Catching Up on Latest Lunacy by George Ziemann -- January 18, 2008 I'm finding a benefit in being too busy to write every day. As the noteworthy things I haven't written about pile up, it forces a wider perspective. That's okay, because when you get busy trying to create what the world now calls "content", the day-to-day tripe that emanates from the RIAA almost becomes irrelevant. It's only when you try to market your work that the RIAA is an issue. Speaking of being busy, still cranking out recordings from Jan. 4 and 5. Finished with 11 tracks so far. The accompanying narrative is getting long, too. The night we recorded, an entertainment lawyer friend of Carl's asked, "Why are you recording cover songs in an empty club?" The answer of course, is "because we can." Moving on to our first topic... Tanya Andersen An Oregon judge has denied the RIAA's appeal of a lower court's ruling which awarded attorney fees to Tanya Andersen and dismissed the RIAA's case with prejudice, meaning that they can't sue her again for the same thing. The judge also reaffirmed that Andersen's counter-claims against the RIAA were dismissed without prejudice. Translation: Tanya Andersen, a former US Dept. of Justice case manager has been been given clearance for take-off on a class action suit against the RIAA. Eric Bangeman at ARSTechnica reports: Andersen's malicious prosecution lawsuit accuses the RIAA of invasion of privacy, deceptive business practices, libel, slander, and a host of other misdeeds, saying that the RIAA has "engaged in a coordinated enterprise to pursue a scheme of threatening and intimidating litigation in an attempt to maintain its music distribution monopoly." Her complaint contains some very disturbing allegations, including one that labels attempted to contact her then eight-year-old daughter under false pretenses without Andersen's permission. Andersen is seeking class-action status for her lawsuit, which would allow anyone who was "sued or were threatened with sued by Defendants for file-sharing, downloading or other similar activities, who have not actually engaged in actual copyright infringement" to join the lawsuit. The RIAA has denied any wrongdoing and has moved for dismissal of the lawsuit. The RIAA has denied any wrongdoing, but we all know they're liars. More on that below. Dumbass Debate on DRM A debate about copyright issues and technology took place between Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, and Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School. Kind of. The title was, "Bits Debate: Is Copy Protection Needed or Futile?" The question was, "Should creators insist on technology that will restrict the copying and transmission of copyrighted works?" Already we've got a problem because those are two distinctly different questions. The second problem is that both Cotton and Wu seem to forget that industries are inanimate objects, incapable of creating anything. The idea that maybe there are humans out here creating things that do not belong to corporations completely escapes them. To restate a comment I made about this elsewhere, No one actually addressed the real question, choosing to argue the "duh!" issue of whether copy protection is futile. Instead, they talk about business models and the industry. Know anyone who gives that much thought when they're writing a song, other than to bitch about it (e.g., Tom Petty, Don Henley)? On a slashdot page concerning this, someone writes something like, "Welcome to Web 2.0, where you create music and don't get paid." As opposed to what? Motown? MCA? Sony? EMI? The industry has a long and storied tradition of not paying the artists what they have earned despite contracts designed to minimize such a thing from happening in the first place. And if they get caught, they still only pay a small fraction of what they misappropriated. So what's the difference between what's going on now and any other period of time? Not a damn thing. If the industry shut down tomorrow and the artists and creators can only manage to maintain 15-18 percent of the industry's current overall revenue, it would probably work out to a raise for most of them, cuz the label was keeping the other 85 percent anyway. Should creators insist on technology that will restrict the copying and transmission of copyrighted works? I know a few people that think the answer to this is "yes." Of course, you've probably never heard of them... EMI Whenever anyone mentions Mr. Hands, EMI's new boss, I cannot help but visualize Mr. Hand, Jeff Spicoli's teacher from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It helps if you keep this in mind, so I hunted down a still photo of Mr. Hand tearing up Spicoli's royalty check because Spicoli couldn't spell "recoupable". The big story is that Mr Hands wants to stop funding the RIAA. This was immediately followed by the even bigger story that EMI was getting rid of 2,000 employees and "thousands of acts". Mr Hands is cutting the marketing budget and giving the extra bucks to the A&R department so that they can go dish out advances to a whole new batch of artists. No word on if A&R is going to send out the same people to find the new acts that brought back the last batch -- the thousands of acts EMI is letting go -- but confidence is high. The Rolling Stones showed their support by giving their next album to Universal. MediaDefender Conde Nast has Daniel Roth's story about MediaDefender, a $15-million-a-year waste of time and effort by record labels and other morons to pollute p2p traffic and generally annoy people. Roth illustrates the futility of MediaDefender's existence (thus addressing the title of the debate above) by introducing us to the evil genius who hacked into MediaDefender's servers and proceed to electronically rape and pillage. Apparently there's nothing scarier than a teenager in a messy basement in the middle of the night. Good story, with some well-placed history. The Usual Collection of Idiots Cara Duckworth, a "spokeswoman" for the RIAA, is interviewed by CNet and, among other bullshit, says the following: "...there would also be legal consequences to engaging in illegal downloading behavior... ...in addition to the lawsuits we file against individuals using commercial ISPs to illegally download... ...When an individual is caught illegally downloading music..." ...take action against the services themselves that facilitate the illegal downloading... ...People are now more aware of what is legal and illegal when it comes to downloading music..." Cara, you ignorant slut, there is no basis in the entire U.S Code to support the premise that downloading anything is illegal. The RIAA has never sued anyone solely for downloading. There is no case law to support this theory. Downloading is mentioned exactly three times in the laws of the United States. Two of those appearances concern veterans and medical records. The third is an affirmative defense for possession of child pron. There is no situation in which the word "illegal" can accurately be applied to a download. This leaves us with only the question of whether Duckworth knows full well she is lying out her ass or if she rides the short bus to work every morning with the rest of the RIAA staff. Hmmm... That's only one idiot, leaving room to salute the celebrity psycho of the week. Despite a lot of effort on the part of 2007's Mother of the Year, including the introduction of multiple personalities, Tom Cruise's new video wins this week's prize.