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Kansas AG Rejects Settlement Discs
RWarrior(fobw) writes "Kansas's Attorney General has rejected 1600 CDs by 25 different artist as part of the music industry's anti-trust settlement. Is this a community values issue, a censorship issue, or just crap music being foisted off onto the public as part of a meaningless settlement?"
What's with all these new records these days? I'm still content with my Weird Al - Bad Hair Day album.
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Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter removed 5,300 discs, or 5 percent of the 107,000 his state was scheduled to receive.
And those where just Britney Spears CDs too!
More on topic though, it seems almost like they send the states whatever they have sitting in a warehouse without any rhyme or reason. A lot of those CDs *shouldn't* be in libraries imho.
I wonder if the settlement was for Books-On-Cd as well, as that would of been a welcome addition to the blind and near-blind library patrons.
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Kansas isn't exactly known for its progressive thinking, which leads me to believe that it's mostly a censorship and "values" issue. However -- and the CNN article doesn't help to clarify this because it doesn't mention specific albums -- a pretty good argument could be made in the case of certain Outkast and Notorious B.I.G. albums that it's the RIAA foisting off more un-saleable crap on the public just to comply with the letter of the law.
Just like when they sent a library in Wisconsin 1000 copies of The Bodyguard soundtrack.
Asshats.
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In Korea, long hair is for old people!
What use would the state of Kansas have for 1600 CDs, many of which are duplicates? The only logical thing would be to put them in libraries and allow the citizens to borrow them so they can rip them onto their hard drives and share them as MP3s. When will the RIAA learn to be responsible and not only help out their customers but also themselves. I can buy DVDs and many computer or video game titles for less money than a new CD. Not that I would be particularly compelled to buy the latest CD anyways, there has been nothing but junk for the past few years when it comes to music.
The "settlement" as we have seen in other articles is crap. Most of the cd's are from groups that no one wants to listen to.
As a parent in Kansas, I think the AG is right to refuse some of the cd's. I watch what my kids listen to (my older kids listen to all kinds of rap)..but not my young daughters.
If the record companies are pissed...so be it. They lost...didn't they?
I'm glad they don't read the books as well, there are authors with sentiments far more violent and twisted than any 90's pop act.
I actually have a lot of respect for Kline whose department restricted the discs. (I live in Kansas)
I listen to a local radio station called 96.5 the buzz, and every friday they do a "current events" day, where people call in.
Well, people started to call in about the CD's incident and bashing it for censorship.
Then a really weird thing happened, the two Junior DJ's got a call from Phill Kline. They did an on the spot interview on why he was censoring them.
I guess what it came down to was that his general rule was
"If the CD has a track that is about violence against women, or the degredation of women, and promotes youth violence then the entire CD needs to be removed"
He said that he supported his staff, because it would look worse for him to allow CD's that had violence in them, than to allow them through.
Since his department was responsible for handling the donations, they were responsible for the content, unlike a situation where the Library system was responsible.
I think this is a good case of Covering his ass, espeically in an environment where everyone is hunting for some moral reason to remove someone, instead of taking factors such as freedom of speech into play etc.
The problem is, I am not as good as explaining his position as he was, and so this is probably going to recieve some replies that were answered well by him in the interview, but I am doing my best to explain where he was coming from.
He did what he felt was important, since this was an issue of a dispersment which he was responsible for.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Is this a community values issue, a censorship issue, or just crap music being foisted off onto the public
YES!!
The settlement CDs should be rejected because they are mostly unsold crap the labels couldn't sell. Rejecting them because "the albums .. did not mesh with the values of a majority of Kansans" is blatent censorship. Censoring material is right up there with the corporate BS that the RIAA pushes around. You, Mr. Phill Kline, are a very bad man.
Censorship is censorship, no matter how you try to disguise it.
Quit throwing around heavy word when they're not needed. The Kansas AG did not say they were banning any of those CDs. He said they were making sure that the state government was not giving out materials that people might find objectionable. The Kansas Librarians' Association had no objections.
Now, if you can find a link to an article about the Kansas AG forcing a library to remove or not carry certain materials, then come back with the word censorship. Until then, quit screaming about nothing. Otherwise, no one will pay attention when you scream about something important.
The real issue here is with the settlemens in general, not the specific CD's.
The record companies settled for millions of dollars. They decided to pay this with CD's. In the deal, the CDs were presumably valued at market price.
Whoa! Hold on, the record companies do not pay anywhere near market value for any of the CDs. They pay for the production costs, which sure a hell ain't $16 a CD; more like $0.50.
So this really wasn't any sort of punishment for the recording industry. More like a lesson that they could do whatever the hell they want and "repay" their debt to society with worthless crap.
Well, most notably this is NOT censorship. It's a reasonable rejection by Kansas of crap foisted onto them in the form of a "settlement". The hubris of the music industry in their passing off inventory as fodder for art as value would be laughable were it not so egregious and offensive.
Here in the state of Washington, the CD's provided were highlighted in the local news with local librarians and school officials beside themselves trying to fathom what they were to do with these CD's.
Hat's off to Kansas for some chutzpah and balls to reject these CD's though the music industry skates on the whole deal anyway.
Most odd to me is the permission to the industry to choose what the form of payment in settlement would be. This is similar and as offensive as the wink and nod to Microsoft to "settle" many of their claims by "contributing" software to schools... at inflated MSRP valuations.
This was very similar to what libraries do all the time.
That doesn't make it right. Societies discriminated against blacks "all the time" too.
They did libraries a big favor by selecting these CDs because there's no way libraries could have said what they wanted.
If there's "no way" that libraries can say what they want, it's a flaw in the organization of the libraries of Kansas, not a license for someone else to dictate their content for them. It seems to me that, having continual contact with the public, libraries are more in touch with what the people really want. Therefore, they should be in charge of stocking themselves.
Just because the library approved of it, doesn't mean the library's users approve it as well. How would you like it if FOX news was the only game in town, footage from iraq was deemed unfit for tv, and FOX news agreed with it?
So much for 'evening things out'.
I don't remember about "violence against women" in lyrics from Lou Reed. Kline is beyond being ludicrous.
Why on earth is the music industry allowed to choose what CDs to send so they can dump whatever stock they would otherwise send to a landfill? This is not a settlement its crap. They should be settling with money or with a selection of _all_ their CDs or those at the courts will. Fuck those bitches totally. The AG was should have refused every single one and asked for more. Lets make a settlement were the defendant is allowed to empty all the fluff out of their pockets and see how that goes down.
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The fact that the RIAA is picking the cds instead of giving the recipients the choice of what to get is what's so stupid about this. They never should have been given that option.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This purging of objectionable content is censorship -- pure and simple.
.. It would have been more appropriate for these library resources to be presented as is, rather than withheld. If the AG wanted to "make the local library board aware" of some potentially objectionable content would be one thing (though still highly dubious).
This is not to say a person in Kansas can't go buy the material on their own, it's not censorship in the sense of it not being allowed at all (like say Texas in banning sex toys a few years ago).
Kansas AG is a prime example why some types of people should not be in law enforcement, let alone responsible for enforcement of all laws in a state. If a elected official can not seperate their personal beliefs from his official function as a representative of the government, than they should not be in power (A better example is John Ashcroft).
For a little bit of background, in Kansas, with some exceptions, every statewide office by default goes to a Republican unless that canidate goes outside of a loose centrist feel.
Case in point, Dennis Moore, the only democrat from Kansas in the house, ran against Phil Kline, Alan Taft and a few others since being elected. The only way (and this is a subjective observation) he seems to keep beating the republicans is because the local RNC chapter keeps trotting out hard right wingers like Kline to run against him.
Otherwise in Kansas politics, the republican gets it almost every time (the democrats in the kansas house and senate seem to have less power than the democrats in Texas do, at least down there they have the big red button of denying a quorum if absoulutely needed).
Back to the topic / artical
Other topic, Kansas politics makes for an interesting read on the way the party not in power has to play ball in the midwest. Like the fact that the democrats didn't even field a canidate during the 2002 Senate race. Or the fact that the (late) prior democrat governor (Kim Finney) had several parts of her platform that were planks in the republican party platform (prolife being primary amoung them).
Rejected CDs
rejected for Kansas public libraries by Attorney General Phill Kline's office:
* Alice In Chains, "Greatest Hits," "Live"
* Big Punisher, "Yeeeah Baby"
* Blink 182, "Cheshire Cat"
* Foxy Brown, "China Doll"
* Concrete Blonde, "Bloodletting," "Classic Masters"
* Cypress Hill, "III," "Live at the Fillmore"
* Da Brat, "Unrestricted"
* Devo, "Pioneers Who Got Scalped"
* Heavy D, "Heavy"
* Jagged Edge, "JE Heartbreak"
* Live, "The Distance to Here"
* Mase, "Harlem World"
* NAS, "It Was Written," "Nastradamas"
* Notorious B.I.G., "Born Again"
* OutKast, "Aquemini," "Stankonia"
* Rage Against the Machine, "Renegades"
* Lou Reed, "Growing Up in Public," "Rock and Roll Heart," "Sally Can't Dance," "Walk on the Wild Side"
* Silver Chair, "Freak Show"
* Soul Asylum, "Candy From a Stranger," "Let Your Dim Light Shine"
* Stone Temple Pilots, "Tiny Lights: Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop"
* Toadies, "Hell Below"
* "Bad Boy Records Greatest Hits"
* The Wu-Tang Clan, "The W"
* Wyclef Jean, "The Carnival"
"quit screaming about nothing"
Spoken like a true censor! I think all material belongs in a library. Especially free material. I don't know what sort of Librarians' Association Kansas has but I think elsewhere in the world they would be tripping over themselves to get that much attractive media into a library for FREE.
She may come in for Outkast but sometimes they walk out with Aldous Huxley as well.
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
He said they were making sure that the state government was not giving out materials that people might find objectionable. The Kansas Librarians' Association had no objections.
Oh, so if the people running the libraries are just as ass-backwards as the AG, this makes censorship OK?
Just because all the powers that be agree to censorship doesn't make it NOT censorship.
I bet the Kansas Librarians' Association wouldn't put up a fight if the AG decided Darwin's "Origin of Species" was "objectionable," either.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Spoken like a true censor!
Hardly. I could care less what you listen to or read. If my local library carries copies of "Nazism For Dummies", then good for them. If they want to carry Eminem, good for them.
I think all material belongs in a library.
Have you ever donated materials to your library? I have donated a hundred or so books to my local library. Not all the books I give them end up on the shelves. They pick and choose. Why? Because they have only so much room on the shelves. They have to be selective.
You think the AG would ban the Wizard of Oz as well. Not only is it violent (2 witches die), but the main theme is a young female who wants out of Kansas.
7 4.htm/ can't think of anything good about their city or state!
Of course, maybe even the AG knows you can hide the truth about Kansas.
Look. Even the people of Topeka http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/state/93055
Oh, so if the people running the libraries are just as ass-backwards as the AG, this makes censorship OK?
What's so hard about this? He was being selective about the materials that were being supplied to the libraries via the state government. That's it. He wasn't telling them they couldn't carry Outkast. He was simply saying that the state wasn't going to provide it to them. It's not censorship! The libraries can carry Outkast if they want to. No one is being access to the music. Nothing is being burned.
Dumb part of this is while Kline is trying to censor what come into the libraries, he hasn't been looking at what's already there.
:(
I live in Kansas and our library's collection of audio CD's is mostly stuff nobody under 30 would be interested in. Lots of broadway musical scores, classical records that can be bought for $3-$8 in Wal-Mart because they are in Public Domain, ect.
Anyway, there's a small collection of "Pop" music, and I know there's a copy of Slipknot's Iowa in there, and there's some RATM, too. So it's already in circulation in Kansas.
Maybe the collection of discs is mostly unsellable stuff. But the lists of artists being blocked right now sounds a lot more interesting than reports of several thousand CDs of Whitney Housten singing the Star Spangled banner like other states are getting.
It's not the artists' best works, but it sounds like we got some of the better giveaways. I say let them in since we're not getting any choices.
When I first saw the headline about the discs getting rejected, I thought Kline was rejecting the settlement discs because they were tons of crap like the other states had been getting. What a letdown when I read the story.
I can't argue that Whitney singing the national anthem is crap. However, many CD's were rejected on decency grounds.
I can't believe that this crowd thinks Outkast is crap music. Outkast has many excellent songs, some of which are very political and some of which are about other complex themes. To reject it based on decency grounds is not only censorship, but it's the rejection of the genre as a whole as invalid for public consumption.
How did you nerds feel when a judge ruled that video games are not expressive speech? Don't come back and reject the speech of another genre based on similarly idiotic premises.
No... it is not about rap, given that many of the groups are in completely different genres. It's about someone dictating that bands like _Devo_ "promote(s) violence or illegal activity". Yes, everytime I slip that Devo disc in I feel like beating up a few little old ladies and robbing a bank. Of course, a big part of Devo was thinking for yourself. Oh wait... could that be the real connection?
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
Wouldn't *all* of this been solved if libraries were simply given credit to buy CD, rather than dump this crap on them?!? If the record companies are not just dumping crap they can't sell on this than the whole thing would be settled by giving each institution credit for X CD's, and be done with it. Then all of these institutions could have, oh, I don't know, expanded their classical offerings, or even the history sections on jazz, or something usefull. It seems odd the the record industry wouldn't opt to give libraries CD's that aren't huge sellers (that people are less likely to buy) just to move that market a bit. As in we all know that the bodyguard didn't do to well, but I'm sure there are a ton of other not so hot CD's that you could dump and at least MAKE IT LOOK LIKE YOUR TRYING.
I guess my point is that we all knew that whoever was handling the case must have fscked up somewhere when we found out that they 'won'. If the companies weren't going to play fair, they could have at least tried a little harder to not make it so obvious.
To allow the record companies to dump their junk as a 'settlement' speaks volumes about how corrupt the system has become.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I think you vastly underestimate the passion of librarians. I know a few, and *all* of them are particularly vocal regarding access to all types of material, no matter the subject matter.
A librarian is the custodian of knowledge for the common man. The common man likes things a librarian probably doesn't, but as a professional they will fight for that common man to be able to get the book / cd / information he wants.
librarians aren't into censorship
I insist that my library contains content that is inappropriate for minors, because if it didn't - it would be completely useless for me.
"Sorry sir, we don't have 'Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time' because the under-10's wouldn't be able to understand it, how about 'Thomas the Tank Engine goes to a Black Hole' instead?"
There's a name for that.
It's called "everything the RIAA has rights to".
"Crap" need not ever be explicitly written in such stories. "RIAA" already implies that.
of a given CD - find the closing bid on a brand new CD of the same title on eBay + shipping cost, and ask RIAA to use that as the monetary value of the CD. I wont be surprised if they dump 1 million of these CDs instead of 1000 in that case.
The State of Kansas only has to purchase 4 more cds at the regular price over the next 24 months, and all of the cds are absolutely free!
They merely have to pay $2.79 each for shipping and processing. The selection of the month comes automatically, but the head librarian can return it back to RIAA and they will pay for the shipping.
They even have a full 10 days to try them, and if the State of Kansas is not completely satisfied, they can return all of the cds and have no further obligation.
The problem is that when a bunch of folks get together and start making noise about how evolution is the devil and creationism should be taught alongside it in a science class, they mean Creationism, as in the Judeo-Christian belief. There's no scientific evidence *at all* for such a belief.
There *is*, however, a small mountain of evidence that proves evolution happens and that evolution is a viable means of speciation. There's a lot of really good reading on this topic (with references!) at TalkOrigins.
And just in case I'm not being abundantly clear on this point, evolution is a fact. It happens. We've seen it.
The problem with teaching anything other than evolution in a *science* class is that anything else *isn't science.* No matter what, creationist theories cannot be proven because they rely on faith. Faith is not evidence, nor is it proof, and that's what's conveniently forgotten by most folks in favour of teaching Creationism.
If they want to teach about different creation stories in a social studies class, great. I'd be all in favour of that too. It's Constitutional, it's a good exposure to other cultures, and it just seems well-balanced. But that isn't what the right-wingers are asking for. They want Judeo-Christian Creationism taught as a science, and that's just ridiculous.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Real science doesn't prove anything. We create the best theories that we can given the information that is available to us, but we never know when some new fact will be revealed that will require us to rething our ideas.
That said, anything that can't be disproven is not science. This is where creationism fails. Consider, astronomers have observed events out in space that have occured 12 billion years ago. Really though we don't need the HST to effectively disprove creation. Creationism says the universe is only ~7000 years old. Capella, the brightest star in Auriga (slightly NW of Gemini) is 7824 light years away. The Andromedia Galaxy at 2.2 million light years is the most distant object visible to the human eye.
If creationism was a science, these observations would invalidate it immediatly. To its adherants however creationism must be right, since the Bible says it. Therefore, instead of changing the theory when contrary observations are made, they create ad hoc explanations of why the observations are incorrect.
People can believe what they want, but not all theory's are equal. Creationism is not science and so I maintain it has no place in the science class room.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
something they can recognize in Kansas without a million-dollar consultant. bravo for their AG. this nonsense about "we'll give you product if you just go away and stop biting my ankles," is not a settlement, it's a warehouse cleaning exercise.
you want to make settlements count, three words... Cold Hard Cash. get the cash, not the paperwork.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
True, you didn't advocate the Judeo-Christian creation story, but assuming we are both talking about American schools, what other possible version would we be talking about? That is the Creation theory that Creationists want taught in schools. In fact, I think that is the only creation theory that I've ever heard advocated by creation "scientists".
:)
Also, though it's true the Bible never gives the age of the universe. However, all the most popular Christian scientists believe in Young Earth creationism. This means they believe that everything was created in six literal days and that the age of the earth can be roughly estimated based on the lineage given in the bible.
Yes, not all creationists are Young Earther's. There are creationists who believe in intelligent design, which means that God guided evolution. They don't deny evolution at all, so I have no problem whatsoever with them. Sure, it's not scientific, but it's not anti-scientific so it does no harm in my opinion. The Christians who belive in this also tend to believe in the seperation of church and state, so you won't typically hear of them trying to get this taugh in our schools.
Anyway, I realise you aren't a Creationist, but that doesn't make the discussion any more interesting from my perspective. I know a lot of young earth creationists from growing up in a Baptist church, so the topic is not just academic to me
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
The music companies basically took the entire inventory that they had been unable to give away for the last 20 years and dumped it on the state attorneys general as "settlement" for the millions of dollars ripped off from consumers during the course of the price fixing fiasco. Nobody can honestly say that the CDs distributed as part of the settlement had a fair market value equal to the amount that was swindled from consumers. I mean look at the list of artists: Michael Bolton, Stone Temple Pilots, and other equally obscure junk. The recording industry laughed all the way to the bank on this one.
So is it censorship if the individual library decides not to carry porn?
Yes.
More disturbingly, is it censorship if the individual library chooses not to carry the latest beheading video from Iraq?
Yes.
Just like it was discrimination when I decided to start dating a white girl instead of a black girl.
Or a girl who wasn't a serial killer. Just another characteristic. Yup.
Is it less censorship when the individual libraries do it, rather than the AG?
No, it's just as objectionable.
My old city library once had someone donate every issue of Playboy to the library. The library kept them behind the desk (didn't want parents angry that their kiddies were leafing through them), but they were in the card catalog and in circulation and could be checked out. Same for a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Frankly, I don't really think that it's a good idea for parents to restrict what their kids read/watch (talk it over with them, give and justify your views, do whatever you want, just don't "keep them from content", because there's only one way that people mature enough to deal with content, and that's experience). However, that isn't really the relevant issue here -- I'm certainly in the minority on this point. What is at issue is that a group of people should not dictate the set of ideas that *other* people can be exposed to -- this goes above and beyond molding and controlling your own child's development, which is as far as the rights of parents extend -- not to the children of other parents.
May we never see th
What's worse is if you are one of those libraries that had the music industries abandoned warehouses dumped on you. These CDs flat out blow; we have six copies of Whitney Houston's Star Spangled Banner single. We haven't recieved the shipment from one of our 3 branches yet either, so I suspect we'll have 6 or 8 before it's all over. Every library we've talked to has recieved several copies of several CDs. Even if they were good, most libraries don't carry multiple copies of CDs.
Most of the CDs are crap that they couldn't sell 5 years ago, and shitty singles. When have you ever seen a library carry a single?
Oh yeah, and we can't give them away, donate them to our friends of the library group (because they would sell them for $.50-$1 apiece, and that could concievably benefit us, except for the ones they end up throwing in the dumpster...) or anything else.
Let me put it another way: If I could get out of a speeding ticket by emptying out one of my junk closets, why exactly would I feel like I need to slow down in the future?
HitScan
Thank God there's freedom of the press then. You may not like Fox news, but that doesn't mean I can't watch it.
I love hearing all the liberals spout off about how bad Fox news is. What should be done about it, should Fox News be banned because some people think they are biased? Who chooses what news media outlets can exist and what can't? That job would have to be done by someone in the government wouldn't it?
Give me a large number of biased news organizations (current situation, for both sides) any day over the government having any say whatsoever over what news organizations can say.
Censorship is the government telling people what they can and can't say. What Fox News runs for stories is their decision, and their freedom to decide.
Now back on topic. In my opinion, this isn't censorship, it is refusal to accept an inadiquate payment for the settlement. Everyone knows that the RIAA is dumping CDs in these settlements. Now someone is doing something about it.