Sony has resorted to the tactics of virus writers to stop people from listening to music. Paris is burning with frustration from the bottom up, and the response from the top is “zero tolerance.” And we, the United States–without public approval, without accountability, without even visibility–have been literally putting our prisoners in the gulag.
Category: Injustice
When I was in fourth grade at St. Mark Elementary, a once-fine school now under the purview of fools, there was a pair of brothers a year or two older than me–both in the same grade. I don’t remember their names, which were pretty generic, like Joe and John or something. Also in their grade was a kid named Ricky, who pretty obviously had a learning disability.
Pretty much the only reason I remember these kids is that at lunch, most days, Joe and John would tease Ricky with essentially the same patter, day after day. I knew what they were doing was wrong, but I was very small and very timid, and anyway if I could hear what they were saying in that tiny lunchroom then so could the supervising adults.
The routine went something like this. Joe, the (much) larger brother, would lean over and mutter something in John’s ear. John, who did almost all the talking, would prod Ricky and ask him whether he liked a big’un.
Ricky would shake his head and laugh.
John would ask again, to see if Ricky was sure.
“Yeah,” Ricky would say, laughing harder. “Okay. Yeah. Yeah.”
Joe and John would laugh too. Sometimes John would turn and announce to the room that Ricky had confirmed his affection for a big’un.
John would continue the interview, asking Ricky to if he liked lamb fries.
Ricky, laughing louder and in exactly the same tone, would say “Yeah. Yeah. No. No I don’t.”
Ricky, John would repeat, do you like them lamb fries.
Ricky would laugh harder yet, the way people laugh when they think laughing is what they’re supposed to do. He would be laughing too hard to speak by now, so he’d just nod, up and down and up and down. Joe and John would exchange high fives.
I could tell by the tone of the participants that this was not a kind thing to do. I tried to imagine what big’uns and lamb fries could be; I came up with vague and unsettling and unhappy ideas. I didn’t understand the jokes, but I knew I would one day.
I’m twenty-four with Master’s degree and I have no idea what they were talking about.
Update 10.24.2005 1544 hrs: The Internet has informed me that lamb fries are fried lamb testicles, and that a big’un refers to, well, you can probably deduce that from context.
Thanks, the Internet.
NOT COOL. My mom is supposed to leave for London tomorrow. That is quite enough with the bombing.
Only two fatalities so far, but as of this morning there were still people trapped underground.
Update 1046 hrs: Thirty-three.
Update 1329 hrs: Thirty-seven.
On a less happy note, I had been wondering for a while why almost all of Rebecca Borgstrom’s protagonists are brave children in great danger. I suppose her column today is an answer of sorts.
Argh. Unbelievable.
KENTUCKY.
Bus Ride Epiphany
Thinking about the Zappa quote from Leonard and the yesterday’s brilliant perspective-shift post at the iPAC blog brought me to a conclusion this morning, and I think it’s an important one. Just as printer manufacturers are actually in the business of selling toner cartridges, and just as FM radio and broadcast TV are in the business of selling your attention to advertisers, the record industry (like its tagalong, the movie industry) is not in the business of selling records. Their business has nothing to do with sales.
Think of the constituents of the RIAA as a group of investment brokers. Their customers are musicians, from whom they obtain capital in three forms: new music, the rights to that music, and promissory notes on the advances that constitute most of any musician’s pay.
You and I are the stocks in which they invest that capital, by means of advertising, radio and television play, and physical or electronic distribution. Even for the least successful major-label musicians, that investment typically yields a profit in the multi-hundred percentage range. For the most successful, it’s orders of magnitude greater–all the millions of $17.95s people pay for the big names.
Of that profit, the record company takes an eighty-nine percent commission.
Then it gives the remaining two bucks back to its investor, the artist–if it gives anything at all. Most of the time, the artist never even sees that two bucks, because it goes toward paying for the advance they got from the record company (more capital). You’re probably already familiar with this part of the story: it’s often years before the artist begins to see the royalty checks start to trickle in. Meanwhile, he or she is living off the advances with very little actual money to his or her name, and the record company is applying pressure to spend that money to create another, more lavish album (yet more capital).
This model actually helps me better understand the RIAA’s position on their thousands of lawsuits. They know that suing their customers is bad business, but they don’t believe they’re doing that: they’re suing us, the entities from whom they buy money with music, because it seems like we’re taking their capital and giving no return on investment.
Remember, when you “buy” a CD, you aren’t actually purchasing anything. You’re leasing from the record company the right to listen to a certain selection of music in a strictly specified manner of their choosing. The actual piece of plastic itself is basically a perk, with which you are not allowed to do as you please–you can make exactly one copy of it, which you can’t give to anyone else, and they’d rather you not be allowed to make that copy at all. They still want the rights of the lease to be attached to that piece of plastic, though. If you break it, they’re not going to send you a replacement, and you’re not allowed to download another copy of it from someone else (even though you still ought to have those listening rights).
In essence, they want contractual control over their capital after they’ve invested it, just as shareholders have to some degree. When they file lawsuits, they see themselves taking class action against negligent publicly-held corporations who spent their share prices in Bimini instead of running profitable businesses. They feel wronged, and justified for it.
I hope this makes clear how completely insane and backwards the music business model is. Forgive me, but I want to go over the big points again:
- The RIAA is a group of brokers with their pick of clients, most of whom are willing to do anything to be allowed to invest with them.
- They take capital from the investors whom they deem worthy, invest it, and reap huge profits.
- From those profits, they exact a commission of eighty-nine to a hundred percent.
- They’re well aware that their business model is incredibly shaky, and that they suddenly have a deadly competitor–the Internet–who is providing all their services, better than they can do so, for free.
- Just as monopolies have done again and again over the course of American history, they are trying to legislate and sue it out of existence.
This is why they have no qualms about suing grandmothers and Girl Scouts. This is why they are scared to death of Downhill Battle and everything it represents. They’ve already been pushed off the ledge, and bad law is the strawberry plant to which they’re clinging.
You probably already know that when you’re hanging from a strawberry plant with tigers above and tigers below, there’s only one thing to do: eat the strawberries. If the members of the RIAA were smart, they’d do so, by embracing and promoting voluntary collective licensing. But they’re scared, and fear makes people stupid.
It’s silly to assign agency to “the market,” to speak as if it were an active governor of what works and what doesn’t. But it’s useful, nonetheless, to think of it as a force that will eventually flatten any bad business model and replace it with a better one. This is what is happening with the record industry right now. This is why they’re going to fall, and we’re going to win.
Leonard says that it was in fact Zappa, and offers further quotage:
“In every language, the first word after ‘Mama!’ that every kid learns to say is ‘Mine!’ A system that doesn’t allow ownership, that doesn’t allow you to say ‘Mine!’ when you grow up, has — to put it mildly — a fatal design flaw.”
Maria notes that in fact it’s usually more like “no,” then “mine,” then “mama.” I think that only makes the quote more interesting, as does the fact that it relates not at all to free culture, and very well to the MPAA/RIAA model of purchasing and licensing. To quote Leonard himself, “‘own’ ‘it’ ‘on’ ‘DVD!'”
Update 12.09.2004 1615 hrs: Maria wishes me to state that though she has studied development, she is not in fact a developmental psychology student, and that I have never stated any facts about her or quoted her accurately, and also that I should be dragged out in the street and shot.
See? I did it again!
blah blah Brendan’s pet issues
I shouldn’t do things like reading this list of banned books, because it just makes me hate everything and accomplishes nothing. But still. My favorites are the parents who challenged the curriculum inclusion of books by Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis for promoting “witchcraft and demons” and “mysticism,” respectively. I don’t need to tell you how thoroughly Christian their books are, because you already know. See? Accomplishing nothing!
In other nonaccomplishment news, I’m going to wait and see about IPac. On the one hand, their statement of principles aligns with a lot of what’s important to me, politically. On the other hand, this is also true of the ACLU, and there are reasons I don’t belong to the ACLU. I know it’s only a word, but I just don’t like the designation of “political action committee.” For some reason I’m comfortable supporting the EFF and Downhill Battle in a way that I don’t associate with any PAC.
Okay, there is one thing I’ve been meaning to write about. The place where the EFF and Downhill Battle intersect is Save Betamax, a combined effort to stop S. 2560 (which used to be called the INDUCE Act) from taking away your iPod, TiVo, CD burner, Kazaa, VCR, scanner, tape deck or whatever else the RIAA and MPAA decide is “inducing” people to violate their own definition of copyright. I don’t much like political blogging, but 2560 is bad. I’m unfortunately writing too late to tell you to sign up for the call-in days (as I did), but I’m sure there will be more opportunities to help stop the bill from becoming law. There’s an enormous effort by a huge coalition of companies, groups and individual humans to keep veto power over media innovation out of Hollywood’s hands. I hope you’ll join it, and I hope it works.
I feel like getting arrested
Hey, wanna see if you’re a terrorist? Excuse me–“Specially Designated National or Blocked Person?” Thanks to the Department of the Treasury, you can, in PDF or ASCII flavors! (As stated above, I do feel like getting arrested, so I was going to write a form script that would search the file for you, but it’s 1.35Mb of unmarked-up plaintext, and I don’t want to kill my webhost with that much sequential search.)
I’m aware of this list because today I had to write down some personal info and sign a release form at work. My company could be getting a federal contractor as a client, so every employee name has to be checked against the list. Fair enough. I don’t like that, but it is the law.
I do have a problem, though, with the fact that we contracted an outside firm to do the checking. Everybody in this company had to sign a paper saying that neither my employer nor this firm were liable for any consequence of having yourself checked. Then everybody had to print his or her first, middle and last names, DOB, and SSN. The forms will be sent off to VeriCorp, who of course can be trusted with my SSN and corresponding information! I guess!
Keep in mind that my employers are probably paying thousands of dollars for this: VeriCorp is going to take a list of a few hundred names, then they’re going to take the text file linked above, and they’re going to have some people hit CTRL-F a few times. And if one of those people makes a typo and you go to Secret Terrorist Jail, whoops! Oh well! They’re not liable!
I am making use of hyperbole here, obviously. Nobody’s going to go to jail; if you’re on the SDN list and the FBI doesn’t know where you are, you’re certainly not going to be working under your real name, much less putting it down on that form. This whole thing is a redundancy measure, a legal fallback.
My point is that there is no reason to be sending hundreds of people’s personal info to an outside contractor, liability-free, when the list is publicly available, and we have an in-house software development team who are all experts at data correlation. I guess the potential client doesn’t trust us to verify our own employees, because we’re an interested party in the negotiations. But if they don’t trust us to verify the information correctly, why trust us to send it correctly in the first place?