Newscoma

So, you think the AP flap over threatening a blogger, and trying to rewrite the Fair Use copyright law is over? Think again. This isn’t over, not by a longshot. Right from the beginning, the AP threats on against a blogger, and their desire to rewrite the particular part of copywrite law governing Fair Use, has been RIAA/MPAA-like (the AP’s statement on bloggers use is forthcoming) You know, suing P2P users for presumptively sharing files. So, here is an article on the recent opinion of the MPAA which says they should not have the burden of proof to prove someone intended to share a file.

Read the whole thing. She’s right.

As is Rex Hammock who even gives some practical advice.

This thing is going to get ugly. Very, very ugly. And I’m not feeling too optimistic about how this and other things are all connected. Terry Heaton has also been following the story.  He links to this one that hits it on the head.

The distinctions have become more academic: if 3 million people read Drudge and 65,000 read the New Republic, which is mainstream?

Silence is keeping up with a lot of this as well and Jack Lail has a ton of links over at his blog. They are two seasoned news people that get that this is a big deal.

And Sadcox says:

Excuse me while I plot a way to generate traffic for myself instead of someone else.

As bloggers, we get it. We want the eyeballs to come to our homes on the web and hang out with us. I heard Brittney Gilbert speak at last year’s Bar Camp in Nashville about the world that blogging gives us, no matter who we are. Blogging makes a big world smaller.

The Associated Press is being a bit disingenuous. This is about setting rules in a world that has very few rules and polices itself. If the AP sets guidelines then do they get a level of say so? Then what?

Seriously, then what?

Last year, Squirrel Queen and I went to the Conference for Media Reform in Memphis. Folks were talking about this then and it’s coming to fruition now.

My only suggestion is to pay attention to what’s going on in regards to blogging. In many ways it’s about control and money.

Bill Moyers quoted former Baltimore journalist and creator of The Wire, David Simon,  in his speech at this year’s conference this:

Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperbacks of All the President’s Men” and The Powers that Be” atop our Associated Press stylebooks. No business school called to us, no engineering lab, no information-age computer degree – we had seen a future of substance in bylines and column inches. Immortality lay in a five-part series with sidebars in The Tribune, The Sun, The Register, The Post, The Express…

Those days, although nostalgic, are over to an extent.

In this new world of media, there are new challenges.

And then there is this:

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of “Internet metering” in one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.

AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and that it was considering pricing based on data volume. “Based on current trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times over the next three years,” the company said in a statement.

There are a lot of things going on not only in the news industry but the Internet as a whole.

For me at least, it’s all connected.

This online world does not need to be comprised of the haves and the have nots.

There has to be room for everyone.

From Xark.

He’s ‘tooning about this.

And, yes, I laughed. Go read him everyday.

UPDATE: Hell must have frozen over and the devil must be iceskating because Michelle Malkin and Daily Kos agree on this.

The only difference between the different parties so far has been tactics. Many have been supporting the call first made by TechCrunch to boycott all AP stories, yet Kos is calling for the exact opposite, telling bloggers they should be quoting more AP stories, and large chunks of AP text to force AP to test its threats in a court of law.

The talk of much of the internet, and some pretty fine work from the Associated Press.

This from the Machinist:

Comcast, the AP determined, actively manages data on its network by using software to essentially masquerade as its subscribers’ machines. When non-Comcast Internet subscribers request files from your Comcast-connected machine — as happens in peer-to-peer file-sharing applications — Comcast’s technology steps in and tells the non-Comcast subscriber you’re not available.

This is a difficult story to explain, but it’s quite important. For years, consumer advocates have been demanding that Congress and/or the Federal Communications Commission impose “network neutrality” regulations that would force broadband providers (like Comcast) to treat all data on a network equally. Lawmakers have so far failed to do so.

Broadband providers, meanwhile, insist that they do treat all traffic equally, but they reserve the right to use certain technologies to “manage” data on their network. The Comcast plan suggests that broadband providers mean something very broad by “traffic management” — including, it appears, purposefully stepping into your network sessions to shut them down.

More on the wonderful world of spam.:

In all the words being written about Comcast’s violating net neutrality and throttling down BitTorrent, no one has pointed to their excuse.

Bandwidth. (To the right, a yummy pork shoulder and ham product from the good folks at Hormel.)

Many small ISPs, especially if they’re based on WiFi, routinely throttle down BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer applications. They have done so for years. Their bandwidth costs them real money, and the only way they say they can assure adequate speed to all is to minimize the movement of big files.

And from Globe and Mail:

Like those “unlimited” cellphone data plans that turn out not to be unlimited at all, this kind of thing is another example of how the cable companies and telcos try to suck and blow at the same time: they sell you their unlimited or high-speed plans, bragging about all the things you can do with them, and then charge or block you as soon as you try and do any of those things.

Read up on it. Things are happening in our online world and we may not even know what’s going on.

And, if we are running blogs as we are wont to do, we probably need to know this stuff.

Just saying.