Sorry, I’ve been away for a bit ~ that will change very soon. However, this little jewel from College Humor was too good to pass up . . .
http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1913584&fullscreen=1
This was posted on one of my absolutely favorite morning blogs –> Daily Kos<- -, which if you have not bookmarked, you should. It is updated during the day, and for American politics, culture with amazing commentary could not be any better (sorry, Huffington Post!)
At first I thought I might make a few “comments” about the mess in Albany, NY ~ but they’re doing just fine holding THAT circus without any further comments from me!!
I had written about RIAA and MPAA –> once before here <– an ezine called Zeropaid. This was the section that was posted at Kos and really caught my attention … These might be the reasons they lost the PR battles and probably the "war" ~ (Republicans, are you listening???)
“We figured a short list might be in order:
-destroying Napster and Audio Galaxy and not creating an alternative for the get-go,
raiding people’s homes because they uploaded Star Wars (not necessarily leaking it in the first place),
-hacking the URN hash and polluting FastTrack,
-hacking The Pirate Bay,
-having Viacom serve DMCA notices to people posting video’s of people eating in a restaurant on YouTube,
-suing tens of thousands of average American’s including fining one individual $222,000 for sharing a couple songs,
-saying that files in a shared directory is copyright infringement in court,
-saying that evidence is too hard to get and that the industry shouldn’t be burdened to prove their cases in court,
-suggesting that iPods are little more than little pirate ships,
-saying in court that even making one back-up copy of a DVD is illegal,
-lobbying to put in the DMCA, demanding that laws should be in place to prevent any tinkering with DRM including for research purposes,
-installing rootkits on people’s computers,
-installing spyware on people’s computers via the MediaMax technology,
-being outed for being hypocrites for pirating a documentary movie and claiming that it’ll only be in a safe place,
-tried to bring people a broadcast flag and telling people you can’t record TV shows if the broadcaster doesn’t like it,
-trying to bi-pass the backfiring of WIPO and the FCC to bring in the broadcast flag anyway, -tried to get ISPs to do all the copyright industry’s dirty work,
-pressured and bullied other countries to implement laws the industry saw fit and using shady lobbying tactics to accomplish this,
-tried to sell us music that cannot be copied through the internet and on discs,
-tried to bi-pass the will of the European Union and get countries to pass “three strikes” laws even if artists disagree with it,
-attempted to price fix music albums,
-secretly hold negotiations to pass draconian copyright laws that would see people’s physical property effectively stolen on the mere suspicion of copyright infringement through ACTA, -demanding that laws be passed that mandates the promotion of legal alternatives,
then not providing the kind of deals that would allow legitimate services to flourish with internet groups and businesses like ISPs,
-alienate an entire generation by labeling their own customers as pirates,
-likened downloading music on the internet to terrorism,
-likened internet users who download music online to “biker gangs”,
-spread blatantly false information about file-sharing,
-forcing people to watch anti-piracy ads on movies,
-suing people who had a recently deceased family member,
-argue that the industry is for artists, then going to court and demanding that royalty rates should be lower for artists – thus having to pay them less and keeping more money from album revenues,
-forcing radio broadcasters to pay royalties even if they don’t play music from the copyright industry,
-suing a lawyer for blogging about court cases related to copyright,
-and possibly the whole issue of listing countries that hold 70% of the world’s population and labeling some as rogue nations that need to update their copyright laws via the USTR Special 301 report – thus alienating many countries in the first place.
Again, a short list of probably simple misunderstandings in the world of PR that have been taken out of context by the “enemies of copyright”.“
Just so it’s clear, the copy is from the articles, the pictures I added …
An article in the news today allowed me to look back at an earlier article about the same subject. The article today was about Internet censorship ~ it involved several major players: AT & “We’re not the old/new ma bell” T, NB “how dare you post a show we’ve posted on YouTube” C, and Micro “we own the internet” soft. 
“. . . AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.”
It was those lovely MPAA and RIAA letters that gave me pause. I have thought for sometime that when a major entertainment group is threatened by new technology and/or advances they react as a lumbering dinosaur. There is a lot of noise, fury and damage while desperately clinging to the old vines of doing business as the vines appear to be rotting out from under them.
While lamenting the decline of CD sales (and the profit they bring to the RIAA) the blame is being placed on the evil people who download. This has resulted 
in court cases involving elderly grandmothers and very young children … obviously the ring leaders determined to bring down the entertainment industry as they know it. The fact that artists have succeeded by using the Internet to showcase AND release their material seems incidental as they cling to an aged business model.
And recently the RIAA decided that uploading a song you purchased from YOUR music player to YOUR computer is a mortal sin worthy of death by flogging or another lawsuit. Heaven forbid that you would even THINK of burning onto a CD!
Here is the article in full (I’ve also included the link in the article to the previous story)…
January 8, 2008, 7:07 pm
AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter
By Brad Stone
Tags: at and t, CES, content filtering, Copyright, digital fingerprinting, NBC, piracy
For the past fifteen years, Internet service providers have acted – to use an old cliche – as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.
But ISPs may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.
At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.
Such filtering for pirated material already occurs on sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox, and on some university networks.
Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.
“What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.
Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.
“We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” he said. “We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies that are out there.”
Internet civil rights organizations oppose network-level filtering, arguing that it amounts to Big Brother monitoring of free speech, and that such filtering could block the use of material that may fall under fair-use legal provisions — uses like parody, which enrich our culture.
Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, who has led the company’s fights against companies like YouTube for the last three years, clearly doesn’t have much tolerance for that line of thinking.
“The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status,” he said. “The question is how we collectively collaborate to address this.”
I asked the panelists how they would respond to objections from their customers over network level filtering – for example, the kind of angry outcry Comcast saw last year, when it was accused of clamping down on BitTorrent traffic on its network. Read the article about THIS lovely issue HERE )
“Whatever we do has to pass muster with consumers and with policy standards. There is going to be a spotlight on it,” said Mr. Cicconi of AT&T.
After the session, he told me that ISPs like AT&T would have to handle such network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer. “We’ve got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there’s no doubt about it,” he said.
The article appeardin The New York Times today January 9th.
It was this from the article that gave me the title of tonight’s post:
“Whatever we do has to pass muster with consumers and with policy standards. There is going to be a spotlight on it,” said Mr. Cicconi of AT&T.
After the session, he told me that ISPs like AT&T would have to handle such network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer. “We’ve got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there’s no doubt about it,” he said.
Oh yes, a friendly way to do it. Maybe they could hire consultants from MPAA and RIAA since they are having such success with what they are doing.
—more tomorrow
After quite a futile time this evening – between my computer and internet connection, I’m going to try again later today.
By the way, if you click on the picture – which will enlarge it – the wheels appear to be moving … something worked this evening!
If you have never read “The Onion” you have missed a delightful collection of completely made-up fanciful and commentary articles. In October 2, 2002 they printed an article that shows they had their crystal ball completely polished – or at least pointed in the right direction. Thanks to durnMoose blogs for printing this article!
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Here is the complete article:
LOS ANGELES—The Recording Industry Association of America filed a $7.1 billion lawsuit against the nation’s radio stations Monday, accusing them of freely distributing copyrighted music.
“It’s criminal,” RIAA president Hilary Rosen said. “Anyone at any time can simply turn on a radio and hear a copyrighted song. Making matters worse, these radio stations often play the best, catchiest song off the album over and over until people get sick of it. Where is the incentive for people to go out and buy the album?”
According to Rosen, the radio stations acquire copies of RIAA artists’ CDs and then broadcast them using a special transmitter, making it possible for anyone with a compatible radio-wave receiver to listen to the songs.
“These radio stations are extremely popular,” Rosen said. “They flagrantly string our songs together in ‘uninterrupted music blocks’ of up to 70 minutes in length, broadcasting nearly one CD’s worth of product without a break, and they actually have the gall to allow businesses to advertise between songs. It’s bad enough that they’re giving away our music for free, but they’re actually making a profit off this scheme.”
RIAA attorney Russell Frackman said the lawsuit is intended to protect the artists.
“If this radio trend continues, it will severely damage a musician’s ability to earn a living off his music,” Frackman said. “[Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich stopped in the other day wondering why his last royalty check was so small, and I didn’t know what to say. How do you tell a man who’s devoted his whole life to his music that someone is able to just give it away for free? That pirates are taking away his right to support himself with his craft?”
For the record companies and the RIAA, one of the most disturbing aspects of the radio-station broadcasts is that anyone with a receiver and an analog tape recorder can record the music and play it back at will.
“I’ve heard reports that children as young as 8 tape radio broadcasts for their own personal use,” Rosen said. “They listen to a channel that has a limited rotation of only the most popular songs—commonly called ‘Top 40’ stations—then hit the ‘record’ button when they hear the opening strains of the song they want. And how much are they paying for these songs? A big fat zip.”
Continued Rosen: “According to our research, there is one of these Top 40 stations in every major city in the country. This has to be stopped before the music industry’s entire economic infrastructure collapses.”
Especially distressing to the RIAA are radio stations’ “all-request hours,” when listeners call in to ask radio announcers, or “disc jockeys,” to play a certain song.
“What’s the point of putting out a new Ja Rule or Sum 41 album if people can just call up and hear any song off the album that they want?” Frackman asked. “In some instances, these stations actually have the nerve to let the caller ‘dedicate’ his act of thievery to a friend or lover. Could you imagine a bank letting somebody rob its vaults and then allowing the thief to thank his girlfriend Tricia and the whole gang down at Bumpy’s?”
Defenders of radio-based music distribution insist that the relatively poor sound quality of radio broadcasts negates the record companies’ charges.
“Radio doesn’t have the same sound quality as a CD,” said Paul “Cubby” Bryant, music director of New York radio station Z100, one of the nation’s largest distributors of free music and a defendant in the suit. “Real music lovers will still buy CDs. If anything, we’re exposing people to music they might not otherwise hear. These record companies should be thanking us, not suing us.”
Outraged by the RIAA suit, many radio listeners are threatening to boycott the record companies.
“All these companies care about is profits,” said Amy Legrand, 21, an avid Jacksonville, FL, radio user who surreptitiously records up to 10 songs a day off the radio. “Top 40 radio is taking the power out of the hands of the Ahmet Erteguns of the world and bringing it back to the people of Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting. It’s about time somebody finally stood up to those record-company fascists.”
And of course, we know that a couple of years later the RIAA began suing anyone they could possibly think of who might have a single song/CD in their possession that might be a copy. 
Aside from actually dealing with people who were making enormous quantities of music available, they have also gone after grandmother’s who had no idea how to operate a computer – and there is even a story floating around that they have sued at least three dead people.
Of course, they were a number of years behind ASCAP (another royalty organization) that was collecting money if a Girl Scout Camp sang “God Bless America” around the campfire, but that’s another post!
I was looking through “The Onion” archives and found this article dated November 30, 2005. At first glance, it seemed like just another Onion article that John Stewart might have used.
The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that it will be taking legal action against anyone discovered telling friends, acquaintances, or associates about new songs, artists, or albums. “We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material,” a press release signed by RIAA anti-piracy director Brad Buckles read. “We will aggressively prosecute those individuals who attempt to pirate our property by generating ‘buzz’ about any proprietary music, movies, or software, or enjoy same in the company of anyone other than themselves.”
RIAA attorneys said they were also looking into the legality of word-of-mouth “favorites-sharing” sites, such as coffee shops, universities, and living rooms.
However – this week a serious bill began to make it’s way through the “hallowed halls” of Congress. Here are some of the key provisions:
—Criminalize “attempting” to infringe copyright.
Federal law currently punishes not-for-profit copyright infringement with between 1 and 10 years in prison, but there has to be actual infringement that takes place. The IPPA would eliminate that requirement. (The Justice Department’s summary of the legislation says: “It is a general tenet of the criminal law that those who attempt to commit a crime but do not complete it are as morally culpable as those who succeed in doing so.”)
–Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software. Anyone using counterfeit products who “recklessly causes or attempts to cause death” can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.
–Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations.
Wiretaps would be authorized for investigations of Americans who are “attempting” to infringe copyrights.
–Allow computers to be seized more readily.
Specifically, property such as a PC “intended to be used in any manner” to commit a copyright crime would be subject to forfeiture, including civil asset forfeiture.
Any chuckling over The Onion article stopped. I was teaching in India when Indira Ghandi with a single stroke of a pen took all liberties away (including those afforded to those of us who were working there). Somehow, when I read/think about some of the things going on – or proposed, I hear faint sounds of the Sitar in the background.
There’s such an immediacy to the internet, but it still takes a camera at just the right moment to capture some wild and wacky pictures!!!
maturenotdeadblog 