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Dear Congress: Are You Insane???By George Ziemann -- November 12, 2007 To paraphrase Lewis Black, I've seen three stories this week involving the government and the entertainment business, each of which has led me to believe that someone is completely bat-shit crazy and, for a change, it's not me. The least important of this trifecta of stupid is that Lyle Lovett is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee tomorrow to try and convince them that American artists deserve performance royalties for over-the-air broadcasts (radio, television). According to the linked article, "most people in the music industry think that allowing broadcasters to escape paying a performance royalty is unfair." Of course, to entertain this notion, you must be willing to ignore the fact that the music industry paid radio to play their songs for the last 40 years. Our second example is the Senate's PIRATE Act, a bipartisan piece of stupid that has failed the first three times it was introduced. The focus of this is to empower the Dept. of Justice to hunt down those evil filesharing children so that the RIAA can pretend like they have nothing to do with it. This promises to be a good thing for the DOJ, which apparently doesn't have more important things to do than roust children for listening to music. "When we protect intellectual property from copyright infringement, we protect our economy and our ideas," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (Dumbass-VT), apparently unaware of the US Code Title 17, Section 102 (b), which says, "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work." As far as economic concerns, dog food and disposable diapers are far more important to the US economy than the music industry. But the pinnacle of idiocy is presented by Democrats at the House of Representatives, which according to CNet, "could give the movie and music industries a new revenue stream by pressuring schools into signing up for monthly subscription services such as Ruckus and Napster." The penalty for universities not willing to finance the failing music business model is that all their students will be denied any federal financial aid. "Pressuring" seems like an understatement. This is governmental extortion for the benefit of a monopolistic foreign industry that has destroyed itself by greed and ineptitude. The Needs of the Many There's something in the Constitution about copyright laws being in place to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Having copyright law twisted to the point where it is used to deny college students the ability to complete their education based on such an arbitrary decision over which the students themselves have no control seems to be directly contrary to the purpose of creating copyright laws in the first place. From the amount of activity going on, it is obvious that Congress still considers music to be a "useful art," or they wouldn't be wasting their time with it when the country has so many more important problems, like New Orleans, for instance. If this is the case, what they are doing with these attempts at legislation seem to go far beyond just typical Congressional tunnel-vision and may be unconstitutional. All of these actions are designed
to provide assistance to the cartel, which is more than happy
to inform you that, despite the fact that they only What about the other 99 percent? The hundreds of thousands of musicians who don't work for the RIAA? Why is it so important to subsidize Britney Spears and R. Kelly but not your favorite local band? Are signed stars the only ones whose art is useful? Are they the only ones the DOJ is going to "protect"? Are the major labels the official government arbitrators of what is and is not art, based solely on what is marketable? Or do they just make the most frequent campaign contributions? Whatever the answer is to the above questions, the actions Congress is taking on behalf of the cartel are the greatest threats to the progess of science and the useful arts, especially if deserving, intelligent students lose financial aid because the university they choose refuses to pay tribute to the tone-deaf greedy bastards at the RIAA. UPDATE - November 19 -- According to Wired, C-Net was wrong about the entire financial aid thing. In turn, this makes me wrong for believing them. |