We heard rumors of this a couple weeks ago from people involved in some of the six strikes program at various ISPs, but the six strikes effort, already delayed from its original planned starting date of July until around now, has been pushed back again until "the early part of 2013." The Center for Copyright Information, which is administering the program, claims that it's due to "unexpected factors largely stemming from Hurricane Sandy," but we've heard that's mainly an excuse for some other problems that meant the plan was simply not ready for prime time. Either way, the program will certainly begin at some point... at which point ISPs and the entertainment industry will proceed to piss off some of their best customers for no good reason. Can't see how that's going to increase sales, but I guess all of those MPAA lawyers who have "anti-piracy" in their titles have to feel like they're contributing something to justify their salaries.

A few weeks back, we noted that a court had ordered the TSA to explain why it had failed to obey the court's earlier order that, while the nudie scanners being used in airports were legal, the TSA was required to hold public hearings on the purchase and use of the machines. Yet no such hearings have happened. The TSA has now responded and essentially said that since there's no deadline on when the court told them to hold a hearing, there's no problem. Basically "we can hold a hearing whenever we get around to it."

It also blames the fact that there had been "significant personnel losses" in the group of folks responsible for obeying the order, but insisted that everyone else in that group was really (really!) focused on obeying the order, and they'd get around to it at some point. Really. They promise.

Petitioner offers no basis whatsoever for its assertion that TSA has delayed in implementing this Court’s mandate. On the contrary, as the Sammon Declaration demonstrates, TSA has been keenly aware of the importance of implementing the Court’s directive, and has given high priority to the AIT rulemaking. Despite “significant personnel losses” in the group of economists within TSA charged with completing the regulatory analysis... the agency began on the heels of the Court’s ruling the process of preparing the documents necessary for notice-andcomment rulemaking, and has devoted almost all of the staff available to conduct the required economic analysis to its expedited completion, even going so far as to hire contract consultants to accelerate its completion despite unforeseen personnel losses

Later, it claims:

In sum, there has been no "waiting" and no "delay."

Other than the fact that we're still waiting, you mean?

Given all of the mistakes made by both US and New Zealand officials in the raid on Kim Dotcom and Megaupload, there are a series of appeals going on in the case in New Zealand concerning some of the evidence as well as what information Dotcom is allowed to see. While the extradition hearing was set to occur next month, it's now been pushed back until at least March 2013 and could get extended longer. The idea is to give some time to let the appeals process run its course.

Dotcom seems pretty pissed off about this, as every moment of delay means more time during which his business has been shut down without a single adversarial hearing -- and during which it can't be re-established. For pretty obvious reasons, this is immensely troubling. There was no reason why Megaupload couldn't have been brought to court under a normal civil lawsuit process, like so many other companies over the years -- including Napster, Morpheus, Grokster, Aimster, Veoh, YouTube and others. After the judge was able to hear both sides, they would have been able to determine if an injunction (and eventually, a complete shutdown) made sense or not. Megaupload didn't have that luxury. Instead, the US government simply decided to shut them down on what increasingly appears to be extraordinarily weak evidence. And as the legal process draws out, that business is gone.

What happens if the entire case falls apart? The US government then will have destroyed what turned out to be a legitimate business on no basis. This way, Hollywood gets to be happy, because the US government took out (at its own expense) a service they hated (but which many artists loved). That doesn't seem right at all.

It looks like the internet uprising really is having an impact. Senator Ben Cardin -- a co-sponsor of PIPA -- has put out a press release saying that he won't vote for the bill as written today, after hearing from many constituents. Oddly, he says he will remain a co-sponsor of the bill, but wants to amend the bill to take into account the concerns he's hearing.

Similarly, six other Senators, including two co-sponsors -- Senators Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley (the two co-sponsors) along with John Cornyn, Jeff Sessions, Mike Lee and Tom Coburn -- have asked Harry Reid not to bring the cloture vote he's promised to bring on the 24th. In other words, as many of us have been asking: don't rush this. This is huge news. With Senators -- including three co-sponsors -- coming out so forcefully to Harry Reid that this bill needs more time, Reid is much more likely to delay the cloture vote, and to leave PIPA aside for other business for the time being. Either way, the letter (embedded below) makes it clear that more debate on the issues in the bill were promised and never held. And, they note, that they're hearing more and more and more about the problems in the bill, and believe they should be discussed openly, before anyone is voting on cloture or on the bill itself.

All of this, by the way, is because tons of you (tons!) have stepped up and reached out to your Reps. and Senators and let them know that these bills are unacceptable. Let's see if Harry Reid, Patrick Leahy and Lamar Smith finally admit that they, too, can hear you.

Update: Harry Reid apparently cannot hear you. He has come out with a statement saying that the cloture vote will continue on January 24th, despite the concerns of so many Senators (even co-sponsors of the bill) because it's "too important to delay." No. He's wrong. What's too important to delay is a real careful look at the impact of such a bill.

Update 2: More and more Senators appear to be distancing themselves from the bill. The latest is Senator Pat Toomey who makes it clear he does not like any bill that involves the government being able to order blocks of links to certain websites -- something he calls "pretty disturbing."

Rick Falkvinge has posted a thought-provoking piece that analogizes the patent system to various forms of web caching and their impact on discussions. As he notes, in online discussion forums and blogs, if there's a delay from when your comment is made to when it appears, the conversations tend to be slower and less involved. It gets really bad when all comments need to be moderated and that's because you don't get that immediate fulfillment. Honestly, one of the reasons why I think Twitter took off at the level it did was because it felt so realtime (and became more so over time).

And yet, the patent system is quite different. The whole basis is that you have to delay things.

You can observe the same phenomenon on moderated blogs, but on a much tougher scale. There, it can take hours for people to be able to build on and improve upon ideas, as the bottleneck is that much thinner. If somebody needs to manually approve a comment in a particular location, that’s basically a guarantee that there will not be a meaningful improvement of ideas in that location.

Now, imagine a twenty-year web cache server. If you come up with a good idea, people won’t be able to improve on your ideas and take them to the next level for twenty years. Another twenty for a total of forty years before you could respond in turn. You suffer. They suffer. The exchange of ideas as a whole doesn’t just suffer, it crawls to a near-stop, its velocity measurable only by laser precision measurements.

If five minutes of wait time kills the rate of ideas as much as it really and actually does in all our experience, what would a timescale of decades do?

The obvious retort is that innovation is different than a discussion. But, that's not really true. So many studies on innovation have shown that it's an ongoing process and that a big part of that process is often communication with others (not even directly about the innovation at hand) to replenish ideas and to keep things fresh and moving forward. It actually has many characteristics of a discussion.

So, with that in mind, Falkvinge's point is even stronger than you might think. He goes beyond just arguing that innovation is slowed down for the twenty year patent delay, to basically say that innovation is stifled to a much greater degree, because the necessary participation, experimentation and idea generation by others is so stifled, that they don't even take part.

The years long (and, at times, totally contradictory) fight over .xxx shows no signs of letting up, even though ICANN has approved the TLD, despite protests from various countries. Apparently European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, specifically stepped in and asked the US government to delay the implementation of .xxx so that the EU could prepare a way to try to stop the TLD. Thankfully, the White House told Kroes that, even if it doesn't agree with the decision to move forward on .xxx, ICANN is supposed to be independent and stepping in and going against the organization could do more harm than good.

Of course, part of what's amusing is that part of Kroes' reasoning for asking the US to step in is that so many others have been trying to get the management of the domain system moved out of ICANN and into a UN body, in part because they don't trust ICANN being under the control of the US government. She argues that ICANN's decision to go through with .xxx only gives more fodder to those who wish to get rid of ICANN. Of course, couldn't the same be true if the US stepped in and asserted its power to block ICANN? If anything, it seems like that would lead others to scream even louder about how ICANN is a sham and it's all really run by the US government.

Is Rupert Murdoch flip-flopping on paywalls again? Way back when (i.e., two years ago) Murdoch was a big believer in the idea that news should be free online, and that he could more than make it up with other business models. But, then, earlier this year, he did a complete flip-flop, declaring that all his publications would put up paywalls, saying that free content is bad, and accusing aggregators and search engines of "stealing" content. Some speculated that it was all a ploy to get others to put up paywalls. Though, others just think Murdoch's getting a little senile. Either way, it looks like he's stalling a bit. Jay Rosen points us to the news that Murdoch is "postponing" the date for when he wants his papers to have paywalls. It's not clear if the delay is due to technical difficulties in implementing a paywall, or if he's actually reconsidering. Either way, it doesn't look like the great big paywall is going up any time soon.

Tracy writes in to alert us to an attempt by a Milwaukee newspaper to get people to pay, specifically for investigative reporting, by publishing it in the paper a week before it goes online for free and by offering it online only to paying subscribers:

Investigative reporting is the most expensive form of journalism produced by the Journal Sentinel newsroom. Because of the expense and resources it requires, we are giving our print and e-edition subscribers exclusive access to the Preacher's Mob series. We will be doing this on a regular basis with certain enterprise stories and investigations. Online readers will be able to see the full story later this week. For now, all readers can read this summary version below or click on several interactive and multimedia features, including a mini-documentary that contains jailhouse interviews, audio files of secret recordings of Michael Lock by a law enforcement informant, and an interactive map of key dates and places in the world of Michael Lock. With an e-edition subscription, you can read the full series as it unfolds over five days in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel starting May 17.

On the whole, I don't think this is as bad an idea as some others, but it's difficult to see how it'd be successful. If the details of a story are really that interesting, then any other news organization in the area has incentive to at least report on the high points for free online and get all the online traffic that the Journal Sentinel should have received. Also, the number of people who really think it's worth paying for a few investigative reports to get it a week before others get to see it seems like a very small audience. I'd imagine the lost online ad revenue from not drawing traffic to the website is a much bigger number than the incremental new subscribers who want to read the story at the Journal Sentinel.

As was widely expected, Congress voted last week to delay the switch-off of analog TV signals, sort of. It did move the hard deadline of February 17 until June 12, but it is also allowing TV stations to switch off their analog broadcasts any time before then, and many stations say they'll do so as soon as they can, beginning next week. Over a third of the nation's TV stations plan to move ahead with the switch, as planned, eager to shed the additional cost of broadcasting both in digital and in analog. So instead of a hard deadline, some stations will drop off of the analog air next week, others not until June, and others somewhere in between -- a situation that hardly seems easier to understand for the confused and lost among us that the delay was supposed to help. Furthermore, how does this sort of staggered transition help sort out the converter box coupon mess?

We were a bit surprised when the House rejected a plan unanimously approved by the Senate to delay the transition from analog to digital over the air TV broadcasting from February to June of this year. However, we knew it couldn't last. A little horse-trading and favor-promising and the new bill has won approval from both parts of Congress with Obama expected to sign it (wonder if he'll wait five days for comments?). The end result is that pretty much everyone loses -- other than some grandstanding politicians and the 12 or so people who haven't upgraded and who will upgrade between now and June. Everyone else -- including the folks who still won't be ready when June rolls around lost out here. It will slow down a variety of other important wireless offerings and increase confusion in a market where the February cut-off date was drilled into the minds of millions.