Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 4th, 2020

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January 4th, 2020




Australians Pirating Less as Streaming Services Thrive
Jennifer Duke and Nick Bonyhady

Australians are pirating online entertainment less as streaming services provide the market with a smorgasbord of content on smart devices within an arm's reach of most people.

The federal government's annual study of piracy practices found the portion of people who unlawfully accessed all their digital entertainment fell from 10 per cent to 1 per cent over the last year while those who combined pirated and paid content dropped from 22 per cent to 15 per cent.
Piracy is down as consumers have more content available from streaming services.

Piracy is down as consumers have more content available from streaming services.Credit:Sam Mooy

Over the five years since the survey of just under 2500 people began, the proportion of audiences getting their TV, movies, music and games online has steadily risen from 65 per cent to 80 per cent, with streaming the preferred method for most.

Communications Minister Paul Fletcher attributed the reduction in piracy to the rise of streaming platforms, enabled by the rollout the National Broadband Network.

"It is pleasing to see Australians increasingly turn to legitimately-sourced content," Mr Fletcher said in a statement. "It is widely accessible and reasonably priced, which supports the continued growth and success of our creative industries."

Marc C-Scott, a senior lecturer in media at Victoria University, said he did not believe the NBN played a significant role as it lets users to pirate content at the same speed as streaming legitimate material.

"The key reason why people have been pirating in Australia, it's all about content. It's not about the NBN," Dr C-Scott said. "I can't see the NBN being the golden bullet in this scenario."

YouTube, Spotify and iTunes were the top music services while Australians preferred Netflix, YouTube and Stan for movies, the survey found. This was the same as in 2018.

There has been a surge in streaming services in Australia with Disney+ launching in November and relatively recent launches of Foxtel's sports option Kayo Sports, Network Ten's 10 All Access and improved free broadcast-on-demand options from Nine, Ten and Seven West Media.

Quality, ease of use and a desire to avoid piracy were the leading reasons people picked legitimate content over illegal options, the survey found.

There was a slight downturn in the number of people saying they streamed TV shows, which Dr C-Scott said might be a result of users being unsure of whether watching Netflix or clips on YouTube counted as TV.

There was also a slight increase in those streaming movies unlawfully from 21 per cent to 25 per cent. Cost, ease of use and speed were the primary factors pushing Australians to piracy.

While streaming services were the main reason for the downturn in illegal downloading, more than half of survey respondents said they would give up attempting to pirate if they were confronted with a blocked site.

There have been laws in place since 2015 allowing copyright holders to seek court orders requiring telecommunications companies to block these sites and rules introduced in 2018 allowed the content owners to go a step further and get injunctions against businesses like Google if necessary.

Blocked websites can lead to a significant reduction in piracy, however sites often pop up under new names quickly afterwards.

In May, Google agreed to voluntarily remove websites from search results that had been blocked by internet service providers for hosting pirated content rather than go through the courts.

The changes came after severe criticism against the tech giant by Village Roadshow chief executive Graham Burke, who has repeatedly warned the cinema, theme park and film production business had lost "millions of dollars" due to piracy.

Mr Burke, who is retiring as chief executive at the end of 2019, has also lashed out at the government for failing to accept recommendations made by the competition watchdog over copyright takedowns after an 18-month inquiry into the digital platforms and their impact on local media companies.

Mr Burke said in a short statement there was still a "massive need" for more to be done on piracy and he would continue campaigning on the problem in 2020.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fede...27-p53n5m.html





How the Entertainment Industry Solved Piracy, Then Made It Popular Again

Streaming services are starting to look a lot like cable packages.
Karl Bode

In the past ten years, we lost hope in American politics, realized we were being watched on the internet, and finally broke the gender binary (kind of). So many of the beliefs we held to be true at the beginning of the decade have since been proven false—or at least, much more complicated than they once seemed. The Decade of Disillusion is a series that tracks how the hell we got here.

For decades now, the entertainment industry has struggled to realize that the best way to stop piracy is to offer consumers better, cheaper products. Instead, the industry spent much of the early aughts suing and vilifying potential customers or lobbying for copyright laws like the DMCA that created more problems than they professed to solve.

Only in the last 10 years has the industry’s thinking finally started to evolve. Instead of treating would-be customers as nefarious villains, companies began listening to data showing that—fair or not—the industry needs to view piracy as a competitor. In short, it finally learned the best way to stop piracy is to listen to consumers and start giving them what they want.

That lesson remains a work in progress. While video streaming has exploded in the last decade, an ocean of costly services—all rushing to hide exclusive content behind paywalls—risk annoying consumers and driving them right back to piracy.

July 2011: Spotify Finally Gives US Consumers What They Want

For much of the late 90s and 2000s internet users routinely flocked to Napster, BitTorrent, or other peer to peer (P2P) services to download digital music content they often couldn’t find online. The industry’s response wasn’t subtle; it engaged in a scorched earth legal campaign to sue everybody from college kids to grandmothers in the hopes of putting an end to the practice.

It didn’t work: despite shelling out more than $17 million in the early aughts to sue potential customers, the industry saw less than $400,000 in actual settlements. The lawsuits didn’t stop piracy, either.

Enter Spotify, whose 2011 launch finally delivered a popular service that was easy to use, had an extensive library of songs, didn’t cost an arm and a leg, and brought some much needed competition to Apple’s domination of the digital space. Many former pirates were quick to flock to the service, supporting studies that showed the best way to beat piracy was through innovation and better services, not lawsuits.

January 18, 2012: SOPA and PIPA Protests Shut Down The Internet

The entertainment industry’s most controversial attempt to stop piracy in the last decade came in the form of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The bills were so poorly written they risked imposing vast new censorship systems on the internet. And the backlash to them was so severe, the internet all but shut down in protest in early 2012.

“The rejection of SOPA/PIPA was monumental in showing that Hollywood couldn't just scream ‘piracy’ to get Congress to do whatever it wanted to expand the power and control of copyright laws,” copyright expert Mike Masnick told Motherboard.

Masnick noted that in the three decades prior to SOPA, Congress had passed 15 separate new "anti-piracy" laws, none of which actually stopped piracy, but all of which gave legacy studios and record labels ever more power and control.

“The rejection of SOPA/PIPA showed that the public was no longer willing to accept vague scaremongering about ‘piracy’ as an excuse to give up more control and to limit the internet,” Masnick said.

February 2013: The Rise (And Fall) Of “Six Strikes”

Another major cornerstone of the entertainment industry’s war on piracy was its much heralded Copyright Alert System (CAS). First launched in February 2013, the project was a joint effort between the entertainment industry and internet service providers (ISPs) intended to scare would-be pirates away from piracy with an escalating series of warnings and penalties.

Also dubbed “six strikes,” the penalties for accused pirates ranged from having your connection speed throttled and your broadband suspended until you acknowledged receipt of “educational” copyright materials provided by the entertainment industry. Little was done to independently verify industry piracy allegations, and users had to pay a $35 fee just to protest their innocence.

Users who received such notices could easily hide their BitTorrent transfers behind VPNs and proxies to avoid detection. Despite endless claims that the project dramatically reduced piracy, the effort was ultimately shut down in 2017 with absolutely no evidence it actually accomplished much of anything useful.

2018: Worried About Liability, ISPs Kick Users Offline

While the six strikes initiative no longer exists, ISPs have since been forced into taking even tougher positions against pirates. After ISPs like Cox were sued by the music industry for allegedly not doing enough to thwart piracy, many ISPs like AT&T began kicking some users off the internet entirely for piracy.

Like six strikes, there’s little to no evidence this is actually helping reduce piracy rates. Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have argued that terminating consumer access to an essential utility for violating copyright is an absurd and draconian overreaction.

2019: The Rise of Streaming Video (And The Glut Of Annoying Exclusives)

Despite its worst impulses, the decade did see the rise of an endless roster of streaming video alternatives, letting consumers finally cut the TV cord. While the sector had to be dragged kicking and streaming toward offering better alternatives to bloated cable bundles, the end result is an ocean of less expensive services with the kind of customer service that puts Comcast to shame.

But there’s trouble in paradise. As every broadcaster and their uncle rush to jump into the space, consumers are being inundated with confusing license agreements and content exclusives, forcing them to hunt and peck through services to find the TV shows and movies that used to be available in more centralized repositories like Netflix.

Studies have shown there’s a real risk that confused consumers may simply return to piracy, and there’s some early anecdotal evidence that may already be happening.

If there’s a lesson from the last decade in piracy, it’s that you can’t “defeat” piracy, you can only mitigate its impact. Data suggests piracy acts as a sort of invisible competitor and a metric of consumer dissatisfaction. You don’t stop it by suing grandmothers or buying problematic laws, you do so by listening to consumers and providing better, cheaper, simpler services.

That remains very much a lesson in progress, and there’s some evidence that if the entertainment industry isn’t careful, history will just keep on repeating itself.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/q...-popular-again





Films are Quietly Disappearing from Disney Plus

Movies like Home Alone and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides have vanished from the streaming service
Austen Goslin

With the release of Disney Plus, Disney has effectively done away with its fabled Vault. For years, the Vault was where Disney put films between waves of releases, so some classic titles would be unavailable for long periods. It was a smart way to drive interest in Disney’s release schedule for DVDs and Blu-rays: Whenever a beloved film emerged from the Vault, consumers, collectors, and resellers would rush to buy it, assuming their opportunities to own it would be limited. But with its new streaming service, Disney promised that all its classics would be permanently available to subscribers. That doesn’t apply to every movie on the service, however. Some films clearly aren’t going to live on Disney Plus forever.

In fact, as 2020 began, some Disney Plus users noticed that a few films had gone missing from the streaming library. Dr. Dolittle, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Home Alone and Home Alone 2, and The Sandlot are no longer streamable on Disney Plus. All these titles disappeared without warning, and so far, Disney has not commented on the titles.

Many fans are surprised by films dropping off the service, particularly since Disney hasn’t issued press releases about the changes. Where companies like HBO and Netflix put out monthly bulletins of everything coming to and leaving their streaming services each month, so viewers can plan their last-minute binges, Disney has only emphasized new arrivals, not departures. But the company has never actually promised that the various offerings on Disney Plus would remain there indefinitely. Sources tell Polygon that encumbrances with various legacy deals are likely the reason for the departures, and that titles may rejoin the service permanently after those licenses expire.

In a statement to Comicbook.com in November 2019, a Disney Plus spokesperson said, “there will not be a ‘rotating slate’ of licensed movies each month […] With Disney Plus, beloved classics from the Disney vault will now stream in a permanent home, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King — the entire 13-film Signature Collection — all available on day one.”

The Signature Collection, for those unfamiliar, replaced the company’s Platinum Edition and Diamond Edition home video releases of Disney classics like Beauty and the Beast, Bambi, Peter Pan, and Sleeping Beauty. This statement certainly makes it clear that Disney’s classics won’t be leaving Disney Plus — but it doesn’t say anything about the service’s hundreds of other movies.

And there are films that are already set to leave Disney Plus. According to a report from Bloomberg, a few of the service’s biggest titles, like Black Panther, are currently set to lapse back to Netflix in 2026, where they were before Disney Plus launched. On top of that, a few enterprising Disney Plus users noticed that other films had hidden expiration dates, which could indicate the end of certain contracts and licensing deals, even though Disney owns all of the titles on Disney Plus.

Perhaps the most direct statement on the idea of titles leaving came from Disney CEO Bob Iger himself. In March 2019, Iger said that soon after launch, Disney Plus would “house the entire Disney motion picture library.” But he clarified that he was talking about “the movies that you speak of that traditionally have been kept in the ‘vault’ and brought out basically every few years.”

These comments leave a slight loophole to explain some of the missing movies. In a later presentation in April, Disney also specified that the catalog rollout would take time. During the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, CNET reported Iger as saying that Disney Plus subscribers would be able to download their favorite movies, when talking about movies that could potentially leave the platform due to the Netflix deal.

According to the CNET report, Iger said, “By and large, almost all of it is there … And if you’re a subscriber, you can download it and put it on a device, and it will stay on the device as long as you continue to subscribe.” In a later statement to The Verge, a Disney Plus representative clarified that downloaded content would only stay on viewers’ devices as long as that content was available on Disney Plus — which means that the company was always planning for some titles to leave the service.

This isn’t the first time movies have quietly been removed from Disney Plus. In 2019, movies like The Shaggy Dog and Garfield 2: A Tail of Two Kitties were also removed. But while these few titles have left the service, and possibly more that have gone unnoticed, Disney has also been adding to the Disney Plus library.

For now, it seems that the complications of licensing deals and streaming rights mean that the selection of movies and shows on Disney Plus, both in the U.S. and in other countries, could remain in flux for the next several years.
https://www.polygon.com/disney-plus/...an-dr-dolittle





Jimmy Iovine Knows Music and Tech. Here’s Why He’s Worried.
Ben Sisario

The biggest story in music over the last decade was the industry’s reconciliation with tech — after a decade fighting the internet, the music business fully embraced it in the 2010s. Streaming has now finally returned the business, which was nearly decimated by the shift from physical to digital formats, to growth.

Perhaps no one has had a broader view of this phenomenon than Jimmy Iovine, the producer and record executive who made the leap to the other side. He and his partner, Dr. Dre, sold their company, Beats Electronics, to Apple for $3 billion in 2014 and helped launch Apple Music, the tech giant’s late entry to the streaming market, which now has more than 60 million subscribers.

It was, from the start, a strange pairing. Apple is obsessively cautious in maintaining its public image; Iovine, the son of a Brooklyn longshoreman, blurts profanities in a high-pitched rasp and is one of music’s great hustler-salesmen. But Iovine, who co-founded the Interscope label in 1990 and led it until he left in 2014, has long been one of the sharpest observers of the tug-of-war between the entertainment business and Silicon Valley.

Iovine, 66, retired from Apple in 2018, and says he has devoted himself to passion projects like the XQ Institute, an educational initiative led by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs. He has even started taking guitar lessons. “I’m realizing how hard Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen’s jobs really were,” he said from his home in Los Angeles, with a chuckle.

Iovine has also become a dedicated collector of contemporary art, guided in part by David Geffen, his friend and fellow mogul retiree. His most prized work is a 2017 commission by Ed Ruscha, “Our Flag,” an update to one of Ruscha’s perennial subjects that shows a star-spangled banner ripped and tattered — a striking comment on contemporary politics.

“If you looked at the painting and thought it represented the disarray of democracy you would be right,” Ruscha said. “Any flag that flies for 250 years deserves to be a little soiled but nothing this extreme.”

In a series of conversations in December, Iovine spoke about his career transition from the studio to the halls of Cupertino, and the tangled relationship between music and tech in the 2010s. Artists, he said, are more powerful than ever, thanks to social media — but too few, in Iovine’s opinion, have made social statements as bold as those by the 82-year-old Ruscha and “Our Flag.”

“This painting says more than any song that I’ve heard in the last 10 years,” Iovine said. “Why is that?”

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Back in 2010, you were still at Interscope, where you had hits with Lady Gaga, Eminem, the Black Eyed Peas. At the same time, you were building up Beats. But within four years, you left the label and sold Beats to Apple. Why did you take that trajectory?

What you’re talking about actually goes back 20 years. It’s all a response to Napster. I saw how powerful that technology was, and I realized we had to switch gears. The record companies were not going to exist without tech.

Why I got into the music business originally was to be associated with things that were cool. And I realized that the record business at that moment, the way it was responding to Napster, was not cool.

Meaning suing people?

Yes, and putting up a moat, like that was going to do something. So I said, “Oh, I’m at the wrong party.” And I met a bunch of people in tech. I met Steve Jobs and Eddy Cue from Apple. And I said, “Oh, this is where the party is. We need to incorporate this thinking into Interscope.”

I find out a lot through the artists I work with. Dre is a perfectionist of audio, maybe one of the greatest audio producers that ever existed. And when I found out what Dre was concerned about, that the equipment his kids were listening to the music on — an entire generation was learning about audio through cheap, inefficient equipment. That’s how Beats started.

Steve Jobs used to sit with me at this Greek restaurant and draw out what I needed to do to make hardware. He’d say, “Here’s distribution, here’s manufacturing,” and he’d be drawing on this paper with a Sharpie. And I’d go, “Oh, [expletive].”

So what did you learn when you got to the other side?

I didn’t want it to be the other side. I wanted it to be all one thing. I wasn’t bailing on music. I always thought that technology was going to get people to listen to music in a better way, and you were going to promote it all through a streaming service. But it would all be in the same house.

Is that where things ended up? Are music and tech in the same house, or is the house divided?

The two sides don’t speak the same language. Content doesn’t know what technology is building. And engineers are just going by the way they see a problem. The streaming business has a problem on the horizon, and so does the music business. That doesn’t mean they can’t figure it out.

What’s the streaming business’s problem on the horizon?

Margin. It doesn’t scale. At Netflix, the more subscribers you have, the less your costs are. In streaming music, the costs follow you.

And the streaming music services are utilities — they’re all the same. Look at what’s working in video. Disney has nothing but original stuff. Netflix has tons of original stuff. But the music streaming services are all the same, and that’s a problem.

What happens when something is commoditized is that it becomes a war of price. If you can get the exact same thing next door cheaper, somebody is going to enter this game and just lower the price. Spotify’s trying with podcasts. Who knows? Maybe that will work.

And let me just say, what Daniel Ek has done with Spotify is extraordinary. I knew who he did those original deals with. Those were impossible deals, and they’re suffering from that now. All the streaming companies are. But he’s done an incredible job.

If you look at the last 20 years of the music business as a recovery from Napster, has the problem now been solved?

I don’t view it as problem solved. There’s been progress, but there’s a ways to go yet. If I were still at Interscope, here are the things I’d be worried about. I’d be worried that I don’t have a direct relationship with my consumer. The artists and the streaming platforms do.

I’d be worried that an artist like Drake or Billie Eilish streams more than the entire decade of the 1980s, according to the information I’ve seen from labels and streaming services. I’d also be worried that the streaming services aren’t making enough money, because that can jackknife.

What about the future of the record business? Why should the next Billie Eilish sign with a record company at all?

The artists now have something they’ve never had before, which is a massive, direct communication with their audience — from their house, their bed, their car, whatever. And because of that, everybody wants them. Spotify wants them, Apple Music wants them, Coke wants them, Pepsi wants them. And people that make terrible second records are still famous and still have online audiences. The power of celebrity, this obsession with Instagram — it’s driven by personality and lifestyle.

So hail to the artists, because in the end they’re winning. It isn’t their problem to figure out how the streaming company and the record company are going to make more money. It’s the streaming company and the record company’s problem to figure out how to become more valuable to that artist.

You left Apple in 2018, just three years after launching Apple Music. Why?

When I went to Apple, it was a new creative problem for me. How do we make this the future of the music business? How do we make it not ordinary? But I ran out of personal runway. Somebody else will have to do that.

What do you think about Taylor Swift pushing for control of her master recordings?

Well, who doesn’t want to own their masters? But what she is doing is amplifying that because she has a giant platform. That’s going to have an effect, and it isn’t going to be neutral. So if you’re a 16-year-old kid making music on Pro Tools, that is now in the conversation. If I was still at Interscope. I would say, “O.K., this is coming. So I have to figure out, how do I evolve my relationships with artists?”

What’s the secret for an artist to have a long career today?

Quality — of everything you do. Make quality the priority, not speed. Speed is marketing, but you have to have something great to market.

Dre says we’re seeing a lot of quantity over quality right now. Somebody asked me the other day, how do you make a Christmas album that lasts? I said, “Don’t make it with disposable artists.” If you don’t want to be disposable, take care of the art.

Are you impressed by artists’ work now?

Artists have these new platforms that are very, very powerful. So why do visual artists like Mark Bradford, Kara Walker, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer make such powerful statements on where we are today in our culture, like Marvin Gaye, Public Enemy, Bob Dylan or Rage Against the Machine did? What has changed?

One of the reasons I left music was because there wasn’t a kind of music that I related to. I grew up with Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, John Lennon. When Neil Young’s “Ohio” came out, I was 17 years old. I was a year from being drafted. My instincts said that this war is wrong. And here was a guy whose music I loved, and all of a sudden, I was part of, “We don’t agree with this.” And Neil Young had one-tenth of one percent of the platform that some of these artists have now.

These days I am getting that from the art world and not the music world.

So I call up Ed Ruscha, and I said, “Could you make me an American flag?” And he said, “Only if I can make it the way I feel about America today.” And I said, “Absolutely.”

When I got that painting, I knew that Ed had hit on something. And I said, “Where are the musicians that are doing this?”

There are some clues. Have we entered into an age of music where artists are afraid to alienate people? Since the country is so polarized, am I afraid to alienate the other audience? Am I afraid to alienate a sponsor from my Instagram? I don’t know. I’m asking the question.

But you do have artists like Eilish who are talking about climate change.

There are a few. But not nearly enough.

If I were still running Interscope, I would be signing artists and encouraging them. Right now there are a lot of people running around saying, “What’s making noise on TikTok?”

That’s fine. But I’m more encouraged by the people who are saying, “Whoa, this artist has something to say. I’m going to support them, because I believe that in the end they’re going to win, and that will make all of us win.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/a...op-decade.html





The 2010s were Supposed to Bring the Ebook Revolution. It Never Quite Came.

Publishing spent the 2010s fighting tooth and nail against ebooks. There were unintended consequences.
Constance Grady

At the beginning of the 2010s, the world seemed to be poised for an ebook revolution.

The Amazon Kindle, which was introduced in 2007, effectively mainstreamed ebooks. By 2010, it was clear that ebooks weren’t just a passing fad, but were here to stay. They appeared poised to disrupt the publishing industry on a fundamental level. Analysts confidently predicted that millennials would embrace ebooks with open arms and abandon print books, that ebook sales would keep rising to take up more and more market share, that the price of ebooks would continue to fall, and that publishing would be forever changed.

Instead, at the other end of the decade, ebook sales seem to have stabilized at around 20 percent of total book sales, with print sales making up the remaining 80 percent. “Five or 10 years ago,” says Andrew Albanese, a senior writer at trade magazine Publishers Weekly and the author of The Battle of $9.99, “you would have thought those numbers would have been reversed.”

And in part, Albanese tells Vox in a phone interview, that’s because the digital natives of Gen Z and the millennial generation have very little interest in buying ebooks. “They’re glued to their phones, they love social media, but when it comes to reading a book, they want John Green in print,” he says. The people who are actually buying ebooks? Mostly boomers. “Older readers are glued to their e-readers,” says Albanese. “They don’t have to go to the bookstore. They can make the font bigger. It’s convenient.”

Ebooks aren’t only selling less than everyone predicted they would at the beginning of the decade. They also cost more than everyone predicted they would — and consistently, they cost more than their print equivalents. On Amazon as I’m writing this, a copy of Sally Rooney’s Normal People costs $12.99 as an ebook, but only $11.48 as a hardcover. And increasingly, such disparities aren’t an exception. They’re the rule.

So what happened? How did the apparently inevitable ebook revolution fail to come to pass?

To figure out the answers, we’ll have to dive in deep to a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice in 2012 against Apple — newly entered into the ebook market with the advent of the iPad — and five of what was then the Big Six publishing houses. The Department of Justice accused Apple and the publishers of colluding to fix ebook prices against Amazon, and although the DOJ won its case in court, the pricing model that Apple and the publishers created together would continue to dominate the industry, creating unintended ripple effects.

The case of US v. Apple encapsulates the dysfunction of the last decade of publishing. It’s a story about what we’re willing to pay for books — and about an industry that is growing ever more consolidated, with fewer and fewer companies taking up more and more market share. What happened to the ebook in the 2010s is the story of the contraction of American publishing.

“To my mind it’s game over for this business.”

When the Kindle entered the marketplace in 2007, Amazon had a simple sales pitch: Anyone with a Kindle could buy all the ebooks they wanted through the online marketplace, and many of those ebooks — in fact, all New York Times best-sellers — would cost no more than $9.99.

$9.99 is a steal for a new book. At the time, most hardcovers were averaging a list price of about $26, and many cost more. But for Amazon, this price point was an apparent no-brainer. The first generation Kindle was expensive, and value conscious customers needed some incentive to buy into it. Why would anyone spend $399 on an e-reader if they couldn’t expect to make up at least part of the cost in a discount on ebooks?

And while this point is often glossed over, Amazon was actually following a precedent set by publishers in its pricing model. In her opinion for US v. Apple, Judge Denise Cote noted that before 2009, most publishers discounted ebooks by 20 percent from the price of a hardcover, which often led to a suggested list price of around $9.99.

But by 2009, publishers had changed their minds. Now they considered the idea of $9.99 ebooks to be an existential threat. Printing and binding and shipping — the costs that ebooks eliminated — accounted for only two dollars of the cost of a hardcover, publishers argued. So the ebook for a $20 hardcover book should cost no less than $18. And according to publishers, by setting the price of an ebook at $9.99, Amazon was training readers to undervalue books.

“The big concern — and it’s a massive concern — is the $9.99 pricing point,” David Young, the CEO of Hachette Book Group USA, told the New Yorker in 2010. “If it’s allowed to take hold in the consumer’s mind that a book is worth ten bucks, to my mind it’s game over for this business.”

Here’s where book prices come from

Before we delve further into the weeds here, a quick primer on how book prices are set. Print books are generally sold under a wholesale model, which works like this: First, the publisher will set a suggested list price for a book; say, $20. Then it will sell the book to resellers and distributors for a discount off that suggested list price. So if Simon & Schuster wants to sell a $20 book to Amazon, Amazon might negotiate a discount of 40 percent for itself and end up paying Simon & Schuster only $12 for that book.

But once Amazon owns the book, it has the right to set whatever price it would like for consumers. The $20 list price that Simon & Schuster set was just a suggestion. Under the wholesale model, Amazon is free to decide to sell the book to readers for as little as a single dollar if it chooses to.

Until 2010, ebooks were sold through the wholesale model too. So if Simon & Schuster was publishing a $20 hardcover, they could choose to set a suggested list price of $18 for the ebook — two dollars less than the hardcover — and then sell that ebook to Amazon at a 40 percent discount for $10.80. And Amazon could, in turn, feel free to sell that ebook for $9.99 and swallow a loss of 81 cents.

To be clear, the numbers we’re using here to get a handle on how pricing works are imaginary. (Amazon negotiates different discounts for itself at different times from different publishers, sometimes around 40 percent, but at other times higher and at other times lower.) But we do know that Amazon was making very, very little money off ebook sales in 2010, and was in fact probably losing money on most of them.

For a company as big as Amazon, it’s perfectly reasonable to lose money on a new initiative if that will help them dominate the market space. But publishers were terrified of what would happen once Amazon had established itself as the only game in town, ebook-wise.

Would Amazon keep pushing prices ever further down? And once publishers had nowhere else to sell their ebooks, would Amazon start demanding lower and lower discounts from them to subsidize those low prices? Would Amazon start to demand that publishers sell them ebooks for $5 so that it could maintain that customer-facing $9.99 price point but now make a profit?

It was in the midst of this tense and paranoid atmosphere that Apple made its entrée into the ebook market.

Publishers hoped that iBooks would do for books what iTunes did for music. It didn’t quite work out that way.

In 2010, Apple launched the iPad, and with it, the modern tablet computer. And part of what made the iPad so exciting was that it contained iBooks, an app that publishers were hoping would do for ebooks what iTunes had done for music: be so convenient and easy to use that consumers would flock to it rather than turn to piracy. Crucially, publishers hoped that iBooks would be so streamlined and sleek that it could undermine Amazon’s book-selling dominance.

Apple was offering publishers an incentive to root for it over Amazon. With its App Store, Apple had established a resale model that worked differently from the wholesale model publishers were used to. It was called the agency model, and it worked like this: publishers would decide on what the list price for their book should be, and then put it up for sale at that price in the iBooks store. Apple would take a 30 percent commission on every sale.

Apple wasn’t willing to sell ebooks for $18, but it thought a cap of $14.99 was perfectly reasonable. And if publishers decided to go along with Apple’s plan, they could set a list price of $14.99 for an ebook and be sure that no one in the iBooks store would ever discount it without the publisher’s express permission. Apple, meanwhile, would pocket $4.50 from each sale.

But Apple couldn’t enter the ebook market while charging consumers five dollars more per unit than its biggest competitor was. It needed some assurance that no one would have a cheaper product than it had. So it made a deal with five of the Big Six publishers (Simon & Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan; Random House, then the biggest trade publishing house, abstained): They could all sign on to Apple’s agency model, as long as they guaranteed that they’d also use that same agency model with every other retailer they worked with. That way, Amazon, too, would be forced to sell its ebooks for $14.99 — and if it refused, publishers could withhold their ebooks from Amazon and make them exclusive to Apple.

Publishers agreed to the deal. And just like that, everything changed.

“That’s the kind of thing that’s very clearly illegal”

“Overnight, because of this conspiracy, ebook prices went from $9.99 to $14.99,” says Albanese. “That set the tone for the future of the ebook right there.”

The word “conspiracy” is important here. As far as publishers were concerned, they weren’t conspiring; they were just acquiring the leverage they needed to deal with a company they considered an existential threat to their business. They were preventing Amazon from forming a monopoly, and thus they were promoting a healthier economy for books and for the American book-buying public, too.

According to the Department of Justice, however, publishers were conspiring. They were colluding with Apple to fix prices.

“They [publishers] agreed with each other what the resale prices would be for their electronic books,” says Christopher Sagers, a law professor at Cleveland State University and the author of United States v. Apple: Competition in America. “That’s a horizontal pricing conspiracy, and generally speaking, that’s the kind of thing that’s very clearly illegal. In fact, it’s often prosecuted criminally.”

In 2012, the Department of Justice sued both the five publishers who had agreed to Apple’s agency model plan and Apple itself. And the presiding judge, Denise Cote, was not impressed by the argument that Apple and the conspiring publishers had only acted to prevent a monopoly. “Another company’s alleged violation of antitrust laws,” she wrote in her opinion, “is not an excuse for engaging in your own violations of the law.” She imposed sanctions of $166 million on publishers to compensate those who bought ebooks at inflated prices.

But while Cote’s sanctions required publishers to briefly modify the agency model so that resellers could set their own prices, within a few years, those sanctions expired. Today, the agency model that Apple developed is once again the standard sales model for ebooks.

“The Department of Justice suit in hindsight was corporate squabble,” says Albanese. “It hasn’t done much to address Amazon’s market position. Would the ebook trajectory have continued to grow had that suit not happened? Probably we would be in about the same place.”
“The answer is to sue both of them”

Ironically, by winning when it comes to ebook pricing, publishing seems to have hurt its ability to convince readers that print books are worth spending money on.

“Amazon can still discount whatever they like on the print side,” explains Jane Friedman, a publishing consultant and the author of The Business of Being a Writer. On the ebook side, however, Amazon now lists publisher-mandated prices, often with the petulant italic addition “Price set by seller.” “So the market is very weird, and often the ebook costs more than the print,” Friedman says. “Sometimes it feels like Amazon is trying to make the publishers look ridiculous.”

And because ebooks are often more expensive than Amazon’s heavily discounted print books, traditional publishing’s ebook sales seem to have fallen off — and Amazon is more dominant than ever in the print book market. “It’s so much cheaper,” says Friedman.
In this new market, high ebook prices make it harder than ever for young authors in particular to survive. “The split has really hurt debut novelists,” says Friedman. “It’s hard to ask readers to take a chance on someone unproven at that high price point, and since the ebook market does lean towards fiction, it’s hurting the new people.”

Self-published authors, meanwhile, are flourishing. They’re allowed to set their own ebook prices just like publishers are — and consistently, they set their prices very, very low. “It’s a shadow market,” Friedman says. “Novelists with huge backlists go and put them out as ebooks independently. And if a reader has a choice between reading this great series at $2.99 a pop or a $12 novel, what are they going to pick?”

Antitrust law professor Christopher Sagers argues that the outcome of the DOJ’s ebooks case shows that the real problem with the industry is not just that Amazon has a monopoly. The big trade publishers, he says, have a monopoly too.

“There used to be hundreds of publishing companies. They’re now mostly owned by five,” Sagers says. (After that Department of Justice lawsuit, Penguin merged with Random House, and the Big Six became the Big Five.) “Why are ebooks expensive? It’s not because Amazon is vicious. It’s because there’s no competition at the wholesale level.”

For Sagers, the solution to the ebooks problem was not to let publishers fix prices to prevent an Amazon ebook monopoly. He thinks that instead, the government should have prosecuted everyone involved. “Critics of the case all said, ‘It’s terrible to sue the publishers and not let them have a cartel if you’re going to let Amazon have a monopoly,’” he told Vox over the phone. “I say that’s crazy. The answer is to sue both of them.”

The Big Five publishers “are huge, and they have been able to put in place practices that are kind of unfair and that authors have to put up with,” Friedman allows. “That said, they need that kind of size to be able to effectively deal with something like Amazon. If you look at an indie publisher, I wouldn’t want to be one of them.”

Friedman points to the way the entire book market has contracted and consolidated itself, so that nearly every phase of a book’s life is dominated by a tiny subset of companies. “People complain about Ingram’s terms, too, because nobody can compete with Ingram,” Friedman says.

Ingram is a distributor, and it’s one of the only companies that currently exists to handle book distribution: It’s the Amazon or the Penguin Random House of this portion of the process of putting books out into the world. In December 2019, Publishers Weekly reported that Ingram had begun putting out feelers on buying Baker & Taylor, one of its competitors; this May, Baker & Taylor stopped selling to bookstores. Ingram now faces virtually zero retail competition.

Ingram benefits from an industry that has consolidated to the point that there is almost no competition, and entering the marketplace as a new and independent player is nearly impossible, along every single level. In that, it’s in a position almost identical to that of both Amazon and the Big Five.

“You have to accept them, because who else are you going to go to?” Friedman says. “It’s hard to get around these last men standing.”
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/...uit-apple-ipad





Internet Shutdowns Used to be Rare. They're Increasingly Becoming the Norm in Much of the World
James Griffiths

At the start of this year, as Zimbabwe cut off internet access across the country following anti-government protests, the internet pressure group Keep It On warned that such "shutdowns must never be allowed to become the new normal."

Twelve months later, however, that's exactly where we are.

An ongoing internet blackout in Indian-controlled Kashmir is now the longest ever in a democracy -- at more than 135 days -- according to Access Now, an advocacy group that tracks internet freedom. Only the autocratic governments of China and junta-era Myanmar have cut off access for longer.

The blackout came as Indian troops flooded into Kashmir following New Delhi's removal of the region's legal autonomy. But the shutdown left some Kashmiris unaware of the reason the internet had been cut. And without internet access, they have been largely removed from the conversation ever since, so difficult is it for people in the region to get their messages out.

Kashmiris have been without internet access for so long that WhatsApp has reportedly begun deleting their accounts for inaction.

David Kaye, the United Nation's special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, has described the ongoing shutdown as a "communications siege" and "collective punishment without even the allegation of an underlying offense."

This week, the tactic spread to other parts of India, as authorities in multiple regions, including in parts of the capital New Delhi, cut phone and internet services amid widespread protests over a controversial citizenship bill. Tens of millions of people have been affected by the most recent shutdowns. The move has attracted widespread outrage and seen pushback from politicians and even some judges.

India's increased internet censorship has been greeted with delight in China, however, where state-run media pointed to it as an endorsement of Beijing's own authoritarian approach. The People's Daily said this week that India's example showed "shutting down the internet in a state of emergency should be standard practice for sovereign countries."

Where it all began

Following ethnic riots and violent unrest in the far-western province of Xinjiang in 2009, the Chinese authorities cut off internet and phone access for the entire region.

While blackouts had occurred in spots around the globe before, they were normally accidental, caused by damage to the undersea cables which power much of the internet. Even as Xinjiang went dark, cutting people off from friends and family, and ruining businesses that depended on the web, it seemed like an aberration, the type of tactic only an authoritarian regime like China's would, or could use.

In the 10 years since, the internet has created a communications revolution across the developing world, with many countries leapfrogging older technologies and adopting smartphones, social media and mobile payments, driving economic growth and linking communities.

As more and more countries have seen the internet being used to organize for political change, however, internet blackouts have become increasingly common, a go-to tool for controlling unrest and stifling criticism of the government. Nor is the tactic limited to authoritarian states: the worst offender by far is India, the world's biggest democracy.

African states have also embraced the tactic, with Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Ethiopia all cutting off internet access in an attempt to rein in anti-government protests.

This is in line with a general pattern of increased online censorship. It's partly due to the spread of more sophisticated technology that makes it easier, and cheaper, to monitor and filter traffic online. It's also influenced by a shifting perception of internet censorship, which once used to be seen as something of a losing battle.

China's Great Firewall, however, has proved beyond doubt that not only can the internet be controlled, but that doing so can help prop up the regime and prevent opposition movements from getting off the ground.

Despite arguably kicking off the trend of internet shutdowns, Beijing is not a frequent offender in this regard. Chinese censorship is generally sophisticated enough that the authorities don't need to use such a blunt instrument as shutting off all access -- they achieve the same purpose by filtering what can be discussed in the first place.

For other countries, particularly in the developing world, simply turning off the internet can be an attractive shortcut to this level of control. Shutdowns give police a freer hand to reign in unrest without the type of hyper-scrutiny on social media that has become common in highly-connected societies, and enable the government to ensure that its message is the only one heard on a particular topic.

In 2018, there were 196 internet shutdowns globally -- mainly in Asia, Africa and the Middle East -- according to Access Now. In the first half of this year alone, there were 128, and 2019 looks to be the worst year on record. According to Freedom House, a Washington-based NGO, almost half of the world's population lives in a country "where authorities disconnected internet or mobile networks, often for political reasons."

Major ramifications

Losing internet access isn't merely an annoyance -- it can deprive people of vital information during periods of unrest, putting them at risk. It also restricts the media's ability to hold government or security services to account.

Much of the global economy depends on communications technology -- everything from high-speed stock trading to logistics and delivery services -- and internet shutdowns can have major economic repercussions too.

The Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations estimates that between 2012 and 2017, shutdowns cost the country's economy more than $3 billion, and there have been many more blackouts in the years since.

"Shutdowns impact the ability of citizens to get accurate information from government sources in times of unrest or emergency. It also becomes harder for citizens to contact family members and friends in other parts of the country, or in other countries," according to the Internet Society. "The efforts of first responders and healthcare providers can also be hindered if a shutdown prevents their ability to effectively coordinate and communicate in the event of an emergency or natural disaster."

The methods behind an internet shutdown, particularly a complete one, are fairly straightforward. The government simply orders internet service providers (ISPs) to drop connections to the outside world -- like turning off a home modem, but for the entire country.

When a complete shutdown is in place, there is often no way around it. Anti-censorship tools like VPNs don't work when there is no internet connection for them to use. Kashmiris have nicknamed a train which runs to the neighboring territory of Jammu "The Internet Express," as so many of them use it daily to check their email and keep their businesses running.

Alternative means of providing internet access are largely in their infancy. Satellites which beam in broadband are expensive and depend on private companies being willing to defy governments. Mesh networking, which uses phone and router connections to create a peer-to-peer chain from a cut off area to the open internet, requires a level of consistent population density that isn't necessarily in place in many areas, such as Kashmir, affected by internet shutdowns.

What can be done?

In many instances, especially blanket shutdowns, internet blackouts may breach rights guaranteed by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international treaties. The United Nations has also affirmed member states' responsibility to protect people's access to the internet and freedom of expression online.

Peter Micek, general counsel for Access Now, said that "every internet shutdown should be tracked and called out by the United Nations."

Not only are such blackouts potentially in breach of UN-protected rights, but they also obstruct international aid work, security and development, he added.

Micek said that while human rights bodies have long called out censorship, "we now look beyond, to technical bodies like the ITU, funding institutions, regional bodies like ASEAN and the African Union, to the UN Secretary General himself to make clear that shutdowns are unacceptable measures, an affront to the law of nations."

Having rights and enforcing them are quite different, however. In India, some individual shutdowns have been challenged in the courts, and there is an ongoing effort to change the country's law on internet shutdowns to make them more difficult to impose.

According to Access Now, growing awareness of the damage caused by internet shutdowns has led to more frequent challenges in the courts. "Even when a court doesn't directly rule in favor of the plaintiff, or even hear the case, taking legal action can have a positive impact for the human rights of those suffering under the shadow of internet shutdowns," the group said.

Many of these cases have been brought by individuals, not internet companies, even though they are often the most affected by shutdowns. Access Now and others have argued that industry could be playing a much wider role in this fight, contributing both financial and reputational weight. In the US for example, Apple fought hard against an attempt to get it to undermine encryption for the FBI.

But in many countries, courts are underpowered and unlikely to challenge shutdowns. Many governments are also following China's lead in writing the ability to filter and control the internet into law. Industry has shown itself unwilling to challenge governments, such as Beijing, where there is little chance of success in court -- including Apple.

"The business community can band together in their existing associations ... and demand governments rein in their destructive tendency to order internet blackouts and throttling," Micek said. "Disclosing the financial cost of shutdowns is a clear way businesses can illustrate the adverse economic impacts to policymakers."

Companies can also refuse to carry out network disruptions and instead challenge governments with legal, lobbying and policy tools, he added.

The year 2019 was when internet shutdowns became a mainstream problem -- and the case against them, both economic and political, is undeniable. With that case proven however, next year internet freedom advocates and anti-censorship organizations face the much more difficult task of working out how to fight back.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/21/a...hnk/index.html





Why Do Data Caps Exist and How Can You Bypass Them?
Bertel King

It’s common knowledge that mobile providers like AT&T and T-Mobile throttle user connections after they use a certain amount of data in a month—but did you know that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) might be doing the same thing?

Why do companies impose data caps, and what can you do about it?

The Reason Behind Data Caps

Internet data caps

Before answering this question, let’s define what data caps are. Both ISPs and mobile providers put a limit on how much data you can use in a month. For example, there’s a Comcast data cap in many states across the US. And even though unlimited mobile plans are more prevalent than a few years ago, most plans still have data capping in some form.

What happens once you use that amount of data? It depends on the provider. Sometimes your connection is slowed down, also known as throttled. Or companies charge you for the data you use above the cap. In some cases, you simply lose internet access altogether.

So why do data caps exist? Mobile providers have repeatedly stated that data caps allow for lower prices and help ease congestion. Verizon has told the US federal government that data caps exist to relieve the need to throttle their customers. Cable ISPs also use data caps to manage “congestion” but there are several reasons why many people are skeptical.

First of all, the amount of data available on cell phone plans has skyrocketed faster than the speed at which additional infrastructure has been built. You might have expected to get several gigabytes of data on your plan a few years ago, but now it’s easy to get dozens of gigabytes for the same price.

And yet, even with so many people streaming mobile video, the providers aren’t saying that congestion has increased significantly.

Second, and more importantly, is that cable companies and their lobbyists are starting to admit that their data caps are more about making money than relieving congestion. The lead lobbyist of the cable industry put it simply as, “Our principal purpose is how to fairly monetize a high fixed cost.”

Many people are getting fed up with data caps, especially when companies put caps in place and then charge more money to get the same service that customers previously had. Remember that Comcast data cap? You can remove that for an extra $50 a month.
What You Can Do About Throttling and Data Caps

Stop the Cap website

Before looking at how to bypass your data caps, you may want to first register your support with groups who are lobbying against the price gouging practice that’s taking place in the name of (non-existent) congestion relief.

StopTheCap.com has a great page on how to take action against ISP data caps, and many of the suggestions apply against mobile providers as well.

Many people believe that usage-based pricing and data caps violate the central tenets of a free and fair internet, and that the time has come for customers to speak up against these unfair practices. Sign petitions, share information, and get in touch with your representatives to make your preference known.

How to Bypass Data Caps

Now that you’ve taken a moment to address the root of the problem, let’s explore how you can get past data caps on your own internet and mobile plans.

Technically, you can’t bypass your data cap. Once you’ve been throttled, you’re stuck until the end of the month—unless you resort to questionable practices, like deleting the throttle-service file mentioned in our article on avoiding mobile data throttling.
How to Avoid Mobile Data Caps

But if you find that you’re hitting your data limit on a regular basis, you can use data compression to your advantage. We’ll start with mobile options, as there are more of them:

1. Enable data compression. Some web browsers can compress the data you download to your device. Google Chrome offers data compression on both Android and iOS, which will lower your monthly consumption of bandwidth. Opera’s Turbo function does the same thing.
2. Use a VPN with compression. Some mobile VPNs, like Hotspot Shield, offer data compression to further limit the amount of data you consume.
3. Install data-saving apps. Because of the irritating prevalence of data caps, developers have started creating apps that help you consume less data in various ways. Samsung provides an app for its Android devices called Samsung Max.

These are just a few of the steps you can take to reduce your mobile internet usage.

Unfortunately, there are fewer tried and tested strategies for avoiding throttling from your ISP. The deployment of data caps by ISPs is more recent and not as widespread (at least in the US) so counter-tactics are still being developed. Here’s what we know so far, but as we come across more, we’ll keep you updated!

1. Tweak your browser settings for maximum data savings. The best thing you can do here is to make all plug-ins click-to-play (we have tutorials on this for Chrome and Firefox). This is a good idea for all sorts of reasons, but it will definitely save on data. You can even disable images if you really need to cut down on your bandwidth.
2. Use Opera’s Turbo function. The desktop version of Opera offers data compression with Turbo.

As of right now, that’s the best way to go. You might be able to find a desktop VPN that offers data compression, but they seem to be rare, possibly because of the massive amount of data they’d be asked to compress.

It’s Time For Change

Data caps are a blatant money grab and they don’t do customers any good. There’s ample reason to take a stand and voice your displeasure to ISPs and mobile providers.

But until enough people form a unified front, we’ll have to resort to finding ways around them. Unfortunately, internet issues are hard to mobilize around, as we see with the debate over net neutrality.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/data-c...st-can-bypass/





The Old Internet Died And We Watched And Did Nothing

It’s 2020 — do you know where your content is?
Katie Notopoulos

Quick: Can you think of a picture of yourself on the internet from before 2010, other than your old Facebook photos? How about something you’ve written? Maybe some old sent emails in Gmail or old Gchats?

But what about anything NOT on Facebook or Google?

Most likely, you have some photos that are lost somewhere, some old posts to a message board or something you wrote on a friend’s wall, some bits of yourself that you put out there on the internet during the previous decade that is simply gone forever.

The internet of the 2010s will be defined by social media’s role in the 2016 election, the rise of extremism, and the fallout from privacy scandals like Cambridge Analytica. But there’s another, more minor theme to the decade: the gradual dismantling and dissolution of an older internet culture.

This purge comes in two forms: sites or services shutting down or transforming their business models. Despite the constant flurries of social startups (Vine! Snapchat! TikTok! Ello! Meerkat! Peach! Path! Yo!), when the dust was blown off the chisel, the 2010s revealed that the content you made — your photos, your writing, your texts, emails, and DMs — is almost exclusively in the hands of the biggest tech companies: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple.

The rest? Who knows? I hate to tell you, but there’s a good chance it’s gone forever.

Here’s some of what we lost during the 2010s:

Friendster

Were you on Friendster? Maybe not, but I was. In fact, my weirdest claim to internet fame is that I was Friendster user number 227 (one of the founders was a friend of a friend so I was invited early in 2002). Although the social network fell out of favor pretty quickly, it wasn’t until 2011 that it finally transformed completely into a gaming company, wiping out all vestiges of its old user profiles.

Myspace

Myspace suffered a longer, more painful death. By 2013, it became completely music-focused, although you could still log in to your old account, and your photos and data were still there. But in 2019, due to an ill-fated server migration, all pre-2015 profile content — hundreds of thousands of photos of scene hair taken with a Nikon Coolpix in a bathroom mirror — are gone forever.

Flickr

Yes, Flickr still exists. But in late 2018, Flickr was sold off by its then-owner, OATH, the AOL/Yahoo conglomerate that was bought by Verizon. The buyer was SmugMug, a photo-hosting and printing site mainly used by professional photographers. In the transition, Flickr users were given a few months to download their archives, upgrade to a paid SmugMug account, or lose all their photos except for their most recent 1,000. It’s unclear how many Flickr users had over 1,000 photos on there to begin with (with nearly unlimited free storage, it marketed itself as a good way to back up your phone’s photos), and of those, how many paid for the upgraded service and kept their collections online. It’s certainly likely that a massive amount of photos were deleted completely — some of those from people who never bothered or knew to download them.

Webshots

Webshots was founded in the mid-’90s but hit its stride in the early ’00s when digital cameras became more affordable and it was bought by CNET, then bought by American Greetings. It was sold back to its original owners, who in 2012 relaunched it as Smile by Webshots, turning it into a site for desktop wallpapers. Users were given just two months’ notice that their photos could be downloaded, migrated over to a new paid Smile account, or would be deleted permanently.

Photobucket

In 2017, Photobucket announced that “hotlinking” (hosting the photo there to display on a different website) would only be allowed for paid accounts — and the new price was $400 a year. Hotlinking feels archaic now, but hotlinking with Photobucket hosting was used for posting to message boards, blogs, or even Amazon listings, leaving the old internet pockmarked with missing photos.

Blogs

Sure, blogs still exist, but the promise of a scrappy new form of communication, open to anyone has been chewed up and spit out by social media. Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and even Medium have all made the idea of a personal, updated website seem less useful to someone who just wants to post stuff about their life. The midrange of professional blogs, people who made money blogging, often in food or fashion, still thrives, but many have shifted to Instagram (one professional travel blogger told me that sponsors still prefer her blog posts to an Instagram ad). The 2013 sunsetting of Google Reader — something I used to keep track of my “blogroll” — was both a symptom and the pulling of a final plug on the heyday of personal blogs.

For the pro tier of blogs, sites like Gawker, Videogum, or the Awl, this decade was not kind either. Former Gawker writer Alex Pareene best described the changing economics of the media business plus freakish bad luck as the “death of the rude press.” We are entering the next decade without outlets for the sort of voices that defined the last one.

One strange point is that, unlike photo hosting sites, personal blog hosts managed to make it through the decade without deleting massive amounts of people’s stuff. Blogger is part of Google, which is probably the only reason it lives on life support (though in 2018, even one of the cofounders of Blogger had trouble finding anyone who still actually worked there).

WordPress has managed to keep chugging and even bought Tumblr off Verizon. LiveJournal was sold to a Russian company where it thrives.

Xanga, however, deleted the old blogs of users who didn’t pay for a pro account (you could download your old 2004 emo blog) in 2013 and now still exists only for paid users.

Tumblr’s Adult Content

Last year, Tumblr banned adult content just ahead of being sold from Verizon to WordPress. It was controversial with the users, especially with a bungled rollout that censored all sorts of SFW images. In addition to stifling one of the spaces that had been so important for young people’s exploration of and learning about sex, it also meant that years and years of content was being zapped off the face of the Earth.

AOL Instant Messenger

Officially sent to the glue factory in 2017, AIM had been replaced for most people with other, more mobile-friendly messaging services for a long time. If you remembered how to log in, you could download your old chat logs. Otherwise, they’re all lost to the sands of time.

When we signed up for these services in the 2000s, we naively trusted them.

Companies don’t make internet culture; people do. People make communities; they make the inside jokes; they make their own mores and unwritten rules. But people need the web services and platforms made by companies to create this culture. We’re locked in a symbiotic relationship: We, the users, need the companies, and they need us to keep running. When they shut down or delete our precious stuff, it’s because we’ve abandoned and neglected them for years already, leaving them to starve.

We understand now that tech companies that run these services will blossom, only to shut down a few years later (of course, unless they’re Google or Facebook). By 2019, we’re used to this. We know now never to trust these companies (and definitely not Google or Facebook). We’re jaded.

But when we signed up for these services in the 2000s, we naively trusted them — we didn’t know that our photos would get deleted, or that Hotmail would deactivate our account if we didn’t log in after 30 days, or that we could never find those old messages we sent our friends.

And for the most part, we’ve become OK with it. No one put up too much of a fuss when Flickr deleted photos, not when you compare it to, say, the uproar over Snapchat tweaking its design.

The internet from 10 years ago is part of our history and has broad cultural importance. Of course, on a personal level, plenty of us are happy to see our cringeworthy old posts or old profiles disappear (just ask Kevin Durant, whose teenage BlackPlanet profile was unearthed recently). The unforced obsolescence of the old internet has given those of us who have posted things we wouldn't want a future employer to see a reprieve, a slate wiped clean. There’s a decent argument that everything you do on the internet before age 18 — photos of bad hairstyles, cryptic song lyric posts your crush, dumb tweets — should instantly disappear as soon as you come of age, like a sealed juvenile criminal history. If you’re over 30, there’s a 100% chance that you will recoil in horror at something you posted on the internet over 10 years ago.

There is a small handful of people who do care a lot about the ongoing effect of Thanos snapping his fingers over the internet. Researchers, academics, and artists also have worked to preserve certain things, like Rhizome’s Webrecorder tool for archiving sites. These people see our online past as not just a collection of embarrassing posts from our teen years, but an important piece of our cultural history worthy of study and analysis and preservation.

The Archive Team has been working for years to preserve and archive parts of the internet for posterity, starting in 2009 when Yahoo killed Geocities — an early warning of the decade to come. Currently, it is attempting to archive as much of Yahoo Groups as possible, which Verizon shut down this fall (users have until early 2020 to download partial data from their groups). A look through its “Deathwatch” page — a list of websites and services shut down over the last 10 years — is harrowing.

I spoke to Jason Scott, the founder of Archive Team, this month when Twitter announced it would delete the accounts of people who hadn’t logged in in six months — which would include real people who happened to die (Twitter later said it is pausing this effort until it can figure out how to memorialize accounts). “This isn’t my first rodeo; these aren’t my first clowns,” he said of Twitter.

It’s one thing to realize that some smallish and mostly abandoned sites like Flickr can’t afford to keep running (Flickr recently sent an email to users asking them to spread the word to friends about signing up for paid accounts, since it’s still operating in the red). But when a big profitable company like Twitter or Verizon plans to delete accounts, well, Scott is right. That’s clown behavior. And we should feel free to be mad about it.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...e-old-internet





Happy Public Domain Day! Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” is Copyright Free

Starting today anyone can legally remix and republish classics that include Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Gift of Black Folk, and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr.
Hakim Bishara

Lobby card for the 1924 film Peter Pan, the first adaptation of the book to film (Wikimedia Commons)

Public Domain Day is here, and there’s much to celebrate. Starting today, January 1, anyone can legally access, remix, and republish (depending on your jurisdiction) classics like George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Gift of Black Folk, Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr, and the first film adaptation of Peter Pan.

These works belong to thousands of titles from 1924 that will enter the public domain in 2020 after being copyrighted for 95 years.

These copyright-free works will be available on the Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, and Google Books, which will offer the full text of the books, instead of showing only snippet views or partial previews.

This means that educators and historians can share the texts; community theaters can screen the films; youth orchestras can publicly perform classics; and creators can legally reimagine the books, films, and songs from 1924.

One other major benefit of the public domain is that it gives a second life to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. “The vast majority of works from 1924 are out of circulation,” writes Balfour Smith, program coordinator of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain in a blog post. “When they enter the public domain in 2020, anyone can make them available online, where we can discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.”

In the past, copyright protection in the United States lasted for 75 years. That changed with the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which gave works published from 1923 through 1977 a 95-year term.

Here are some more films, books, and music you can enjoy copyright-free in 2020, as compiled by Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain:

Films

• The first film adaptation of Peter Pan
• Buster Keaton’s The Navigator
• Harold Lloyd’s Girl Shy and Hot Water
• The Sea Hawk
• Secrets
• He Who Gets Slapped
• Dante’s Inferno

Books

• Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
• Jelly Roll Morton, King Porter Stomp
• E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
• Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not … (the first volume of his “Parade’s End” tetralogy)
• Eugene O’Neill, Desire Under the Elms
• Edith Wharton, Old New York (four novellas)
• Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (the English translation by Gregory Zilboorg)
• A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young
• Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus
• Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Ant Men
• Agatha Christie, The Man in the Brown Suit
• Lord Dunsany (Edward Plunkett), The King of Elfland’s Daughter

Music

• “Fascinating Rhythm” and “Oh, Lady Be Good”, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin
• “Lazy” by Irving Berlin
• “Jealous Hearted Blues” by Cora “Lovie” Austin (composer, pianist, bandleader) (recorded by Ma Rainey)
• “Santa Claus Blues” by Charley Straight and Gus Kahn (recorded by Louis Armstrong)
• “Nobody’s Sweetheart”, music by Billy Meyers and Elmer Schoebel, lyrics by Gus Kahn and Ernie Erdman

But not all the works of art released in 1924 were masterpieces. To cool off some of the excitement about this year’s Public Domain Day, Slate put together a list of the worst of 1924, according to critics of the time.

Last year’s list of public domain newcomers included more works of visual arts, as Hyperallergic reported. Works included Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)” (1915–23), Max Ernst’s “Pietà or Revolution by Night” (1923), and Wassily Kandinsky’s “On White II” (1923). The list also included Kahil Gibran’s book The Prophet, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and Charlie Chaplin’s film The Pilgrim.
https://hyperallergic.com/535370/the...omain-in-2020/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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