Well color me surprised but not all of the record companies are happy with UK ISP Virgin Media’s planned subscription service for downloading music.

The UK company believes that consumers want to be able to download as much music as they want and without it being loaded down with DRM restrictions. It’s newly announced subscription service is built around this idea that will allow their subscribers to download as much music as they want for an additional monthly fee and allow them to keep it permanently. The fee for the service hasn’t been announced but people in the know are suggesting it will be around the £15 mark.

At this point only Universal and some smaller indie labels have signed up with the ISP’s service. The other record companies, like Warner Bros, EMI, and Sony Music aren’t too happy with the service as they believe that it will cannibalize their existing digital sales. They also don’t believe that it will do anything to convert persistent file-sharers.

A Virgin Media spokeswoman said it’s committed to launching a “comprehensive” service this year. “We’re making good progress in developing the service and are on track to launch before Christmas,” she said. “We’re in talks with both major and independent labels and are committed to launching a comprehensive service.”

However, while record labels are keen to work with Virgin because of the reach it offers via its 3.7m broadband subscribers, they argue the music download service needs to make commercial sense.

A label executive involved in the negotiations said the labels support Virgin Media’s music plans in theory, but any service must deliver both feasibility and scale.

“We want to work with Virgin Media as a partner but any deal has to sit comfortably with how we value our assets against how it values its customers,” he said. “We have to evaluate each deal as it comes in and make sure we’re happy with the overall value of the proposition.”

Source: New Media Age – Record labels cast doubt on Virgin Media’s music model

Somehow I don’t hold out much hope that the Virgin Media subscription idea will end up seeing the light of day.

Related posts:

1. Splendid: Record Industry Goes After Radio Stations For “Piracy”
2. Whopper Virgins: it doesn’t get much more offensive than this
3. The farce of musicians actually getting paid

The United States FTC issued a statement today announcing a rare takedown of rogue ISP Pricewert, LLC. (Aliases include 3FN and APS Telecom.)

Besides sounding vaguely like an obscure German-industrial band, Pricewert stands accused of actively recruiting and colluding with cybercriminals to infect computers with spyware, viruses, trojan horses, Jonas Brothers tracks, and according to the FTC statement, pornography containing bestiality, incest, and violence. The FTC alleges that Pricewert advertised its services on the “darkest corners of the internet” (4chan?) and even set up a forum to allow criminals to exchange information more readily.

According to the FTC, Pricewert either ignored take-down requests or moved criminal elements to other IPs to thwart detection. Further dastardly acts cited in the complaint include DOS attacks, botnet deployment and spam distribution.

The FTC have backed up their case with IM transcripts that show senior employees conspiring to configure botnets with bot herders. The court issued a temporary injunction barring upstream providers from enabling the alleged bad guys, and froze Pricewert’s assets pending a hearing on June 15th.

Related posts:

1. RIAA smacks down Usenet.com in court
2. MySpace Wins Record Anti-Spam Judgment
3. BBC shows what happens when you buy a botnet

I have said this before and I will say it again without a second of hesitation – metered broadband is bad for the Internet. It is bad for innovation on the web and it is especially bad for any video business online. This will be especially true as the quality of downloadable, or streaming, video – be it movies or television shows – increases in quality. With every increase in quality you will have larger and larger file sizes being transferred via the web and every single byte of those files will count against your download cap.

Stacey Higginbotham made this point the best today in her post at GigOM where she used the example of downloading the HD version of Twilight from iTunes

Time Warner Cable: Time Warner’s price per GB for its proposed tiers ranges from 75 cents to $15 (unless you max out the overage fees on the 100 GB per month tier and default into unlimited service for $150). This means the bandwidth for “Twilight” would cost between $2.85 and $20.60. After adding in the $3.99 rental fee, the evening at home costs between $6.84 and $24.59.

At a time when just about everyone and their brother is spouting off about how big video is going to be we have broadband providers talking up the supposed need to move to a metered broadband. The only need that I can see is the need to find more ways to gouge their customers.

So it was interesting to see this story on SA Business by David Saleh Rauf reporting that Time Warner is postponing the implementation of their metered broadband program

Officials with the cable company said Monday they are postponing implementation of a new billing format for San Antonio and Austin customers based on Internet usage until October.

A trial program intended to charge varying rates depending on usage was slated to begin this summer. The decision to delay the meter program was prompted mostly by customer reaction, said Gavino Ramos, Time Warner’s vice president of communication for South Texas.

I don’t see how Ramos figures that customer reaction is going to change between now and October. The point is that metered broadband is just a bad idea all around.

Related posts:

1. Time Warner Cable to try out some social blackmail
2. Broadband – a public utility or a profit margin?
3. Last Minute Deal Keeps Viacom Content on Time Warner Cable

So, the RIAA is getting much press about how it has figured out that suing grandmothers, dying children and single mother’s on the poverty line isn’t such a great idea. At least that is how it seems from what is being written up about this newest announcement of theirs. The reality of the matter is that they have only decided not to pursue wholesale lawsuits.

Their new method of attack is to strong arm ISPs to follow the French example of three strikes and you lose your internet connection.

In deals that are being brokered by Andrew Cuomo – the same person who threatened ISPs with public shame if they didn’t censor USNET – the ISPs agree to become RIAA enforcers. Based on information that will be provided by the RIAA our ISPs will issue consumers two warning emails letting them know that they have been caught downloading pirated digital goods.

The third will be to notify the consumer that their access to the Internet is being cut off. After which you could still find yourself being sued by the RIAA who will use your ISP termination as evidence against you.

It doesn’t matter that this will be the same type of questionable information that the RIAA used to sue people with. It doesn’t matter that it is the same information that has resulted in the RIAA losing more and more court cases as people begin to fight back. Unfortunately though when it comes to RIAA backed ISP action we don’t have the same legal recourse that we do when the RIAA sues people.

While a lot of people might want to herald the fact that the RIAA is dropping mass lawsuits as some kind of victory nothing could be further from the truth. The real truth here is that if this type of ISP interference goes ahead consumers will be in an even worse position. First we will have a private corporation deciding whether or not you deserve having an internet connection based of highly suspect information provided to them by the RIAA. Second we have no way to prove our innocence like we would in a court of law.

In other words – if this plan goes ahead we are screwed – royally.

[hat tip to TechWag and Techdirt]

Related posts:

1. Moby Says “the riaa needs to be disbanded”
2. O.K. Corral time for the RIAA
3. RIAA chief declares DRM dead

Up to this point your service provider for that connection to the web has generally restricted themselves to only managing the pipe in the way that will make them the most profits. The majority of the time; unless it was in their best interests, the ISPs have stayed away from policing the data that goes through their pipes.

That could change in the very near future if Andrew Cuomo; New York’s Attorney General, has his way and if either; or both, of the bills before Congress are passed.

In the first instance with Andrew Cuomo it looks like he has made it his life’s mission apparently to force Internet Service Providers to block child porn. On the face of it this is a noble idea but knowing that it would be next to impossible to legislate them into doing this Cuomo has taken to publicly shaming – or at least threatening to – ISPs that don’t check all the data going through their pipes for child porn and then reporting the offenders. To a point his plan has been successful in that the majority of ISPs have been blocking all USENET access but that in itself is a joke considering that 99% of all USENET is actually legitimate content.

However not satisfied with that, it appears the Cuomo got a hold of some promotional literature from an Australian company called Brilliant Digital. It seems that the company is promising that is able to inspect every single image, every single movie, every document whether it is attached to an email or found in a search as it moves through any Internet Service Provider’s network. This information was then passed on to the companies that Cuomo is trying to pressure into policing their networks to the Attorney General’s satisfaction.

Then today Doc Searls had a post where he pointed to two pieces of legislation that would make this enforced policing easier to thrust upon ISPs. The first one S.173B; which Doc describes as nothing more than a great big expensive kludge that would create more problems that it would solve, reads in part

A bill to require the Department of Justice to develop and implement a National Strategy Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction, to improve the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, to increase resources for regional computer forensic labs, and to make other improvements to increase the ability of law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute child predators.

The second piece of legislation; S.519, is in doc’s opinion nothing more than legalized wiretapping of the Internet and it reads in part

A bill to modernize and expand the reporting requirements relating to child pornography, to expand cooperation in combating child pornography, and for other purposes,

As Doc says in his post regarding the last one

The other is a wiretapping bill for the Internet. I get that from Section 103, which says one Task Force purpose is “increasing the investigative capabilities of state and local law enforcement officers in the detection and investigation of child exploitation crimes facilitated by the Internet and the apprehension of offenders”. Hence the move by Andrew Cuomo in New York.

Like I said in the beginning the idea of fighting child pornography is a good and righteous fight but when do we cross the line between the good fight and overt surveillance of all your online activity regardless of what you are doing. Given how bad even the current so-called sophisticated nanny software is when mothers can be blocked from site talking about breast feeding, or some young person trying to understand themselves by searching for gay pride information.

While Doc Searls frames his post by tying this nettapping to the idea that these types of policing ideas happen because we are still trying to frame the web as just another arm of the telcom business I think this paragraph of his says it better

This is one more slippery slope at the bottom of which the Internet is just another breed of telecom service, subject to ever-expanding telecom regulation, all for Good Cause.

To me moves like this smack more of the ever encroaching nanny state where everything we do, say or think is being governed by goodie two shoes who think they know what is best for us. How much longer will it or how much more will we take before we stand up and tell them all to piss off.

Related posts:

1. AT&T, AOL to Remove Child Porn Sites
2. U.S. Senators Take On Child Pornography With $1 Billion Warchest
3. Germany to Introduce CP Internet Censorship