued in their pleading that:

"(Ludlow Music's threats) have jeopardized (JibJab's) First Amendment-protected right to free speech and its right to disseminate that speech via its Internet hosting facilities. (JibJab) therefore seeks a judgment that its artistic expression is protected by the First Amendment and copyright's fair use doctrine, before that expression is silenced by (Ludlow's) threats."

Inexplicably, as noted by the people at the Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog, it appears that the Jib Jab people have now turned around and sent a cease and desist letter to The Black Lantern for using 9 non-contiguous seconds of the "This Land" video in his mashup of the Legendary KO's "George Bush doesn’t like Black People". To make matters even more surreal, JibJab's lawyers in the case  (Goldring, Hertz, Lichtenstein & Haft) like to collect "Bill of Rights" awards from the ACLU in their spare time (clearly these awards only honor amendments 2 through 10).

It Was Only a Matter of Time…

This past Friday, the Wall Street Journal had an interesting article about Saatchi & Saatchi’s new “content arm” called GUM:

"In an effort to reach young people who increasingly tune out traditional advertising, London ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi is offering marketers an unusual proposition- the opportunity to own their own hip-hop band as a way to spread their advertising messages.

Saatchi & Saatchi said it assembled that as-yet-unnamed band as part of its launch yesterday of a division it is calling GUM, which will target teenagers and people in their 20s for advertising disguised as entertainment.

Saatchi & Saatchi said it is offering potential advertisers naming rights for the all female band, or the chance to have their products appear in the band’s music videos or on stage with it.”