Thoughts on the Megaupload Bust

CORRECTIONS: My bad -- turns out I jumped to conclusions in my lust to post on this seductive story. Just for starters, Kim Dotcom (a) was merely renting the mansion with intent to buy and (b) evidently may not have made all or even most of his fortune from  Megaupload. This doesn't change my suggestion to the movie industry, so I'm leaving the column up, with appropriate hems and haws. You might, however, have more fun reading a fabulous new article by Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica, who dug deeper and struck platinum. Turns out my hint that Mr. Dotcom might be trying to emulate Bond villains wasn't the half of it.

Dare I suggest they ought to turn this into a movie? 

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Thought for the day. The Megaupload bust reads like a comic book on the subject of how rich you can get by distributing movies for free. Their business model was to attract maximum traffic by hyping the FREE part, while simultaneously selling premium accounts and of course selling advertisements.

This appears to have been hugely lucrative. Mr. Kim Dotcom, head of the Megaupload empire, inhabited a huge mansion with secret, armored safe rooms and other super-toys that would make a James Bond super-villain jealous, all financed by giving stuff away.

Now over to you, Hollywood. Forget for a moment how much you hate Megaupload for allegedly stealing your content. Think instead about how much you envy them for getting filthy rich in the process...

And hold it right there. Instead of merely hating and envying them, what if you actually competed? You would, of course, put their likes out of business overnight. While getting even richer than them.

Golly, wouldn't that be easier than hiring Chris Dodd to bribe Congressmen to enact dumb laws that earn you the hatred of film fans everywhere -- laws like SOPA that, even if they were to pass and actually succeed in suppressing piracy, would merely make your onetime fans seek out other forms of inexpensive online entertainment?

And wouldn't it be more profitable to court your billions of fans in China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere -- with easier ways of watching your films they can actually afford -- rather than ceding this mind-boggling market to the likes of Kimdotcom?

One day, one of your kind will wake up and do it, getting far richer than the rest of you put together, Lords of Hollywood.

Why not now? First one in gets the lion's share.

Just a thought.

If you don't tell your Congressman to stop SOPA...

...this website could disappear, along with many others you depend on.

I'm doubtless preaching to the choir here. We've been informing readers about the dangers of PIPA (the Senate's Protect IP Act) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act, as it's dubbed in the House) ever since they came out of committee. But if perchance you do NOT moan at the mere mention of these acronyms, I suggest you scroll down to earlier posts or mosey on over to Ars Technica by clicking here. 

Wikipedia and other Internet leaders actually shut down on Wednesday January 18, 2012 -- hoping to to jolt readers into realizing where we're headed if Congress follows Big Money instead of its voters. Your calls and letters have scared them into reconsidering one provision of the bills (pertaining to DNS filtering), but that's it and it's not much. Both bills still give Hollywood the power to take down websites that they merely suspect of linking to offshore sites that may violate copyright. For example, if I happened to link to the BBC, and a Hollywood web-scrawler decided that something on the BBC Website violates copyright, they could take ME down.

POOF! No due process. No free speech. In the past I have described the consequences of these bills as "a China style Internet," but its actually much worse. China at least reserves the power to block Internet sites to its government. Our Congress would let ANY well-heeled copyright-holder shoot first and ask questions later. SOPA and PIPA thus not only trash the Bill of Rights but effectively dismantle the rule of law, by granting private entities god-like censorship powers.   

I did not close for the day, figuring my scant  elite band of readers would simply conclude I hadn't paid my bills. Plus, half of the site these days is devoted to mustering opposition to these lobbyist-authored, First-Amendment-flouting pieces of censorship legislation, so I'll just say say,  CALL (do not email) YOUR CONGRESSMAN TODAY by tapping this link. (Next post will NOT be about SOPA or PIPA, I promise. Righteous Indignation will be shelved abd I'll go back to Poking Fun.) 

P.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUVENILE BOASTS. Dunno how to prove it, but we may have been first (or among the first) to push the Twitter hashtag #stopSOPA -- urging its use in a post dated October 28, 2011. Even if I'm full of it, #stopsopa is a giant rolling snowball now. Get in on the action and use it.

An open letter to link spammers

If you use Google, you've doubtless inhaled a new form of Internet pollution that I'll call Link Spam. It consists of pseudo-reference sites, painstakingly constructed by writers-for-hire, all with the objective of fooling Google into serving them up as the answer to your web search. The sites look amazingly real, and often are very nicely designed, but their content leaves you with a feeling that you've seen it before.

And you have! Because the writers usually crib from all the honest-to-goodness websites that good people have poured all their energy into writing and creating. Problem is, you often can't find these real sites anymore, because the smog of Link Bait has crept into every Internet nook and cranny. Worse, the phony sites are often better at gaming Google's search technology.

Anyhow, I thought I was thoroughly jaded by Link Spammers... until yesterday. That's when I received an email that pushed me over the edge. I was amazed, enraged, agog at their chutzpah. I gotta share it.

I'll let our exchange speak for itself.

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-----Original Message---
From: Annie Lee
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2012 11:54 AM
Subject: Question regarding the Resources section to www.wine-people.com

Hello there,

I understand that this may seem out of the blue but I wanted to compliment you in all the hard work that you had put into this website! My name is Annie and I am a Library Assistant for [I'm blanking the name here in case it's actually legit.] Book Club.

Our club primarily focuses on classic literature but recently, there has been a craze for health foods and benefits. I'm not sure if it's because of the Biggest Loser (probably) but we try to talk about different health tidbits that we run into. I've been doing research on wine too when I came across your website and I think your research page is awesome! Throughout my research though, I found a page that combined both health and wine! ( http://www.wineclub.org/2011/12/health-benefits-of-wine/) I knew that wine was good for you (granted, it is consumed moderately) but I didn't realize how many health benefits it had! I think it would make a great resource for your website and I hope it helps people change their views on wine in the long run. Please let me know if you think my suggestion is something that you would like to add to your resources page!

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my e-mail. Please let me know if there's anything else I can help you out with! Hope you have a good start to the new year!

Sincerely,
Annie Lee

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MY REPLY:

Sent: Friday, January 06, 2012 3:54 PM
To: 'Annie Lee'
Subject: RE: Question regarding the Resources section to www.wine-people.com

Many thanks for your kind words about wine-people.com, Annie. I actually don’t have a research page and have little to say about health on this website, so I’m a bit mystified by your comment, but I’m glad you found my work informative.

I did take a look at the page you recommended – wineclub.org aka Wine Love.

It’s attractively designed, but to be frank, I wasn’t that impressed with its content. It all kind of reads like it was hastily written by one person who is new to the subject. I also noticed that about a third of its screen real estate is occupied by banners and sidebars for one and only one client, [a wine-of-the-month club] and that the site makes use of Google Analytics in a fairly sophisticated way. All of this leaves me with the strong suspicion that wineclub.org was created by a web-placement agency to serve as link bait. Wineclub.org would therefore not have qualified for my links page.

In any case, Wine People has been in mothballs for quite some time, and I couldn’t post a link even if I wanted to. When you visited, you may have noticed the last post was made two years ago. I keep Wine People going strictly as a reference and as a courtesy for the wine folks I interviewed.

I wish you a very happy and healthy New Year and thank you again for your interest in wine-people.com.

Thanks again, Arthur P. Johnson

P.S. Feel free to email me again about my new website, http://techtakes.net

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DISCLAIMER: I haven't heard back from Annie. Her email was so artful in its flattery that even I almost believed it for a few minutes. I'm still stunned by the amount of sheer grunt work that must have gone into writing wineclub.org. I leave open the possibility that it may actually be legit, and of course I'd love to hear from anyone who has received similar-sounding emails.

Free phone call blitz makes Congress think twice about censoring Internet

Gotta brag just a bit -- we detested it first. Now that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has stalled in the House, thanks to over 400,000 phone calls and letters to Congressmen from folks blessed with a brain like YOU, allow me to mention that we urged action back in October. This humble little neo-non-newspaper also came down hard on the Senate's counterpart travesty, PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Acy), back in June.

Now it looks like the House Judiciary Committee is holding fire until January. This will give Committe Chair Lamar Smith time to huddle with his buds at the MPAA (Big Cinema) and RIAA (Big Music) that are rumored to have written the bill. Dollars to donuts nothing happens until something awful steals all the headlines, at which time he'll introduce yet another bill with an even loftier name amounting to the same stupid, First-Amendment-Canceling piece of, ahem. Long sigh.

So listen friends, I know it's the holidays and you have zero time to read this post, much less pick up the phone, but please...

If you don't want a China-Style Internet, please tap this link to make a free phone call to your Congressman. A marvelous new technology from a company called Mobile Commons has been making our bought-and-paid-for Congress suddenly realize that elections are looming and some of us vote. You will be taken to a Tumblr page asking for your phone number and address. IT'S OKAY. You will immediately be called by a robot, told a bit more about SOPA, and then connected with your own hometown Congressman, and...

Your one phone call matters infinitely more than a thousand petitions. WHY? Because your Congressman's caller ID will verify that you are no Ouside Agitator but A VOTER IN HIS OR HER DISTRICT. The staffers who monitors phone calls will wake up, take note, log the call, possibly even get back to you. And it will matter a whole lot, maybe even more than your vote. Because 400,000 phone calls so far have already forced SOPA back into committee -- but if you don't want the same SOPA Opera this spring, we've got to make Congress realize that this is a Third Rail. They touch it and their support dies.

Got it? Good. The whole thing will take maybe three minutes. Please tap the link, while Tumblr is still offering this marvelous service. The call is free. Your Constitutional right to speak your mind on the Internet may not be free for much longer, unless you tap here today.

Retraction: Why I just became a Justin Fan

WHOOPS: I spoke dismissively of Justin Bieber in my recent article about the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA).

What I didn’t realize was that Justin just blasted SOPA as “ridiculous” on a radio call-in show, proving he’s a got more stuffing than some people give him credit for.

Any Congressman who votes for SOPA should be hauled off in cuffs, quoth the Biebs.

I think that’s about right and media pundits who mock the young prodigy for this should be ashamed.

My apologies, Justin. Your down and dirty radio rant may do more than any highfalutin editorial to #stopSOPA – so I say, go Bieber. He knows he wouldn't be where he is without his early covers on YouTube, and we do too, and where was the harm? There wasn't.

THIS JUST IN: As I write this, Google just leaked word they may quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been lobbying for the bill. Better late than never, Google–Yahoo quit weeks ago for this very reason.