Around the world, (almost everywhere apart from Australia) Television content is now available on the web. Sometimes for free, [catch-up TV] and sometimes for a couple of dollars from iTunes.

In Europe and the Americas [err, Canada and the USA] the resulting drop in P2P has been nothing short of miraculous.

Concurrency (Day/Date release globally) in Australian Television is staring to occur. Unfortunately, probably five years too late to save free to air.

In Australia, whilst we get the occasional older Television show popping up on the various Free to Air channels websites, we still can’t buy the current (last nights episode) of the Big Bang Theory.

An analysis of just who is still using the ED2K networks shows that it is those countries that are the poor cousins to the USA’s content distribution and pricing policies.

South America, China, Australia, Hungary

Unfortunately, catch-up TV at $1.99 per episode is still a little unrealistic with programs that disappear after being watched.

The horse has bolted, it is time for the content industry to man up and remove all DRM, including the sixties mission impossible leftover,  “Mr. Phelps, this tape will self destruct in thirty seconds”.

All that this achieves is to encourage technically competent persons to find ways around the encoding.

Amazon self publishing e-Book authors have set the future. Cutting out the middle man to ensure that clients and Author are both satisfied after each transaction.

Budding authors (yep you) should click here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-summary-page.html?topic=200260520

Kindle offers 30% of the sale price to each and every self publisher:

With Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) you can self-publish your books on the Amazon Kindle Store. It’s free, fast, and easy. Books self-published through KDP can participate in the 70% royalty program and are available for purchase on Kindle devices and Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, PC, Mac, Blackberry, and Android-based devices. With KDP, you can self-publish books in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian and specify pricing in US Dollars, Pounds Sterling, and Euros. You will also find useful information on our active community forum. 

So Amazon allows authors to self publish their works.

CD-Baby allows Singer/composers/bands to self publish their music digitally (via iTunes) or via CD-Rom

You-Tube allows film makers to self publish.

iPhone and Android allow phone owners to become miniature Rabbit ISP’s by setting up miniature hot-spots for their mates…

Could someone please tell me, what are the various companies and organisations that depend on being able to stuff up your entertainment with DRM, advertising interruptus, and suing dead grandmothers going to do for a living when all of humanity is so busy having a good time creating new content that the big business content becomes totally irrelevent ?

Could it be that organisations like the RIAA, the IPFI (et al) have passed by their “Best Before” dates but no-one told them?

How can big brother regain control of all those free Internet Radicals ?

Microsoft have decided that they will issue a lockdown Operating System that precludes users from loading alternative Boot options (e.g.: Linux).

Obviously MS aren’t aware of the new “openness meme currently sweeping the world.

Shame about that. Because of course, this means that Microsoft have elected to join the group of self euthanising conglomerates.

Must be that Japanese influence… save face at all costs. Even if the ship sinks.

Globally, Governments are enacting much needed legislative ammmendments to the original laws and constitution of the land.

Online Piracy Top Ten Sites - Chart of the Day by Infogafik Statista

These legislative imperatives are urgently needed by global commercial interests to insure the criminalisation of everyone over eight years old that either uses or attempts to do any business on the Internet.

I came across a great quote today:

It is so powerful in it’s simplicity that it could even form the basis of an amendment to the constitution of any country.

“So, while big business can afford to pay for you to promote broken copyright regulations… I, the modern consumer, don’t have to pay for movements like anonymous to defend my right to get entertainment the way I want it.

What do I want?

1. I want to download movies; all of them, even the old ones that will
   no longer make a buck for corporates to sell so don’t get
   re-released.

2.  I want to be able to read and make comments about the
   movie/music/books/whatever at the source of the download.

3.  I want to NOT pay for unnecessary and un-environmental plastic
   packaging of entertainment.

4.  I want NEVER to be denied an option to watch a movie, read a book,
   listen to music that is available in other countries, but not in
   my country because of broken copyright laws and regulations that
   you are trying to protect.

Dear Reader, want to make a change ?

Send the above four items with the Oatmeal Link to every politician you know.

Suggested letter to your local politician:

Cut Here:  ——————————————————————————————————————–

Dear [Insert your local members name here]

We the tax paying people of this nation, who elected you to into office so that you could serve our needs, require  that you give consideration to the following items …

The Content Manifesto: (items 1-4 above)

1. I want to download movies; all of them, even the old ones that will
   no longer make a buck for corporates to sell so don’t get
   re-released.
2.  I want to be able to read and make comments about the
   movie/music/books/whatever at the source of the download.
3.  I want to NOT pay for unnecessary and un-environmental plastic
   packaging of entertainment.
4.  I want NEVER to be denied an option to watch a movie, read a book,
   listen to music that is available in other countries, but not in
   my country because of broken copyright laws and regulations that
   you are trying to protect.

Should you fail to give heed to our requests, then please either reduce our taxes by 38% [hereafter to be known as the discretionary entertainment budget allowance - May also be referred to as the Hollywood Bail-out] so that we the people can afford to be entertained so that we the people will continue to be motivated to work for the taxes, [where jobs are available,] that you need from us or please update your Resume, because we the people won’t be voting for you again.

Of course “we the people” now have cameras on all our phones and are creating enough content on Youtube every eleven days to completely replace all of Hollywoods last 100 years of content creation so if you pass SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, we the people will still have our peer created content, but you won’t have Hollywood lobbyists buying you lunch any more, nor will you have a job.

 Signed

[Insert your name here]

John Q. Citizen.

The Western Suburbs of Sydney is considered the breadbasket of the “Clubs” revenue stream.

It is populated by a diverse range of people across many nationalities, occupations and religious persuasions.

The councils in the Western Suburbs have done an excellent job of attempting to make the West a friendly and pleasant place to live with a proactive beautification expansion to amenities by the planting of trees, gaily decorated bus shelters and expansion to sporting venues and public parks and reserves.

Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates the Local Government efforts.

There is an element that like to ride un-silenced motorcycles through the back streets, paint graffiti on buildings, walls and signs and let off very loud fireworks.

The Explosive Act 2003 and Explosives Regulation 2005 govern the use of explosives and fireworks in NSW. The Explosives Regulation 2005 requires all activities involving the handling of explosives and fireworks be carried out in accordance with the:

• AS2187 – Explosives: Storage, Transport and Use
• Australian Code for the Transport of Explosives by Road and Rail
• Australian Dangerous Goods Code

Unfortunately I could find nothing about the limitations and controls for fireworks being delivered by remote control flying objects.

Which makes the following grouping of photographs almost terrifying.

(The Helicopter parts, widely scattered were assembled for the photo – without me applying too many of my fingerprints to the parts… in case the local gendarmes would be following this up.)

Industrial Fireworks, a couple of slabs and remote control helicopters don’t to me seem like a very good combination.

I don’t necessarily wish to spell out what appears rather obvious, but the reader should consider the payload capabilities of low cost remote control devices. The result is concerning.

The question that councils should be asking, is who has the necessary licences to be able to purchase this kind of very loud firepower. The fireworks in the photos below are not everyday consumer grade fireworks.

The question the gendarmes should be asking, is who can afford to let off this many fireworks and destroy perfectly good Radio Control  toys ?

Probably not a couple of unemployed kids having a lark.

The people of Abbotsbury are asking, what are the police doing about it and who will clean up the glass from the broken beer bottles and all the exploded firework components.  Probably the local council, having to divert resources from making our environment a friendlier and happier place to live.

Or Why the fourth Quarter Retail Figures Will Not Reflect the Real State of the Economy.

Last year, my partner purchased a new tree. It was one of those fibre optic light changing plastic monstrosities. It took a minute to put up and thirty seconds to plug in. It came with  a number of decorations “built in” – in other words, pre-trimmed.

No more untangling strings of Christmas tree lights. YaY!!!

Last night (Christmas Eve I asked her (my partner) where we had put the tree. It used to be in the garden shed, but I knew that she had put it carefully somewhere in her office. Her response came as a surprise, “Why bother? It doesn’t really feel like Christmas… and I’m not sure where I put the tree. I think it’s behind some boxes and I couldn’t be bothered digging it out.”

There was a part of her comment that struck a logical chord within my childlike “Oi where’s the chrissie tree” contemplative navel gazing reverie.

She was being logical, after all, older generations without screaming bundles of joy don’t really need Christmas trees.

Australia has now entered the baby-boomer retirement phase.

As a country, our principle bandaid solution is the increase of migration from overseas.

The following suggests a possible barrier to long term financial recovery, not understood  by the average person aghast at this countries apparent cavalier attitude to illegal migrants.

Christmas.

Every year from the age of two or three I awoke on Christmas morning to the delight of a flashing, shiny Christmas tree decorated with szalonna cukor [a Hungarian traditional mashup of toffee and marzipan wrapped in coloured shiny foil that reflect all of the lights on the tree].

My Hungarian origins meant that I was actually waiting for St. Mikulas, and not Santa Claus and he came earlier in the month, yet my Judeo-Christian parents, in accordance with their proud new New Zealand citizenship modified the Hungarian Traditions moving the entire celebration to Christmas eve.

By the age of five, I had figured out that the miracle of the tree and presents appearance and the simultaneous disappearance of my father appeared  to coincide. My mothers role was to distract my brother and I by retiring to our bedroom and singing Menybol az Angyal and other Hungarian Christmas carols, whilst we eagerly awaited the little bell jangling from the direction of the lounge room to indicate that St. Mikulas had been and gone.

Of course, Hungarian tradition still differs in that St. Mikulas brings the entire tree (fully decorated). Which of course dictates that the family doesn’t get to trim the tree together as is western custom in other parts of the world.

Notwithstanding differing tree sourcing traditions, every years Christmas since, has been memorable in the annual mad shopping dash to ensure the duck/goose, ham, colbasz as an annually growing list of appetizing imperitives were collected and prepared for the great day.  

Christmas was a target for the entire family, “Thanks be to God, we made it, another year.”

For my Jewish friends,  it was  “Happy Hanukah time, we made it, another year.”

I received a link from a friend and colleague in the USA this morning, to the “Charlie Brown “Meaning of Christmas”. A great skit of the meaning of Christmas. However, it is the meaning of Christmas for less than one seventh of today’s rapidly growing emerging nation dominated, global population explosion.  

The Origins of Christmas Financial Reporting

Christmas only became about the religious aspects as a justification for the boost that merchants and traders needed on what, for the Northern Hemisphere was the first day of Winter, which for the northern agronomic based societies of Europe, meant no fresh greens for the next three months.

The Roman Emperor Aurelian, declared the 25^th of December a celebratory holiday [day of the God, Invincible Sun, Sol Invictus] in recognition of the first day (longer day) after the three [shortest] days period of the Winter Solstice. Therefore, the Northern Hemisphere solstice Celebration day, was the last day of the market where souls would deign to travel to the markets to buy up large before the worst of the winter snows and blizzards arrived.

History has turned that historical survival necessity into a market driving annual event.

Industries globally strived to create goods that could be sold at market for the best price possible to allow craftsmen and tradesman to better provide for their families during a time when the only central heating consisted of yesterdays burnt wood, relit and boosted with some fallen tree branches and such dried dung as could be scraped from barn dung pile.

We have a lot to be grateful for since Aurelian’s declaration, the world has developed additional capabilities. Plastic and credit cards were invented, we discovered oil and “climate control air-conditioning arrived to make the Christmas period and the ensuing winter more bearable.

No longer do we need the smell of fresh pine needles in our home to banish the stale smell of humans locked up for months on end in an environment where all the windows are closed against the cold.

With a global fertility rate of over 2, the need to continue production at all levels to be able to meet manufacturing quotas so that Christmas bonuses could be paid and the recipients could provide for their families those luxuries that usually only arrived once per year.

Japan, that country of innovative  consumer engineering excellence, showed us what happens to an economy as the fertility rate stalls and then starts to decline.

Whilst Australia has maintained it’s fertility rate, it has done so by ignoring the Judeo-Christian Winter Solstice written history ingrained imperative.

The majority driver of fertility in Australia is now via persons of the Muslim faith, who of course don’t observe and consequently fail to “commercially” practice Christmas.

The Christmas retail imperitive fails when:

• Christmas becomes irrelevant due to the ageing population
• economic divers evaporate due to differences in religious observation
• the cost of consumer targeted goods lowers to the point when one doesn’t have to save all year to be able to afford it. and;

The manufacturing cycle, that used to reward handsomely for increased production levels has been moved offshore by industrialists keen to regime shop labour costs to increase profit margins to reward shareholders.

In other words, it is difficult to have continually increasing fourth quarter numbers if a company lays off all its’ employees in favour of cheaper offshore labour.

Especially if the companies that pay the employees to enable them to shop at each others emporiums all emulate each others labour regime shopping initiative and lay off all their staff. Who is left to shop and with what Christmas bonuses ?

The catch up and bite you period appears to be five years. Companies playing in this short term gain arena are learning that they are unable to remain industry leaders for more then a five year period, regardless of how strong their balance sheet was at the beginning of the game.

Political Ramifications

• The population fertility rate for almost all developed nations are in serious decline.
• Some nations like the USA are offering 10 year visas to Judeo Christians females, hoping to harvest their offspring’s long term economic benefits.
• Australia has since the eighties had a generous non-secular approach to immigration.

                                   NATURAL INCREASE AND NET OVERSEAS MIGRATION

ABS 3101.0 Components of Annual Pop Growth - Australia

Source: ABS Australian Demographic Statistics (cat. no. 3101.0)

As can be seen from the above ABS graph, that policy has paid handsomely in the natural population increase making it’s effects obvious in 2004. Yet the results will be increasingly obvious this year at the cash registers.

The Western suburb shopping centres yesterday were just like any other shopping day.

No traffic jams, no teeming throngs of people all trying to squeeze through the entrance gate simultaneously. In fact it appeared to me that one would be hard pressed putting together an all male first fifteen.

Christmas of the future ?

Unless we make some basic alterations to how we prepare for and celebrate Christmas, the following scenario, will become a reality.  

December 25, 2020:  Kids ordering goods from the $1 eBay shop being delivered direct to their bedroom windows by autonomous flying UAV delivery vehicles all year round whilst watching videos of Miracle on 34 St and asking their mothers, “Beeyatch, what was all that teary shit about ? Who in the hell is dat fat Klaus character, was he another one of them famous pedophiles ?”

Our only alternative to ensure survival when the copper and iron ore stop being needed is to dramatically re-skill our nation to become home based artisans, tradesmen and craftsmen, enabling a return to former years when the ability to make something with ones hands was a revered skill and not one that was shamefully labeled by today’s XY&Z generations as Dat Dere Blue Collar Worker.

We need to retask our populations skillset, taking advantage of of the different commercial opportunities presented by increasingly cosmopolitan population.

References:

Charlie Browns Christmas http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKk9rv2hUfA

COMPONENTS OF ANNUAL POPULATION GROWTH Australian ABS Graph – ABS 3101.0

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/95553f4ed9b60a374a2568030012e707/2dcec62e1995fc03ca2577ac00157d70/Body/0.3818!OpenElement&FieldElemFormat=gif

When I was a kid my dad used to take great pleasure in wrapping two bottles of Lion Brown beer in Christmas wrapping paper and sitting the result atop our galvanized steel rubbish bin for the hard working rubbish men,(whom I wasn’t allowed to talk too, because they were the rubbish men,) which made me rather curious about why they got beer, yet couldn’t benefit from the privilege of a hello from myself.

Anything that didn’t fit in our twenty gallon galvanized drum set (when it was empty, it made a great drum upside down…) was taken to the (smelly) Johnsonville rubbish tip by my dad and I on the weekend.

These days, there are no athletic rubbish men running along the street waking us at dawn to the sound of the clanging bin boot scoot. Just the big Truck with the Wheelie bin grab ‘n hoist that growls along the street at 5:00 am.

Leaving two bottles of Lion Brown in a Christmas wrapping on top of the wheelie bin would result in a mess to clean up the next morning.

One thing I have learnt over the last fifty years, rubbish men no longer run along the footpaths, in fact they wont even get out of their truck if the bin falls over…

There’s no smelly rubbish tip either. There are now only “recycling centres” and… bi-annual rubbish collections.

These are instigated by the local council [city hall] by sending us a letter detailing the dates that they will collect rubbish placed on the median strip in our area.

Householders then clean-up their yards, sheds and spare rooms and place the haul at the edge of the street.

The affluence of the entire nation can be measured by analyzing the replacement value of the quality of the rubbish being tossed.

Walking the dog each afternoon [3-6 kilometres through the neighbouring suburban region],  has allowed me twice a year to meander through the debris of other peoples domestic lives and resulted in the following observations.

Five years ago rusty garden implements, old chipboard cabinets falling to pieces, refrigerators, old stoves, aging push button dishwashers with a liberal sprinkling of broken and outworn children’s toys littered the kerbs.

The council would then arrive promptly as advertised with a large tipper with some likely lads running along the side of the lorry and throwing rubbish into it.  

At least that rubbish that didn’t contain any metal, copper or brass as that had been picked up already by the scavenging obviously commercial Steptoe and son [Scrap merchant] trucks circling the block for the entire week of rubbish pickup.

Four years ago, as the price of 42 inch LCD screens crashed through the $1,000 barrier, televisions started piling up. The council sent a memo to all householders for the next pick-up that ordered that all mains leads had to be cut off electrical items before anything was dumped.

The Steptoe and son Trucks had been added to by utes  [truck if you’re American] with mesh cages.

Three years ago the council mechanized and used a grab, which unfortunately wasn’t all that popular with the citizenry as it took most of the turf with it and managed to smash a lot of the glass in the televisions and litter the nature strip with silicon fragments that glitter even today..

The trucks and utes now had competition from persons towing trailers behind four wheel drives..

This year I noticed three items worthy of note.

• The Television screens and old CRT computer screens had all their insides removed by the householder prior to dumping. (Presumably not for canibalisation by little Johnny for nine life  electrical experiments on the family cat with the high voltage transformer.)
• I noticed cars were stopping with elderly people getting out and examining each pile (rather than a cursory glance slow drive past).
• Neighbours who as late as last year would never have been seen dead poking trough a trash pile, were poking through our trash pile in broad daylight.

….AND, the council guys were two weeks late in their pickup (almost like they already knew that there would be nothing left of any value except for the garden cuttings).

The moral to the story is that apart from mining, there is another industry in Australia that is growing obviously growing rapidly.

The home based recycling industry is forging ahead in leaps and bounds, and it would appear that is has many thousands of Australians as stakeholders.

As a country we are being becoming less wasteful. The only question we should be asking, is this evolution from choice or necessity.

P.S.  For those that were wondering, my dad made similar Christmas relief packages for both the postie and the milkman in addition to the rubbish chappies.

In 1994, as CEO of Australia’s fastest growing ISP,  (Ausnet Services), I insisted that we install W3c cache servers at each dial-in pop around Australia.

And we cached the “J” server from Palo Alto to our Portland Oregon offices and then replicated that in Sydney.

All DNS queries on the Ausnet network stayed in Australia saving overseas bandwidth.

Every morning (2:00 am), we analyzed what overseas content the users read yesterday and cached today’s version of that content to make sure that our users had the maximum possible enjoyable online experience.

We were charging by the minute/hour so in effect we were (apparently) working against our own interests by making sure that users had rapid access to their content. So would argue the Telco’s. Nevertheless, in reality, the word of our “network” speed got out to Australians and we were deluged with daily sign-ups. After all APC magazine voted Ausnet as Australia’s best value and fastest ISP several months running.

For a long time – at least until the “Optik Surfer” hacking episode, Ausnet developed the trust of its users.

When we built OGN, the meme continued with the development and construction of the world’s first Terabyte internet cache. We constructed the AUIX and allowed other ISP’s to access the Terabyte cache through the Sydney Internet AUIX facility.

However, the Koltai caching concept was only targeted at decreasing internet “lag”, packet loss and increasing the user online experience.

I had not considered the concept of Web 2.0 or Google to increase the user experience by scraping cached content to deliver it in a new format.

This idea was the business model of the Newspapers, Television and radio news.

i.e.: Grab the content from Reuters/AP – add a couple of opinions apply the current editors’ editorial guidelines and publish – charging for the result.

In other words, News organisations were in the aggregation and arbitrage opportunity business.

The internet caching “meme” continued to expand through the nineties until a firm called Akamai utilized young Adrian Chadd’s Squid software and rolled out a worldwide implementation.

Suddenly all ISP’s had the benefits of Akamai caching. Unfortunately, for Akamai, P2P started to become popular about the time they were rolling out.

Akamai’s IPO in November 1999 at $174 per share must have put a smile on quite a few stag investors over the following six months as the share priced grew to nearly $300.00.

As P2P utilisation increases Akamai shares decrease in value to where in the last twelve months the Akamai share price has been trading in the $12.29 – $23.58 range.

Why is that?

Akamai was the big white hope only a few years ago. It would “decongest” the internet – particularly in a country like Australia where the lag time of the pacific fibre transit added an inordinately unacceptable delay to the delivery of each packet of content.

But the Akamai model is based on the concept of server client distribution.

If that model is nullified by:

a)  every ISP installing their own CDN for content distribution (e.g.: TPG Internet – IPTV, Internode TIVO content – Which together if you think about is a winning combination, the old FTA via TCP and the newer Netflix Video on Demand model…),

b)  P2P illegal file sharing,

c)  Mobile Carrier backhaul infrastructure lack or failure,

What then is the winning combination?

Well, one winning combination is the concept of the content cache as the delivery model – theoretically, whoever owns Akamai also owns the world largest Internet Filter and automatically the  largest amount of content. (No, I don’t  own any Akamai shares.)

Is uncle Rupert looking at a triple play with Yahoo and Akamai with a couple of ISP’s in every country thrown in for good measure?

Well possibly not, but if I were he – then that is what I would be looking it.

But, like always, I left out the best part.

The above triple play would only come into it’s own as a Goggle killer with the inclusion of P2P.

After all, today the media lacks consumer trust.

P2P has consumer trust plus it’s edgy, a little bit naughty and currently free.

Gee if you added ubiquitous caching (with appropriate editorial control), added the worlds dominant financial services search engine to the front end and delivered it via P2P, who wouldn’t love it?

Ummmm Google?

And possibly Facebook if it buys Ebay, imagine your friends being notified when that rare African war mask that they have all admired on your lounge room wall get a status update with an Ebay buy it now link…

Hmmm, every consumer a store owner…

What a great way to commercialise an entity that was originally about meet/greet/cheat.

And Jerry Harvey thinks he has problems now – Oi Vey!!! (Sound of forehead being slapped with palm of hand).

Then again, Facebook may have competition for the little shop that could sell.

If I was DHL, it would make sense to tie up with the worlds biggest shipping company.

Global Delivery  – any article,  24 hour guarantee, only ten bucks…

So add DHL/Ebay to the mix and scratch Facebook.

The questions that politicians should be asking themselves is that with the lowering cost of telecommunications, (free) – how long will it be before consumers control their own communications networks without being answerable to filters or consumerism based censorship.

Cisco claims that 25% will do so by 2015.

With Motorola ceding it’s technical chip forming capabilities to Google, we now have an advertising broadcasting (YouTube) company becoming a hardware manufacturer.

Sarah Connor warned us about Cyberdyne. Until now, I always thought the TV series was SciFi fiction.

The question then remains, if Politicians depend on the Large Corporations for election campaign contributions,  will the large corporations continue to donate to politicians when country borders and individual currencies become irrelevant ?

When will that happen.  Well boys and girls,  it’s happening now.

So be nice.

Last week Nilay Patel, former Engadget super blogger,  wrote about the Amazon Cloud player [1].

In case you missed his article, here are some of the highlights.

Amazon Cloud Player and how bandwidth killed the copyright star

If you’re reading this you probably don’t need much background on Amazon Cloud Player — suffice it to say that Amazon launched a new “freemium” cloud storage service that’s tied into their music store. You get 5GB of online storage for free and 20GB if you buy an MP3 album from Amazon, and subsequent MP3 purchases don’t count against the cap. There’s also a Cloud Player app for Android that can play music files stored on your account — it doesn’t matter if they’re files you purchased from Amazon or elsewhere, and Amazon has tools that’ll upload your DRM-free iTunes purchases to make a switch easy. None of this is particularly earth-shattering — as a loyal Amazon MP3 customer who’s almost wholly switched to the subscription-based Radio, I actually think most of these features are a couple years too late.

Fast forward

So what’s new for Amazon? Bandwidth, and tons of it. We’ve reached the point where uploading 5 or 15 or 20GB of data to a cloud service is a feasible task for most broadband-connected consumers, and that changes the nature of the argument entirely. If you’re a Cloud Player customer, you get a defined 5GB or 20GB of storage, and the music that lives in that storage is your copy. Your copy that you’re allowed to make. It’s not “functionally equivalent” to a fair use copy anymore — it is a fair use copy. I’d even bet that additional purchased songs that don’t count against your cap are actually transferred to your storage and given extra space that doesn’t show up on the meter, because that way each user still has their own copy.

This is going to completely fuck the labels, since they can’t argue that Amazon is making unauthorized copies of songs. In order to stop Cloud Player, they’re going to have to completely switch tactics and argue that it’s actually the content that matters, and that Amazon doesn’t have the rights to enable streaming content from their platform. But that’s a ridiculous argument, since Amazon is just going to say that it’s not actually doing much of anything — it’s just giving users some storage space and publishing an app that can play those files over the network. The labels will have to somehow argue that the content of the music files is protected, since they can’t really touch what the users are doing to their own copies.

I wrote my opinion on this topic recently to the Link Institute mailing list.

I actually think that this time the Amazon guys have leap frogged iTunes by two country miles.

So next we will see Amazon Radio ….
What are people listening to right now ?
22% are listening to …..      Click here to listen to a ten second clip…
16% are listening to …..      Click here to listen to a ten second clip…

Click here to buy a copy…

The power of marketing.
If the labels leave it alone, it has the capacity to create enormous global sales for recording artists and for the first time ever, a World Top Twenty…. Which of course will result in the emergence of the “Superstar….”

Interesting, this might actually revitalise the music industry that has been locked into iPod/iTunes mania (which of course is only available to one sixth of the worlds population.) [2]

one sixth of the worlds population or 14.9%

Coloured version of this table available at [2]

Now all we have to do is remove the Caps that countries like Australia, New Zealand and the UK enforce on their Internet users.

Internet Caps are a barrier to commerce and unless the carrier is also the content publisher (e.g.: Warner/UMG/Comcast) or a cable TV company with a V.O.D. service (e.g.: Telstra/Foxtel) there would appear to be little justification in Capping the bandwidth.

In this regard, our Government have got it right with the rollout of the NBN and Amazon have got it right with the Music Cloud.

It would be a shame if this brilliant opportunity for the Music industry to get back on top is spoiled by the short-sighted carrier walled and throttled gardens.

Memo to Amazon:  Can you please switch on Australia please.

Hat tip to Kim Holburn

References:

[1] http://nilaypatel.co/post/4239083697/amazon-cloud-player-and-how-bandwidth-killed-the

[2] Reason Number 5 For the Loss of Music Sales – iTunes is too Good.

http://kovtr.com/wordpress/?p=514

Throughout my life I have had the privilege to work with some very clever people and from them I have learned a lot.

I have also worked with some very dumb and greedy people.

DUMB & DUMBERER

There was the investor who really thought the Internet was about how much money one could make from providing dial up modem access to other persons content.

As any CEO, I was charged with the growth and the success of the company.

And grow it I did.

In less than twelve months we had an Australia wide Frame Relay network that extended into New Zealand and across the pond to Portland, up to Seattle and down to Palo Alto.

We had a magazine, Internet Australasia that was selling 72% through sales (which was 8% better than Woman’s Weekly) and we were  adding about hundred new customers every day.

I negotiated to acquire the name world.net.

I negotiated a “B” class of IP numbers….

I negotiated an IPO with Phil Rudd from Ernst & Young in Seattle, sitting downstairs in the IRS building in a little “yet to be famous” coffee shop called Starbucks…

But the investor was a disbeliever.

I had allowed the company to be hacked.

There was no value to the “B” class IP numbers.

The domain name was just a name and as for the NASDAQ listing… his exact words were:

“Ahhhh, you have to be joking… no-one in America will buy shares in an Australian ISP”

So we parted Ways and he replaced me with a highly qualified tomato grower. (His “B” Plan.)

(Nine Months later Ozemail raised 55 million on the Nasdaq, considerably less than the 250 Million that Phil had suggested that we could raise.).

Had the shareholder believed me in September 1995, his personal net worth would have increased by a conservative 131 million dollars.

So how does he feel now ?

I have no idea. He was always right back then, so I’m sure that whatever he is doing, he is probably still right about.

But I know one thing for sure, he didn’t make that 131 million dollar equity out of the tomato farmer – but his ego won, and he was right! (The Tomato farmer ? I think he went back to growing tomatoes.)

DOWNRIGHT GREEDY

Then there was the next investor.

The next guy was a little bit more adventurous, he understood that for big bucks, there had to be some bigger risk.

Unfortunately for me I didn’t understand that I was the risk.

As part of the deal, I had to agree to be insured as a Key Man for several million dollars.

A few months later, after the business had grown from zero billing to a million per month, we were having a board meeting to discuss the details of the NYSE reverse listing of a NYSE cashbox with five million dollars in the bank.. Basically, I was being offered the deal of a century…  If I gave the investors the five million, they would give me a proxy to vote their shares in any way I wanted too.

Gee, seemed like a great deal to me.  (Scratches head…)

I left the boardroom to grab some papers from my office.

The door was ajar a few millimeters and open plan office outside was empty. As I was coming back from my office, I overheard the following conversation in hushed tones:

A Big six Accountant:      “It seems to be going well”.

A Lawyer: “What do we do if it goes pear shaped?”

Shareholder 2: “We turn to the “B” plan and shoot Tom.”

I stopped and waited for the laughter.

There was none.

The next day I asked my solicitor to look into canceling the insurance policy.

-         What happened to that company ?

Well about eight months later the company announced how well it was doing in the Australian Financial Review after the restructure (after I left). Two months later, the

investor did a private deal for shares with the company’s largest Debtor…(yep the reason the company entered liquidation in the first place) and the company went into liquidation with of course, the investors personal accountant appointed as the liquidator.

What happened to the technology ?

Well,  the staff all wandered off and took the technology with them. You might have heard of a little Tech company called Akamai…

And that’s the story of the “B” plan.

Suddenly it’s almost easy to understand why Australia doesn’t have too many Billionaires. Every financier, politician and Big Six accounting firm is happy to execute the “B” plan.

There are very  few that have “the Vision”.

Those  that do are tall poppies that  obviously need to be taught a lesson.

The Lesson ?

In Australia there is very little incentive to be an entrepreneur.

Rupert Murdoch has told us that the content from News Limited is valuable. It costs money to produce and disseminate that content.

In fact, I stopped blogging because I didn’t have the money to hire fact checkers or editors.

I also stopped blogging because I didn’t want my unedited work influencing the predominantly young population of readers that KOVTR was receiving.

In other words, I didn’t think I was qualified to be a blogger or a person of influence that other persons might take part of their formational educational constructs from.

Recent events have led me to believe that Journalists have not become any more credible than some of those that I had the misfortune to meet in the nineties.

…and if Rupert claims that those Journalists output is valuable, ergo sum, my output also has a value.

So, here I am, eight months after my final blog piece, with a new blog article.

Journalists are Gods! Daytink!

I have recently had the distressing experience of dealing with a Journalist.

You know the type, I’m a technology journo, have been for twenty years, I’ve seen everything, know everything and you can’t possibly know more than me.

It matters not one iota that the journalist has never

• set-up a global Frame Relay network, or
• created a BBS,or
• built an ISP, or
• argued with Telecom about what constitutes a connected device (modem) on the PSTN network,  or
• written a billing program, or
• worked RF globally, or
• taken Telstra to Federal court three times over billing issues, or
• bounced a laser beam off the moon, (and received it back again) or
• built anInternet Exchange, or
• argued the merits of BSD memory utilisation with Kirk McKusick, or
• went bug hunting with Toni Li (C-ios 2.1) for 34 hours straight with no sleep, or
• designed the Blueprint for the worlds largest CDN network (Akamai), or
• argued with banks about online credit card billing and why it should be allowed, or
• redesigned the numbers of FR ports on a BSTDX Lucent switch.

No Journalists don’t actually have hands on experience at anything really except they have a way with words.  This understanding comes from years of being edited by other journalists (usually their editors) on how to use words sharply with efficiency.

Subsequently, they are extremely proficient at character assassination.

Unfortunately, the worlds second oldest profession, don’t understand the collateral damage of their 800 words @ 55 cents per articles trashing some poor entrepreneur. They don’t realise that their measly $200 story actually was the straw nail in the coffin for the ASIC investigator scalp hunter to quantify the banning of the Entrepreneur.

Others, married to or living with stock brokers arn’t above bending the real facts all to benefit their partners ambitions of picking up a cheap public company…

Nobody in the past dared take on Journos for fear of the global Reuters/Knight (et al) associated reprisals.

Today, thanks to one small minded individual, I am declaring war on all Journalists that believe they know more than even one entrepreneur that they would write about.

My Name is Tom Koltai and I am an Entrepreneur.