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Old 13-11-19, 07:43 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 16th, ’19

Since 2002



Volume XVIII, Issue Number I



























November 16th, 2019




Disney+ Heralds a Whole New World of Pirating (and Some of It Is Legal)
Adam Adler

The first time I heard about it, I didn’t think it was possible. “You’re telling me you’re going to have access to every Disney movie? I call BS.” But I was wrong. And it wasn’t just Disney movies — there were also The Disney Afternoon TV shows, various Disney Channel specials, and a bunch of other programs I’d never even heard of. Only this wasn’t Disney+.

This conversation took place seven years ago — back when Netflix Instant was getting started. I was in college at the time, and my dorm’s resident pirate had used BitTorrent to illegally obtain something like 300 GB of Disney content. At the time, it was hard for me to understand how that much piracy was even possible. My computer’s hard drive didn’t even have that much disk space, and the thought of consuming even a small fraction of that content made me feel like the Champion of All Couch Potatoes.

Fast forward to the present. We are now just a few days away from the launch of Disney+, and today’s technology makes the world of 2012 look like a Conestoga wagon at the start of the Oregon Trail. In the past few years, Netflix has grown from 27 million subscribers to 140 million subscribers, streaming quality has increased to support astounding 4K or even 8K resolutions, and there are now numerous other streaming services competing with Netflix.

The launch of Disney+ will have a huge impact on the streaming services market. But it will also impact internet piracy. The rise of Netflix and increased demand for video content correlated with a substantial downswing in video piracy. This makes sense. Internet piracy is driven by four primary factors — price, convenience, availability, and conscience. Generally speaking, content that is expensive, hard to access, and hard to use is more likely to be pirated than content that is cheap, easily accessible, and easy to use.

This explains why Game of Thrones is the most pirated show ever. The show is only available to consumers who either subscribe to HBO as part of an expensive cable TV package, which might not even include on-demand viewing and which almost certainly requires consumers to pay for tons of content they don’t want, or to people who pay $15 a month for HBO Now, who might only be interested in that one show.

Neither option is particularly attractive, which explains why season 7 has been pirated over a billion times and why the season 8 premiere was downloaded nearly 55 million times within 24 hours of its initial broadcast. On the flip side, those same piracy factors explain why Steam appears to have reduced video game piracy. The service sells games cheap, has convenient features like cloud saving and unlimited downloads, and a low barrier to entry.

It’s easy to understand why the rise of Netflix is associated with a decrease in video piracy. Netflix is cheap, more convenient than traditional piracy, and it contains a handful of features that simply can’t be found on The Pirate Bay like bookmarking your place in an episode or series, a powerful recommendation engine, and list features.

Disney+ places us at the precipice of a piracy proliferation. It is among the first services in a new wave of streaming competitors and a harbinger of dark times ahead. The problem is not Disney+ itself but the new wave of Netflix competitors that Disney+ brings with it including Apple TV+, HBO Max, NBC’s Peacock, Discovery/BBC, and Quibi. That’s on top of the already existing services like Hulu, CBS All Access, and Prime Video. Whereas Netflix used to be a cheap one-stop shop for content, the world of Disney+ is one where subscribers have to pay close to $100 a month to access all the content they’re interested in. They’ll also have to install countless apps on each of their devices and switch from app to app to find what they want.

Compare that to the world of piracy, which is free, quick, and easy, and has seen its fair share of innovation over the years. The most notable piracy advancement is the development of Kodi, which provides users with quick and ready streaming access to virtually any content they might want. To make matters even worse for the streaming services, it is not even illegal to stream a copyrighted work.

The Copyright Act makes it illegal to distribute a copyrighted work, but it is not illegal to view someone else’s illegal distribution. For example, if a bar owner broadcasts a Pay-Per-View fight without permission, the fight organizer can sue the bar owner. But the owner cannot sue the bar patrons for watching the fight. The same thing is true for streaming. It is illegal to distribute a stream of copyrighted materials, but it is not illegal to access a stream. That means one of the most powerful piracy deterrents no longer exists.

Ultimately, the prevalence of piracy functions as a barometer of consumer satisfaction. The past few years have confirmed that piracy increases when consumers are frustrated with the price or convenience of a product or service. If piracy does pick up, I suspect that the major industry players will attempt to modify the Copyright Act to crack down on it, probably by outlawing the unauthorized streaming of copyrighted works and/or by requiring internet service providers to help content providers identify pirates. We can already see this approach in action. A few senators recently introduced a bill that would increase the penalties for making a work available for streaming. While these attempts will certainly discourage pirating, they won’t address the underlying consumer frustration.

In the ideal scenario, the fragmented streaming marketplace and resultant consumer frustration would cause consumers to reject the multi-service model. This, in turn, would lead to consolidation where there are just a few services, but each would have a wealth of content offered at a reasonable price. Of course, it’s also possible that enough consumers buy into each of the streaming platforms that they remain profitable despite the inevitable increase in piracy. This would lead to even more services, and it would create an outcome that is similar to cable TV packages, with high costs and a relatively low density of desirable content.

Disney+ officially launches on Nov. 12, but I can’t help but think of the service as a natural extension to the 300 GB data dump from 2012. The key difference is that in 2012, only a small fraction of Disney’s library was available for legal purchase, and even that was prohibitively expensive. That changes with the launch of Disney+.

As consumers, the power rests in our hands. We get to decide which services are worthy of our money and deserve to succeed. Disney+ offers tremendous value and is exactly the kind of offering that can displace pirates. But with a horde of competitors in its wake, it remains to be seen whether Disney+ will lead to A Whole New (Pirate-Free) World or if it is just the first step on the road to Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, A Pirate’s Life for Us.
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/...vices-netflix/





People Sure are Excited about (Pirating) 'The Mandalorian'
Jack Morse

Disney+'s The Mandalorian is hot. Like, stolen car hot.

The much anticipated Star Wars television show premiered on Nov. 12, and within hours it was already being illegally downloaded by thousands of people. Which, frankly, isn't that surprising — especially considering Disney bungled the launch of its streaming platform.

A quick jaunt over to The Pirate Bay allows for a peek into the world of pirated content. As of the time of this writing, there are six different versions of the show's first episode available for download. And while we did not download the episodes to verify they're real (or that they're virus free), the thousands of people seeding the episode seem to suggest there's at least something there.

Of course, that people would pirate The Mandalorian shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone — especially Disney. Back when Game of Thrones was still considered good, the Season 8 premiere episode was reportedly watched illegally more than 54 million times in the first 24 hours after airing.

And yeah, some of those illegally downloaded files likely contained malware. Which, other than the ethical and moral reasons, probably provides the most solid justification for just shelling out for the damn thing the legal way.

After all, the $6.99-a-month subscription fee is a lot less than the cost of replacing a virus-laden computer.
https://mashable.com/article/piratin...e-mandalorian/





Disney+ Warns Viewers of 'Outdated Cultural Depictions' in Old Movies

But the service is being criticized for using vague and dismissive language.
Mariella Moon

It's no secret that some of Disney's old cartoons and movies contain racist and other offensive elements, and it was a mystery how the company would address the issue when its streaming service launched. To all of those who wondered: here's your answer. The entertainment giant has added a short warning at the end of the description for titles with problematic themes -- like Dumbo, Peter Pan, The Jungle Book and Lady and the Tramp, which perpetuated harmful racial stereotypes -- that says: "This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions."

As The Washington Post noted, the company's decision not to censor those titles was met with both praise and criticism. (You won't find the notorious Song of the South, criticized for glorifying plantation life and slavery, on the service, though.) Some think that Disney is taking accountability for its past by showing those titles as they were shown back then with a warning attached. But critics point out that the wording used is vague at best -- Gayle Wald, head of American studies department at George Washington University, said the company should've been more explicit about its intended message.

To emphasize his point about Disney's "dismissive" warning, Twitter user @unicornmantis posted the company's notice right next to Warner Brothers'. While Disney kept it vague and used the word "may," WB's warning acknowledged the ethnic and racial prejudices depicted in old cartoons like Tom and Jerry. "These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today," it reads.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/14/...tions-warning/





Album, CD Business Booms for One Firm, Even as Streaming Grows
Sam Stall

Chip Viering, president of Optical Media Manufacturing, has intentionally hitched his wagon to a falling star. Or rather, several of them.

Over the last decade, streaming sites and compressed file-sharing technologies such as MP3 have chased most “physical” media from the forefront of the audio and video recording industries. To put it simply, pretty much anything you can hold in your hand, from VHS tapes to CDs, has become an endangered species.

In this, Viering sees not disaster but opportunity.

Though his company does plenty of digital file-sharing work, it also acts as a sort of clearinghouse for customers whose products demand (or work best when presented in) an old-school audio or visual format. Optical Media Manufacturing offers (among a great many other services) in-house design for things like vinyl album cover art, liner notes and DVD formatting and duplication, plus access to a list of still-surviving domestic suppliers of such exotica as cassette tapes, boutique vinyl record pressers—even a guy who can still do VHS.

“We straddle the digital and analog worlds,” Viering said. “We have to. We have to be experts at both.”

Viering, 55, founded the company in 2005 with his wife, Holly. Both of them spent years in the business of replicating and distributing music and other media through now-antiquated formats such as audiocassettes, CDs and DVDs. When those media succumbed to pressure from digital streaming—leaving a still-substantial number of customers in the lurch—it created a business niche.

“I started in this business in 1986, in the VHS and laser disc era,” he said. “And I’ve just followed the formats.”

Business is quite brisk of late, in part because so many of the company’s one-time rivals have left the industry.

“My competition has been going by the wayside,” Viering said. “We’re maintaining what I call a ‘last man standing’ business plan. We started this place when the behemoths went away, and as the big plants go out of business, we’re getting more calls.

“As the industry slowly erodes, it’s boom times for us.”

The company guards its roughly 500-strong client base zealously, lest someone get snatched away by one of Optical Media’s surviving competitors. Suffice it to say that buyers include second-tier film studios that need a bunch of DVDs to supply to Redbox; libraries and other institutions seeking audiobooks; and musical groups who want CDs to sell at shows or, perhaps, actual vinyl records.

Mastering such arcane technologies occasionally produces some oddball requests. For instance, the company recently finished a collectors’ LP for Mannheim Steamroller featuring a milk-white vinyl disk “splattered” with red and green. And for the ’80s-themed Warner Bros. movie “Ready Player One,” the company was hired to create a copy of the movie on VHS tape.

Which was a very big deal.

“I only know one place that has a working VHS machine,” Viering said.

Nevertheless, the company produced 500 VHS copies, which were given out as a promotional piece—and promptly started showing up on eBay for $250 each. No one else has asked for VHS work, which is fine with Viering.

“I don’t want VHS to come back,” he said. “It’s a nightmare format.”

Tactile experience

The company’s biggest non-streaming market is creating DVD and Blu-Ray discs for big-box retailers, followed by vinyl records—a format so popular that it now has its own special division, Indy Vinyl Pressing, to handle demand. Album cover design and liner notes are done in-house, while the actual record pressing is farmed out to one of the roughly 10 remaining U.S.-based record-pressing companies.

“Indy Vinyl Pressing was born three years ago,” Viering said. “We know all the pressing plants in America. When a customer comes to us, we know we’re going to the right plant for his project.”

Vinyl records are indeed relatively hot, with industry trade groups predicting they’ll outsell CDs in 2019—the first time that’s happened in 33 years. Viering and other experts in the field say that stems from a general dissatisfaction with streaming services by some music connoisseurs. Those compressed files, delivered over the internet, are indeed convenient, but they provide a less-than-ideal listening experience.

Also, there’s still a strong desire among many fans to possess a musical medium they can hold in their hands.

“My favorite quote is, ‘You can’t roll a joint on the back of an MP3,’” said Andy Skinner, co-owner with his wife, Annie, of Broad Ripple-based Indy CD & Vinyl.

Whenever someone tells the Skinners vinyl is “coming back,” they happily point out that, for a certain section of music fandom, it never left. Vinyl LPs vanished from most big retailers in the 1990s, when their producers stopped taking back unsold units, forcing stores to eat that cost. After that, their only steady suppliers were specialty outlets.

Vinyl gained popularity, Skinner said, not just because the format (and CDs, for that matter) sounds better than a streaming file. Albums also have a certain retro cachet, what with their colorful jackets, copious liner notes, and even distinctive smell. And though the price of recent releases has grown to $13 or more, vinyl has attracted a fan base far larger than baby boomers looking for a nostalgia fix.

“Currently, our single biggest demographic is younger women,” Skinner said. “Teenage and early-20-something women make up a huge part of our customer base.”

‘Convenience always wins’

How long the current nostalgia lasts is anyone’s guess. Michael Graham, owner and president of The Lodge Studios Inc. (an Indy-based recording studio that regularly purchases CD services from Optical Media Manufacturing for its musical clients) believes the deciding factor won’t be music quality, but convenience.

“Convenience always wins,” Graham said. “The quality of MP3s is hideously bad, but it won out over CDs. It’s great that the vinyl trend has come in, but I don’t think it’s going to be a major player in the future. I think the digital world will completely take over, and vinyl will be fairly ‘boutique’ in 10 years.”

It’s equally difficult for Viering to predict where his company will be in a decade. Its extensive streaming work probably isn’t going anyplace. But its various physical media could face varying fates. For instance, VHS is pretty much done. The equipment to produce it is becoming so antiquated that almost no one remembers how to clean and maintain it, let alone use it.

Audiocassettes, for the moment, still seem to retain a certain following. But there’s little of the nostalgia around the format that helps buoy interest in vinyl. Viering said the company still produces lots of fitness, yoga and self-help DVDs, but the size of the individual product runs has slowly dwindled from, say, 5,000 to maybe 1,500.

As for vinyl, it’s hard to say. It’s the product that’s attracted the most collector interest, and it could remain the medium of choice for music fans seeking a product they can collect and show off. Unless, of course, it doesn’t. Because while an MP3 file might not sound as good, and a CD might lack the “warmth” of vinyl, it’s a sure bet that neither of those formats has ever melted in a hot car.

“I think we’re going to stay steady, or see a slight upwards curve as the collector market continues to grow,” Viering said. “I’ve got 10 more years to work, but I think that, even after that, there’s still going to be an interest from collectors in physical media.”•
https://www.ibj.com/articles/vinyl-keeps-spinning





Apple Is Considering Bundling Digital Subscriptions as Soon as 2020
Gerry Smith and Mark Gurman

• Company keeps rights to bundle News+ service with TV+, Music
• Move may woo more subscribers, but lower publishers’ News+ cut

Apple Inc. is considering bundling its paid internet services, including News+, Apple TV+ and Apple Music, as soon as 2020, in a bid to gain more subscribers, according to people familiar with the matter.

The latest sign of this strategy is a provision that Apple included in deals with publishers that lets the iPhone maker bundle the News+ subscription service with other paid digital offerings, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing private deals.

Apple News+, which debuted in March, sells access to dozens of publications for $10 a month. It’s often called the “Netflix of News.” Apple keeps about half of the monthly subscription price, while magazines and newspapers pocket the other half.

If Apple sold Apple News+ as part of a bundle with Apple TV+ and Apple Music, publishers would get less money because the cost of the news service would likely be reduced, the people said.

As the smartphone market stagnates, Apple is seeking growth by selling online subscriptions to news, music, video and other content. This month, it launched Apple TV+ for $4.99 a month with shows from stars including Jennifer Aniston and Jason Momoa.

Bundling these offerings could attract more subscribers, as Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime service has done. Apple is already experimenting with this kind of approach. It recently began offering a free Apple TV+ subscription to students who are Apple Music subscribers. Still, the company’s plans may change, given how complex deals like these can be.

Some media executives say the amount they’ve received from Apple News+ so far has been less than expected. One publisher typically gets under $20,000 a month, less revenue than it saw from Texture, a previous iteration of the service that Apple acquired last year, one person said.

Apple News+ offers dozens of magazines, like the New Yorker, GQ and People, as well as major newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. Bloomberg Businessweek, owned by Bloomberg LP, also participates.

It remains unclear whether publishers are seeing less revenue than they expected because Apple News+ has few subscribers, or because their content isn’t being widely read. Publishers share the remaining 50% of the revenue based on how much time Apple News+ subscribers spend reading their articles. Apple has not revealed subscriber numbers for Apple News+. The company recently expanded the service to Australia and the U.K.

Advertisers have been less interested in Apple News+ because Apple’s restrictive data policy makes it difficult for marketers to target specific readers, one of the people said. Some publishers also would like Apple to share data about subscribers, like email addresses, which they could use to sell other offerings.

As part of the contracts, media companies have the right to pull their magazines or newspapers from Apple News+ after a year if they’re unhappy with the service, one person said.

The media industry was initially wary of Apple News+ before it launched, fearing their readers might cancel existing subscriptions and get their articles at a cheaper price from Apple. For that reason, some did not make all their articles or magazines available. Others, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, didn’t sign up.

Still, some news executives are pleased with how Apple News+ has gone so far.

“The financial results to date are consistent with our expectations,” Norm Pearlstine, the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, said in a statement. “We are optimistic that they will continue to grow in the months and years ahead.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...s-soon-as-2020





Steve Jobs Was Right: Smartphones and Tablets Killed the P.C.

There has been only one tech trend worth paying attention to in the 2010s: the dominance of the smartphone. The personal computer was an inevitable casualty.
Farhad Manjoo

I got an iPad Pro recently, and I’ve fallen madly in love with it.

This was unexpected. I’ve had iPads before, but like a lot of people, I hadn’t found them to be very useful. Tablets were good for surfing the Web and watching Netflix, but they’ve always been dogged by the charge that you couldn’t get a lot of work done on them.

Apple’s latest iPads are different. Not only can you get work done on them; in many ways they’re productivity dream machines. Today’s iPads are powered by custom-designed processors that are faster than the chips on some of the Macs Apple makes, and the iPad’s separately sold keyboard is better and more durable than the accursed, falling-apart mess of a keyboard that Apple is shipping on its much-maligned current line of laptops.

Apple unveiled a new 16-inch MacBook with a revamped keyboard on Wednesday, good news for the many Apple lovers who’ve been grumbling about the company’s lackluster slate of recent Macs. But I think the iPad is already beginning to eclipse the traditional personal computer. In the four months I’ve had this latest model, the iPad Pro has eaten into the time I spend on my phone and my old-school laptop and desktop. Among other things, I now research and write just about every column using an iPad (I still compose many first drafts by speaking into my headphones, but I’m an odd duck).

I thought I had gotten out of the gadget-reviewing business for good last year. Since the smartphone had gobbled up everything from cameras to music players to portable gaming systems, I declared the whole field of gadgetry dead. But just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.

The history of the iPad is a story about consolidation, focus and the power of scale in the tech business. It’s a story about how thoroughly one company, Apple, has dominated the entire hardware business this decade. And it is also, really, a story about the only thing that mattered in tech in the 2010s — the smartphone — and the way that one device became the gravitational center of the entire tech business, shaping every market in the industry, and much of the non-tech world beyond it.

The iPad has always been freighted with great expectations. Although the iPad was unveiled in 2010, three years after the iPhone, development of the iPad predated development of the phone, and Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, always seemed to have his heart in the tablet.

In one of his last interviews before his death in 2011, Jobs declared the iPad to be the future of computing. “PCs are going to be like trucks,” he told the journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — meaning the traditional Mac and Windows machines would still be around, but like big rigs, they’d be used by a small set of power users for a dwindling set of specific, high-power tasks. The “cars” of the tech industry, as Jobs saw it, would be phones and tablets.

For a while, he was only partially right. The iPad sold well at launch, but after a few years it hit some hurdles. After Jobs’s death, Apple left the iPad to languish, and did something similar with the Mac.

Meanwhile, something amazing happened with the iPhone and the many Android-based copycat phones it inspired. In the 2010s, smartphones became more popular, more powerful and more profitable than anyone in the tech industry thought possible. Within a few years, their sales and usage eclipsed that of PCs, and for much of the decade they were the fountain of most new consumer innovations across the technology industry. Smartphones made Uber and Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok possible. Smartphone cameras began to surpass stand-alone cameras, turning much of culture and society into a meme-soaked playground where visual media matters more than text.

The smartphone also altered the business dynamics of the tech industry. When the iPhone came out, Apple was just one of many successful hardware companies in the world. But the smartphone decimated a host of phone brands (remember Nokia? Motorola?), and as smartphones gained more power, they began making life impossible for a slate of hardware start-ups, from GoPro to Jawbone.

On the strength of the iPhone, Apple began capturing a greater and greater slice of the tech hardware business; although it didn’t sell a majority of units, its commitment to the high end of the market allowed it to make the bulk of profits. In the last quarter of 2017, according to one estimate, Apple made 86 percent of profits in the smartphone industry.

Apple’s dominance came despite the fact that the company made some big mistakes and was late to many big innovations. Samsung, not Apple, invented huge-screen phones. Apple’s Mac line was plagued by delays and dead ends, including a 2013 redesign of the Mac Pro that looked like a trash can and proved just as useful. And on the iPad, for many years, Apple just seemed to fall asleep. The iPad’s stylus and keyboard-forward design? Microsoft did it first on the Surface.

Yet none of this mattered. Because of its hold on the smartphone business and a very sticky software ecosystem that users found hard to leave, Apple has been able to incorporate many innovations pioneered elsewhere and sell its customers on a series of peripheral billion-dollar businesses, including the Apple Watch and AirPods.

And ultimately, it’s the ecosystem that explains why I can’t stop raving about the iPad. When it came out, the big knock on the iPad was that it was just a big phone; today, that’s what I love about it — like the Watch or AirPods, the iPad feels intuitive and natural to me because it works just like the device I use most often, my phone.

Like a phone, in most scenarios I find the iPad to be faster, more portable and easier to use and maintain than any traditional P.C. I’ve ever owned. The iPad’s limited screen space and emphasis on full-screen apps also makes for fewer distractions than on a traditional personal computer. The iPad, like my phone, lets me log in to my bank using my face; the Mac, in 2019, doesn’t even have a touch screen.

The iPad still can’t do everything a laptop can, and I still have to log in to a “real” computer sometimes. I had a long chat recently with Dan Seifert, the deputy editor of the Verge, who uses an iPad every day on the subway but often finds the device infuriating.

“For someone like me, who’s been using a desktop operating system for a long time, there’s a lot of built-in conventions that I’m used to that can be frustrating,” Seifert said. In particular, the iPad doesn’t work with antiquated work flows that are built for PCs. Say you need to log into your company’s bespoke publishing system or expense program? It’s possible those won’t work on your iPad — at least not yet — because they were built for much older devices.

But Seifert agreed with me that many of these uses are a special case. He still uses P.C.s because often, in Jobs’s parlance, he needs a truck. Most people, however, don’t need trucks, and few of us will need them in the future. Seifert isn’t teaching his kids how to use desktop operating systems like the Mac or Windows, and neither am I.

It took longer than he expected, but Steve Jobs was right. Over the past decade, for most people, in most use cases, phones killed the P.C. To get work done, now you just use a big phone — which Apple happens to call an iPad.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/o...-pro-ipad.html





FCC Sued by Dozens of Cities after Voting to Kill Local Fees and Rules

Cities challenge FCC vote to preempt local fees and broadband regulations.
Jon Brodkin

The Federal Communications Commission faces a legal battle against dozens of cities from across the United States, which sued the FCC to stop an order that preempts local fees and regulation of cable-broadband networks.

The cities filed lawsuits in response to the FCC's August 1 vote that limits the fees municipalities can charge cable companies and prohibits cities and towns from regulating broadband services offered over cable networks.

"At least 46 cities are asking federal appeals courts to undo an FCC order they argue will force them to raise taxes or cut spending on local media services, including channels that schools, governments, and the general public can use for programming," Bloomberg Law wrote Tuesday.

Various lawsuits were filed against the FCC between August and the end of October, and Bloomberg's report said that most of the suits are being consolidated into a single case in the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. An FCC motion to transfer the case to the 6th Circuit, which has decided previous cases on the same topic, is pending.

The 9th Circuit case was initially filed by Eugene, Oregon, which said the FCC order was arbitrary and capricious and that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the Constitution, and the Communications Act. The cities' arguments and the FCC's defense will be fleshed out more in future briefs.

Big cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco, Denver, and Boston are among those suing the FCC. Also suing are other municipalities from Maine, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington, according to a Bloomberg graphic. The state of Hawaii is also suing the FCC, and New York City is supporting the lawsuit against the FCC as an intervening party.

FCC lost net neutrality preemption battle

Chairman Ajit Pai's FCC already lost one attempt to preempt local regulation throughout the country. When it repealed federal net neutrality rules, the FCC also preempted states from imposing net neutrality laws. While a federal appeals court upheld the repeal of the US-wide regulations, it ruled that the FCC can't preempt all state laws in one fell swoop. The state of Washington continues to enforce its net neutrality law, and other states may do so in the future.

The FCC lost its preemption battle on net neutrality largely because it had given up its primary authority to regulate broadband. "[i]n any area where the Commission lacks the authority to regulate, it equally lacks the power to preempt state law," the appeals court ruling in that case said.

When the FCC preempted local cable regulation, a consumer advocate pointed out a similarity with the net neutrality case. The cable decision "is consistent with the commission's current perplexing view that it has no statutory authority over broadband but can nevertheless preempt states and local authorities from exercising their own authority," John Bergmayer, legal director of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, said after the August 1 vote.

The FCC argues that states and localities cannot collect fees and impose requirements that aren't explicitly allowed by Title VI, the cable-regulation section that Congress added to communications law with the Cable Act of 1984. The FCC acted partly in response to an Oregon State Supreme Court decision that upheld a 7% "telecommunications" license fee the city of Eugene imposed on Comcast. The FCC wants to get that fee and others off the books.

The US cable law prevents local authorities from collecting more than 5% of a cable operator's gross revenue in any 12-month period. The FCC said that some local governments have been requiring in-kind contributions from cable operators to get around the 5% cap and ruled that most in-kind contributions must count toward that cap.

Pai claimed that the preemption will spur companies to expand broadband networks, but Democratic FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel pointed out that ISPs haven't actually promised to deploy more broadband in exchange for the regulatory favor from the FCC. She added that "there is no enforceable obligation to expand broadband capacity."

Five groups representing local governments detailed some of the arguments against the preemption in a filing with the FCC last month. They argued, among other things, that the FCC "has exceeded its authority, inserting itself where Congress provided no authority or direction to do so in a manner contrary to the clear and unambiguous terms of the Cable Act." The local-government groups also said the FCC order violates the 10th Amendment by overriding states' rights, specifically by "directing state and local governments to surrender their property and management rights to 'advance... federal policies' related to broadband deployment."

Local governments also say the FCC order will make it harder to provide public, educational, and government access (PEG) programming. More generally, they say the FCC has "commandeered" the municipalities' "budgets and other resources... for the purpose of compensating cable operators in violation of legitimately adopted local franchises and state laws."

Separately, the FCC is facing another lawsuit filed by cities over the federal agency's September 2018 decision to preempt about $2 billion worth of fees related to deployment of wireless equipment such as small cells used for 5G.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...test-in-court/





Victory Over Telecom Industry Gives Connecticut Towns a Way to Provide their Own Faster, Cheaper Internet Service
Edmund H. Mahony

The telecommunications industry lost and consumers won in a Connecticut Superior Court decision that gives cities and towns the right to use existing utility infrastructure within their borders to create municipal networks that deliver cheap, fast internet service to homes and business.

Perhaps the greatest benefit to consumers in the decision in a suit by towns against the telecommunications industry and state utility regulators is its potential to develop a means of delivering fast, efficient internet services to underserved towns in the state’s rural northern corners and in parts of large cities like Hartford.

In the decision Tuesday, Judge Richard Shortall concluded that, under state law, cities and towns have the right to create internet networks by stringing their own cables on the poles and through the underground conduit that distribute cable television, telephone and electric service within their borders. The towns were opposed in the case by Frontier, United Illuminating, the wireless and cable television industries and the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority.

Among other things, the industry groups argued that allowing municipalities a cost-free place on utility poles — a pole location known as the municipal “free gain” — would create unfair and illegal competition for the industry.

Consumer advocates were cheered, among them the state Office of Consumer Counsel, which argued that the lack of internet access of any sort in some parts of the state’s lightly populated areas depresses everything from real estate values to educational achievement to health care access. The office has been looking for years for way to expand access, among them use of the municipal gain.

“We are pleased because the Court ruling opens the door to municipal broadband offerings using the municipal space on poles and in conduits," said acting Consumer Counsel Richard Sobolewski. “Many members of the public desperately need access to internet services at higher speeds and affordable prices in order to meet their daily needs for health care information, education, public safety warnings, and all the other aspects of modern society that run through the internet.”

Town officers were enthusiastic about the decision, which they said affirmed a view they have held of state law since municipal gain became a topic of contention as the result of a 2013 revision of state statutes. But they also are hesitant about hiring contractors to string new lines in the face of what likely will be years of appeals by the telecommunications industry.

“Now we have to decide how to move forward,” said Jessica Fowler, a former Sharon selectman and currently a member of Northwest Connect, a group created to expand and improve internet access in the state’s northwest corner.

Fowler said she has dial-up internet service and others in Sharon have no access to service of any kind — including cable television. She said some areas, such as the town of Norfolk and the village of Falls Village have been contemplating establishing their own municipal electric utilities as a means of gaining access to utility poles.

“It not unusual out here to have a 20 or 30 minute drive to see a doctor,” Fowler said. “Access to online health care can be important.”

Manchester, where access to service is less an issue than speed, has been fighting for access to utility poles for years. Assistant Town Attorney John F. Sullivan said the goal there is to eventually use a high-speed municipal network as an economic development tool by connecting residents, business and town services.

Questions have been debated before state utility regulators for years about whether towns have free access to utility poles and, if so, whether they can transfer their access to private, third-party service providers. In May, state utility regulators issued a ruling for the industry and against the towns.

CCM Executive Director Joe DeLong said Shortall’s decision is “a win for municipalities and their property taxpayers, and represents a clear, fair and reasonable reading of state statutes."

A Frontier spokesman said the original decision by utility regulators was "the correct one based on state and federal law, as well as the principles of fair competition."
https://www.courant.com/news/connect...v3y-story.html





Free Broadband? UK Labour Party Promises Nationalization
AP

The British Labour Party's latest plan for public ownership of big industries sent shivers through the telecoms sector Friday with an electoral promise to nationalize part of the former phone monopoly BT to provide free fiber optic broadband.

Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who outlined the plan during a speech ahead of next month's election, described broadband as being “at the heart of Labour's plans to transform the future of our economy and society.”

The self-described socialist, who has already announced plans to renationalize water companies and some rail lines, described it as an effort to help all parts of society face the future.

"What was once a luxury is now an essential utility," Corbyn said. “That's why full-fiber broadband must be a public service, bringing communities together, with equal access, in an inclusive and connected society.”

Labour plans to nationalize BT's digital network, known as OpenReach, and the company's other broadband-related businesses. The value of the assets would be set by Parliament, with shareholders receiving compensation in the form of government bonds, Labour said in a statement. The project would be funded in part with a tax on multinational corporations, including Amazon, Facebook and Google.

Labour's plans to nationalize some industries are part of a bitter election campaign that has seen both major parties woo voters with promises to increase spending after a decade of budget austerity under Conservative-led governments. Britain is holding the Dec. 12 election because Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to secure a majority in the House of Commons so he can take the U.K. out of the European Union by Jan. 31.

Johnson described Labour's broadband plan as a “crackpot scheme.’’

The telecommunications industry also greeted the plan with dismay. TechUK, which represents British technology companies, described it as fundamentally misguided.

"These proposals would be a disaster for the telecoms sector and the customers that it serves,’’ TechUK CEO Julian David said in a statement. “Renationalization would immediately halt the investment being driven not just by BT but the growing number of new and innovative companies that compete with BT.”

BT shares fell as much as 3.7% to 188 pence in early trading on the London Stock Exchange.

One rival, TalkTalk, said Friday that the sale of its full-fiber optic broadband business, FibreNation, has been put on hold because of the Labour announcement.

Shares in companies including National Grid, which operates the national power network, the Severn Trent water company, Royal Mail and rail franchise holders such as National Express and Go Ahead Group are already trading at a discount because of concerns they will be nationalized, according to Michael Hewson of CMC Markets.

BT was surprised by the announcement because Labour recently assured the company that it wasn't a candidate for nationalization, Hewson said.

“With other companies also being told the same thing by the Labour Party, investors will no doubt be looking very carefully at other possible candidates for nationalization, and whether they need to be concerned,” he said.

BT’s competitors seized the opportunity to offer their view on their contribution to broadband delivery in the country.

James Lusher, Virgin Media's head of external communications, tweeted a gif of a raccoon stealing food from a cat bowl captioned with the words: "This mine now."

In the more studied response, the company pointed out that it had “pledged to bring next-generation Gigabit broadband to half of the U.K., by the end of 2021.”

“With billions of pounds worth of private money invested in the U.K., Virgin Media continues to expand its network, providing competition and choice to consumers,” it said “Government policy has a role to play and can help to accelerate broadband deployment in a way that minimizes the level of public subsidy needed and provides the U.K. and consumers with incredible connectivity within a competitive market.

Labour governments nationalized many industries, including railroads, coal, steel, energy suppliers and telecommunications after World War II as Britain struggled to rebuild its economy. The Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sold off most of those assets in the 1980s because of concerns that large state-owned monopolies were inefficient and amid hopes that competition would provide better service at lower cost.

British Telecommunications, now known as BT, was privatized in 1984 when more than half its shares were sold to the public. The government sold its remaining shares in 1991 and 1993.
https://www.newstimes.com/business/t...s-14837230.php





An Oral History of LimeWire: The Little App That Changed the Music Industry Forever

And the untold story of a Spotify killer that never saw the light of day
Quinn Myers

In 2001, the internet’s premier file-sharing service Napster was shut down after just two years, leaving a giant vacuum in the ever-expanding peer-to-peer file-sharing space. There was, however, no putting the toothpaste back into the tube. Suddenly, it was possible — and extremely popular — to download media for free. It was only a matter of time before the next platform emerged to meet that demand.

Enter Mark Gorton, a successful hedge-fund manager who saw an opportunity for commerce in peer-to-peer networking. As such, he launched Lime Group LLC in 2000. Within Lime Group was LimeWire, a proprietary team of engineers exploring the peer-to-peer space. LimeWire was by no means an overnight success. But with a team of dedicated engineers, the software slowly grew into a file-sharing behemoth.

A Happy Accident

Greg Bildson, LimeWire COO, in “LimeWire: Beginnings”: LimeWire started at a row of desks right in front of me in the spring of 2000. But at first I didn’t notice. I was busy dealing with the twilight days in the brief life of Lime Objects [a subsidiary eventually merged into LimeWire], where I stocked a pipeline of developer hires, one of whom was an intern who was experimenting with [peer-to-peer] network Gnutella, which would prove to be the model of the future.

We didn’t get our LimeWire name until the fall of 2000. We liked “LimeNode” a lot, but that seemed a little too repetitive. Our expanded plan was to build a corporate server that would participate in the Gnutella network on behalf of companies that wished to take part.

Matt Castro, narrator of “Do You Remember LimeWire?” on YouTube: Mark Gorton released a program that would pick up the mantle of Napster [and] push the envelope of online pirating even further. The big difference between the two giants was that LimeWire had everything. Not just music. We’re talking movies, video, software, games, you name it. LimeWire had it, [and] it was all centralized into one singular program.

Bildson: Having tested and improved things for months, we were finally allowed to release a LimeWire beta to the public in November. To say we had a slow start was an understatement. At the time, we celebrated every 100 downloads and then every thousand, but that was just a drop in the bucket. We were still only a tiny fraction of the network, [and] if anything, we were too conservative in our early days. But it gave us time to better understand the space and our competitors. It would take four years at least for this to really pay off.

Aubrey Bowser, UI Developer, LimeWire: I was the product marketing face for it. Did everything except code in Java. I produced the website, open source community website, content, graphics. LimeWire in the early days was like Pied Piper [the fictional app on Silicon Valley] in their early days. It was the quintessential startup. We were a bunch of post-college grads in the center of the .mp3 revolution. These engineers led the way for Spotify.

The team wasn’t looking to replace Napster. Rather, they were really just into making P2P work. It was so new then. They open-sourced it, and a community thrived behind making the protocol work, so the .mp3 swap thing was incidental to the network capabilities.

Miracle Jones, producer of the forthcoming book series Remember the Internet: I’d known of Napster, but it was too slow and I never felt the need to download music onto my computer. Then I went to college. An engineer outfitted us with a blue ethernet cable and showed us how to log on to the local network. It was my first experience with a fast internet connection.

Miles Klee, “Why Millenials Miss LimeWire Enough to Resurrect It as a Meme,” MEL: The essence of LimeWire was this: By using it, you were breaking the law, and in trying to find any given song or video, you might accidentally download porn or malware, putting the computer itself at risk. It was as reckless as unprotected sex.

Jones: We were gobsmacked by the fast internet connection and basically couldn’t believe that we now had access to all this music and media. Eventually, we became utterly unrepentant in our wholesale pillaging of everything we could possibly steal.

Klee: At the height of LimeWire, Facebook and YouTube were brand new, and they hadn’t yet monopolized how we interact. Web 2.0 sought to turn your real-life friends into followable accounts and avatars, whereas LimeWire capitalized on near-random, anonymous connections between strangers. You couldn’t talk to whoever was hosting the file you wanted; you had to live by your wits and decide whom to trust. Primitive as that sounds, it made for a thrilling suspense you’ll never find in the walled gardens of today’s social media.

Bildson: In those early days, if you got to the point of actually downloading a file, 90 percent of download attempts would fail. This was a classic supply-and-demand problem. Supply was limited, and demand was large. But supply should increase as new people downloaded a copy of a file, right? That was only true if the downloader was using a true Gnutella client.

Jones: Everyone was downloading stuff all day long. We would grab as much as we could, then run off to class, checking in between classes to organize the lucre and start new downloads, inefficiently and redundantly replicating bad music collections everywhere on a thousand semen-crusted iMacs and Gateway 2000s.

Castro: [Soon] over 50 million users were downloading their favorite albums on a daily basis, ripping them onto a CD or transferring them over to their newly received iPod, [which] could hold up to 40,000 songs. And you weren’t about to buy 40,000 tracks of music. In 2005, LimeWire had as many users as iTunes did: 1.7 million. All of them illegally downloading music, which resulted in the music industry losing billions of dollars.

Changing the Internet

Where Napster had only lasted two years, LimeWire was on its way to surviving 10. Even as other file-sharing platforms were sued into oblivion, Gorton was able to outrun the courts. He made a point to form relationships with music industry executives, and did his best to address any legally questionable areas in the software. According to the New York Times, Gorton truly believed he was following the law the entire time.

At its peak, LimeWire was responsible for 80 percent of all illegally downloaded music in the U.S. Millennials had their first taste of infinite on-demand entertainment, and they were hooked. Meanwhile, as more users piled in, so too did bad actors.

Jones: We were coming from a decade where the record companies had been systematically screwing every single human on CDs, refusing to sell singles anymore. It was thrilling and very satisfying to be able to steal entire catalogues of an artist’s work in the “album” form that we were told was so fucking important. It allowed record companies to charge us all a buttload for the one song that was good, which is why an entire generation knows way more Bush songs than they should, which is one half of one song.

Klee: Without the discoverability of browsing or algorithms, you had to know what you wanted and fully commit to the hunt. LimeWire rewarded focus and patience instead of promoting distraction.

Castro: Movies were more of a hassle. You’d have to wait about a day or two for the download to be finished, and you didn’t even know if it was the correct file or not. The only thing you had to go by were the titles of the tracks, and people could bait you into downloading some fucked-up shit.

Jones: You were also beholden to “whatever people had elected to digitize and label” from their own collections, meaning there was a lot of KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails, a ton of Grateful Dead bootlegs and obscure prog rock.

Castro: You could look at someone’s iPod, and if a song said something like “2000_Kanye_my_chemical_romance.mp3,” you knew that they were using LimeWire.

Jones: One infamous mislabeled file was an advertisement for a club that started with Bill Clinton saying:

“My fellow Americans, I would once again like to say that I did not have sexual relations with that woman. I did, however, go to ifreeclub.com where they offer hundreds of free products. Computers, notebooks and accessories. Televisions, home importable audio and video, fashion and cosmetics, housewares and more. Visit them today at www.ifreeclub.com and do like I did. Just get it free!”

Castro: [The Bill Clinton] sample was the original rickroll. It taught us to keep vigilant and make sure that the file size of what we were downloading was correct. When we saw something that was too good to be true, it probably wasn’t.

Castro: There was also a lot of porn, like, a lot. And of course, with porn, comes some fucked-up shit. People would fuck things up by naming it something like “Paris Hilton sex tape.” But when you opened it up, bada bing, bada boom, you were now in possession of child pornography. One study by the U.S. General Accounting Office found, “1,286 titles and file names using 12 keywords known to be associated with child pornography on the Internet. 543 (about 42 percent) of those titles were associated with child pornography images.”

Castro: It was even reported that out of 123 randomly downloaded files on LimeWire, 37 of them contained malware. If you were downloading content from the program, chances are you probably had a handful of viruses on your computer. But you didn’t care. Nobody cared. It was a small price to pay for the infinite amount of music at your disposal.

Johnny Tan, systems administrator and operations manager at LimeWire, 2007–2011: The main moderation we did was over DMCA takedowns or child porn. Everything else we were largely laissez-faire about. We weren’t too fixated on fixing the mislabels and viruses. In our view, it was actually a compelling argument for our new music service. For example, let’s say you search for “Poker Face.” You’d get dozens, if not hundreds, of hits, but we’d position our legit, purchase-based ones at the top.

And the price would be reasonable, such that you’d be forced to ask yourself EVERY SINGLE TIME: “Do I pay this minimal amount to purchase a high-bit-rate, guaranteed version of ‘Poker Face’ that has all the correct metadata to properly fill out my library? Or do I take a chance with ‘PoKerr Fase by Lady Gagga – SUPER QUALITY’ that’s a few kilobytes in size?”

Sometimes you take a chance and hope for no viruses. But there are times when you’re just like, “The per-unit cost is 69 cents, F it, I’ll just buy it this time.” And “this time” happens more and more over time.

Klee: Apart from the viruses and smut, there were always rumors that users would one day be dragged into court over this unrepentant piracy.

Jones: Yeah, we had a vague sense that our galactic-scale larceny was probably some kind of violation of a university honor code or regulation or law, but no one had actually explicitly said anything about not doing it. There were just thick blue ethernet cables for everyone and a big shrug from all authority figures, like some kind of Oklahoma land-run. It was glorious.

Joel Tenenbaum, sued by the RIAA for $4.5 million for downloading 30 songs: The final verdict was $675,000. I filed for bankruptcy years ago; the RIAA never got a dime from me, while I — hopefully — cost them millions of dollars to litigate me. Professor Nesson [Tenenbaum’s defense lawyer] was very vocal in the fact that I was being made an example of, and argued that this was an illegal use of the statute. It felt very unfair, but I have the satisfaction of knowing they were more hurt by the lawsuit than I was.

Castro: The music industry was pissed, and someone needed to hang for it. Profit for albums kept plummeting, with the only program helping them being the iTunes shop, which was released three years after the birth of LimeWire. File-sharing changed the entire music industry as a whole, and nobody knew what the fuck to do. So companies did what companies do at a time of crisis. They sued.

Tan: Ultimately, it boils down to this: The media industry (both back then as well as to this day) doesn’t give people the freedom and flexibility that we desire. We don’t want to pay $150 for a bundle of mostly worthless stuff like cable, nor do we want to be nickel-and-dimed for every possible subscription that has even a mild interest for us, which is what we get today.

LimeWire allowed us to get around a lot of those limitations and made distribution particularly straightforward. That trained the legal eyes of the media dinosaurs on us, leading to our ultimate demise.

Turning LimeWires Into Grapevines

In 2006, LimeWire reportedly had 4 million active users a day, and was well on its way to being downloaded 200 million times. The company itself was extremely profitable, thanks to the small percentage of users who opted for the paid service. According to the New York Times, LimeWire’s revenue in 2006 was $20 million.

The company’s pockets were deep and its user base was vast, but with a tsunami of litigation and bad press (from all the viruses and child porn) bearing down, it needed to open legacy music industry executives’ eyes to their inevitable future: a prescription-based streaming model.

In 2007, Gorton hired his first CEO, George Searle; renovated a 15-story, cast-iron building in New York City; and focused LimeWire’s attention toward the horizon.

George Searle, LimeWire CEO, in a corporate blog post four months and 12 days before the company was shut down by a federal judge: As rich as our history is, I’m very excited about what the next 10 years will bring and firmly believe the best is yet to come.

Rochelle DiRe, VP of Human Resources, LimeWire: Prior to George [Searle] being hired, the overall vision of the company was to build the platform. It was just Mark [Gorton], 35 other engineers and next to no corporate structure. I called it Engineering Eden — it was well-funded, and led by a former engineer. At that point, there was a low, single-digit percentage of their users converting to paid users, but most of the users were free, so it was a very simple model to administer.

Bowser: We were making money through ads and the higher support tier from LimeWire Pro.

DiRe: But the strategy pivoted to making friends with the music labels, so we needed to staff up with lawyers [and] marketing people.

Tan: By 2010, we were largely finished with Grapevine [the Spotify-esque subscription service]. It was up and running, but the content was mostly indie with a few very small labels on there. Still, it was in many ways a precursor to things like Spotify, with one distinguishing feature: for a monthly subscription fee, instead of streaming whatever you wanted, you were going to be allowed to download and keep, or “own,” a certain amount of songs every month, depending on your plan.

DiRe: We were basically building what would turn into a Spotify. From what I understand, within the music industry, there was a battle between the younger, digital side who saw the future of their industry, and the legal teams who just saw the pain of the past.

Tan: The fact that users would “own” songs was the deal-breaker for a lot of the dinosaur record labels. I remember one meeting with a music label I won’t name, where the exec in the room basically told us, “If you listen to a Madonna song, I want you to pay us for that privilege. You never own music, you simply buy a license to consume that music at that moment. Next year, when you want to listen to that same song, I want you to pay us again. Thirty years from now, when your grandchildren want to listen to that Madonna song, I want them to pay us. You will never own this music, you only buy a temporary right to listen to that music at that moment, nothing more.”

Jarret Battisti, Global Production Manager, Lime Company: I would have loved to see Grapevine released to the public. We were developing it just ahead of Spotify getting its U.S. licensing, and I think the service had an honest shot.

DiRe: But they were out for blood, and ended up turning down what I think would’ve been a very profitable business model for them, just to take revenge on the early pioneers. So that was sad. It was a little bit like [trombone noises].

Searle, two months and 10 days before being shut down by a federal judge: We now have more employees, more resources and more users than ever before. We’re proud to say that LimeWire has become the world’s most popular P2P file-sharing program. I firmly believe the best is yet to come!

The End of the Grapevine

Music industry executives couldn’t be convinced. The Recording Industry Association of America came at LimeWire with a $75 trillion claim in damages. After lengthy litigation, LimeWire ultimately settled out of court for $105 million to 13 different record labels.

DiRe: The possibility of being extinguished was right there, and the possibility of doing something huge, pioneering and groundbreaking was right there too. But we were outgunned. The record labels were so spiteful, they not only wanted us closed, they demanded that we destroy the code. Things started to cut against us, and we had to do layoffs.

Battisti: It was sort of a given that the LimeWire talks with the labels and RIAA could come to an impasse at any point, but we had a decent amount of confidence that things would settle and we could continue to operate. Of course, when talk of the injunction began, we couldn’t help but feel uneasy.

Tan: It was a truly sad moment when we had to lay off about one-third of the company [because of the lawsuits]. This occurred about six to eight months before we ultimately shut down. Lots of tears and feelings of betrayal on that day. Before that, it was a tight-knit team. Everyone believed in what was possible, and no one left.

DiRe: We fought to the very end. [Judge Kimba Wood’s ruling] was the moment of truth, and it was heartbreaking. We felt she wasn’t an informed judge, not very technologically savvy. Maybe in a different judge’s hands it would’ve turned out differently. But then we closed, and that was that. Everyone went their separate ways.

Battisti: Shelving Grapevine was really the one that hurt the most. It felt like the team had something special in the works there.

Tenenbaum: The whole thing seems adorably dated now: downloading Limp Bizkit and Green Day and being sued for that, when all the labels seemed to have switched over to a radio-like model where you get free music with ads, or a subscription service like Spotify. Or that you can legally watch all the songs I was sued for on YouTube, where they’ve all been posted in duplicates.

But I’m not any kind of expert on the music business. I’m a public-school teacher now. I Spotify a bit, but mostly Pandora, or use the actual files I have.

Battisti: I was with LimeWire nearly until the day the doors were locked forever. It was a bit of a whirlwind, to say the least, the whole thing felt like something out of a film. But after the injunction was official and we shut down the P2P client, my manager asked if I wanted to stay on to help with customer responses. I agreed and began sending form emails to virtually anyone who contacted us. There were about four of us, including the lead of the customer support group. The rest of the office was basically a ghost town, but we sat there, just emailing away. Reactions ranged from anger to empathy. It was an emotional experience, and certainly unique in my professional history.

Klee: Nothing lasts, and nowhere is that as true as on the bleeding edge of technology. For all its flaws, and despite its basically indefensible premise, LimeWire offered a chance to outrun the powers that be, toward a future that wouldn’t arrive. LimeWire itself was a glitch, and a happy one, too.

DiRe: This shoulda-coulda is very real. Things could have and should have turned out differently. We had 50-something million subscribers.

Battisti: It’s tough to tell where a now-legacy tech brand like LimeWire would sit in today’s landscape. Adapting and staying relevant is no small feat.

DiRe: But if you squint, and think about if it would’ve worked, we were a decade ahead of our time, in so many ways.

Bowser: [It] was a great time with talented people still dear to my heart. I miss all of them.

DiRe: We had this amazing culture, amazing office, at an amazing time in the digital revolution. LimeWire should’ve been right there with, or instead of, Spotify. It didn’t work out that way, of course, but we had fun trying!
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/...dustry-forever

















Until next week,

- js.



















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