Media

MONACO – Tumblr, which has been a non-commerical blog platform, has announced an agency program for brands who want to share their messages in the form of “story telling,” explains founder and CEO David Karp in this interview with Beet.TV We spoke with him in last year at the Monaco Media Forum where he was a speaker. News that Tumblr will be acquired by Yahoo! was just reported. Andy Plesser

After its launch in 2004, RapidShare’s speedy growth saw the company become one the largest file-hosting sites on the Internet. However, like all sites of this nature, RapidShare became popular with those looking to store copyright-infringing material. It was a relationship that would prove problematic. RapidShare fought many legal battles with entertainment companies seeking to hold the company liable for the actions of its users, but it was a big surprise three years ago that really caused it to take stock. In 2010, the RIAA submitted their list of foreign “notorious markets” to the Office of the US Trade Representative and among the usual torrent site suspects were RapidShare. In the year that followed the company spent huge amounts of cash – reports suggest around 500,000 euros – lobbying to change the site’s image and convince entertainment companies that it was serious about protecting their copyrights. In the short-term at least the strategy appeared to pay off. RapidShare were absent from the USTR’s 2011 list, a sign that entertainment companies felt they had the file-hoster reasonably contained and on the right track. In the months that followed, particularly following the shutdown of Megaupload, RapidShare made further adjustments to its business plan, publishing a controversial “anti-piracy manifesto” and taking increasingly harsh measures to deter file-sharers. As a result, traffic plummeted. As can be seen from the chart above, not even a temporary boost in traffic following the 2012 shutdown of Megaupload could disrupt the downward trend for long. RapidShare’s actions caused a continual reduction in traffic from its heyday in 2010 (50th most popular site in the world) but the worst was yet to come. Late November 2012, RapidShare was still very popular, ranked 150th in the world by Alexa, but now, just six months later, the site is ranked 860th. The effect on the company has been dramatic. According to an insider who spoke with Swiss news site 20Minuten, RapidShare has been forced to fire 45 employees – 75% of its workforce – even after assuring them late last year that their jobs were safe. Of particular concern is that only a few weeks ago the company was still hiring fresh staff from abroad. They will be told to leave in seven days, the insider reports. “The employees themselves, no matter who you ask, do not believe in the survival of the company,” the source said. According to the source, late last year then CEO Alexandra Zwingli announced a “strict austerity program” for the company. Zwingli was subsequently replaced by Kurt Sidler, the former head of business software company Sage. 20Minuten confirmed the departures with RapidShare. “The situation is undeniably so that we can reduce costs and unfortunately we have to part with a number of employees,” said Sidler. “RapidShare is maintained and the operation has concrete plans for the future.” With RapidShare having publicly turned its back on the very community that made it rich over the years, never again will the site be able to return to the business model that once elevated it to elite status on the Internet. The appointment of Sidler, who says his job is to “align RapidShare with customer needs and requirements”, suggests the company will now move in a very different direction. Source: RapidShare Fires 75% of its Staff After “Rogue Site” Revamp Bites

Among other topics, Mr. Miles, who specialized in unearthing lost material about forgotten subjects, made films about the history of Harlem and a black regiment that fought in World War I.

Over the past months we’ve discovered ‘pirates’ in the most unusual places, from the FBI, through major record labels and the U.S. Government to the Vatican. Inspired by these revelations the Canadian Pirate Party decided to take a look at the downloading habits of their local Government and police, against a backdrop of vigorous recent debate surrounding online piracy in Canada, and the copyright troll phenomenon in particular. With help from the pirating anti-piracy group Canipre several movie studios are gearing up to sue thousands of Internet subscribers. Interestingly, the Pirate Party’s findings suggest that even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Government’s Industry Canada could become potential targets. “This discovery shows that copyrighted materials have, in fact, been downloaded via the RCMP and Industry Canada networks,” states Pirate Party leader Travis McCrea. McCrea notes, however, that like most copyright trolls, their evidence is far from rock solid and can’t be linked to individual downloaders. “However, we cannot be sure who is responsible for downloading the material, or even if it was downloaded by employees, contractors, or a person who was using an open wireless connection. This is why this type of intellectual property enforcement doesn’t work – there is no method of reliably telling who actually engaged in the infringement of copyrighted materials.” Below are a few “hits” that were found with data provided by BitTorrent tracking outfit Scaneye, starting with the police IP-addresses. The pirated titles are not unusual and the list mostly includes popular TV-shows and movies. Royal Canadian Mounted Police Pirates Industry Canada IP-addresses have also been caught pirating movies TV-shows and games, including episodes of The Voice, Duck Dynasty and The Ultimate Fighter. The IP-addresses that were found are pulled from peer lists which increases the possibility of false positives, which is exactly how many copyright trolls are believed to gather evidence. Industry Canada Pirates In the months to come thousands of Internet subscribers may be dragged to court, with movie studios demanding thousands of dollars in compensation. The Pirate Party Canada speaks out fiercely against these trolling actions. They point out that despite the crackdowns on individual citizens, the police and the Government can seemingly continue to pirate without repercussions. The fact that the makers of Game of Thrones and other frequently pirated titles don’t seem to mind, makes it all the more confusing according to the Pirate Party. “Between the difficulty of targeting individual pirates, the double standard of targeting individuals more harshly than organizations, and the fact that many content creators don’t see piracy as detrimental to their business, it’s clear that something is wrong with the way intellectual property rights are currently enforced,” the Party comments. “If the goal of copyright enforcers – and the creators they represent – is to increase profits and protect creator rights, shouldn’t there be a better way to accomplish this than by harassing individuals who may or may not bear any responsibility for copyright infringement happening on their IP address?” For the many future troll victims in Canada, we hope that the judges handling these cases will ask the same questions. Source: Canadian Police and Government Caught Pirating Movies and TV-Shows

There are over quarter billion people who have Shazam installed on their mobile device. This astounding number instantly makes Shazam a big player in the second screen market. When Shazam enabled TV recognition in September they made a big splash and instantly interested advertisers in seeing what they can do. Now, the mobile-first company has just announced a new CEO, Rich Riley to help take them into the now more mature mobile-first environment. We interviewed Riley, the former EVP of the Americas for Yahoo! about the importance of TV and what to look out for in the future as Shazam grows.  continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Sony Pictures is under pressure this summer, and not just to produce hit movies. Daniel S. Loeb, an activist investor, wants Sony to spin off part of its entertainment unit.

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The best minds of my generation have been destroyed by the madness of contriving ways to get people to click on ads, conforming to a conceptual framework of disruption in which ruptures take the form of optimizing commercial capitalism. As the hot air of “technology” and “social” fill up the bubble once more, food for Cacophony fills the streets, the airways and the wires of the Network. The time is ripe for more weird fun from The Cacophony Society. The Cacophony Society is a randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society. We are the punctuation at the end of hypothetical sentences, words in the prose of technological satire, grammarians of absurdist syntax and our numbers are prominent in the flat edge of a curve. You may already be a member! A common criticism of the Occupy Movement has been that its anarchist structure means it will have little influence beyond the current moment. The counter-example is the San Francisco Cacophony Society (formerly The Suicide Club) which spawned and influenced the Billboard Liberation Front, Burning Man, Fight Club, Ad Busters and Santa Con. Culture jamming continues to be a powerful force in countering the technological scientism of Silicon Valley. Non Event Wednesday Dec. 9th all day. Dress like you always do. Do what you normally do. Object of the event: See if you can pick out the other participants. This was a really big event last year. Let’s see if we can do it again! Sponsored by: The Bureau of Objective Reality Last Gasp of San Francisco has published “Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society.” This new instruction manual and historical document is cornucopia of cacophony and should prove to be an inspiration to a new generation about to be chained to the “promise” of Google Glass. Frankenstein’s Workshop Saturday, Sept. 5 8:00 p.m. Meet: At the N.E. corner of Judah and 7th Ave. Bring: Recently or about-to-be deceased animal bodies or parts (please no “roadkill”) Wear: Something you won’t mind getting indelible stains on Dr. X and The Other One For the scholars of Cacophony, and the future generation of pranksters, the holy historical documents (Rough Draft) and other ephemera are being housed in the virtual halls of the Cacophony Society Section of the Internet Archive. The youth of the world have an indispensable new resource in their pursuit of a renaissance of cacophony.

Tuesday morning, TorrentFreak received an email from a UK music industry source which clearly indicated that the labels. led by the BPI, still view website censorship as the way forward in the continuing piracy battle. In the past sites such as The Pirate Bay, KickAssTorrents (KAT), H33T and Fenopy have been blocked by court action, but the list this time is particularly ambitious. A total of 25 sites are listed including some of the world’s largest torrents sites – 1337x, Bitsnoop, ExtraTorrent, isoHunt, Monova, TorrentCrazy, TorrentDownloads, TorrentHound, TorrentReactor and Torrentz. In fact, if the current action comes to fruition, only one of the current top 10 torrent sites will remain unblocked in the UK. However, in the torrent scene news travels very quickly indeed and if there is one thing users hate more than a badly-seeded torrent, it’s censorship, and the signs are that the proposed blocks will be met head on with potent circumvention tools. PirateProxy.net is the world’s largest Pirate Bay proxy site whose growth has been nothing short of phenomenal. From a standing start in the second quarter of 2012 the site has achieved amazing things. According to Alexa, PirateProxy is the UK’s 137th most popular site, just ahead of its Netherlands ranking of 145th. To give an idea of scale, PirateProxy’s traffic can be compared with that currently achieved by Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz. “Once I read that TF article, I started configuring and testing new proxies sites for Torrentz, Isohunt and Extratorrent,” the admin of PirateProxy told TorrentFreak. “I have already created proxy sites for other blocked torrent sites such as KAT, Fenopy and H33T. Katproxy.com has become really popular in the UK recently too and i’m hoping to add these proxy sites to a new section on proxybay.info.” As noted in our previous article, the world’s second most popular Pirate Bay proxy is PirateReverse.info. An admin there say they’re also well prepared. “At the moment we’re looking to proxy all the torrent sites that were mentioned and we’ve already acquired such domains,” TorrentFreak was informed. “We’re always willing to invest in the proxies we provide to make them as fast and accessible as possible, and we’re planning some hardware upgrades shortly.” However, in addition to the torrent sites the BPI list also contains other domains related to file-hosting searches (FilesTube, Filecrop) and MP3 sites (Grooveshark, MP3Skull, BeeMP3 etc). Early signs suggest that these aren’t the main priority of proxy providers since they are more difficult to set up. “It would be particularly difficult to proxy the file sharing sites however, because of all the protection they use to stop people hot-linking the downloads, same goes for Grooveshark and the MP3 services,” PirateReverse explain. “We will be looking into it, but for the moment the torrent sites are our priority. They will all be listed on torrentproxies.com when available, which we’re working to make the number one hub for torrent site proxies.” PirateProxy’s admin says that any non-torrent site proxies will be driven by demand. “I set up Proxybay.info a while back to collect good working proxies for The Pirate Bay. I am planning on doing a re-design that will allow proxies of other sites to be included as well. Currently, I am only planning on unblocking popular torrent sites, however, I may move onto other types of sites if there is enough demand.” While both sets of proxy admins work separately, they share the belief that censorship is not only ineffective but also counterproductive. “The current censorship regime in the UK just shows how technology is always a few steps ahead of government. They will catch up eventually, but by that time, we will find other ways to circumvent these blocks,” says Pi

Robin Good's insight:How much does it really cost to publish your own book? Miral Sattar, on PBS Mediashift, provides a very useful article outlining eight main expenditure areas and providing some indication of what the cost of doing these activities may be for an independent self-publisher.From formatting to getting reviews, the article properly identifies all of the work steps needed to professionally publish a book without going to partner with a traditional book publisher.I found this resource to be very useful, not so much for the precise cost ranges listed, but more for outlining so clearly to new would-be self-published book authors, how much work and how many people have been traditionally involved in this process.While I firmly believe that today it is not necessary at all to involve all the professionals listed in this article, it is also true that for most people it is really a must to have someone checking his writing style, editing work and helping out with formatting and graphics before even considering to distribute a new book.It should be kept in mind though that there are certainly also new alternatives for proofreading, editing and vetting your content, as well as for getting beautifully designed covers that can get those more inclined to learn to save quite a bit of money and time.Useful. Informative. 7/10Full article: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/05/the-real-costs-of-self-publishing-bookSee it on Scoop.it, via eBook Publishing World