Category: General

Happy Thanksgiving to those who Celebrate today. As an outsider, I’ve always thought a holiday to give thanks made the most sense. Relatively low commercial intrusion, no gift giving tradition and no religious divisions.

And I have so much to be thankful for.

MPAA Boss Defends Censorships With Blatantly False Claims http://tinyurl.com/3x66kl5

If you’re for the usupportable COICA try not lying! COICA would have prevented YouTube from ever getting established, would tackle music lockers and music search engines. In fact any innovation the existing power brokers would simply be banned without any review, just in a nice cosy arrangement.

Every statement made by an MPAA representative can be safely assumed to be lacking in factual support: in other words a lie. The “reports” they quote are mostly made up and only consider one side of the equation, even after they double or triple count on their side.

The MPAA “reports” have never been even submitted to peer review (the standard for scientific papers) and consistently debunked by the Federal Government Accounting Office and anyone without their agenda. Their agenda is to protect their business model so they would enjoy the near-monopoly “rents” they’ve enjoyed in the past, even though the technology that enabled those monopoly rents has been superseded.

If your business needs intrusive legislation, almost certainly a breach of the First Amendment, then you have already failed. When you’re fighting your customers every day, you’ve already failed.

It’s a long article but it’s well worth the read.

What’s scary is that there are still people, and people in power, who will believe Pisano’s blatantly false and misleading claims here and will push forward in favor of government censorship of websites, contrary to the very clear rules of the First Amendment. In the end, it’s hard to see how COICA would pass even a rudimentary First Amendment review — as more and more First Amendment experts are noticing. 

It’s really quite distressing the level of blatant falsehoods that the MPAA will spew in favor of getting the US to become a regime of censorship.

While COICA has almost no chance of passing in this Congress, here are the 19 Senators who were quite happy to sell out your First Amendment rights to do the bidding of the industry that bought and paid for them.

• Patrick J. Leahy — Vermont
• Herb Kohl — Wisconsin
• Jeff Sessions — Alabama
• Dianne Feinstein — California
• Orrin G. Hatch — Utah
• Russ Feingold — Wisconsin
• Chuck Grassley — Iowa
• Arlen Specter — Pennsylvania
• Jon Kyl — Arizona
• Chuck Schumer — New York
• Lindsey Graham — South Carolina
• Dick Durbin — Illinois
• John Cornyn — Texas
• Benjamin L. Cardin — Maryland
• Tom Coburn — Oklahoma
• Sheldon Whitehouse — Rhode Island
• Amy Klobuchar — Minnesota
• Al Franken — Minnesota
• Chris Coons — Delaware

Hey, Movie And TV People, Here’s How To Avoid Becoming Apple’s Lunch http://tinyurl.com/2btdz8c

Wise words from Matt Rosoff at SAI Business Insider:

O’Reilly took the mike for the first question, and made the point that the recording industry blew it in the early days by not offering its content in a convenient digital format for a price that consumers were willing to accept. As a consequence, piracy took off, and Apple’s deal was the best bargain that the industry could get. He suggested that the film and TV industries are making the same mistake now by withholding content from new digital platforms like Google TV and Netflix streaming.

Here, Emanuel got hot under the collar and insisted that piracy is wrong and shouldn’t be considered when making business decisions. Instead, he suggested that the government and industry needed to do more work to educate consumers about stealing content and to enforce existing laws.

Emanuel’s right. Content has value. The problem is, once content is digitized, it’s trivially easy to copy it. And every copy protection scheme will eventually be broken. (Cory Doctorow did a great job explaining why this is true way back in 2004–basically, you can’t encrypt content against the people who you’re also supposed to be delivering it to.)

This is isn’t a moral argument. It’s a physical argument. Arguing against the piracy of digital content is like arguing against gravity. Or death.

Essentially he makes the same argument that other make: you can’t sell abundance (digital goods that can be reproduced infinitely at little cost, but you can use that abundance to sell scarcity. Or you can focus on events that have immediacy. Immediacy is a scarcity that you can sell and sports or other live events are a great example.