The FM radio plays the songs that the record industry paid to put there. As far as the RIAA is concerned, you can record your favorite radio station 24/7/365. Why? Because they know that if you really like a song, you'll get the CD so you can really hear it. The reason is that given the compression, limiting, and the general limitations of an analog bandwidth-limited FM channel, there's a big difference between what you can record off a radio in cassette and what you'll hear if you play back a CD. The best you can say about the quality is "good enough for casual listening".
A few years ago, the product was vinyl records and people found out what was on the records by listening to tracks on AM/FM radio. Yes, people once listened to music on AM.
These tracks played on radio are and were PROMOTIONAL TOOLS. No promotion, i.e. if the people have no way to hear what is on a record, they won't buy it.
Why should we pay the industry's promo costs, except as they are reflected in the price of the actual product?
An MP3 is in many ways comparable to an FM radio signal. Is it a "perfect copy"? If it is, why doesn't everybody but the totally honest download all their music? Despite what's been done to shut down P2P and Internet Radio, it's still possible to get almost anything if you know how/where to look. Why do people buy CDs?
It isn't just about supporting artists, it's just that CDs sound better.
128K MP3 quality isn't about getting every nuance of the music to your ears, it's about being "good enough" for casual listening.
The MP3 IS A PROMOTIONAL TOOL designed to get you to buy the CD. Anyone who mistakes MP3s for products has just fallen for the hype of the people who want to turn our computers into DRM-locked household appliances.
Why does RIAA care about MP3s and not FM radio? Because independent artists can distribute MP3s via upload to Internet radio networks and to P2P networks without having to pay a gatekeeper fee to independent promoters to get to FM radio. The RIAA labels keep the gatekeeper fees (aka payola) high enough to freeze out "just anybody".
Do MP3s as promotional tools work? There's a recent album that was released by an unknown band itself on MP3 for promotional purposes before they started selling the CD. They made a very nice profit off it.
Do MP3s work as promotional tools for major record labels? The evidence indicates that it works just as well as FM radio does.
What's the problem?
This isn't about piracy, it's about monopoly.
I wouldn't mind paying say, $1-2 for a CD-quality track I really liked, if there was any practical way to deliver a 50 meg download... this takes a while even with a broadband link... and I'm running 56K anyway.
Buy an MP3? I'm not interested in paying for music whose sound is "just good enough". If you're a musician, I'll repay your promotional costs when I buy your record. Don't expect me to pay your promo costs up front, if I can't find out whether or not your CD is worth buying by listening to some tracks at "just good enough" quality to figure out whether I want it or not, I'll find some artist who doesn't expect me to pay promotional costs in advance.
That's the real problem with the MP3 music services, regardless of vendor and regardless of the level of DRM built into the product/player.
People know whether they articulate it or not that there's a difference between sound worth paying for and freebie promotional tools whose sound is just good enough to tell you whether the CD is worth buying or not. What an MP3 service provider can do for you is provide you with lots of MP3 music packaged conveniently. . . so you can figure out what CDs you want to buy.
Why? Not because of artist loyalty or love of the RIAA, because CDs actually sound better, and if you've got a big bucks stereo system, you want to use it so you can listen to every little nuance of what your favorite artists do.
For an MP3 service, you are buying access to music, NOT the MP3s. This isn't to say that you want one-shot MP3s or time-locked, etc. You might decide to listen to your favorite new album on MP3 for a month or a year before you get around to buying. Maybe you're short on money and have to wait until your next check. But if you really like it, you'll buy the CD sooner or later. The artist and label make just as much money if you buy it a year from now after listening to the MP3 1,000 times as they do if you decide you've got to have it 30 seconds into the song.
The people who whine about PIRACY are the ones who haven't figured out what the RIAA labels know.
A product people will NOT pay for has a cash value of ZERO.
Sure, you'll rip the CD under "fair usage" afterwards if the RIAA's 0wn3d Congresswhores don't stop you, but generally where you can play it under circumstances where "just good enough" is good enough, e.g. your MP3 player when you're out jogging or doing other things where you don't have your full attention on the music.
The fair usage is what the RIAA/MPAA want to redefine out of existence.
Major PC developers would die on the vine as their profits dwindled along with it's usefulness. They're making lots of money. Think they're just going to roll over and let themselves be dominated like that?
Evidence indicates that they're doing just that.
Otherwise, they'd be doing political organization, throwing in megabucks into an industry PAC, and calling on the community for help.
What's really going on is that they are putting even less effort than MS did into "Trustworthy Computing".
Unfortunately, a point-by-point refutation would require posting the complete article, but I don't want to meet the CNET legal staff in court over a DMCA takedown of my post.
The AAW Declan cites as not being concerned about the article has reason not to be. Their members don't want to see people posting large chunks of their books on the Web for free access. Time-Warner isn't concerned about the DMCA, either.
Anyone who reads the article will see a pattern emerging. The people who are not concerned about the DMCA infringing on their rights can depend on their deep-pocketed parent organizations paying their legal fees.
I'll happily bet Declan's career and freedom on whether the peculiar conclusions he's come to about the DMCA are true or not. Not mine. The DMCA can be used against any content that offends anybody who can afford a lawyer.
I've already had to pull content off my site because of a meritless legal claim simply because I can't afford to defend a lawsuit at this point.
Apparently, Declan has forgotten that just because he has a major publication to defend him, academic researchers have schools behind them, and major corporations have legal staffs, that not everybody has a big daddy they can hide behind for legal protection.
Pick out offending brainwave profiles? The pattern recognition problems in facial recognition are a hell of a lot simpler. They haven't been solved yet. By anybody. Every test ot the technology I know of that the manufacturers didn't do has failed miserably
I think that whoever approved this should be the first test subject. Let's see if he has any brainwaves.
Here's a complete list of successful El Al hijacking in the last 30 years:
They don't have brain-wave scanners. They don't have k3wl, l33t supertechnology. They don't even have armed pilots.
What they do have is bulletproof and hardened doors between cockpit and passengers, openly armed air marshals on board, and ground security that's trained and clueful.
Oddly enough, I do run a business. No, I'm not selling 1M unit quantities. Your point?
I've also been around for a while, the first VC-funded software development company I worked for ran in a C-64 environment.
The fact that you can't sell 1M units without an RIAA label doesn't mean that it's impossible to sell 1M records on the Internet.
This is not to say that "YOU SUCK!", this is just saying that becoming a "hit" isn't guaranteed to be any easier just because one is marketing via the Internet.
However, neither of us has any reason to believe that this is impossible.
Let's say a well-known artist with a fanatic following finishes a contract committment and he runs through the numbers and decide not to renew with a major label because his profit from his next CD is higher even with a fraction of the sales generated by her last one...
Let's say somebody's career takes off 'the old fashioned way' based on Internet airplay from non-US Internet radio and word of mouth because everybody likes it.
Do you know why unknown artists suddenly become popular other than 'well, I guess the marketing must have really worked out'... 'the stars must have been right'... ? If you don't know how someone can go from zero to rock hero, don't say that nobody can do it on the Net.
My point is that not only is this not impossible, I think it's going to happen sooner or later. RIAA's problem is that they have to prevent it from happening anywhere for anybody.
Working with an independent artist now. We get CD-on-demand from where ampcast buys it. I don't expect to sell 1M units... I see the person in question as appealing to a niche market. I'm just hoping if we can get the pieces together and put enough effort into it, the artist gets to make a comfortable living.
1. Political: If the "geek community" builds an effective PAC (e.g. NOT geekpac), we can buy just as much political access as Hollywood can. Actually, more for the same amount of money, we have numbers as well as more money than they do. The average NRA member or AARP senior citizen makes quite a bit less than the average IT pro. Why do they have groups with political influence and we don't?
2. Business Model: If ONE artist goes platinum without the help of an RIAA label and announces $5-10M in profits, their business model crashes, their mainstream artists will be bailing. Perhaps we can accelerate this process. The linked post also explains why piracy is a red herring, a non-issue which is core to the RIAA disinformation campaign.
You got it. It does NOT take persuading the masses to collectively boycott RIAA. All it takes is for an indie to prove that one can make real money without the help of an RIAA label.
Hmmm... I'm not the best person to give you the list you're asking for... but here are 3 sites I know that have both downloadable MP3s and non-RIAA CDs for sale:
Courtney Love. She was the first "name" artist to denounce record industry business practices publically and effectively. Bookmark and wait a couple of weeks, the site's down for upgrading.
Janis Ian is the one who recently wrote some remarkable articles on piracy and the record industry which have been slashdotted, she also sees MP3s as promotional tool, not product.
Elian Gedeon. She's an independent artist who's just beginning to get the word out about herself. I know who's going the e-commerce route to market her CDs and merchandise. "New music" by definition.
Here is what should be a complete RIAA membership list. If the label isn't listed, it's safe to assume that it is NOT RIAA.
However, the great majority of artists you've never heard of who are selling their own CDs and making downloads available are non-RIAA. If in doubt, ask.
I just spent some time googling and searching at the THOMAS US Congressional legislation Website. I did this because while the record industry is driven by insane greed that they've managed to escalate to an active danger to liberty in the entire world, they aren't remotely close to that stupid. If they were, they wouldn't be dangerous.
The only reference I could find to "Recording Revenue Collection Act" was at uncoveror.
The record labels pay independent promoters lots of money per song to get on the radio which then goes in part to radio stations, far more than they could possibly collect from end users. Why? Because most people find out about music they buy from FM radio.
They discourage people from listening to FM, they've broken their business model.
Yes, the idea you describe is insane. If Hollings introduced such a thing, RIAA would unplug its campaign support immediately.
If Hilary Rosen took an idea into her head to get Hollings to write anything like that, her employers would not only consider her insane, they'd probably do their best to get her locked up in a booby hatch.
I should have checked the site first. Here ar a set of stories on their front page.
MAFIA TO OFFER PRE-PAID ILLEGAL SERVICES
MICROSOFT DEVELOPING WINDOWS BSD
NEW DAWN BIOTECH ADMITS THAT CHICK'N IS REAL
OSAMA BIN LADEN MAY ATTACK FROM SPACE
THE UNCOVEROR IS AN ONION-STYLE HUMOR SITE, YOU IDIOT!
Piracy is a red herring. RIAA wants to block any content providers their don't control completely.
The arguments about lower quality music selling CDs is one of the two core factors of the RIAA business model. If you like a song played on FM or via any MP3 provider, you'll buy the CD, it's a lot less hassle than a 50 meg CD audio and you get full quality and all the nuances you paid for when you got your big bucks stereo or Dolby Pro Logic system.
The difference? If I'm an independent artist, I can upload to any P2P or any Internet Radio provider that's left. If listeners like what they here on P2P, they'll tell their friends. If the owner/DJ of a Internet Radio station likes it, they'll play it on the "air". No money changed hands.
As an independent artist, (which I'm not) I can NOT get access to a FM radio station playlist without paying a shitload of money to an "independent promoter" who pays the radio station in an under or over the counter transaction. Even given the money, the good timeslots go to the regular customers, all of which are RIAA labels.
So RIAA labels have a monopoly on FM radio content. That's where the sheeple go to hear "new music". Anything you hear on commercial radio is a commercial for an RIAA label band or musician. (A series of Salon articles lays out the whole deal) That's the OTHER core factor in the RIAA label business model, exclusive access to FM radio.
If an artist goes platinum without record company backing, he'll have made $5M-$10M. If one goes platinum for the first time with a label behind him, he might break even against his record label advances, partially due to legit advances but mainly due to Enron-style economics.
The day one goes platinum without a record label, the business model used by all the RIAA labels just went into the dumper.
Metallica will hear "this guy went platinum and made 5 MILLION DOLLARS OFF HIS FIRST RECORD?"... and I predict they will be among the very first to tell their lawyers "GET US OUT OF THIS RECORD LABEL CONTENT NOW!!!". However, this will probably be page 10 of Billboard, that issue of the magazine will be the first "all lawsuit" issue.
With Internet Radio and P2P unplugged, the record industry can say to an artist "You make a living with us or not at all, without us, the only people you can sell CDs to are the ones who show up at your gigs."
Without exclusive control by labels over any method a musician can use to get to the public, all a RIAA label is, is a ruinously expensive source of venture capital, both in terms of money and personal integrity, and if they change their mind about promoting a record, the musician can;t legally work.
Anyone who talks about piracy is either a conscious shill for the industry or parroting industry propaganda. Check out what Courtney Love and Janis Ian have to say about this. (presumably you know how to use Google)
MP3s and songs played back on analog FM are promotional tools, NOT products.
So Tim O'Reilly is going to tell his employees: Get any software you please from any vendor you please for your desktop workstations. If your computer isn't up to running it, we'll get you an upgrade, and don't worry about downtime, if you can't work while you're waiting, take some time off on us. If it won't talk to the other applications on our network, don't worry about it, it's our problem. Take some more time off on us while we fix it.
When a public policy position is this easily reduced to transparent (but not "Trustworthy") absurdity, it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
Any organization has the right to mandate the use of software matching certain specifications to ensure interoperability and a common environment so that any employee will be able to function on any workstation she is assigned to for at least basic applications like mail, office apps, etc. It just happens that in a government, such regulations and laws have the force of law because it is the government. Further, it also has the responsibility to both itself and to its customers to keep information it collects secure. It can best meet this responsibility by mandating the use of securable software. Microsoft doesn't make any.
Moreover, a government is in a special position with respect to legacy software and formats. Unlike most businesses, documents created 25 or 50 years ago must be accessible not only to government employees, but to the general public as well. When looking up a legal precedent and why it was made, one frequently has to go back 25 or 50 or even sometimes, 100+ years to look up what the courts and the legislators had to say about it. Does anyone think MS will be around in 100 years?
Government also has special requirements regarding security, it has many databases full of software it must maintain in order to function which are an attractive target for h4xx0rs. The CA state employee database which got hacked a few months ago. Allowing state agencies to pick insecure MS products in the name of "freedom of choice" is just not acceptable.
Finally, one other point that should have been obvious to Tim. The Open Source Movement has gotten big enough that it either must get political or get crushed. MS lobbying killed the NSA Secure Linux project despite the fact that MS makes no secure products of its own. What's going on with respect to laws being made by politicians 0wn3d by Hollywood that will destructively impact the Open Source Community is known to all of us with the remotest clue. Until I read what Tim said, I would have put him in that category.
We can no longer afford to follow our previous traditions of ignoring politics or pretending to be a political player via geektivism, which as Declan has said, must ultimately fail. Politicians listen to our presentations politely and with blank incomprehension, our people get the feeling of having made a difference, then they go back to their offices and talk to the lobbyists who speak to them in a language they do under$tand.
We either have to learn to play with the big boys... to compete in the political arena with Microsoft and Hollywood as equals or find ourselves locked out of the software market and ultimately, locked out of the ability to use our own computers in any manner not preapproved by MS and Hollywood.
While I support the Digital Software Security Act and will tell my CA state legislators to vote YES, the Open Source Community is going to get our collective asses kicked over this one unless it is willing to organize a PAC for the purpose of collecting our money to redistribute to politicians...
If you want access to politicians, you've got to pay for it just like everyone else who gets it does. That's a lesson we must learn NOW for our own survival.
Re:What CAN We do? (continued)
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Lessig @ OSCON
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Hate to be the first comment on my own post, but:
Yes, I know that $150K != $200K, I revised one number when I should have fixed both.
There are a lot of people who made have made their pile in high-tech, the latest ones being the ones who exited high-tech stock before the dot.bomb . If you are one of them, ask yourself "If Hollywood gets everything it wants unopposed, what are my chances of profitable high tech investment or starting a successful new technology with the Feds and Hollywood in control of what my company can and can't do? If you know one, show them this post and my other one on this thread.
Here's a fair usage quote from a recent slashdotted article by Cory Doctorow which might help you answer this:
"The tech companies at the BPDG had been there with the understanding that the BPDG's job was to establish a set of objective criteria for new technology. Those criteria might be restrictive, but at the very least, tech companies would know where they stood when they were planning new gizmos.
Hollywood suckered the tech companies in with this promise and then sprang the trap. No, you won't get a set of objective criteria out of us. From now on, every technology company with a new product will have to come to us on its knees and beg for our approval. We can't tell you what technology we're looking for, but we'll know it when we see it. That's the "standard" we're writing here: we'll know it when we see it."
Can you do business in this environment with CDTBPA thrown in and more legislation designed to lock down and lock out technology as Hollywood builds on its success? How much is it worth to you to have an America you can do business in?
I'm asking you to open your checkbook, your Roladex, and give some of your time.
The next person who asks you this in a few years may be asking for "your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor". It won't be me, I won't be in the USA at that point. I won't be able to make a living here.
Of course, you might be looking forward to retiring in a non-tech, sleepy, backwater America where bright, ambitious kids emigrate and high tech is something you buy or have smuggled in from Japan or Europe or Canada. If this is your wish, just do nothing, the Senator from Hollywood and his friends will bring this to your door.
If you who have benefited most from high-tech business are not ready to come forward and protect your own interests as well as those of the rest of us, fine. If your next vacation home or a high-end Lexus are more important to you, your money and your right to spend it as you please.
When you discover that your choices to do technology yourself are to beg the government and DMCA/RIAA for permission and wait or to emigrate, at least you'll know who to blame. Not Jack Valenti or Hilary Rosen. The person you see whenever you look in the mirror. "Shoulda, coulda, woulda" won't stop the content industry from turning the US high-tech community into roadkill.
I'm not nominating myself as the head of a geek-oriented version of the NRA/AARP.
I can say that I know how to find that person and the other resources needed to get started. But nothing can be done without the seed money. The people we need to get this running don't work for free and the services we need have price tags attached.
For the rest of you, if this happens, be ready to participate. No mass-action political organization works unless there are people who really will partipate, with your $5 and $10 and $100 and $1000 contributions, with the willingness to point-and-click a fax "message to Congress", talk to your non-tech friends, and to walk precincts for our friends if you're asked to do so.
If this doesn't happen and Declan is proved right, the best advice I can give you is to start preparing for a future when there is no longer a significant high-tech presence in America. Will you emigrate or figure out how to make a living in a depressed economy that isn't ever coming back?
What CAN We do?
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Lessig @ OSCON
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I admire Lessig, but times have changed and he hasn't.
We have brick-walled on what public interest political educational and advocacy groups can do. If we are to be able to make a living at high-tech, we can no longer afford to send delegations to DC to give dog and pony shows which will be greeted with polite applause and be followed up by backroom political deals involving money comming from Hollywood.
Here's the minimum specification for starting something effective... along the lines of the NRA/AARP style political advocacy group I've been calling for which is the only chance we've got of reversing this tide before it rolls over our jobs.
What would it take to form a REAL political activist group with a chance of winning?
All it would take to start an organization along the lines of what I'm calling for would be for ONE person (or a handful of people) to hire a political organizer with experience, either out of NRA/AARP/etc. or one who understands their methods, an experienced political lobbyist, set up a domain, a server, a contract with a political fax server outfit (to do the "fax your legislator" setup), and a PAC registration... and announce on slashdot and Politech that "we're open for business"... that person doesn't even NEED to put together an overview, I've posted one in several versions.
The startup budget might be as much as $200K. That just gets the office open, the Webserver up, and minimum support staff, to actually make donations to politicians means raising money... as in open your checkbooks, we as a group must at least match Hollywood's spending on politicians. The good news is that we as a group collectively have a hell of a lot more money than they do. All we need is a group to aggregate our donations and get them to our friends and our enemies' opponents.
Note that there are people who've been saying "if you think this needs doing, why don't you do this?"... that's the answer. This is not something any random geek can put together, there's a cost of entry here and most of it goes to buy expertise that isn't in the average geek's head.
Anybody who believes otherwise is wasting his time, and if you get sucked into his trip, yours as well. (Greetz, GeekPAC! - *snicker*) If you can't do this, don't start a group, wait until somebody else does that can. If nobody else appears, start making plans for America's non-tech future. Saying "We're gonna take back Congress" is a waste of time unless you have access to at least some budget and expertise.
If nobody in our community can do this... as in pay the cost of freedom... we don't deserve it and we won't have it. We CAN win... but somebody's going to have to get together the framework described here to do this.
Losing on this issue is going to cost anybody in a position to do anything serious about our situation a lot more than $150K.
While Toho [jp] probably can roll over Davezilla, if they go after Mozilla, they are going after Time-Warner-AOL(Netscape)... what happens if Time-Warner decides not to allow the broadcast of any Godzilla movie on any property they control, including on the air broadcasts from TV stations carried by their system?
That's just the beginning. I'm sure that this empire can come up with other nasty things to do about them.
Toho v Time-Warner-AOL = Bambi v Godzilla (an actual short flick, and another instance of lack of trademark defense)
As for the first few years of NRA... we have more money, better educated people, and we have the web and mailing lists... a lot better than telephone trees and mass snailmailings.
Once we have a credible presence, NRA / AARP / etc. will be happy to do business for us. Credible means... once we can do something for them as well as vice versa.
We need lobbyists armed with position papers and CHECKBOOKS ready to write multi-kilobuck checks... who can say "we've got XX thousand members in your district. Who would you like them to vote for?"
We need lobbyists who can say "Remember what happened to former Congressman XXXXXX who backed the RIAA?"
An organization that can't come up with a decent splash page in 6 months or so is NOT going to organize us by our millions to rise up and take over DC.
My conversation with one of their leaders has convinced me that they are no more capable of understanding the political environment they're supposed to be working for us in than a chimp is of mastering calculus.
This isn't the sort of philosophical issue that we can afford to be noble losers about.
It's our jobs, or what's left of them.
Or if you aren't working, whether there will ever again be a wave of high-tech company expansion that'll get you a job.
CDTBPA, BPWG recommendations, and we don't know what next mean that the cost of US high-tech R&D go through the roof, and the brain-damaged technology Hollywood is likely to approve will reduce the functionality of hardware, software, the Internet itself in a way even or especially noticeable by Joe Sixpack *and* his PHM. What does this economy look like for a high-tech worker?
The example for us to follow is the NRA, not the Federation of Atomic Scientists. We have to learn how to play hardball politics in the big leagues. NOW.
This isn't about taking a noble stand. It's about kicking asses and taking names. It's about raising enough money to tell politicians "Our way or the highway. Your choice." Our chunk of the economy is 10x that of the entertainment industry. If we can't figure out a way enough money given this to make guys like Hollings go away, we deserve what we are getting.
This is also about the future of whether there is going to be any human freedom or not in this part of the 20th century.
However, I think the motivation that's going to get us to open our wallets and checkbooks and get up early some morning to walk a precinct for a candidate our organization's political analysts say is our friend is or point-and-click faxes to our elected officials every other week is... a few rich, greedy assholes want to protect a dying business model that is publically denounced by their own employees in a manner which will probably end the IT or other high tech careers of a whole lot of us.
So they can inflict a few more boy bands or Britney Spears soundalike on us before they retire.
Declan is RIGHT in that the traditional educational approach is not working and it isn't going to.
His analysis of the current political situation is right, but only as far as it goes. What he's missed is that o1ur jobs are at stake. High tech R&D will have to move out of the USA if Hollywood gets everything it wants and at the moment, MPAA/RIAA have NO meaningful opposition.
He is WRONG about the options being to keep doing futile educational attempts or go home.
Lessig is RIGHT in that we have to stay engaged in the political process. He is WRONG in saying we have to do the same old things, only bigger and better.
BOTH are wrong in thinking there are no other options.
The third choice is ORGANIZE in a clueful way.
Is the average member of the National Rifle Association a major record label suit making $1M a year?
Is the average retiree member of the American Association of Retired Persons a VP of Universal making $2M a year?
I think you know that the answer to both questions are NO.
Does Congress listen to the NRA or the AARP? Not always, not all the time, but in general, the answer is "YES!". The "not always" simply means that nobody gets everything they want all the time.
Is the income of the average member of either group that much greater than ours? Of course not, our average incomes are far higher than theirs. Is the average intelligence or wisdom of the average member of each group so much greater than that of the average "geek" that they deserve political influence and we don't?
What does the NRA/AARP do?
They collect money from members and contribute to the politicians who are their friends and to the opponents of their enemies.
They have a full time lobbyist staff in DC to keep track of the issues connected to their members and disburse campaign money and give advice to politicians which gets listened to.
When quiet words in back rooms don't make the point, they contact their membership, tell them that they need to contact their Congressperson and why, and make it easy for their members to contact Congress via Web > fax gateway servers (snailmail to Congresspeople is obsolete) and by other means.
When they really want to make a point, they target politicians and not only support their opponents, but actively campaign, i.e. buy their own ads, make their own commercials, and put their own people into precincts to rid the world of the presence of their political enemy.
The high-tech part of the US economy is $500B, the entertainment sector about $50B. They are the tail, WE are the dog. Who's getting wagged?
There seems to be an assumption that just because we work with computers, there's a collective cluelessness that will make it impossible for us to combine as a whole to save our own asses, that we are too stupid to understand what our own self-interest is and too selfish to give our own money and time to do anything about it.
Declan has offended us because he's the first geek public figure to make the assumptions that our opposition makes about is explicit.
Our options are:
Do what the NRA/AARP does. Band together, open our wallets, donate our own time to make sure our friends get elected and our enemies get retired. One $100 contribution to a Congresscritter can be ignored. 100,000 such contributions aggregated by a "geek" organization means that when the Department of Commerce sets up a DRM conference, our people will be invited VIP guests and maybe Hollywood doesn't get invited.
watch corporate high-tech R&D move to places where Hollywood doesn't 0wn the government to escape the drastically increased costs of compliance and slower development cycles with the legislation passed or in progress will mandate.
The individual geek option in this case is to move out of the US when this happens to wherever the most interesting companies are going or learn how to love flipping burgers. Do you want to say "Would you like fries with that?" on the job?
bet on every government in the world adopting the same shackles on its own high-tech that the US entertainment industry wants. I think this a sucker bet.
Get ready to open your checkbooks to buy insurance against having to move out of the USA to practice any high-tech profession via the political process. Or start saving up for relocation and startup money in a new country. Or see what kind of fast-food uniforms you look best in.
People, it's "Join or Die" time.
We can find something to join or invent something, but we WILL stand up and be counted or we WILL be rolled over.
You have run out of time to decide. What's it going to be?
Right. If you and others are willing to pay for that education to be delivered in the form of 30 second commercials and by lobbyists hired by an organization that represents us who can write Hollywood sized checks.
What you're describing does not work. Declan apparently thinks that's all we're capable of doing and therefore we should give up.
If we as a community can't get it together that far, start practicing the phrase "You want fries with that?"
Our option? Find or create a NRA/AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) that represents us. The average member of NRA or AARP has a lower income than the average one of us does. Politicians take the organizations and the interersts they represent seriously.
We are NOT taken seriously. You know what the fix is.
The approach you describe is basically, more of the same stuff that didn't work last time around. The educational lobbying approach EFF, etc. uses has been taken as far as it can go, i.e. we've discovered it fails against a well-financed and organized opposition. Declan is right in saying that approach is doomed to failure.
Look, if the NRA or AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) were opposing us instead of Hollywood, we'd STILL be getting our asses kicked.
The NRA / AARP have lots of people ready to give money in $10 and $50 and $100 contributions, put in time, point and click their way to contacting their Congresscritters.
I'll let you figure out what the lesson is for us in terms of what it takes to get taken serious ly in DC.
you're up against such massive sources of wealth, it would be nothing for our competitors in the auctioning off of Feinstein's votes to step up their bids by a factor of 100 if they wanted to win the prize badly enough.
If the DMCA/RIAA want to give Dianne Feinstein $50,000,000 or even $5,000,000 , even the press and the average voter will wonder why and what they're trying to get from their money. The probability of this is exactly 100%, because the opposition candidate will notice and the attack ads will trumpet it when she runs for re-election next, even given that she isn't running again for another 4 years The GOP is very good at attack ads.
The phrase "The Senator from Disney" won't be exclusively an in-group geek community joke anymore, and the favorable public image Disney has will be more than neutralized by the fact that even Joe Sixpack knows that there is never a good motivation in terms of the public interest for a corporation to make a gigantic campaign contribution to an incumbent. Suddenly the press starts asking questions of the sort that indicate the incumbent is in deep shit.
Since there isn't 5-10% more difference between winning and losing a election, I'd say that rubbing the public's collective face in the fact that she is 0wn3d would probably be in effect, an award of the Senatorial seat to the GOP the very next time she runs.
In this case, the "smart, safe" thing to do would be for her to return the RIAA/MPAA money publically and pledge to work for "protection of consumer rights".
The other obvious point that an organization capable of giving $500K to a single candidate in a single election cycle has lots of motivated people in it and probably has a lot of non-member support behind it. The support of the NRA or AARP goes well beyond its membership.
Why is it more important for Ashcroft to bust song-swappers than terrorists? Or the crooks at Enron, Worldcom, who have stolen billions of dollars from stockholders? How about fraud at Global Crossing?
See below. Here's the profile of a typical legistator who called for this. While it's universally conceded that politicians are 0wned, one would think that Senator Feinstein would be embarrassed at coming so cheap.
To put this into perspective, if 1,000 geeks cared to come up with $500 each and contribute it under the name of a single organization, Feinstein would be a fanatic P2P advocate, even if she can't spell P2P.
individual contributions
Global Crossing $24,000
Walt Disney Co $22,750
William Morris Agency $21,000
Time Warner $16,800
Vivendi Universal $15,000
Any questions?
I have posted fair usage quotes from your interesting and thought-provoking article along with a link to The Register URL where the original article was posted in an appropriate forum.
The forum I chose is called psychoceramics. It's an international forum of the sort you would like to make disappear for the discussion and appreciation of crackpots.
You deserve the opportunity to take your place among the notable net.kooks of our time and I'm glad I could give it to you. Very few manage to make the transition from complete obscurity to immediately joining the ranks of men like Archimedes Plutonium with a single article, but you deserve this recognition and I will be happy to see you get it. It's unfortunate that Monty Python's Flying Circus isn't still being produced, as it would be the ideal venue to present your interesting ideas visually to a mass audience with all the seriousness that they deserve.
I look forward to seeing your encore performance, though I can not begin to imagine how you will be able to top this. Do try, though.
A.Lizard
p.s. any laughter you heard in response to your article from The Register itself was *at* you, not with you. I am certain that your article was published solely for its entertainment value.
Bravo!
Slashdot Mirror
The FM radio plays the songs that the record industry paid to put there. As far as the RIAA is concerned, you can record your favorite radio station 24/7/365. Why? Because they know that if you really like a song, you'll get the CD so you can really hear it. The reason is that given the compression, limiting, and the general limitations of an analog bandwidth-limited FM channel, there's a big difference between what you can record off a radio in cassette and what you'll hear if you play back a CD. The best you can say about the quality is "good enough for casual listening".
A few years ago, the product was vinyl records and people found out what was on the records by listening to tracks on AM/FM radio. Yes, people once listened to music on AM.
These tracks played on radio are and were PROMOTIONAL TOOLS. No promotion, i.e. if the people have no way to hear what is on a record, they won't buy it. Why should we pay the industry's promo costs, except as they are reflected in the price of the actual product?
An MP3 is in many ways comparable to an FM radio signal. Is it a "perfect copy"? If it is, why doesn't everybody but the totally honest download all their music? Despite what's been done to shut down P2P and Internet Radio, it's still possible to get almost anything if you know how/where to look. Why do people buy CDs?
It isn't just about supporting artists, it's just that CDs sound better.
128K MP3 quality isn't about getting every nuance of the music to your ears, it's about being "good enough" for casual listening.
The MP3 IS A PROMOTIONAL TOOL designed to get you to buy the CD. Anyone who mistakes MP3s for products has just fallen for the hype of the people who want to turn our computers into DRM-locked household appliances.
Why does RIAA care about MP3s and not FM radio? Because independent artists can distribute MP3s via upload to Internet radio networks and to P2P networks without having to pay a gatekeeper fee to independent promoters to get to FM radio. The RIAA labels keep the gatekeeper fees (aka payola) high enough to freeze out "just anybody".
Do MP3s as promotional tools work? There's a recent album that was released by an unknown band itself on MP3 for promotional purposes before they started selling the CD. They made a very nice profit off it.
Do MP3s work as promotional tools for major record labels? The evidence indicates that it works just as well as FM radio does.
What's the problem?
This isn't about piracy, it's about monopoly.
I wouldn't mind paying say, $1-2 for a CD-quality track I really liked, if there was any practical way to deliver a 50 meg download... this takes a while even with a broadband link... and I'm running 56K anyway.
Buy an MP3? I'm not interested in paying for music whose sound is "just good enough". If you're a musician, I'll repay your promotional costs when I buy your record. Don't expect me to pay your promo costs up front, if I can't find out whether or not your CD is worth buying by listening to some tracks at "just good enough" quality to figure out whether I want it or not, I'll find some artist who doesn't expect me to pay promotional costs in advance.
That's the real problem with the MP3 music services, regardless of vendor and regardless of the level of DRM built into the product/player.
People know whether they articulate it or not that there's a difference between sound worth paying for and freebie promotional tools whose sound is just good enough to tell you whether the CD is worth buying or not. What an MP3 service provider can do for you is provide you with lots of MP3 music packaged conveniently. . . so you can figure out what CDs you want to buy.
Why? Not because of artist loyalty or love of the RIAA, because CDs actually sound better, and if you've got a big bucks stereo system, you want to use it so you can listen to every little nuance of what your favorite artists do.
For an MP3 service, you are buying access to music, NOT the MP3s. This isn't to say that you want one-shot MP3s or time-locked, etc. You might decide to listen to your favorite new album on MP3 for a month or a year before you get around to buying. Maybe you're short on money and have to wait until your next check. But if you really like it, you'll buy the CD sooner or later. The artist and label make just as much money if you buy it a year from now after listening to the MP3 1,000 times as they do if you decide you've got to have it 30 seconds into the song.
The people who whine about PIRACY are the ones who haven't figured out what the RIAA labels know.
A product people will NOT pay for has a cash value of ZERO.
Sure, you'll rip the CD under "fair usage" afterwards if the RIAA's 0wn3d Congresswhores don't stop you, but generally where you can play it under circumstances where "just good enough" is good enough, e.g. your MP3 player when you're out jogging or doing other things where you don't have your full attention on the music.
The fair usage is what the RIAA/MPAA want to redefine out of existence.
Evidence indicates that they're doing just that.
Otherwise, they'd be doing political organization, throwing in megabucks into an industry PAC, and calling on the community for help.
What's really going on is that they are putting even less effort than MS did into "Trustworthy Computing".
The AAW Declan cites as not being concerned about the article has reason not to be. Their members don't want to see people posting large chunks of their books on the Web for free access. Time-Warner isn't concerned about the DMCA, either.
Anyone who reads the article will see a pattern emerging. The people who are not concerned about the DMCA infringing on their rights can depend on their deep-pocketed parent organizations paying their legal fees.
I've already had to pull content off my site because of a meritless legal claim simply because I can't afford to defend a lawsuit at this point.
Apparently, Declan has forgotten that just because he has a major publication to defend him, academic researchers have schools behind them, and major corporations have legal staffs, that not everybody has a big daddy they can hide behind for legal protection.
I think that whoever approved this should be the first test subject. Let's see if he has any brainwaves.
Here's a complete list of successful El Al hijacking in the last 30 years:
They don't have brain-wave scanners. They don't have k3wl, l33t supertechnology. They don't even have armed pilots.
What they do have is bulletproof and hardened doors between cockpit and passengers, openly armed air marshals on board, and ground security that's trained and clueful.
They don't give terrorists a break with profiling.
I like Star Trek technology as well as the next guy, but I also recognize the difference between SF and reality.
I've also been around for a while, the first VC-funded software development company I worked for ran in a C-64 environment.
The fact that you can't sell 1M units without an RIAA label doesn't mean that it's impossible to sell 1M records on the Internet.
This is not to say that "YOU SUCK!", this is just saying that becoming a "hit" isn't guaranteed to be any easier just because one is marketing via the Internet.
However, neither of us has any reason to believe that this is impossible.
Let's say a well-known artist with a fanatic following finishes a contract committment and he runs through the numbers and decide not to renew with a major label because his profit from his next CD is higher even with a fraction of the sales generated by her last one...
Let's say somebody's career takes off 'the old fashioned way' based on Internet airplay from non-US Internet radio and word of mouth because everybody likes it.
Do you know why unknown artists suddenly become popular other than 'well, I guess the marketing must have really worked out'... 'the stars must have been right'... ? If you don't know how someone can go from zero to rock hero, don't say that nobody can do it on the Net.
My point is that not only is this not impossible, I think it's going to happen sooner or later. RIAA's problem is that they have to prevent it from happening anywhere for anybody.
Working with an independent artist now. We get CD-on-demand from where ampcast buys it. I don't expect to sell 1M units... I see the person in question as appealing to a niche market. I'm just hoping if we can get the pieces together and put enough effort into it, the artist gets to make a comfortable living.
2. Business Model: If ONE artist goes platinum without the help of an RIAA label and announces $5-10M in profits, their business model crashes, their mainstream artists will be bailing. Perhaps we can accelerate this process. The linked post also explains why piracy is a red herring, a non-issue which is core to the RIAA disinformation campaign.
Hmmm... I'm not the best person to give you the list you're asking for... but here are 3 sites I know that have both downloadable MP3s and non-RIAA CDs for sale:
However, the great majority of artists you've never heard of who are selling their own CDs and making downloads available are non-RIAA. If in doubt, ask.
The only reference I could find to "Recording Revenue Collection Act" was at uncoveror.
The record labels pay independent promoters lots of money per song to get on the radio which then goes in part to radio stations, far more than they could possibly collect from end users. Why? Because most people find out about music they buy from FM radio.
They discourage people from listening to FM, they've broken their business model.
Yes, the idea you describe is insane. If Hollings introduced such a thing, RIAA would unplug its campaign support immediately.
If Hilary Rosen took an idea into her head to get Hollings to write anything like that, her employers would not only consider her insane, they'd probably do their best to get her locked up in a booby hatch.
I should have checked the site first. Here ar a set of stories on their front page.
MAFIA TO OFFER PRE-PAID ILLEGAL SERVICES
MICROSOFT DEVELOPING WINDOWS BSD
NEW DAWN BIOTECH ADMITS THAT CHICK'N IS REAL
OSAMA BIN LADEN MAY ATTACK FROM SPACE
THE UNCOVEROR IS AN ONION-STYLE HUMOR SITE, YOU IDIOT!
The arguments about lower quality music selling CDs is one of the two core factors of the RIAA business model. If you like a song played on FM or via any MP3 provider, you'll buy the CD, it's a lot less hassle than a 50 meg CD audio and you get full quality and all the nuances you paid for when you got your big bucks stereo or Dolby Pro Logic system.
The difference? If I'm an independent artist, I can upload to any P2P or any Internet Radio provider that's left. If listeners like what they here on P2P, they'll tell their friends. If the owner/DJ of a Internet Radio station likes it, they'll play it on the "air". No money changed hands.
As an independent artist, (which I'm not) I can NOT get access to a FM radio station playlist without paying a shitload of money to an "independent promoter" who pays the radio station in an under or over the counter transaction. Even given the money, the good timeslots go to the regular customers, all of which are RIAA labels.
So RIAA labels have a monopoly on FM radio content. That's where the sheeple go to hear "new music". Anything you hear on commercial radio is a commercial for an RIAA label band or musician. (A series of Salon articles lays out the whole deal) That's the OTHER core factor in the RIAA label business model, exclusive access to FM radio.
If an artist goes platinum without record company backing, he'll have made $5M-$10M. If one goes platinum for the first time with a label behind him, he might break even against his record label advances, partially due to legit advances but mainly due to Enron-style economics.
The day one goes platinum without a record label, the business model used by all the RIAA labels just went into the dumper.
Metallica will hear "this guy went platinum and made 5 MILLION DOLLARS OFF HIS FIRST RECORD?"... and I predict they will be among the very first to tell their lawyers "GET US OUT OF THIS RECORD LABEL CONTENT NOW!!!". However, this will probably be page 10 of Billboard, that issue of the magazine will be the first "all lawsuit" issue.
With Internet Radio and P2P unplugged, the record industry can say to an artist "You make a living with us or not at all, without us, the only people you can sell CDs to are the ones who show up at your gigs."
Without exclusive control by labels over any method a musician can use to get to the public, all a RIAA label is, is a ruinously expensive source of venture capital, both in terms of money and personal integrity, and if they change their mind about promoting a record, the musician can;t legally work.
Anyone who talks about piracy is either a conscious shill for the industry or parroting industry propaganda. Check out what Courtney Love and Janis Ian have to say about this. (presumably you know how to use Google)
MP3s and songs played back on analog FM are promotional tools, NOT products.
Get any software you please from any vendor you please for your desktop workstations. If your computer isn't up to running it, we'll get you an upgrade, and don't worry about downtime, if you can't work while you're waiting, take some time off on us. If it won't talk to the other applications on our network, don't worry about it, it's our problem. Take some more time off on us while we fix it.
When a public policy position is this easily reduced to transparent (but not "Trustworthy") absurdity, it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
Any organization has the right to mandate the use of software matching certain specifications to ensure interoperability and a common environment so that any employee will be able to function on any workstation she is assigned to for at least basic applications like mail, office apps, etc. It just happens that in a government, such regulations and laws have the force of law because it is the government. Further, it also has the responsibility to both itself and to its customers to keep information it collects secure. It can best meet this responsibility by mandating the use of securable software. Microsoft doesn't make any.
Moreover, a government is in a special position with respect to legacy software and formats. Unlike most businesses, documents created 25 or 50 years ago must be accessible not only to government employees, but to the general public as well. When looking up a legal precedent and why it was made, one frequently has to go back 25 or 50 or even sometimes, 100+ years to look up what the courts and the legislators had to say about it. Does anyone think MS will be around in 100 years?
Government also has special requirements regarding security, it has many databases full of software it must maintain in order to function which are an attractive target for h4xx0rs. The CA state employee database which got hacked a few months ago. Allowing state agencies to pick insecure MS products in the name of "freedom of choice" is just not acceptable.
Finally, one other point that should have been obvious to Tim. The Open Source Movement has gotten big enough that it either must get political or get crushed. MS lobbying killed the NSA Secure Linux project despite the fact that MS makes no secure products of its own. What's going on with respect to laws being made by politicians 0wn3d by Hollywood that will destructively impact the Open Source Community is known to all of us with the remotest clue. Until I read what Tim said, I would have put him in that category.
We can no longer afford to follow our previous traditions of ignoring politics or pretending to be a political player via geektivism, which as Declan has said, must ultimately fail. Politicians listen to our presentations politely and with blank incomprehension, our people get the feeling of having made a difference, then they go back to their offices and talk to the lobbyists who speak to them in a language they do under$tand.
We either have to learn to play with the big boys... to compete in the political arena with Microsoft and Hollywood as equals or find ourselves locked out of the software market and ultimately, locked out of the ability to use our own computers in any manner not preapproved by MS and Hollywood.
While I support the Digital Software Security Act and will tell my CA state legislators to vote YES, the Open Source Community is going to get our collective asses kicked over this one unless it is willing to organize a PAC for the purpose of collecting our money to redistribute to politicians...
If you want access to politicians, you've got to pay for it just like everyone else who gets it does. That's a lesson we must learn NOW for our own survival.
Yes, I know that $150K != $200K, I revised one number when I should have fixed both.
There are a lot of people who made have made their pile in high-tech, the latest ones being the ones who exited high-tech stock before the dot.bomb . If you are one of them, ask yourself "If Hollywood gets everything it wants unopposed, what are my chances of profitable high tech investment or starting a successful new technology with the Feds and Hollywood in control of what my company can and can't do? If you know one, show them this post and my other one on this thread.
Here's a fair usage quote from a recent slashdotted article by Cory Doctorow which might help you answer this:
"The tech companies at the BPDG had been there with the understanding that the BPDG's job was to establish a set of objective criteria for new technology. Those criteria might be restrictive, but at the very least, tech companies would know where they stood when they were planning new gizmos.
Hollywood suckered the tech companies in with this promise and then sprang the trap. No, you won't get a set of objective criteria out of us. From now on, every technology company with a new product will have to come to us on its knees and beg for our approval. We can't tell you what technology we're looking for, but we'll know it when we see it. That's the "standard" we're writing here: we'll know it when we see it."
Can you do business in this environment with CDTBPA thrown in and more legislation designed to lock down and lock out technology as Hollywood builds on its success? How much is it worth to you to have an America you can do business in?
I'm asking you to open your checkbook, your Roladex, and give some of your time.
The next person who asks you this in a few years may be asking for "your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor". It won't be me, I won't be in the USA at that point. I won't be able to make a living here.
Of course, you might be looking forward to retiring in a non-tech, sleepy, backwater America where bright, ambitious kids emigrate and high tech is something you buy or have smuggled in from Japan or Europe or Canada. If this is your wish, just do nothing, the Senator from Hollywood and his friends will bring this to your door.
If you who have benefited most from high-tech business are not ready to come forward and protect your own interests as well as those of the rest of us, fine. If your next vacation home or a high-end Lexus are more important to you, your money and your right to spend it as you please.
When you discover that your choices to do technology yourself are to beg the government and DMCA/RIAA for permission and wait or to emigrate, at least you'll know who to blame. Not Jack Valenti or Hilary Rosen. The person you see whenever you look in the mirror. "Shoulda, coulda, woulda" won't stop the content industry from turning the US high-tech community into roadkill.
I'm not nominating myself as the head of a geek-oriented version of the NRA/AARP.
I can say that I know how to find that person and the other resources needed to get started. But nothing can be done without the seed money. The people we need to get this running don't work for free and the services we need have price tags attached.
For the rest of you, if this happens, be ready to participate. No mass-action political organization works unless there are people who really will partipate, with your $5 and $10 and $100 and $1000 contributions, with the willingness to point-and-click a fax "message to Congress", talk to your non-tech friends, and to walk precincts for our friends if you're asked to do so.
If this doesn't happen and Declan is proved right, the best advice I can give you is to start preparing for a future when there is no longer a significant high-tech presence in America. Will you emigrate or figure out how to make a living in a depressed economy that isn't ever coming back?
We have brick-walled on what public interest political educational and advocacy groups can do. If we are to be able to make a living at high-tech, we can no longer afford to send delegations to DC to give dog and pony shows which will be greeted with polite applause and be followed up by backroom political deals involving money comming from Hollywood.
Here's the minimum specification for starting something effective... along the lines of the NRA/AARP style political advocacy group I've been calling for which is the only chance we've got of reversing this tide before it rolls over our jobs.
What would it take to form a REAL political activist group with a chance of winning?
All it would take to start an organization along the lines of what I'm calling for would be for ONE person (or a handful of people) to hire a political organizer with experience, either out of NRA/AARP/etc. or one who understands their methods, an experienced political lobbyist, set up a domain, a server, a contract with a political fax server outfit (to do the "fax your legislator" setup), and a PAC registration... and announce on slashdot and Politech that "we're open for business"... that person doesn't even NEED to put together an overview, I've posted one in several versions.
The startup budget might be as much as $200K. That just gets the office open, the Webserver up, and minimum support staff, to actually make donations to politicians means raising money... as in open your checkbooks, we as a group must at least match Hollywood's spending on politicians. The good news is that we as a group collectively have a hell of a lot more money than they do. All we need is a group to aggregate our donations and get them to our friends and our enemies' opponents.
Note that there are people who've been saying "if you think this needs doing, why don't you do this?"... that's the answer. This is not something any random geek can put together, there's a cost of entry here and most of it goes to buy expertise that isn't in the average geek's head.
Anybody who believes otherwise is wasting his time, and if you get sucked into his trip, yours as well. (Greetz, GeekPAC! - *snicker*) If you can't do this, don't start a group, wait until somebody else does that can. If nobody else appears, start making plans for America's non-tech future. Saying "We're gonna take back Congress" is a waste of time unless you have access to at least some budget and expertise.
If nobody in our community can do this... as in pay the cost of freedom... we don't deserve it and we won't have it. We CAN win... but somebody's going to have to get together the framework described here to do this.
Losing on this issue is going to cost anybody in a position to do anything serious about our situation a lot more than $150K.
That's just the beginning. I'm sure that this empire can come up with other nasty things to do about them.
Toho v Time-Warner-AOL = Bambi v Godzilla (an actual short flick, and another instance of lack of trademark defense)
As for the first few years of NRA... we have more money, better educated people, and we have the web and mailing lists... a lot better than telephone trees and mass snailmailings.
Once we have a credible presence, NRA / AARP / etc. will be happy to do business for us. Credible means... once we can do something for them as well as vice versa.
We need lobbyists armed with position papers and CHECKBOOKS ready to write multi-kilobuck checks... who can say "we've got XX thousand members in your district. Who would you like them to vote for?"
We need lobbyists who can say "Remember what happened to former Congressman XXXXXX who backed the RIAA?"
An organization that can't come up with a decent splash page in 6 months or so is NOT going to organize us by our millions to rise up and take over DC.
My conversation with one of their leaders has convinced me that they are no more capable of understanding the political environment they're supposed to be working for us in than a chimp is of mastering calculus.
It's our jobs, or what's left of them.
Or if you aren't working, whether there will ever again be a wave of high-tech company expansion that'll get you a job.
CDTBPA, BPWG recommendations, and we don't know what next mean that the cost of US high-tech R&D go through the roof, and the brain-damaged technology Hollywood is likely to approve will reduce the functionality of hardware, software, the Internet itself in a way even or especially noticeable by Joe Sixpack *and* his PHM. What does this economy look like for a high-tech worker?
The example for us to follow is the NRA, not the Federation of Atomic Scientists. We have to learn how to play hardball politics in the big leagues. NOW.
This isn't about taking a noble stand. It's about kicking asses and taking names. It's about raising enough money to tell politicians "Our way or the highway. Your choice." Our chunk of the economy is 10x that of the entertainment industry. If we can't figure out a way enough money given this to make guys like Hollings go away, we deserve what we are getting.
This is also about the future of whether there is going to be any human freedom or not in this part of the 20th century.
However, I think the motivation that's going to get us to open our wallets and checkbooks and get up early some morning to walk a precinct for a candidate our organization's political analysts say is our friend is or point-and-click faxes to our elected officials every other week is... a few rich, greedy assholes want to protect a dying business model that is publically denounced by their own employees in a manner which will probably end the IT or other high tech careers of a whole lot of us.
So they can inflict a few more boy bands or Britney Spears soundalike on us before they retire.
His analysis of the current political situation is right, but only as far as it goes. What he's missed is that o1ur jobs are at stake. High tech R&D will have to move out of the USA if Hollywood gets everything it wants and at the moment, MPAA/RIAA have NO meaningful opposition.
He is WRONG about the options being to keep doing futile educational attempts or go home.
Lessig is RIGHT in that we have to stay engaged in the political process. He is WRONG in saying we have to do the same old things, only bigger and better.
BOTH are wrong in thinking there are no other options.
The third choice is ORGANIZE in a clueful way.
Is the average member of the National Rifle Association a major record label suit making $1M a year?
Is the average retiree member of the American Association of Retired Persons a VP of Universal making $2M a year?
I think you know that the answer to both questions are NO.
Does Congress listen to the NRA or the AARP? Not always, not all the time, but in general, the answer is "YES!". The "not always" simply means that nobody gets everything they want all the time.
Is the income of the average member of either group that much greater than ours? Of course not, our average incomes are far higher than theirs. Is the average intelligence or wisdom of the average member of each group so much greater than that of the average "geek" that they deserve political influence and we don't?
What does the NRA/AARP do?
The high-tech part of the US economy is $500B, the entertainment sector about $50B. They are the tail, WE are the dog. Who's getting wagged?
There seems to be an assumption that just because we work with computers, there's a collective cluelessness that will make it impossible for us to combine as a whole to save our own asses, that we are too stupid to understand what our own self-interest is and too selfish to give our own money and time to do anything about it.
Declan has offended us because he's the first geek public figure to make the assumptions that our opposition makes about is explicit.
Our options are:
- Do what the NRA/AARP does. Band together, open our wallets, donate our own time to make sure our friends get elected and our enemies get retired. One $100 contribution to a Congresscritter can be ignored. 100,000 such contributions aggregated by a "geek" organization means that when the Department of Commerce sets up a DRM conference, our people will be invited VIP guests and maybe Hollywood doesn't get invited.
- watch corporate high-tech R&D move to places where Hollywood doesn't 0wn the government to escape the drastically increased costs of compliance and slower development cycles with the legislation passed or in progress will mandate.
- bet on every government in the world adopting the same shackles on its own high-tech that the US entertainment industry wants. I think this a sucker bet.
Get ready to open your checkbooks to buy insurance against having to move out of the USA to practice any high-tech profession via the political process. Or start saving up for relocation and startup money in a new country. Or see what kind of fast-food uniforms you look best in.The individual geek option in this case is to move out of the US when this happens to wherever the most interesting companies are going or learn how to love flipping burgers. Do you want to say "Would you like fries with that?" on the job?
People, it's "Join or Die" time.
We can find something to join or invent something, but we WILL stand up and be counted or we WILL be rolled over.
You have run out of time to decide. What's it going to be?
What you're describing does not work. Declan apparently thinks that's all we're capable of doing and therefore we should give up.
If we as a community can't get it together that far, start practicing the phrase "You want fries with that?"
Our option? Find or create a NRA/AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) that represents us. The average member of NRA or AARP has a lower income than the average one of us does. Politicians take the organizations and the interersts they represent seriously.
We are NOT taken seriously. You know what the fix is.
Look, if the NRA or AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) were opposing us instead of Hollywood, we'd STILL be getting our asses kicked.
The NRA / AARP have lots of people ready to give money in $10 and $50 and $100 contributions, put in time, point and click their way to contacting their Congresscritters.
I'll let you figure out what the lesson is for us in terms of what it takes to get taken serious ly in DC.
If the DMCA/RIAA want to give Dianne Feinstein $50,000,000 or even $5,000,000 , even the press and the average voter will wonder why and what they're trying to get from their money. The probability of this is exactly 100%, because the opposition candidate will notice and the attack ads will trumpet it when she runs for re-election next, even given that she isn't running again for another 4 years The GOP is very good at attack ads.
The phrase "The Senator from Disney" won't be exclusively an in-group geek community joke anymore, and the favorable public image Disney has will be more than neutralized by the fact that even Joe Sixpack knows that there is never a good motivation in terms of the public interest for a corporation to make a gigantic campaign contribution to an incumbent. Suddenly the press starts asking questions of the sort that indicate the incumbent is in deep shit.
Since there isn't 5-10% more difference between winning and losing a election, I'd say that rubbing the public's collective face in the fact that she is 0wn3d would probably be in effect, an award of the Senatorial seat to the GOP the very next time she runs.
In this case, the "smart, safe" thing to do would be for her to return the RIAA/MPAA money publically and pledge to work for "protection of consumer rights".
The other obvious point that an organization capable of giving $500K to a single candidate in a single election cycle has lots of motivated people in it and probably has a lot of non-member support behind it. The support of the NRA or AARP goes well beyond its membership.
We also don't need exclusive use of her services, we need only outbid Mickey Mouse and friends.
See below. Here's the profile of a typical legistator who called for this. While it's universally conceded that politicians are 0wned, one would think that Senator Feinstein would be embarrassed at coming so cheap.
To put this into perspective, if 1,000 geeks cared to come up with $500 each and contribute it under the name of a single organization, Feinstein would be a fanatic P2P advocate, even if she can't spell P2P.
OpenSecrets campaign finance disclosures
Dianne Feinstein (D)*
1. Lawyers/Law Firms $485,118
2. Women's Issues $294,532
3. Retired (AARP,etc) $286,413
4. TV/Movies/Music $216,138
5. Real Estate $203,346
6. Securities & Investment $142,135
7. Health Professionals $112,494
8. Computer Equipment & Services $107,866
individual contributions
Global Crossing $24,000
Walt Disney Co $22,750
William Morris Agency $21,000
Time Warner $16,800
Vivendi Universal $15,000 Any questions?
I have posted fair usage quotes from your interesting and thought-provoking article along with a link to The Register URL where the original article was posted in an appropriate forum.
The forum I chose is called psychoceramics. It's an international forum of the sort you would like to make disappear for the discussion and appreciation of crackpots.
You deserve the opportunity to take your place among the notable net.kooks of our time and I'm glad I could give it to you. Very few manage to make the transition from complete obscurity to immediately joining the ranks of men like Archimedes Plutonium with a single article, but you deserve this recognition and I will be happy to see you get it. It's unfortunate that Monty Python's Flying Circus isn't still being produced, as it would be the ideal venue to present your interesting ideas visually to a mass audience with all the seriousness that they deserve.
I look forward to seeing your encore performance, though I can not begin to imagine how you will be able to top this. Do try, though.
A.Lizard
p.s. any laughter you heard in response to your article from The Register itself was *at* you, not with you. I am certain that your article was published solely for its entertainment value.
Bravo!