Insanely busy last few days.

Tons to blog, but must sleeeep...

If you're wondering what I've been doing, there's traces here, here, here, here and here.

"Amazon.ca -- same great features, better country." Great quote; teriffic bloke.

About bloody time, Jeff - thanks for finding a way to make this work.

Er..."National"...er... "Public"...er...

This is clearly the creme de la clueless.

As remarked on here, here, here and almost everyelsewhere.

But could it also be considered actually unconstitutional or illegal?

Time for an excerpt from the 2600 case again:

“Hyperlinks are the very core of the Web, and an integral part of online dialogue...As such, hyperlinks are expression that demands the full range of First Amendment protection.”

NPR - bringing Wanker Management to the web.

Priceless

WARNING: Clicking on this link may cause hot coffee to shoot out your nose with great force.

Everybody knows...we like donkeys.

Think I just ruptured something...

They’re at it again

I understood and fully supported the anger and outrage over CARP and the DMCA in the U.S.

Yet, if I’m honest, I should confess that it was hard for me to get quite as animated as perhaps I should have in my contempt for these two corrupt, ill-conceived initiatives, given that the government involved was that shambling consortium of praetorian halfwits known as the United States congress.

In other words, like crashing in a rented Lincoln, all the damage was happening somewhere “out there” at the furthest edge of my attention with little direct and immediate impact on me personally.

Now, however, this particular venal disease seems to have spread north of the 49th and re-infected a uniquely Canadian collection of bumbling nits.

And it’s not just venal singular, but venal squared, I’m afraid:

Venal Disease #1:

Apparently oblivious to the colossal public outcry in the U.S. that ultimately led to CARP’s humiliating rout – SOCAN (the Canadian music industry analog of the U.S.'s RIAA) is attempting to pass Tariff 22 into law for 2003.

SOCAN (the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada) has been lobbying away with Tariff 22 since 1996. SOCAN currently administers all kinds of tariffs for the performance or communication of copyrighted music. Existing tariffs cover TV, radio, bars, clubs, dancing schools – anywhere their button men can reach. Tariff 22 sets its sights on the Internet as a means of transmission.

The Canadian Copyright Board, smartly, threw a spanner in their plans the last time they tried this one back in 1999. In a refreshing and almost unprecedented outbreak of government sanity, the Board’s negative response to SOCAN’s proposal was notable for a number of reasons...

I’m certainly not a lawyer, and I’ll freely confess that both the weasel-wordiness of SOCAN’s proposal and the comparatively plain English response from the Copyright Board, have my head spinning within a few pages.

But here’s a good indicator of which organization appears to have a more clueful view:

SOCAN wants to make people pay for using the Internet as a music distribution service, effectively killing non-profit Internet-only radio stations by forcing them to pay tariffs for the music they promote (often, incidentally, music from unsigned, unheard-of artists with little hope of ever seeing any of the money SOCAN collects “on their behalf”).

Key concept here: the Internet.

SOCAN’s submission, the snappily-titled “Statement of Proposed Royalties to Be Collected by SOCAN for the Public Performance or the Communication to the Public by Telecommunication, in Canada, of Musical or Dramatico-Musical Works for the Year 2003” manages to avoid using the word “Internet” even once in its entire 35 pages.

The Copyright Board of Canada, on the other hand, in their 64-page decision document, lead off with the fact of the Internet in the title of section 1A, page 3. They go on to intelligently dissect the game-changing nature of the Internet phenomenon at considerable length, using the “I word” well in excess of 100 times before they’re done.

It’s almost as if SOCAN couldn’t bring themselves to utter the beastly word and the Board are gleefully rubbing their faces in it.

So SOCAN got squished the last time out, but they’ve not given up.

They’re trying again for 2003 – this time aiming to ride the paranoid waves of misinformation arising from the Napster, Morpheus, Gnutella and Kazaa stories - and hoping to slide Tariff 22 in under the radar.

Here’s the pertinent weasel-idge in full, just to set your teeth on edge:

“For a licence to communicate to the public by telecommunication, in Canada, musical works forming part of SOCAN’s repertoire, by a telecommunications service to subscribers by means of one or more computer(s) or other device that is connected to a telecommunications network where the transmission of those works can be accessed by each subscriber independently of any other person having access to the service, the licensee shall pay a monthly fee calculated as follows:

(a) in the case of those telecommunications services that do not earn revenue from advertisements on the service, $0.25 per subscriber.
(b) in the case of those telecommunications services that earn revenue from advertisements on the service, 10 per cent of gross revenues, with a minimum fee of $0.25 per subscriber.

“Telecommunications service” includes a service known as a computer on-line service, an electronic bulletin board service (BBS), a Web site, a network server or a service provider or similar operation that provides for or authorizes the digital encoding, random access and/or storage of musical works or portions of musical works in a digitally encoded form for the transmission of those musical works in digital form via a telecommunications network or that provides access to such a telecommunications network to a subscriber’s computer or other device that allows the transmission of material to be accessed by each subscriber independently of any other person having access to the service. “Telecommunications service” shall not include a “music supplier” covered under Tariff 16 or a “transmitter” covered under Tariff 17.

“Subscriber” means a person who accesses or is contractually entitled to access the service or content provided by the telecommunication service in a given month.”

That’s you and me they’re talking about, you know. We're all mere subscribers in the minds of SOCAN.

So can it. If public outcry in the U.S. can kill CARP, then SOCAN WE.

James O’Brien, station manager of RantRadio one of the longest-established Internet radio stations, is rallying support to fight Tariff 22 at his site, here.

Here’s his call to action:

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP STOP TARIFF 22:

1) Write to Claude Majeau (Secretary General of the Canadian Copyright Bureau) and let your (well thought out and non-threatening) opinion be heard. If you can snailmail a letter, all the better, if not, please e-mail Claude at least and help keep RantRadio free for everybody!

2) Use this banner to spread the word and link to James' site at: http://www.rantradio.com/tariff22.php3



3) Post this story to all the online news publications you know of to spread the word of what's happening.

We have until July 10, 2002 to make our response heard on this issue.

Contact info for Claude Majeau:
CLAUDE MAJEAU
Secretary General
56 Sparks Street, Suite 800
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0C9
(613) 952-8621 (Telephone)
(613) 952-8630 (Facsimile)
majeau.claude@cb-cda.gc.ca

There’s also a short, easily-digested summary of the issues from Jason Young posted at the excellent flora.org site, here.

Which brings me on to...

Venal Disease #2:

Flora.org is also one of the places to go for information about the Canadian government’s plans to reform copyright legislation and introduce DMCA-like provisions in support of content protection technologies.

There’s a superb commentary and response to these plans from Roaring Penguin’s David Skoll here.

Also, Rachel Ross at the Toronto Star did her usual excellent job of carving through the weaselry, back in September of last year.

The relevant Government of Canada site is here.

Perhaps the best commentary on this complex tangle, however, is from the talented and insightful Jason Young, again. In this paper he manages to inform, entertain, and persuade with considerable grace. Here’s just a tiny part of his cogent and well-researched analysis:

“Our transactions in cyberspace -- commercial and otherwise -- are mediated more by private code than public law or by public laws giving legal force to private law. If copyright is a bargain -- a relationship between equal stakeholders -- then the subsuming of accountability in the relationship is a betrayal of that relationship. When individuals feel betrayed in relationships, they often begin to act outside of them; we see this manifesting in the widespread piracy on the Internet.”

But don’t hang around here expecting more in this vein. I’ve kept you long enough.

Get yerself off to Jason’s site and study the rest of his paper.

Then head over to Flora.org’s DMCA Opponents forum for all the latest on beating this bogus bill before it gets passed into law.

Don’t let it happen here.

IRCsome

Even if you've never spent much time on IRC, there's still lots to enjoy in this database of quotes pulled out of the chat channels.

My personal favourite has to be quote #6068:

<GaeMan> Chia: Be nice to CAgurl today.
<chirpet> I am always nice to CAgurl. I resent the implication.
<chirpet> I am nice to everyone.
<chirpet> Always.
<chirpet> So shut up.
<chirpet> pigfucker.

Monday:

Still not much attention, other than some rattling of the blogwires, for this spectacular piece of PwC tomfoolery.

Their rebranding announcement was so badly flubbed, perhaps I shouldn't be too surprised to see how little attention it's received. Yet I find it strange that there's been such a shocking lack of scorn and derision heaped on this one. Where have all the cynics gone?

“Monday, a day like no other
Monday, was their last day”
The Living End - Monday

Some entertaining comments running on Plastic, including one wag who suggested: "I think they should have gone with something more pleasant, like "Migraine", or "Projectile Vomitting".

“Every other day (every other day)
Every other day of the week is fine... yeah
But whenever Monday comes...”
The Momas & The Papas - Monday Monday

There’s just so much stupidity to pick on in this.

For example, the caption they’ve thoughtfully supplied to accompany the grinning idiot face-like-a-smacked-arse CEO photo opp on their website, is a tasty 29 words long. 29 words for a mere caption seems a heckuva lot.

But worse than this is the fact that the caption is supplied as a 22KB PDF with 104 words of completely superfluous other crap, including the redundant but inevitable corporate boilerplate. That’s a noise to signal ratio of more than 3:1

How many people are really going to feel rewarded after opening up this hefty file, to find out that the useful content is approximately zero.

[On which note – opening a non-PwC related bracket here for a second – does anyone really think this practice of posting news releases online as PDFs is a remotely good idea? It seems to be an increasingly popular approach, but not one I can make any kind of sense out of.

Anything that makes your news harder to access and harder to read should be considered a dumb move, right?

I love Acrobat – it’s a terrific invention, a fine product, beautifully implemented. But that doesn’t mean it should be used for everything.

The whole point of a news release, presumably, is that you want people to find and read it – right? Locking every news release inside a PDF file makes the information less useable, less accessible and less easy to find. If there’s any good reason for forcing interested media and other audiences to jump through hoops just to read your news, I’m missing it.

Let’s look at the search box on PwC’s site, for example. On April 10th of this year, PwC announced a brand new solution for the insurance industry christened the “iFS Solution”. If you’re in the insurance business, it would be reasonable for PwC’s sales people to expect you might be interested in this thing.

Unfortunately, the only information available about the iFS Solution on the PwC website is embedded in the original news release.

You’re a big insurance company CIO. Someone’s told you about iFS. Sounds cool. You got to the PwC web site and search for “iFS Solution”. You won’t find dick.

Reason – it’s buried in a PDF. (Google, of course, can and has indexed the PDF – so you can still find the info in other ways, but that’s not the point).

Wottabunchofarse.]

Ahem. Where was I?

“Tortured winds that blew me over
When I start to think that I'm something special
They tell me that I'm not
And they're right and I'm glad and I'm not”
The Jam - Monday

Oh yes, Monday. There's all this crap in PwC's positioning statements about how "it's a real word." You can almost hear the implied "at least" in that statement. "At least it's a real word, not like Accenture". Well, yeah. But then that doesn't make it any less stupid. Bollocks is a real word too - but you wouldn't rebrand your company that, would you? Actually, that's not such a bad idea...

“Oh Monday morning, the cracks become quite clear”
The Church - Monday Morning

The creative for this whole thing really sucks bums too. It's evident they're trying hard to look like a Microsoft ad campaign, for some unaccountable reason. But some of the attempts at punchy zesty copy end up just bloody silly.

For example: "SHARPEN YOUR PENCIL. IRON YOUR CRISPY WHITE SHIRTS" Er... Laundered and starched white shirts could indeed be crisp - but "crispy"?! Carr’s water biscuits are crispy. Doughnuts might be krispy. White shirts should be crisp.

There’s some good commentary from James M. Capozzola of the Rittenhouse Review (justly famous for having the longest list o’ links in the known universe).

Although I find myself taking exception to one particular point of snark in his excellent analysis. He ends his commentary with this entertaining little snippet:

PwC Consulting spokeswoman Sehra Eusufzai could not comment on how the company came up with “Monday,” CNNfn reports. “Our brand positioning indicates real people, real business and real experience,” Eusufzai told the cable news network. “That's a central part of what we see this name standing for. Secondly [sic], with any new name introduction, there's bound to be a wide range of reactions, and over time it will come to mean what people want it to mean.”

But then goes on to say:

Oh, we get it now. Let the customer decide what the firm stands for. That’s one helluva way to run a business.

Well, actually – yes it is. In fact, if you think you can run a business any other way you need your noggin twisted. The PwC spokesperson is clearly unprepared, clearly inadequate – but of course the customer’s going to figure out what they think the firm’s new name stands for. That’s the way this stuff works. Throwing $110 million at Wolff Olins to rebrand your company gets you a new name and a new look. But people will still figure out for themselves what they think of you.

You can and should work hard to influence it, but “Positioning” is something you receive, not something you achieve. Corporate reputation – the public perception of what the company stands for – is a gift. It’s something the market will give to you in return for the way you behave. Act like Enron, you’ll be treated like Enron. It was ever thus.

“And I still find it so hard
To say what I need to say”
New Order - Blue Monday

BTW, a few observant punters have kindly pointed out that the actual trademarked name being adopted is “Monday:”

That is - Monday Colon.

Hmm... "Monday Colon". Sounds like the condition you'd suffer after a heavy ale and curry weekend.

Monday Colon – the bumpipe of the global consulting world.

Monday Colon – a crappy start to your week.

"Now, now that you're free, what are you going to be?
And who are you going to see?
And where, where will you go and how will you know
You didn't get it all wrong?
Is this the light of a new day dawning?
A future bright that you can walk in?
No it's just another Monday morning."
Pulp - Monday Morning

Happy Monday

In a quite spectacular feat of fumbled communications, PwC Consulting has kindasorta announced their imminent rebranding as “Monday”.

(Yes, that’s right – “Monday”. They’re calling themselves “Monday”.)

I can only call it a kindasorta announcement for a couple of reasons:

1. They’re not announcing it as a fait accompli – the nastily-worded news release is full of future subjunctive “watch this space” stuff: “Monday will be its new name...” “...it will have meaning and stand for something”.

Great example of the half pregnant launch.

2. Hardly anyone has noticed. This thing has had minimal pickup, hardly registering on radar at all with most of the major dailies and news networks.

Not too surprising, of course. They slipped the release out at 9:00 on Sunday morning. Presumably hoping to springboard off the whole cutesy symmetry thing – trying to get coverage of “Monday” in all the Monday editions.

Didn’t work, of course. Duh-uh. Tiny piece in the WSJ – square root of bugger all anywhere else.

Who the hell is going to pick up such a soft news item for the business pages on a Monday? How many of the business and marketing journalists they’d want to cover this thing are likely to be receptive to a pitch on a Sunday afternoon?

Sheesh. They’re rumoured to be spending more than US$100 million on this. $100 million to follow in the footsteps of Accenture, Zenica, Consignia and numerous other ugly, unnecessary, reputation-squandering rebranding exercises.

Surely $100 million could have bought them some half decent PR advice? Like, er, don’t bother issuing your news release at 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning, for example.

The announcement quotes their CEO saying: “Our new name -- Monday -- is exactly what we want it to be as we create our new business: a real word.”

Indeed. Unfortunately, they’re arrogantly ignoring the fact that it’s a real word with a really unambiguous meaning and resonance for billions of English-speakers worldwide. It means Monday.

The release says: “it will have meaning and stand for something: real people, real experience, real business…and that means real results.”

No...it means Monday. The word Monday means Monday. This is this.

The ads running in support of the launch tell us it means “fresh thinking, doughnuts, hot coffee.”

Monday. It. Means. Monday. Start of the working week. Monday.

Co-opting such a common word leads to some really uncomfortable sentence construction. The WSJ, for example, says: “PwC Consulting will change its name to Monday when it completes its separation from accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP”.

Had to read that twice before I figured out that the “to” was clearly a typo. Surely, I thought, it should be: “PwC Consulting will change its name Monday when...”

But no. They really are doing this ghastly thing. Changing their name to Monday.

So if they’re now going to own the day formerly known as Monday, maybe Monday itself needs to rebrand. Perhaps it’s time to overturn the Emperor Constantine’s fine work and rename Monday to something else.

“PwCday” is one option, but doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. “Pwuckday” – ugh.

Hmm.... well, they are a consulting firm, aren’t they? So if they’re stealing the meaning of our week day, let’s steal some of their meaning in return.

Henceforth and forthwith, I propose that the first day of the working week should be known as “Consultingday”. Or, to make it even easier: “Conday”

Next up: Spades Rebranded -- calling a shovel a shovel.