|
|
Crooks and Liarsby George Ziemann -- May 11, 2009 In December, the RIAA told Congress that they weren't going to file any new lawsuits. Turns out they were talking about something else. Imagine that. But that's okay. Everyone lies to Congress and nothing ever comes of it. Some people won't even acknowledge when Congress is asking a question. I think it's amazing that the RIAA is still keeping up the legal assault, seeing as they have less money to work with every year and they STILL have not won a file-sharing trial in the U.S. After six years, the winning defense has remained the simple phrase, "Prove it." More useful is the MPAA, which has a case pending against the authors of DVD ripping software. The significance of this particular case is that the question being asked up front is whether or not it's legal. In 30 or 40,000 cases, the RIAA has never asked this question of the court in regards to peer-to-peer on an individual basis. To my knowledge, it has not been used as a defense, either, but I'm not paying attention as closely as I used to. In the case of DVDs, the scenario is exactly the same as the Betamax case, which legalized video tape and home recording. There is no logical reason to expect that consumer-level copying should be illegal on DVD when it is legal on tape. The ability to prevent Aunt Marge from making a backup copy of her favorite movie will do nothing to prevent counterfeit bootleg sales. The so-called "pirates" are getting the pre-release films and music from inside the studios and pressing plants. The other part of the equation is that, unlike the record labels, the movie studios are consistently making more money every year. Hollywood may have run out of ideas, but they're still getting butts in the seats. Concert ticket sales were up last year, too. At this point, I'm beginning to realize that the record labels will self-destruct before they will admit they have been wrong. I just wish they'd get it over with so the rest of us can get on with the 21st century. We sure don't need them any longer. But it's not like the RIAA is the only one lying to us. They're just a very obvious example of what seems to go on in every office of Washington, D.C. We've turned into the Hertz "Not exactly..." commercial. We closed Guantanamo? Not exactly... We ended the military tribunals? Not exactly... We hold those that break the law accountable? Not exactly... That's the one I'm having the most trouble with. The rule of law doesn't count. A college kid who gets caught smoking a joint has a better chance of going to jail than the people that decided international laws against torture did not apply to them. Our priorities are misplaced. Part of this is due to the schizophrenic nature of the political parties, both of which have a completely different tone when they are in power than when they are not. The weird part is that the media changes its perspective as well. The media reports what the new party personality says, failing to observe that anything had changed. The best example of this was how the press generally ignored exactly what Bush had to say for 9 years (since he mangled the language so badly), which wasn't that difficult because Bush avoided press briefings and when he did show up, very few questions were allowed. When Obama took office and started holding frequent Q&A sessions with the press, the media started parsing every word and acted like that's what they always did. The last thing I want to discuss is a program going on to get hackers into journalism school. This is in an effort to "save democracy," which makes sense from the perspective that journalism's job is to uncover what people don't want you to know. Hackers do that for fun. But finding out information is only part of the journalists' job. Communicating that information to the public is a big part of it, too, which require a different subset of abilities -- like spelling. The quality of journalism is already pretty bad, so as long as someone is looking to remodel, I have a few suggestions.
|