Big Media Collusion? Google Gets Evil

Google (motto: Do No Evil) is now suspected of colluding with the media giants along with YouTube in an effort to use it's bubblicious valuation to ward off copyright litigation while simultaneously putting the little guys out of competition -- all at the expense of both artist and audience.

Yes, this is the very definition of evil.

Mark Cuban posted a note from a "trusted digital media business veteran" alledging the above in disturbing, though not surprising, detail. read it here.

As Google has grown cozy as the powerhouse of Bubble 2.0 it seems to have cozied up with the early 21st century corporate-political philosophy of: Trust me, I'm [Google] [the president] [your local utility company]. Are they succumbing to the weak-ass corruption at the top of the service industry food chain?

What's even more frightening is that a majority of the old money keeping Google afloat has about as much of a clue as to what it is or will be and the service it provides as they thought they knew when they put all their money into the iOmegas and Pets.coms of yesteryear.

Worse, the biggest consumers of Google and especially YouTube's services, belong to a generation that has grown immune to the hypocrisy of corporate leadership, practically expecting scandals to be exposed as if they are just another element of democracy in action. How many of today's youngest voters can actually name the presidents who preceded their existence (14 years ago, Clinton became president).

Last, will the public and media response to Google's endeavors w/ YouTube and big media -- essentially spending billions to ensure a monopoly on the market before they become stale and "so last year" to today's youth (see Yuki Noguchi's piece in the Sunday WaPo) -- just as the public and media responds to all other corporo-political infringements on democracy (think the ongoing Iraq war)?

BONUS COV'G: MySpace now claims to be using GraceNote to flush it's supposed tens of millions of users of copyright-infringing files.

Big Bad Stallman: One-Sided IP Reporting

Something's brewing when FORBES does a cover story on big, bad Richard Stallman. This article demonstrates just how powerful the open-source movement and the Linux operating system has become.

The article is a good overview of the dilemma facing the Free Software and Open Source movement in the next round of Linux licenses. What I find interesting is how the absence of a "intellectual goods knowledge ecology" counter-narrative to the Forbe's dominant narrative.

Forbes caricatures the Free Software programmers, led by Richard Stallman, as radical demagogues. While we don't have to agree with Stallman's objectively extreme position, Forbes intentionally omits how the Free Software movement believes human rights and issues of freedom of knowledge are involved.

We shouldn't expect Forbes to offer a Free Software defense. What is interesting is that the Free Software and Free Culture movement have failed in their communication strategy. There simply is no mention of their position that issues of access to knowledge or an "ecology of intellectual goods" is in play. Until that camp improves their PR strategy, we should not expect the Free Software movement to be painted as anything but extreme.

Chicago Voter Info Vulnerable to Hackers

A "very serious vulnerability" in Chicago's elections Web site made it possible for hackers to swipe Social Security numbers and the personal information of over 1.3 million voters... No confirmation at this point of any information actually being gleaned from the site.

ABC News reports that the problem has existed for more than five years.
Chicago Tribune reports election officials claim to have patched the more than 5-year-old problem.

Can you imagine how much money may have been made by hackers over the past five years who accessed this info? I mean charging just 2 cents per SS# could provide nearly $30k toward an entire year's tuition at USC.

ABC News report
Tribune story
Illinois Ballot Integrity Project

Robin Williams, Ed Felten Crack Diebold's Code AND STILL...

Last week, former Maryland state legislator Cheryl C. Kagan was anonymously given disks containing source code to Diebold's BallotStation and Global Election Management System (GEMS) tabulation software used in the 2004 elections.

A machine running on the same software version (4.3.15c) defined in the source code sent to Kagan was thoroughly hacked into and documented in September by Princeton's Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten in the 26-page "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine" (view PDF, "Internet Christian minister" Rev. Bill McGinnis summarizes it here).

Kagan's story was first reported last Friday in Baltimore Sun by reporter Melissa Harris.

An accompanying letter refers to the State Board of Elections and calls Kagan "the proud recipient of an 'abandoned baby Diebold source code' right from SBE accidentally picked up in this envelope, right in plain view at SBE. ... You have the software because you are a credible person who can save the state from itself. You must alert the media and save democracy."

No matter how or even if Kagan's story is true, a crime, or whatever -- it remains both ironic and suspicious that the one company authorized to make electronic voting systems in this country has kept their source code bottled up as if it contained the ingredients for Coca Cola's secret syrup. Opening source code to independent professional reviewers and critics who may find bugs and other flaws should be mandatory for a company that for months has represented itself with broken HTML code on their home page (see http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/).

(Coincidentally 2 men pleaded guilty this morning in the FBI investigation into stolen Coke "trade secrets.")

Joe Strupp, of the newspaper industry watchdog Editor & Publisher asks, "Is Press Taking Possible Voting Problems Seriously?" (ABC's World News Tonight is devoting a fair amount of programming to the issue.)

Kagan, a Democrat, is the executive director of the Freeman Foundation -- a philanthropic community-focused charity -- and is a noted critic of her state's election chief and the Diebold voting systems. She said she's been in contact with the FBI and intends to cooperate with any investigation.

Maryland's deputy elections administrator claimed the disks contain "nothing that's being used in this election." Which is quite a suspicious thing to say in and of itself.

In other election season news, Google Earth has new layers and placemarks with useful 2006 election info.

(In Barry Levinson's "Man of the Year," Robin Williams stars as a comedian-turned presidential candidate who is elected only thanks to a bug in the electronic voting system that skews results).


LINK

MPAAs Boy Scout Propaganda

When they're not clearing brush, tying knots and starting fires, the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles are being imbibed with honor-thy-copyright-loyally flim-flam. No joke.

Oddly, no byline on this tight report from the AP's boy scout beat:

"Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft," Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in a statement Friday.

Contact Victor Zuniga, head of Boy Scouts LA to find out the nature of these "merit badges."


LINK

Look Who's Sleeping With You(Tube)

OMG! UMG is not gonna sue YouTube as threatened last month? Is YouTube pinned or just happy to share the bed? Today's New York Times pulls back the covers:

Three of the four major music companies — Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony and Bertelsmann’s jointly owned Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and the Warner Music Group — each quietly negotiated to take small stakes in YouTube as part of video- and music-licensing deals they struck shortly before the sale, people involved in the talks said yesterday. The music companies collectively stand to receive as much as $50 million from these arrangements, these people said.

This payoff will certainly materialize faster than any potential compensation from a lawsuit would. But the possible catch -- doesn't part-ownership also entail liability for any future content-related lawsuits filed against YouTube?

Earlier this week, Universal sued video-sharing portals Grouper and Bolt, demanding 15 grand per infringement and telling the press:

"Grouper and Bolt... cannot reasonably expect to build their business on the backs of our content and the hard work of our artists and songwriters without permission and without compensating the content creators," a Universal spokesman said.

.

Yeah, I'm sure they're worried about 50 Cent appearing on a mini-YouTube or Mariah Carey being compensated (doesn't she have like a $20M contract)?

Last month it seemed Universal woke up thinking it was still 1999, only big mama RIAA is at bay (or, more likely, abusing the courts and/or high school kids).

Will there be more juicy details on this YouTube + Big 3 of 4 so-called partnership? Or is the new YouTube opaque?

Return of the [Pirate] Jigga

The Wall Street Journal is all worked up about Jay-Z's p2p-pimpin' for Coke's Stageside site (which directs you to download video files directly or via direct links to BitTorrent, Gnutella and the like).

Is the industry *finally* comin round the bend? The article -- titled "Record Labels Turn Piracy Into a Marketing Opportunity" details what could be considered (to put it nicely) the industry taking a wide turn. An alternate (if not more accurate) title in a more reality-based publication could be "Record Labels Think p2p is Just Another Way to Own You."

According to the WSJ, the old-school "decoy" technique, in which bad-karma'd companies like ARTISTdirect flood the p2p networks with fakes of "as many as 30 of the Billboard Top 100" to frustrate users to endlessly search for a legit copy of a song instead of hearing it once and then buying the record (not to mention, the title of the song spikes up to the top of the search charts as a result of the neverending-search-for nothing corporat practical joke). Since this is a Public Diplomacy course, let's just make a stretch and call it the carrot-stick approach.

Unfortunately, big media still thinks it has the upper hand and somehow must *fight* p2p and other "free" media-sharing, especially in light of the 2005 Grokster decision. From the WSJ article:

Before the ruling, record labels worried that they might undercut their legal arguments if they used peer-to-peer sites for their own purposes. Now, "we're basically free to exploit these billions of fake files we're putting out," says Randy Saaf, chief executive of MediaDefender.

MediaDefender is the p2p-weasling company that was bought out by ARTISTdirect last year. Somehow -- or I'm not reading it right -- the WSJ scribes are buying into MediaDefender's notion of "marketing," but frankly it's no different than me sharing a hundred fake mp3's on the old Napster and listing them as Metallica cuts.
The chart to the left, featured in the WSJ article, is from BigChampagne, the same online media measuring company that confirmed that -- in terms of "moving units" -- Danger Mouse's "Grey Album" was in a stratosphere to itself on Feb. 24, 2004, or Grey Tuesday, when we all went grey and/or hosted the Album. Today, BigChampagne has courted Nielsen and claims to be "the leading provider of information about popular entertainment online."

Jay-Z, needless to say, never had a problem with the mashup concept and lo, his fortunes have only grown. Nearly two years later, might *some* of the majors be finally getting it? Turn up that Young Dro and stay tuned . . .



(More digressive irony: The top Google results for listen to the grey album are ARTISTdirect-hosted pages.
Search via Yahoo! audio search, however, and it's all there!)