Fox Explains Why SSSCA Is Bad

corbettw writes "Fox News is running an article that slams Sen. Fritz Hollings ("The Senator from Disney") and the Democrats (with the notable exception of Rick Boucher) as having betrayed their principles. More importantly, the article explains why the SSSCA is so bad, in language any American can understand. It's nice to see someone in the mainstream media taking this beast on before it becomes law."

Comments

The Senator from Disney

[Mordain]

I would be really dissapointed if Hollings is ever re-elected. The point of an elected government is to get rid of those who want to lower our freedom, and this guy is definetly going down that road, and dragging everyone he can with him.

We can rant and rave on /. all we want, but if we don't send the message in our ballots also, we have given up the battle.

I sincerely hope that the people in his district are well aware of Sen. Holling's attrocities.

Re:The Senator from Disney

[crotherm]

That is why campain reform is a MUST if USA is ever to see a goverenment that really looks out for the good of the people, and not just the good of the rich and powerful.

Write and phone your congresscritters NOW.

Re:The Senator from Disney

[osgeek]

But when you've got "real" people give money to both sides, you just have an escalated arms race.

The only way to reduce the political dependence upon money is to reduce the power of the government. Reduce the power of the government, and you reduce the number of people (corporations) who want to control it. Reduce the people trying to conrol it, and you reduce the amount of money flowing to politicians.

If the Federal government scaled back services to those specified by the constitution, a lot of the money-chasing and corruption problems would disappear.

Re:The Senator from Disney

[elb]

An interesting point, I think, is why corporations and businesses are allowed to make such large political contributions -- at the heart, why are corporations considered to be people in the eyes of the law? IANAL, but originally the courts held that corporations were people so that they could be named in lawsuits. Frankly, this led to a logical slippery slope that has gotten us into many present-day conundrums.

Corporations and organizations are much different from individuals ("natural persons" as the law puts it). They have different lifespans (indefinite) and different primal motivations (fundamentally businesses are entities for creating wealth, generaly of the monetary kind, but sometimes also the social kind). People's actions are tempered by the fact that your life is finite and the demands of the human psyche for things like love, social contact, happiness, etc. We act towards our physical survival, but once that's taken care of, most act towards -- dare I say -- spiritual survival as well. Corporations don't.

Why not just ban corporations from participating in political discourse at all? Corporations should get no say in how my government regulates my life; I chould have perfect free choice (using amount of money spent) about how much influence any corporation has over my life. The individuals making decisions at corporations will have as much of an opportunity to participate in the political process as anyone else, but they will have to do it as individuals.

You could also play around with this idea and see where it takes you in the realm of copyright law. Should corporations be allowed to hold copyrights at all? Or perhaps we should have some fundamental notion that only the individual creator can be the ultimate holder of a copyright, and corporations are thus more limited in how much control they can have over your MP3s and computers and CDs. The creators of the work are legally protected from having to relinquish total control over their creations in order to merely do business with the rest of the public.

"Corporation" is an entity different from "person"-- not an inherited class. Clearly corporations require certain rights and have certain obligations/responsibilities, but these should be assigned based on corporations' nature as wealth-creating entities rather than assigned just because human beings have those rights as well.

Re:The Senator from Disney

[msaavedra]

That is why campain reform is a MUST if USA is ever to see a goverenment that really looks out for the good of the people

If we want a government that looks after the good of the people, we need citizens who take an active interest in the government and vote according to principle. After all, Disney, Microsoft, et al don't have a single vote in the elections, so who cares how much money they donate? The only reason they have any power over the politicians is because we the people are morons who don't vote, who simply toe the party line, who vote for the candidates with the best commercials, the fullest head of hair, the greatest height, the best-sounding name, etc, etc.

We need to throw the politicians out on their asses when they put Disney's interests above the people's. Nothing will improve until we do this. Campaign finance reform will not help. There will always be loopholes, unless you are wiiling to completely eliminate the first amendment.

I honestly think we get the quality of government that we deserve, and our current government doesn't say much about us as a society.

Not *everything* is the fault of the MPAA.

[Latent IT]

Take from the article, for instance:

Despite being illegal, payola is rife, keeping interesting artists off the air in favor of the manufactured hitmaker of the week.

Okay, assume that statement is fully true, and major labels pay radio stations big bucks to play their manufactured hitmaker of the week. This is keeping the interesting artists off the air?

Wrong.

Somebody listens to it. Someone buys the albums. N'Sync didn't get big because of major label payola, they got big because some clown looked at a shelf in a record store, and said, 'I want THIS one!'

The same with Hanson, Britney, 98, blah-de-freakin'-blah. Someone's listening to this crap. And you know what? It's trendy to call it crap. But when a radio station, that makes money off ad revenue, has to choose what to play, it's either going to choose the mainstream 'crap', or the indie 'interesting' stuff. The rest of what will happen is left as an exercise for the reader.

Other things pointed out in the article are just plain criminal, however:

Record companies regularly deduct 15 percent off the top of sales as an allowance for "breakage" -- a survival from the days of shellac records that now simply serves to reduce artist royalties by that amount

and

And now, record companies -- who have allied themselves with the just-as-bad motion picture industry - want to make it a felony for you to own a computer that is capable of copying music from a CD to your portable player without paying them money, even though courts have held that such copying is entirely legal.

Blame the MPAA for a lot - the DMCA, copy protected CD's, starving artists that sell more than 50,000 records, but not for the bad taste of the little girl down the block.

Re:Not *everything* is the fault of the MPAA.

[Evangelion]

What you are ignoring is the simple fact that the MPAA members, and everyone else in the music industry, learned a long, long time ago -- what people hear on the radio (and later, see on video channels) is what they buy. That's the truth -- you can argue how it's not strictly true in some ideal, controlled circumstance, but that's irrelavent. In the real world, what people hear on the radio, is what they buy.

(Again, whether it's directly true is irrelevant -- alot of kids might listen to stuff because thier friends do. But somewhere along the line, someone is influenced by all the radio play and promotions that the record companies pay for.)

The system of payloa that is currently in use right now is kind of fucked, because payola is strictly illegal -- a record company can't just send a check to the radio stations for airplay. They have to go through an inderect level of "independant" promoters who decide what music to push, and get paid based on whether or not "thier" radio stations play any of "thier" music. So by adding a layer of indirection, the system avoids the old payloa laws (which are there, because it was recognized that paying to get stuff on the air makes people want to buy it -- this is an observed fact.)

This is one of the reasons why the MPAA doesn't like mp3's at all. Because it puts the power of what to listen to into the hands of the consumers. If people can just sit down at thier computer, and listen to whatever-the-hell they want to, from all the music in the world, that shoots the record company's biggest weapon -- control of what's played on the radio -- down. If people want to listen to Cool Indie Band, and they start passing around Cool Indie Band's track, this means that they're more likely to go out and buy Cool Indie Band's album rather than an album made by an MPAA artist.

That is why the MPAA is attacking mp3's and p2p file sharing systems, not because of the arguable amount of revenue they loose because people get thier music for free -- but because it takes control of what people listen to, and what influences people's purchasing decisions, away from them, and puts it back in the hands of the consumers.

This is a huge factor in the equation, and brushing it off by saying "people buy what they want" is simply ignoring the reality that people, en masse, are manipulated into wanting what the MPAA wants to sell to them, via radio.

Re:Not *everything* is the fault of the MPAA.

[ajs]

Obvious point about MPAA vs RIAA asside, this is an excellent overview of the problem vis. radio. The article that Slashdot references here also point out some others in the retail area.

However, I think you're ignoring the number one problem in the music marketing industry today: the labels are free to pay MTV as much as they like. They're also free to pay the teenie show of the week on WB as much as they like. So they do, in exchange for featuring their bands.

This leads us down the road where there's a constant assualt on TV viewers with paid ads (videos, interviews, guest appearances). This gives the labels huge power to invent fads. N'Sync (you UNIX types may know them as XNSync()), Brittany, Christina, Spice Girls, etc, etc were created this way. I find Brittany to be the most illuminating example. Most young girls are attracted to her as a role model because she's famous and seems happy and comfortable with her fame. Try to find someone who will say "I was a Brittany fan before she was famous" (and doesn't just mean they saw her on TV before their friends) and you'll be looking for a long time. Why? Because she was introduced with a massive media blitz that was designed to make her seem "already famous".

So, the payola situation in the Radio industry is silly (even more silly because of the very tiny number of independant stations), but TV makes it look like an honest day's work.

Don't forget Kelly

[slugfro]

The article also mentions Hollings teaming up with Democratic Senator John Kerry (CA) who has plans to run for President in 2004:

Hollings was joined by Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer of California and John Kerry of Massachusetts, both of whom are heavily reliant on entertainment-industry money (with Kerry sure to become even more so if he runs for President in 2004, as expected).

Sending a message via our ballots will become even more important if he really does run for president!

I'm disappointed in Slashdot

[maetenloch]

I'm disappointed in Slashdot's readership.

A lot of the comments so far are just reactions to where it appeared - not what it says.

Whatever you think of FoxNews, try to read the article without projecting on it what you think it's going to say. Note that it's really an opinion piece, apparently part of Fox's Straight Talk feature - corbettw mislabelled it in his summary.

The article in my view is really just analyzing the political risks and possibilities for both parties here. The reality is that both the Democrats and Republicans support constituencies at times that are at odds with the philosphies they publicly profess. In this case it's the support that several heavyweight Democrats have been giving to the recording and movie industries for the SSSCA. Glenn Reynolds (the author) really would like to see the SSSCA buried and all he's really doing here is pointing out is that the Republicans could help kill it AND potentially score political points for doing so.

Glenn Reynolds also produces music in his spare time when he's not teaching law. He also runs a 'blogger' website with nearly hourly comments. He's also a Slashdot reader and poster (which is how I first heard about his web site InstaPundit). I've been reading his site since just before 9/11 and he's been consistent in criticizing the record industry for its corruptness and sneaky ploys to take advantage of the consumer. He's hardly a ideological Republican. Mostly he's libertarian and anti-Idiotarian in his viewpoints. In this, I don't think he's that far off from most Slashdot readers. That is, if they can overlook their media outlet biases.

Forest Gump & Hollywood Accounting

[rlp]

I recall reading an article about Winston Groom - the author of Forest Gump. He had cut a deal with the studio for a percentage of the profit from the movie. The movie generated revenue of over $600 million, but according to the studio, did not make a profit. So, when Valenti states that only 2 out of 10 movies generate a profit that's probably true. Hollywood's accountants may well be the most creative people in the entertainment industry.