“one last fag, then bop, bop, bop”

- Wolfie Smith

With a selection like this, unpleasantness was guaranteed.
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US colleges and their alumni may be offered the right to P2P file-sharing under one of the most radical copyright reforms in a hundred years, The Register has learned.

The amnesty would be part of a “covenant not to sue”, covered by a collective licence that offers the right to exchange major label repertory over a participating college’s campus network. Rights holders would be compensated from a pot of money drawn from students’ tuition fees.

Today, many US universities participate in a compulsory Napster or Rhapsody program; these only offer time-limited DRM-encumbered songs, though, and students are still liable for prosecution by the RIAA or its biggest members. Unexpectedly, the deal would extend outside the campus network to college alumni, too.

However, the proposals, which are still at the planning stage, have already drawn concern from publishers and smaller labels. Digital deals, and specifically collective licensing deals proposed by major labels typically offer songwriters little or no compensation, and leave the burgeoning independent sector as an afterthought.
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Soho’s Nathan Barleys were in mourning yesterday after Ofcom chief Ed Richards abandoned his shape-shifting flagship, the “Public Service Publisher” quango.

Richards said in a speech to the Royal Television Society on Tuesday night that the “the PSP as a concept has served its purpose and we can move on to the relevant questions for today”.

Translated from PR-speak, that means the game is up for the much-derided idea. (It’s been called “Welfare For Wankers”.) So what is the PSP and why did it create such a passionate response from Reg readers?

When the idea was first floated in 2004, it was as a TV commissioning agency for worthy “public service” programming, with a budget of about £300m a year. It was needed, Ofcom explained, “to ensure that the necessary level of competition for quality in public service broadcasting continues through the transition to digital”.

The BBC helped shoot that down, but Richards couldn’t let the idea drop. The PSP was revived, only this time encumbered with Web 2.0 buzzwords – and in one of the most spectacularly naff policy proposals ever made, emerged as a quango for New Media types, with an annual budget of £100m mooted.

“It’s a new media answer to a new media question,” is how Ofcom described it, tautologically.

The argument was that the “market” for worthy new media projects had failed, and that British internet users were too stupid to find it for themselves on Google.

A year ago, we invited readers to tell Ofcom what it thought as part of its consultation process – with hilarious results:

“As a self-actualising media node, I welcome this redistribution of government funds from provincial luddites to new media ‘creative’ Sohoites…

“Cool Britannia lives! The creative industries initiative was good but didn’t radically empower young creatives and their 360-degree thinking. Unleash the collective wisdom of new media and see us swarm!”

“Let’s use those redundant factories to turn out polyphonic ringtones.”

Ofcom coolly ignored the hostile responses, claiming the public supported the concept. Senior BBC web luvvie Tom Loosemore was hired to strategise on what he described as a “visionary and transformative” project.

But after MPs savaged the idea last autumn, Richards had little option but to find a graceful exit.

“Geoff Metzger, managing director of the History Channel, perhaps summed it up best when he said that the public service publisher was a ‘cure with no known disease’,” the Commons Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport concluded.

Yet even then, so many of New Labour’s new media types found the idea of a cash trough so irresistable, that the corpse of the PSP was still being given electric shocks.

“To really move on, the creative industries need to get past special pleading and on to a sound intellectual basis regarding the encouragement of, and support, for risk and how to measure results,” pleaded Lord Lilley of Webquango, one of the authors of the P2P 2.0 proposal, in The Guardian.

Having staked so much of his personal capital on the project, Richards now calls it a “rock thrown into a pool”.

Emergency talks to save digital radio are taking place in Manchester today, the FT reports. Unloved, unviable, and often unlistenable, DAB is a technology the public clearly doesn’t want; so it comes as no surprise to learn that coercion will be used to persuading the public to get on board. With DAB, we’re expected to pay for the stick that beats us up.

DAB has been a very British failure. While the specification is almost 20 years old, and (just about) adequate, bureaucracy and regulatory greed left British listeners with an experience far short of the “CD quality” sound they were promised.

Digital radio has been expensively promoted by both the BBC and Ofcom – both of whom have deeply vested interests in the digital switchover. And the vested interests range far and wide, too – media companies have digital stations of their own, and prefer cross-promoting their investments in their publications to reporting the subject frankly. Meanwhile, analogue radio remains Briton’s best-loved and most popular medium, a survey confirmed this week, with 100m analogue sets in use – compared to 6.5m DAB receivers.

Finally, GCap blew the whistle on the charade two weeks ago, when it announced that it was canning two of its DAB stations.

“We do not believe that – with its current cost structure and infrastructure – [DAB] is an economically viable platform,” the commercial broadcaster said.

The FT reports that secret crisis talks are taking place in Manchester today to try and make digital radio more attractive to commercial broadcasters. Coercion of one form or another seems high on the agenda, however.

One idea is to make the analogue receivers obsolete overnight, by withdrawing BBC broadcasts from analogue radio. Want the Beeb? Go out and buy a new set.

Running down analogue has also spawned dozens of thriving community FM stations, which provide a stark contrast to government-backed “community empowerment” programs based on web technologies such as social networking. These stations also embarrass the BBC, whose own lacklustre local radio stations too often appear to serve as a home for washed-up Alan Partridges. When given the choice, people prefer listening to real people, rather than the patronising “local” voice of the BBC.

Another idea cited is to use our own money for more digital propaganda. The FT reports that the BBC has a £250m spare license payers’ cash, in the kitty handed to it for digital radio:

“Another radical idea would be to use public money to support a huge switchover advertising campaign – and subsidies for elderly and low-income families to buy new radios – in the same way that as has happened in aiding the switch-over to digital television.”

After pressure over the weekend from Wikipedia’s Il Duce Jimmy Wales, the encyclopedia’s most illustrious fake professor Ryan Jordan has resigned his post at Wikia Inc.

An assiduous editor with the nickname “Essjay”, the 24-year old Jordan passed himself off as an older and more mature character: a Professor of Theology with two PhDs – these impressive credentials even winning him fame in a New Yorker feature. The deception did little to stop Jordan’s meteoric ascent. Wales appointed Jordan to “ArbCom”, Wikpedia’s Supreme Court, and even found him a position at his own commercial venture, Wikia Inc.

The deception was initially unearthed by Daniel Brandt in January, and has been simmering since early February, when Wikipedians themselves put two and two together: the Essjay that Wales had blessed couldn’t be the character that Essjay claimed to be. It breezed into public view last week, with a short disclaimer on the New Yorker‘s website.

Wales initially said he was happy with Jordan’s deception, but changed his mind over the weekend, inviting Jordan to resign his positions of responsibility on Wikipedia. The 24-year quit Wikia Inc. yesterday.

(We don’t know if Jordan detached himself from the project completely, however – one blogger advised him to rejoin using a different pseudonym, and, presumably, a new fictional identity. What will it be this time?)

The incident raises more questions than it answers, as neither Wales, Jordan, nor the editors at the New Yorker appears to show a shred of regret for their behavior. And this is what turns a dull story about the procedures of a tediously procedural website into a kind of modern morality play.

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