Better writing than I could manage

A few weeks ago, a bit of sophomoric journalism from the Washington Post lit up the west end of Blogistan with the claim that a legal brief from the RIAA claimed that consumers don't have the rights to copy content from their CDs to their hard drives. When this partial-truth was propagated by one of my favorite blogs, I temporarily abandoned my no-profanity-in-posts rule and lit a roman candle of four-lettered invective in the comments section. To positive reviews, I am proud to note.

But the claim was exaggerated, as it turns out. Normally I'd post a contrite retraction with an apology. But in this case I don't feel it's justified. Heck, if my so-called betters in the White House can use the "Okay, maybe Saddam didn't actually have WMD...but he was gonna!" argument, surely I have license to make similar rationalizations, no? (Or, as Shakespeare's Isabella put it: "Thieves for their pilfering have authority when judges steal.")

Rationalizations aside, the question of whether the "Oh by the way, which one's 'Pink'" suits will soon force you to start popping quarters into your iPod or BluRay to enjoy content you legally purchased is moot. The current state of affairs is already ridiculous. The FAA already assumes you're a terrorist for buying an airline ticket. I don't consider it a coincidence that the climate of fearing the customer has spilled over into mega-capitalism as well.

I'm still on Ubuntu, but sooner or later will have to upgrade the Windows box, if only for testing. And given what coming off the message boards about Vista treating its user as a criminal, I'm not looking forward to that--quite apart from the hardware expenditures.

The anonymous poster on this blog-post, though, did a far more eloquent job (than my carpet f-bombing) of summarizing how it's already gone too far. And that it's past time for a revolution of some sort.

When you buy content from the entertainment establishment, part of your money goes to the RIAA and the MPAA. Here’s what you get in return:

1. Laws that extend copyright beyond all reasonable bounds (originally 14 years, now life of the creator 70 years) These are not required to promote creativity. They are here to protect Mickey Mouse, and the ‘estates’ of dead artists that continue to leach off the culture without providing anything in return.

2. Laws like the DMCA that allow publishers to subvert your fair use rights by slapping on a layer of flimsy DRM that can’t be circumnavigated without breaking the law EVEN FOR USE THAT IS ALLOWED BY LAW.

3. Penal codes that allow a $250,000 fine for sharing a single .mp3. You can commit vehicular manslaughter and get away with a lower fine. (I promise you, it wasn’t concerned citizens who insisted on that sort of draconian punishment.)

4. Trade agreements that require operators of CD plants in foreign nations to submit to government inspections (imagine that, after winning to Cold War, we’re now insisting that the Russians start policing their own presses on our behalf.)

The list goes on. The fact is, when you buy entertainment at full retail, you support some very unsavory practices. This is not meant to justify piracy (a pure boycott would be the more ethical choice.) Rather, it should serve as a reminder that you simply cannot buy entertainment in a fashion that does not entail encroachments on your basic liberties and dignity. There’s environmental fallout from every minute you consume (at full retail.)

The short story is that, in spite of the freedom granted by the first amendment, the entertainment companies are profoundly undemocratic in their regard for individual liberty. Their desire for control of the user experience is absolutely boundless, and they will sue the daylights out of anything that crosses their paths, even if its tangential to their business. Xerox got sued for creating the copy machine. Sony got sued for creating the Betamax. Napster got sued for popularizing P2P. ANYTHING that can be used to distribute culture in any form is instinctively regarded as a threat by the content industry, at least until it can be brought under control and turned into an exclusive revenue stream. And how for will they go to ‘protect’ these streams? Just ask the Girl Scouts, who got sues for failing to pay royalties on songs sung around the campfire.

Some people call this evil. A better description is primitive. Understanding how to operate in a free culture is as challenging as learning how to govern with the consent of the governed. This is not, traditionally, something that Kings were good at. Only when threatened by bloody revolution do they back off and concede ground. And, revolution by revolution, tyranny is slowly replaced by democracy. Well, currently content is King. And like most Kings, it has been abusing its position terribly.

Now, it is fighting to maintain its dominance, but the people aren’t backing down. And nor should they. Not until the King has renounced some of his more despotic practices, and has decided to serve the needs of free culture instead of invading every corner it can find and gouging people for admission at every turn.

The journalist in question--whose name escapes me at the moment--was guilty of...errr...creatively trimming his quote from the brief, and should be disciplined accordingly. Make no mistake there. But I hope against hope that the furor was a wake-up call for the commissars of content. Because they have a PR as well as a business model problem on their hands. The very fact that a whole lot of intelligent people were perfectly willing to believe that of them is a big ol' problem. And blaming Kazaa and college students for it is not the answer.

I find it reprehensible that while my livelihood is under pressure from outsourcing/offshoring every day, I'm told to retrain, retool, and generally suck it up in the name of capitalist progress. But in the alternate reality bubble in which the pointy-haired likes of Jack Valenti exist, the laws of capitalism don't apply. (Rather like the Constitution, human rights and walking the walk of a Christian faith so loudly professed aren't supposed to get between the Right and their kleptocratic grabs for power and money.)

Technically, I'm a content provider. My gentle reader could, for reasons passing reason, plaguarize this blog letter-for-letter and deprive me of the fame and fortune and world domination that are rightly mine. [insert extra-sarcastic eyeroll] But does that give me the right to insert a chunk of code into Blogger that matches the content's thief cuts-and-pastes against this blog? Definitely not.

I gave Dearest a few DVDs recently, and received a couple CDs, which splashes me with guilt for feeding the RIAA/MPAA's monkey. Particularly when the monkey (disingenuously) conflates content and media in their FUDD. And they're in cahoots with Microsoft to enforce their overreaching.

Is boycott the right sort of revolution, though? Or is there a third path? I honestly don't know the answer. Music, in my Universe, largely exists to drown out cube-farm chatter. Movies are something to watch during a leisurely picnic dinner on the living-room floor. Or the adult equivalent of sucking one's thumb after a mind-bruising day. But ultimately, as The Big Lebowski's Walter Sobchak put it, "What's mine is mine." He was talking about dirty underwear, but I'm talking about my control over my own property. And neither Steve Ballmer nor Jack Valenti has squat to say about that.