Greene's Grammy Speech Debunked

jonerik writes: "Today's New York Times has this article which debunks at least part of NARAS president Michael Greene's much-publicized speech at last week's Grammy Awards ceremony in which Greene claimed that he had hired three students to download a whopping 6,000 songs "from easily accessible Web sites" over two days. Leaving aside for a moment Greene's bizarre admission on national TV that he'd hired three students (at least one of whom, Numair Faraz, is a minor) to break the law (the No Electronic Theft Act), Faraz has been interviewed by the Times, saying that they spent more like three days on the project and that the other two students (both unnamed, though both are apparently attending U.C.L.A.) barely used P2P file-sharing programs at all. Instead, they used AOL's popular Instant Messenger to receive song files from friends."

Comments

Pirates

[Pac]

It was said in another context, about other kind of digital object:

"Owners use smear words such as 'piracy' and 'theft', as well as expert terminology such as 'intellectual property' and 'damage', to suggest a certain line of thinking to the public---a simplistic analogy between programs and physical objects.

Our ideas and intuitions about property for material objects are about whether it is right to take an object away from someone else. They don't directly apply to making a copy of something. But the owners ask us to apply them anyway."

Read the whole text

Actually, I believe the word "thief" is too much prone to libel. "Pirate", being not in any dictionary acception what someone who copies a song or a software is, helps reducing this risk while conveing the message of someone who will board the poor record company, rape its women, kill its men, sell its children as slaves and take away all its treasures.

The problem is that these executive and marketing types are easily confused. Sometimes in their small money counting brains the analogies get blurred and they start to believe the metaphor is real.