House Republicans Don't Want Infrastructure Money Going Toward Broadband Competition

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

For years the broadband industry has successfully convinced the U.S. government to remain fixated exclusively on broadband coverage gaps, not the overall lack of broadband competition. That's in part because they've known for decades that substandard maps mean policymakers have never really known which areas lack or need access. That's helped create an ecosystem where we throw billions upon billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies at regional monopolies every year, in exchange for broadband networks that are routinely half-completed.

With a record $42 billion broadband investment on the horizon, the industry is obviously worried that some of that money might go toward (gasp) added competition. As in, not just used to expand access to the estimated 20-40 million Americans without broadband, but funding to help bring new competitors to the estimated 83 million Americans living under a broadband monopoly. That regional monopolization, as we've long documented, is why U.S. broadband tends to be expensive, spotty, slow, and with terrible customer service.

Of course you can't just come out and acknowledge you don't want money going toward encouraging broadband competition, even though more competition would greatly benefit consumers, small businesses, and countless internet-based economies. So instead the industry's biggest players (and the politicians and regulators paid to love them) like to complain about "overbuilding," or the act of creating "duplicative" broadband networks in "already served" areas. This is generally framed in such as a way as to make it sound as if broadband in most parts of the country is already wonderful, and spending any money to expand access in these "already served" areas would be completely wasteful.

That rhetoric and language was quick to pop up in a House Republican letter sent to the two agencies overseeing fund distribution: the NTIA (pdf) and FCC (pdf). In the letters, lawmakers profess they're just super duper worried about the potential for waste:

"Given the billions of dollars concurrently being awarded for broadband infrastructure deployment by several agencies and the Commission, this Office is on the front line of preventing duplicative and wasteful subsidized overbuilding.As you work to allocate grants pursuant to these laws, we urge you to prioritize funding for unserved communities that lack access to any broadband connection rather than funding duplicative or upgraded service in areas that already have broadband access.

Here's the thing though: House Republicans are defining "access" as just a single ISP offering speeds of 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. More often they define it as "any broadband at all, however pathetic." As such, "access" as theses folks envision it could be a single terrible cable company, a single lazy phone company offering substandard DSL, or a single satellite broadband provider offering capped, expensive, slow, high-latency satellite. That's, well, a monopoly. Lawmakers are being prodded by giants like AT&T to ensure that nobody does much of anything to challenge said monopoly, but it's framed in such a way as to make it sound as if lawmakers are doing due diligence regarding fraud and waste.

In reality you can focus on shoring up broadband coverage gaps and expanding competition. In fact, these often operate synergistically. We've seen time and time again how local competition forces entrenched broadband providers to expand their footprint, lower prices, or offer significantly faster speeds. So by funding and encouraging competition, you technically are also helping to shore up broadband coverage gaps.

While the government is no stranger to waste, most of the waste in telecom has generally come at the hands of the telecom monopolies whose turf House Republicans are protecting here. Countless billions have been thrown at giants like AT&T, Frontier, and Verizon for networks they routinely only half deploy. In the twenty years I've covered the sector I've lost track of the billions of state and federal dollars given to giant industry incumbents for network upgrades that simply don't arrive (often with zero meaningful penalty). Notice how it's rarely a concern if the company getting the money is, say, AT&T.

Yeah, the broadband component part of the infrastructure bill is going to be a massive challenge, in large part because most of the broadband mapping improvements being adopted won't arrive in time. Entrenched monopolies of course know this, and are busy injecting themselves in the process on both the state and federal level to ensure as much money as possible goes to them, and not potential competitors. Loyal lawmakers want to help them in this process under the performative cover of just being ultra concerned about government efficiency and waste, when in reality it's all about defending the busted (but very profitable) status quo.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fcc, infrastructure, ntia, spending

'Tis The Season: Congress Looks To Sneak In Unconstitutional Copyright Reform Bill Into 'Must Pass' Spending Bill

from the if-you-have-to-sneak-around... dept

If you have to sneak your transformational copyright bill into a "must pass" government spending bill, it seems fairly evident that you know the bill is bad. Earlier we talked about how the White House is trying to slip a Section 230 repeal into the NDAA (military appropriations) bill, and now we've heard multiple people confirm that there's an effort underway to slip the CASE Act into the "must pass" government appropriations bill (the bill that keeps the government running).

What does keeping the government running have to with completely overhauling the copyright system to enable massive copyright trolling? Absolutely nothing, but it's Christmas season, and thus it's the time for some Christmas tree bills in which Senators try to slip in little favors to their funders by adding them to must-pass bills.

We've detailed the many problems with the CASE Act, including how it would ratchet up copyright trolling in a time when we should actually be looking for ways to prevent copyright trolling. But the much larger issue is the fact that the bill is almost certainly unconstitutional. It involves the executive branch trying to route around the courts to set up a judicial body to handle disputes about private rights. That's not allowed.

At the very least, however, there are legitimate concerns about the overreach of the CASE Act, and, as such, those supporting it should at least be willing to discuss those issues honestly and debate them fairly. Slipping them into a must-pass government spending bill certainly suggests that they know that they cannot defend the bill legitimately, and need to cheat to make it law.

Filed Under: appropriations, case act, christmas tree bill, copyright, copyright troll, must pass, spending

DOJ Tells Sheriff To Give It Back The $70,000 In Forfeiture Funds He Spent To Buy Himself A New Sports Car

from the I-guess-it's-good-to-know-there's-a-line-that-can-actually-be-crossed dept

You have to screw up pretty badly to step on the DOJ's toes hard enough for it to notice when it comes to asset forfeiture. After the briefest of reforms under Eric Holder, new AG Jeff Sessions reactivated the federal forfeiture escape hatch, allowing law enforcement agencies to skirt local reform efforts by having their seizures "adopted" by the feds.

According to proponents of forfeiture, it's a valuable tool that cripples drug cartels. That far more seizures take place than convictions or even arrests is glossed over by fans of forfeiture who honestly (or more likely, dishonestly) believe taking money from motorists during pretextual stops somehow has an effect on the international drug trade.

Gwinnett County (GA) Sheriff Butch Conway managed to cross that line, despite being invited to the White House to gush about the wonderful people at ICE. Conway blew nearly $70,000 in equitable sharing funds (the aforementioned partnership with the feds aided by federal forfeiture adoptions) on a tricked-out Dodge Hellcat. The DOJ recently sent a letter telling Butch it wants its money back.

The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding reimbursement for the nearly $70,000 that Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway spent on the high-powered sports car he drives to and from work.

In a recent letter to Conway, the DOJ characterized the sheriff’s purchase of a Dodge Charger Hellcat — a 707-horsepower muscle car that some have called the fastest sedan ever built — as “extravagant.”

The federal government previously approved the purchase, which used asset forfeiture funds, but are now questioning if the Hellcat is being used for its stated purpose.

The sheriff dubiously claimed the high-powered sports car had "educational" value when applying for the funds. According to Sheriff Conway, the vehicle -- with a 707-hp engine and dark black tinted windows -- would be used at a local law enforcement event to [checks application] "inform teens about the dangers of distracted driving and street racing."

The event specifically named in the funds request only happens once a year. So, rather than let the vehicle idle in a law enforcement garage, Conway decided it could also be his daily driver. However, the DOJ isn't as concerned about this (mis)use of the $70,000 car. No, it's more worried about the other things Conway said the vehicle could help with, despite being something the DOJ considers an "extravagance" unable to be purchased with federal funds.

Guidelines prohibit “the use of equitably shared funds for extravagant expenditures,” the DOJ’s letter, dated July 10, said. “The vehicle in question is a high-performance vehicle not typically purchased as part of a traditional fleet of law enforcement vehicles.”

The feds also took issue with part of the request that stated Conway would also use the car for undercover and covert operations.

It seems like undercover and covert operations might be better served by a vehicle that didn't stick out like a customized one-of-a-kind sports car. The only way to grant the sheriff's claims credence is to assume he believes the "Fast and Furious" movies are a series of documentaries.

The DOJ will likely get its money back. For one thing, it's the DOJ. It's not as if the sheriff can go over its head. For another, the DOJ has informed Butch he gets no more federal funds until this "extravagant purchase" is repaid. Someone who just spent $70,000 in federal funds to upgrade his personal vehicle probably isn't ready to give up the nipple of what's easy. Sheriff Butch is just going to have to swallow his pride (and sense of entitlement) and give back the money he stole from citizens with the DOJ's assistance.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, butch conway, dodge hellcat, doj, gwinnett county, spending, sports cars

The FCC Has To Remind ISPs Not To Spend Taxpayer Subsidies On Booze, Trips To Disney World

from the like-my-subsidized-Rolex? dept

For many years now, the General Accounting Office has warned the FCC that if it's going to throw billions of dollars at giant ISPs, it might just want to track how that money is spent. GAO reports like this one from 2009 (pdf) noted that not only has the FCC historically done a dismal job at tracking subsidy spending, most government broadband policies have been based on flawed, incomplete or downright hallucinated data (just check out our $300 million US broadband map). In other words, for the better part of fifteen years our government not only didn't really know where broadband funding was needed, it couldn't be bothered to track if it was actually going there.

Not too surprisingly, as a result, we've seen years of fraud, waste and abuse in the FCC's Universal Service Fund (USF) and e-rate programs intended for rural and school telecom improvements. To be clear, the USF has certainly helped thousands of communities; but were someone to conduct an audit of state and federal broadband subsidies since the late nineties (which will never happen) they'd very likely find that misdirected funds could have delivered a fiber connection to every U.S. home and school -- several times over.

As the FCC looks to expand the USF to cover additional rural broadband deployment, it's now warning ISPs that somebody's at least pretending to watch where billions of dollars are going. An FCC notice to recipients of FCC funds (pdf) this month informs companies that subsidies intended for broadband...should actually be used for broadband:

"The Commission reminds all eligible telecommunications carriers (ETCs) that receive support from the Universal Service Fund’s high-cost mechanisms of their obligations to use such support only for its intended purposes of maintaining and extending communications service to rural, high-cost areas of the nation."

The FCC proceeds to remind ISPs that this money should not be used for booze, gifts for co-workers, entertainment, political donations or cafeteria art work. Amusingly, the FCC includes a few examples of ISPs that have decided to use the USF as their own personal little slush fund. One ISP, by the name of Sandwich Isles Communications, collected $242,489,940 from the USF over a decade, purportedly to provide telecom service to just 3,659 rural customers. Instead, company owner Albert Hee used taxpayer money for everything from massages to trips to Disney World:

"For example, the companies apparently paid $96,000 so that Hee could receive two-hour massages twice a week; $119,909 for personal expenses, including family trips to Disney World, Tahiti, France, and Switzerland and a four-day family vacation at the Mauna Lani resort; $736,900 for college tuition and housing expenses for Hee’s three children; $1,300,000 for a home in Santa Clara, California for his children’s use as college housing; and $1,676,685 in wages and fringe benefits for his wife and three children."

Note the FCC never bothered to notice. Lee was ultimately convicted in Hawaii of filing bogus tax returns, and the FCC stopped throwing money at the company only just a few months ago. So while it's great the FCC seems to finally be paying closer attention to broadband subsidy fraud (it launched a new strike force last year tasked with rooting out abuse), most of the companies abusing the USF over the last twenty years have had notably more clever accountants, lawyers and lobbyists than Lee (read: AT&T and Verizon). Given these more formidable adversaries you'd be hard pressed in finding anybody interested in conducting an audit to see where those billions of dollars actually went. Still, moving forward, it's a good reminder for everybody that taxpayer subsidies should not be used for Jagermeister shots and happy endings.

Filed Under: accountability, broadband, fcc, isps, spending, universal service fund, usf

Aussie Study: Infringers Spend More On Content Than Non-Infringers

from the try-and-buy dept

We've argued for quite a long time that treating "pirates" like criminals instead of potential customers is a massive mistake for a whole host of reasons. There's the futility of the legal game, for instance, as well as the possible public relations nightmare that going after the public, even the infringing public, can create. But the best reason to not treat infringers like criminals is because they're often the best actual customers of content out there as well. In study after study, it's shown that a person who engages in some infringement spends more total money on movies, music, and video games than someone who gets everything legit. Pirates, scurvy-laden bastards as they may be, happen to be the creative industries' best customers.

And it turns out it's no different in Australia, where a recent government study bore out the same conclusion: infringers spend more money on content than content-saints.

Consumers who flirt with the morally ambiguous line of content consumption spend more money, according to a survey released by the Australian Department of Communications. Over a three-month period among respondents aged 12 and over, the survey found that those who consumed a mixture of copyright-infringing and non-infringing content spent on average AU$200 on music, AU$118 on video games, AU$92 on movies, and AU$33 on TV content. Consumers who only consumed non-infringing content spent only AU$126 on music, AU$110 on video games, AU$67 on movies, and AU$22 on TV; whereas pure copyright-infringing content consumers spent a mere AU$88 on music, AU$24 on video games, AU$53 on movies, and AU$8 on TV content.

In every market, the sometimes-infringer spends more. In the case of music and movies, the delta between the occasional infringer and the all-legal consumer is huge, much larger than the delta between the all-legal and all-infringement consumers. Video games and television don't show the same delta, but even in those arenas the occasional infringers spent more than the saint. Why? How?

Well, because the occasional infringer infringes because they're a fan, a fan perfectly happy to spend money on scarce goods where spending that money makes complete sense.

However, the survey also found that the majority of spending on music and movies was not on the content items themselves.

"For both music and movies, the majority of the average spend was not from purchases of either digital or physical copies. In the case of music, this primarily consisted of concerts and gigs, and in the case of movies, this primarily consisted of going to the cinema," it said.

And since the advents of the VHS and cassette tapes, that's always been the case. Theaters are about experience and live music for great acts will always be in demand, even if bootleg tapes and pirated DVDs are in hefty supply, which they are. For the content itself, the survey respondents essentially indicated that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

A majority of survey respondents said that they would pay for a music subscription service that charged AU$5 per month, and AU$10 per month for a movie subscription service. Only 5 percent of respondents said that nothing would make them stop consuming copyright-infringing content.

In other words, the "everyone just wants everything for free" line the entertainment industries have been pimping for decades is bunk. Instead, the overwhelming majority of customers and potential customers want content on-demand at prices that make sense, in which case they're perfectly willing to fork over the money. And even when they feel the price doesn't make sense, they're still willing to fork over money for things they do value as fans -- even though they may have become fans through pirated content. Either way, the industries win. It's just a matter of how much they want to win. Hint: crying over infringers who spend the most money isn't the optimal response.

Frustratingly, this government study was released roughly a month after Australia passed its version of SOPA, largely at the behest of industry lobbyists armed to the teeth with industry numbers showing industry losses at the hands of these same dastardly pirates who are spending so much money on their products. It sure would have been nice if the government had managed to have access to their own data before passing such draconian legislation, rather than relying on the historically unreliable data from the entertainment industry.

Filed Under: australia, copyright, infringement, research, sopa, spending

Senator Wants To Know Why The US Marshals Asset Forfeiture Division Is Blowing Money On $10,000 Tables

from the converting-expensive-things-into-money-to-spend-on-expensive-things dept

Asset forfeiture -- both at state and national levels -- is receiving some intense scrutiny, thanks to unflattering coverage in major news outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post. Attorney General Eric Holder made some minor cuts to the DOJ's participation in states' forfeiture programs. Meanwhile, at the state level, legislators have introduced bills targeting these programs' perverted incentives -- namely, that the agency performing the asset seizure usually benefits directly from the "forfeited" wealth.

It hasn't always been successful. Wyoming legislators were shot down by the governor -- a former prosecutor -- who explained that asset forfeiture is "good" and "right" -- something it rarely is in practice. Washington DC's city council managed to push its reform bill through, placing more constraints on seizures and raising the evidentiary standard needed to declare other people's assets "guilty."

Back at the national level, Sen. Chuck Grassley is raising some pointed questions about the US Marshals' use of asset forfeiture funds. He sent two letters to the agency recently, the first of which questioned its hiring practices.

Grassley said a whistleblower claimed that Kimberly Beal, then the deputy assistant director of the AFD, had qualification requirements waived to hire a person for a high-paying contract who was recommended by Stacia Hylton, the director of the Marshals Service. According to the whistleblower, Beal did so while under consideration for her current position of assistant director, raising suspicions that the hiring was a quid pro quo arrangement.

“This quid pro quo exchange of favors, if true, would raise serious doubts about the operational practices of the USMS AFD under Ms. Beal as well as, frankly, Ms. Hylton’s leadership of the USMS,” Grassley’s office said in the letter.

The second letter questions the Marshals Service's appetite for office luxuries.

1. Regarding AFD offices at Crystal Mall 4, please answer the following questions:

a. Did AFD purchase a conference table that exceeded $10,000 in cost? If so, what was the cost and why was a less expensive table not considered?
b. Did AFD replace window treatments already provided for in the office lease with expensive custom window treatments? If so, why and what was the cost?
c. Did AFD install custom wallpaper, artwork, crown moldings, and chair rails in its offices? If so, why and at what cost for each of these installations?
d. Does AFD intend to expend similar amounts to decorate and furnish new office space it anticipates moving into in the near future? What will happen to the furnishings and decorations after AFD moves out?

That's the most eyegrabbing part of Grassley's letter but the rest asks similar -- if less dramatic -- questions about the agency's spending habits.

The US Marshals Service doesn't necessarily have a long history of asset forfeiture abuse, but it has previously been called out by the DOJ's Inspector General for being less than accurate with its bookkeeping.

In at least eight of the 55 cases taken up by the asset team between 2005 and 2010, the purchaser or the price of the asset was not recorded. On top of that, the team failed to perform sufficient market research to properly value the assets it was eyeing; for some of them, it couldn’t even provide the OIG with bank statements and other basic documentation.

More damning was the OIG's discovery of a huge conflict of interest. Another whistleblower uncovered lead asset forfeiture official Leonard Briskman's extremely fortuitous moonlighting gig. Briskman, who appraised assets for the US Marshals Service, ran his own private appraisal business on the side.

The inspector general reported that in several instances, Briskman valued and sold the same asset himself without supervision by anyone in the marshal’s office. In addition, he failed to publicly announce the sale of some assets, which limited their availability to the general public. In one case, an assistant U.S. Attorney from the Southern District of New York objected to a decision by Briskman to sell assets that had been seized during the Bernard Madoff case–more than one million shares of a pet prescription firm and a 5 percent stake in another investment portfolio–without announcing the sale.

The US Marshals Service doesn't need to dirty its hands by performing seizures. All it has to do is sit there and wait for assets from equitable sharing programs to roll in. And roll in they do, thanks to local law enforcement agencies partnering up with the DOJ to avoid state laws put in place to limit the sort of abuse that is all too frequent when cops are given the authority to declare money, vehicles and other property guilty on the spot.

As would befit any government agency spending other people's money and divesting itself of other people's property, the US Marshals Service buys $10,000 tables and does little to ensure its auctioned items return something close to market value. Because of its lax accounting and questionable appraisals, money from sales went AWOL and what it did receive from auctions was likely less than it would have obtained with a bit more diligence and competence.

Whether Grassley will receive any answers to his questions remains to be seen, but the recent history of the US Marshals Service doesn't indicate it's an agency enthralled with concepts like fiscal responsibility and public accountability. If the agency is blowing seized funds on pricey tables and custom window treatments, it's going to take more than a couple of angry letters to change its "Spend it like you seized it!" culture.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, spending, us marshals

IRS Audited Over Inappropriate Spending, Claims It Can't Find Its Receipts

from the off-with-their-heads dept

Just a guess, but it probably sucks to be the IRS right now. Between reports about them snooping on people's emails and their targeting of conservative groups, it's quite easy to paint them as a big, evil bureaucracy. Actually, it was pretty easy to do so before all that. You can generally rely on the hatred of the people for a group that requires meticulous spending records and then collects taxes. Big, bad, evil. What could be worse?

Well, how about hypocritical? That sure seems like an apt word in light of reports on how flighty the IRS was with tax-payer money for their own comforts.

The conference spending included $4 million for an August 2010 gathering in Anaheim, Calif., for which the agency did not negotiate lower room rates, even though that is standard government practice, according to a statement by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Instead, some of the 2,600 attendees received benefits, including baseball tickets and stays in presidential suites that normally cost $1,500 to $3,500 per night. In addition, 15 outside speakers were paid a total of $135,000 in fees, with one paid $17,000 to talk about "leadership through art," the House committee said.

Infuriating, right? The bald-faced audacity of the organization that collects our taxes using some of that tax money to go to baseball games has the air of outright thievery. Fortunately, thanks to the investigation by the Treasury Department, we now have a full and accurate account of the awful IRS spending, right?

No, we damn well don't, because the IRS -- and I stress this, the IRS -- is claiming it can't find its own receipts, so the spending may well have been even worse.

Hypocrisy, thy name is now an acronym, and that acronym is IRS. This is the type of thing that keeps pitchfork and torch manufacturers in business. In fact, were it not for the undeniably smooth face and impossibly perfect coiffure of Anderson Cooper getting me through this, I might just be leading the mob.

Filed Under: hypocrisy, irs, receipts, spending

Leaked Documents Show How The RIAA Plans To Spend The Limewire Settlement

from the it's-not-75-trillion-but-it's-a-start dept

The RIAA believes it is on the cusp of victory in its lawsuit against Limewire, thanks mainly to its large selection of damaging charts. However, it seems to be expecting the worst, if these leaked documents are any indication. All evidence below indicates that the RIAA will be willing to settle for only $15 billion (out of a possible $55 billion). Not only that, but it already has plans in place for the dispersal of the Limewire settlement.

Explanatory Notes

First and foremost, the legal war chest must be refilled. It never sleeps and it is always hungry. Copyright won't protect itself and every battle to secure these rights has become long, uphill and against the wind.

A $15 billion payout doesn't come around every day and our executives are justly entitled to a large chunk of that ($3.15 bil.). As an added bonus (to the bonuses), all executives will be treated to a celebratory blimp ride ($2.25 bil.). This dollar amount seems high until you consider that each executive will be requiring their own blimp. Previously, the executives had shared one blimp, but in the post-Napster environment, "sharing" is obviously no longer a legal option.

Other line items include the ongoing efforts in Washington to impose the RIAA's will on the internet, research and development and the opaquely-named "Other Expenditures."

 

(1) Other Expenditures
Having run the "Stealing a Song = Stealing a Car" analogy into the ground, we need a new "go to" catchphrase. Hence, $1.05 billion should be earmarked for development of a new anti-piracy metaphor. Suggestions include:

• Stealing a song is like stealing a yacht.
• You wouldn't steal popcorn, would you?
• There's no such thing as a free lunch, free song or an infinite good.
• File sharing is as un-American as immigration, outsourcing and opium production.
• You wouldn't steal a blimp, would you?
• Stealing a song is like kidnapping an artist's children and is punishable by a sentence of 25 years to life.

Other incidental expenditures include a much-needed re-upholstering of the executive suites and a celebratory hot tub full of money to splash around in with various members of the escort community, each of whom will be paid in full for their services, including any fees due for public performance.

 

(2) Research and Development
A lion's share of the payout will go towards the ongoing development of a time machine/wormhole to 1991 ($450 million). Many recent efforts have come close but the RIAA has yet to reach the pre-Napster days and develop a parallel timeline in which CD sales increase forever. On the plus side, it did manage to get our mom to hook up with our dad, thus ensuring our continued existence.

Other products/services on the way:

• A computer-unfriendly music delivery system, much needed in this time of digital theft. Wax cylinders have been discussed as well as a partnership with RealPlayer, whose clumsy, bug-ridden software would likely prevent music from being enjoyed on a wide variety of operating systems.
• "Lost Sales" calculation improvements, which should allow the RIAA to seek even larger damages from various file sharing services. It is hoped that we will finally reach the trillion dollar mark within the next decade. In addition, breakthroughs should also be sought in the "Shocking Graph" field, what with the recent success of the "Napster Ruined Everything" line graphs.
• A partnership with the developers of The Club to prevent music from being stolen. A possible route would be some sort of clamp that could be tightened around an ethernet cable to prevent uploading. In other words, not so much "throttling" as "strangling."
• Domain seizure technology, via the RIAA's partnership with ICE, which has already proven its ability to take thousands of sites offline despite lack of evidence or proper investigative techniques. On the front burner: cooperating with ICE's takedown of many large pharmaceutical companies who continue to make themselves rich off various anti-seizure remedies, including the weirdly-named Antivan and Dilantin.

Royalty Payments

Royalty disbursements, as expected, will be delivered in a "top down" fashion. Those artists with the most sales will receive a disproportionately large share of the proceeds. After the "Big 3" are taken care of (and a chunk of money thrown towards Paul McGuiness in hopes that some of it lands in his mouth), the remaining funds will be dispersed to yet more lawyers and an appreciable amount ($300,000 ) put towards the ongoing health of Jon Bon Jovi's remaining hair. It is hoped that he will be able to put off his eventual "Trump Hair" for another 7-10 years, thus ensuring his continued success in the field of "fairly attractive frontmen." See footnotes for royalty dispersals.

*Charting Artists

$300,000 will be divided evenly among those artists currently in the Top 40 at the point of dispersal. If said artist happen to include any of the "Big 3," well, I suppose the rest of you should just write better hits, right? There's no crying in the music industry, especially if you're unrecouped.

*Non-Charting Artists

The remainder of the RIAA's roster will split $150,000. To qualify for payment, bands/musicians must have a viable Wikipedia page (stubs and pages slated for deletion do not count) and a web presence that includes more than just a long-abandoned MySpace page. (Try Facebook.)

Filed Under: leaks, satire, settlement, spending
Companies: limewire, riaa

What Does Radical Transparency In Government Look Like?

from the well,-this-is-a-start dept

We've certainly complained when the new administration has failed to live up to its "transparency" promises, but the hiring of Vivek Kundra as federal CIO and Aneesh Chopra as federal CTO has put two real believers in transparency and openness in charge of the technology side of our federal government... and we're starting to see the very first results of that. It's still early, but it's actually quite impressive how much Kindra has accomplished in a very short time. Tim O'Reilly details the new federal IT spending dashboards that can be found at USASpending.gov, and it's really impressive for a gov't project put together in an incredibly short period of time. It actually shows each (participating) departments' projects, including goals and how close they are to meeting those goals. Real accountability? In government? Wow. The whole thing is built in drupal and data feeds are open to the public, so others can take the data on build on it. While it may be a small thing at this point, it's a huge step directionally in showing a commitment to more openness and transparency.

Filed Under: data, government, radical transparency, spending, transparency, vivek kundra