“You’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy are you?”
Published by Kyso Kisaen May 5th, 2007 in A million ways to mortgage the future, Media hackeryThe Bush Adminstration continues its effort to make 1984 a reality:
Retroactive immunity from prosecution is a beautiful thing if you’re a major telecommunications provider in the US, and phone companies are about to receive it if the Bush administration gets its way…
The issue of whether any of this behavior was legal is not important. The government has already argued that legality doesn’t matter when it comes to the phone companies, since even a ruling that their actions were illegal would expose the existence of the intelligence-gathering program in question. Therefore, such cases should not even be considered by the courts.
Business picks up on the ‘we can do whatever we want so nyah!’ vibe and starts to apply it themselves:
“With the furor over the impending rate hike for Internet radio stations, wouldn’t a good solution be for streaming internet stations to simply not play RIAA-affiliated labels’ music and focus on independent artists? Sounds good, except that the RIAA’s affiliate organization SoundExchange claims it has the right to collect royalties for any artist, no matter if they have signed with an RIAA label or not.
People old enough to remember stuff are feeling a little deja vu, maybe a reassuring sequel will make them a bit less queasy:
A sequel to classic 1987 film Wall Street is to be made with Michael Douglas returning as money-crazed mogul Gordon Gekko, according to reports…
The character came to represent the worst corporate excesses of the 1980s.
What astonishes me is how often this happens, with the RIAA. They cried and cried when free radio came out, and now they get paid for people who just play their music. They cried and cried when cassette tapes became popular, and now they get paid for every such tape sold in the US or Canada. They did the same when recordable CDs arrived. Every time, the nation develops a collective amnesia about the organization’s crusade to to be paid every time anyone hears the “intellectual property” that they coerced away from the artist who created it.
I have no doubt that the eventual result of the filesharing fight will be a tax on net traffic that just hands the RIAA some fraction of a cent for every bit of data transferred, ever, forever, because it might be “stolen music”.
I think you have that backwards. The CEOs and executives running the government learned that in the business world, and brought it into government.