Back to the regular posting volume this week.  Only 29 articles this week … ho-hum.

Photo.BLORGE.com

• Pentax said to be prepping 30 megapixel 645D for Spring 2010
• Shutterstock buys BigStockPhoto

SeanPAune.com

• 2009 Emmy Winner List
• CobWEBs Daily Edition – Net Neutrality and living up to Forrest Gump’s Potential
• London Teacher Sentenced For Lesbian Affair With Student
• CobWEBs Daily Edition – Newspapers can’t be saved and shouldn’t be
• Music Industry Using Schools To Spread Propaganda
• CobWEBs Daily Edition – Sidewiki: it may not be bad but it’s not good either
• Summit Entertainment To Remake Highlander; Fanboys Weep
• Scattercast Episode 62: A Remake Of A Previous Episode
• Joss Whedon Comfirms Buffy Season 9 Comic
• CobWEBs Daily Edition – They shoot sploggers don’t they?
• Southern Culture On The Skids Review

SiliconANGLE.com

• Mobile Monday: Mobile App News for Week of September 14th
• Lily Allen rips off a TechDirt post while bemoaning piracy

SitePoint.com

• 12 Tools For Managing Your Passwords

StarterTech.com

• Facebook Puts An End To Beacon
• AT&T Launches 3G MicroCell To Boost Signals
• Google Adds Push Support To Mobile Gmail Apps
• Google Brings Commenting To Any Website With Google Sidewiki
• Twitter Plans To Take Over The World
• Time Spent On Social Networks Triples In Just One Year
• Judge Orders Google To Deactivate User’s Gmail Account

Tech.BLORGE.com

• Amazon launches in-house consumer electronics line
• Dell to buy Perot Systems for $3.9 billion
• Microsoft stealing Apple Store employees away for its retail launch
• Microsoft working on a secret tablet named Courier
• Gmail suffering major outage
• Place Pages for Google Maps could be the biggest threat Yelp has faced
• Google ordered to deactivate user’s Gmail account by judge

It would seem that the music industry has decided that the public school systems are the perfect methods to distribute their anti-music propaganda.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has had a little known program that is free to schools called “Music Rules!“.  It appears the program has been around since 2006, but it has recently been announced that the program has been updated, and new materials are available for teachers, students and their parents.

The potential hand outs are written to educate students all about why “songlifting” (like Ars Technica, this is a new term that we’ve never seen make the rounds before) is wrong, respecting intellectual property, how downloading music is like stealing from everyone in the music industry and a bunch of other one-sided arguments.  Long story short, the RIAA is trying to convince teachers to turn into propaganda streaming machines for them that will teach children how downloading music for free is bad, Bad, BAD!

Did you notice in that last sentence I said “free” instead of “illegal”?  That was done on purpose.  One of the stated points in the documentation from the program says:

taking music without paying for it is illegal and unfair to others

Well, there’s a little problem with this as it is painting a very black-and-white picture of the situation. It is true that the majority of “free” music is illegal, but there have been some very notable exceptions to that idea such as Radiohead’s In Rainbows experiment where people could download the album for free if they chose to do so.  There have also been free music experiments from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and several others, so it is impossible to say “taking music without paying for it is illegal and unfair to others.”

So, just one little aspect of this whole lesson plan can be picked apart that quickly as being full of holes, do you even really need to question that the rest of this system may be full of holes in logic and bias?

I decided to take this one step further and called my 88-year-old maternal grandmother who is a retired teacher.  Her classes were troubled kids in inner city Phoenix, AZ, so it is doubtful this sort of program would have ever crossed her mind at all, but she could as least give me some perspective on how she would have felt giving these sort of handouts that were so clearly corporate propaganda.  Well, her answer was pretty simple: “I wouldn’t have.”

It seems that her contract (mind you this was the 1970’s and early 1980’s) clearly stated that she could never express an opinion in her class that would take any sort of position on this type of matter.  She said the way she would have handled illegal downloading would have been to wait for a student to mention it in front of her, and then she would have asked them how that made them feel.  Her students were the type that were well known for spray painting graffiti and other annoyances, so this was a type of discussion she had on a daily basis with at least one of them.

All that being said, she said she felt these “worksheets” provided by the RIAA would have been a clear violation of her contract, and even if they hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have had anything to do for them for feeling like a shill for corporations and that it also wasn’t what school is about.

And there my grandmother hit the nail on the head for summing up my feelings.  School is not about teaching you something quite this specific as “what is intellectual property”, and do you “vow” to never violate it.  This is not the sort of thing that students need to be taught in school, on federally funded time.  Recently some schools had issues with President Obama speaking to school children because they felt that his speech was going to be a political one that would try to educate children on the health care debate, and many people spoke out about school time being used in this manner.

Lets say this took off, which I highly doubt it will, where would this slippery slope stop?  What other corporate backed programs would worm their way into the curriculum of our schools?  My feeling is that no program of this type should be allowed in, and I question the teaching credentials of any teacher that would use this program.  Can’t think of a lesson plan and fall back to this thing?  ”Buh-bye, please leave your teaching certificate at the door.”

The RIAA is rotten to the core, and releasing something this slanted and bias (again I would point you to the “free music” bit), it just shows how off the wall they are.  Please, if you hear of any school using this thing, speak out against it because you may agree with this program, but will you with the next one?

It has been brought to my attention by some of my very astute commenters on this blog that I am a very jealous person.

From the post Dancing With The Stars Band came this comment.

JB

Uh. Where do I start except you obviously have no idea who plays in that band. You can always change the channel. Why waste your time complaining about something your [sic] not good enough to be in?

And then I received this comment on JJ Abrams Unveils The New Enterprise From Star Trek.

Arkanoid

I’ll never understand people’s need to pick apart a series and make it so serious. Honestly, I don’t consider myself a rabid fan, but I have at least seen most of the original ST episodes, and most of the movies through the current gen. stuff. Stop making such an issue out of the dang minutiae and have fun. Sheesh. What does it really matter if the Enterprise is a little too swoopy, or organic, or not retro enough? That’s subjective. Watch movie, have fun, judge movie after seeing. If you could do a better job with this project they’d have hired you to do it anyway. (emphasis mine – Sean)

The post you are reading right now is the 1,694th post since I started this blog. If you follow the logic presented by these two commenters that if you complain about something, you must be jealous in some way, than I must be the most jealous person alive.

I must be jealous of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as I have written about them 18 times.  I have written 21 times about Scientology, I must be really jealous of their “church”.

I have always labeled myself an “observer” more than a “writer”: I take in the world around me, and I comment on it.  Considering I have done this 1,694 times now, yes, sometimes it is difficult coming up with things to comment on, so I go to the never-ending well that is television and movies.  There is always something there to annoy me.

To answer these particular two instances that were sighted in these comments:

1. I am not angry with the Dancing With The Stars band because I’m not good enough to join them, I simply hate them because I am tired of hearing them screw up something as simple as a 4-4 beat.
2. There is no way I would have wanted the job of rebooting the Star Trek franchise because, well, I think it’s a dumb idea to mess with something people love.

I feel confident in saying these types of comments come from people who just surf through from various sources (and they never leave a real email address for follow up discussion), and if they read even more than one other post on this site, they would see the style of blogger I am… I complain… a LOT!  I own it, I don’t even try to deny it, but I am fascinated by this recent trend of people saying that my complaining about something comes from my being jealous.  Is this something that has happened across the entire Internet that I have somehow missed?

Or, do you think it is possible that I complained about Salad Bar Etiquette due to my jealousy of their mastery of the vegetable plate building arts?

Over three days last October (posts here, here and here), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) finally won their first legal victory against a peer-to-peer user.  However, nearly one year later, the victory has been overturned, and all the parties involved are heading back to court.

For those of you who don’t remember Jammie Thomas, she is a single mother that the RIAA targeted for copyright infringement after she shared 24 songs on the KaZaA network.  After the two day trial, the case went to the jury and she was found guilty and fined $9,250 per song for a total of $222,000.  It now seems the judge in the case, Judge Michael J. Davis, has overturned the ruling of the federal jury due to an improper instruction he gave.

The situation boils down to the definition of what is and is not distribution.  Does the mere act of making a file available to a peer-to-peer network constitute distribution?  The original instruction said it did not, but a hearing was held later outside the presence of the jury where the judge finally agreed with the RIAA that it does.  This creates a mistrial situation, and the previous award is now tossed.

What is slightly curious is that in the 43 page ruling (PDF link via Ars Technica) you almost wonder if Judge Davis didn’t want to find an excuse to overturn the ruling because he felt the award was excessive.

The statutory damages awarded against Thomas are not a deterrent against those who pirate music in order to profit… Thomas’s conduct was motivated by her desire to obtain the copyrighted music for her own use. The Court does not condone Thomas’s actions, but it would be a farce to say that a single mother’s acts of using Kazaa are the equivalent, for example, to the acts of global financial firms illegally infringing on copyrights in order to profit in the securities market.

While the Court does not discount Plaintiffs’ claim that, cumulatively, illegal downloading has far “reaching effects on their businesses, the damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs. Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs, the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000, more than five hundred [emphasis his] times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs…

Unfortunately, by using Kazaa, Thomas acted like countless other Internet users. Her alleged acts were illegal, but common. Her status as a consumer who was not seeking to harm her competitors or make a profit does not excuse her behavior. But it does make the award of hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages unprecedented and oppressive.

It would seem to this untrained legal eye that the Judge may be trying to tell the RIAA to get over itself.  I agree with the Judge that what Ms. Thomas did is illegal, but you would be hard pressed to ever say that her sharing the equivalent of three CDs could ever cost the music industry $222,000.

This is a rather large gamble, though.  There is every chance that the next jury could very well award the RIAA the original $150,000 per song they were looking for, making Ms. Thomas’ new fine a staggering $3.6 million.  My feeling is the judge may try to guide the jury to the same amount, or even less, but it still seems like a bit of a gamble to me.

I’m glad to see the RIAA can no long crow about their one and only victory they have had against file sharers thus far, and I am even happier to see a judge telling them that the judgment they are looking for is totally disproportionate to the crime.  It does concern me that Sony may get to go on the stand again and once again decree that anyone copying music from a CD they own to an MP3 file constitutes piracy, but that is a whole other kettle of fish.

Edgar Bronfman, Jr is back.

For those unfamiliar with Edgar Bronfman, he is the CEO of Warner Music Group.  Good old Edgar and I have a long history of his amazing comments in that I have written about him numerous times,and I’ll link those as we go.

This time around, the story comes from the Chicago Tribune where Mr. Bronfman was talking about the success of games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero.  These games are built around playing fake instruments to music, and those songs tend to be well known.  While bands have seen an increase in sales for music included in these games, Mr. Bronfman told the Chicago Tribune the following:

“The amount being paid to the industry, even though their games are entirely dependent on the content that we own and control, is far too small,” he said during an earnings call this month.

This is shockingly remiscent of what he said in September 2005 when he thought it would be a good idea for Apple to give music companies a cut of iPod sales because he felt the $.99 price for iTunes songs was artificially low, and everyone knew Steve Jobs couldn’t sell iPods without the licensed music.

Bronfman’s solution? Well, if Apple is “artificially” keeping the price of downloads low to promote sales of iPods (you can debate amongst yourselves whether 99 cents is artificially high or artificially low), then as he sees it, the labels should get to share in those [iPod] revenue streams.

However, back in November of 2007, while at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress conference, he said:

“We used to fool ourselves. We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong.

How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”

Mind you, that was only 10-months ago he said this, so what changed?  What do I mean?  Again from the Chicago Tribune:

Bronfman suggested that he wanted Warner to be less a supplier than a partner.

“If that does not become the case, as far as Warner Music is concerned, we will not license to those games,” he said.

So, here we are again, in the exact same type situation we were in back in 2005 when he thought it was a good idea to mess with Apple.  So it appears his solution is to threaten the video game makers with totally withholding music from them.  Does he not realize this would mean no realized income from this revenue stream?  This is exactly like the article I wrote the other day about how the industry is killing off music discovery methods over greed, and now here is yet another example of them doing the exact same thing.

When is this industry ever going to learn that their greed is doing nothing but angering the consumers, and they keep killing the golden goose that keeps laying eggs for them.  Sure, they’re making money from Pandora, but not ENOUGH.  Yes, they are making money from Rock Band, but not ENOUGH.

Mr. Bronfman said that the music industry wasn’t evolving as fast as the technology and that needs to change.  So here you have two of the biggest promotional tools going right now, and you are realizing revenue from it, but you may kill it off because it just isn’t enough.  I am sick and tired of the music industry being nothing but story after story of greed.  How they are so put upon, and everyone takes advantage of them, boo-hoo, poor them.

Well, apparently history does repeat itself, because Bronfman is sounding like a broken record.  Let him cut off the games from getting music, and your company can continue to lose money.  Oh, did I forget to mention Warner Music Group suffered a net loss of $9 million last quarter?  Yeah, good idea, threaten to cut off even more money to drive those losses even higher, good thinking!

Before I say good-bye to Mr. Bronfman before his next asinine comment calls me to his shores again like the Sirens of myth, let us not forget this is also the man who gave his kids a ‘talking to’ after he learned they were illegally downloading music.  He never did reveal what their punishment was, but I suspect it had something to do with charging them more money.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is at it again. I know… you’re all shocked.

The RIAA, the goverening body that is charged with the protection of musical copyrights, is again going so far in their efforts to protect music, that they seem to be doing more harm than good.  The latest confirmed casualty is the startup website called Muxtape.

The site, without a doubt, was questionable in its legalities from day one.  It allowed users to upload MP3s to the site and they could then make a “Muxtape” from those.  It was meant to bring back some of the feeling people got from making mix tapes for friends back in the 1980’s and 90’s.  You were limited to putting 12 songs on each Muxtape, and there was no means for downloading the songs present in the site, all in an effort to show the record industry that this was merely a way for people to promote the music they loved.

As of August 19th, the image shown above here appeared on the front page of the Muxtape site.  The problems more than likely stem from the fact that third-party developers came up with ways for people to download the music, even though one of the owners of the site repeatedly pleaded with poeple to not do so.  The company blog does make things a little less clear, though:

No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.

Whatever is going on with Muxtape involves the RIAA, and that is never a good thing.

So, while clearly Muxtape was on shaky legal ground all along, you then have the case of Pandora, which is 100% legal, but may be shut down by virtue of the greed of the music industry.  According to a story in the Washington Post, last year a federal commission, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB),  ordered that the royalty rate online radio stations pay to SoundExchange be doubled.  Mind you that at this time terrestrial radio does not pay any royalties (although the RIAA is looking to charge radio stations now), and satellite radio, which is subscription based, pays a lesser fee rate than online radio does.

Pandora is free to its one million daily users, and has become one of the most popular applications on the iPhone/iPod Touch app store, and all of this is made possible via advertising revenue.  Under the new fee structure, Pandora will have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of its projected $25 million in revenue to SoundExchange.  If this should go into effect, Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, says he will have to shut the site down because the company will only be wasting money at that point.

Okay, lets do some simple math for the music industry shall we?

Old Pandora fee structure
35% of $25,000,000 is $8,750,000
Sales of music discovered due to people listening to Pandora is impossible to calculate

New Pandora fee structure
70% of nothing due to Pandora shutting down under new fees is $0
No sales of music discovered due to people listening to Pandora is not impossible to calculate, it is $0

Which one looks more attractive to you?  The old fee structure, or the new, greedier structure, that leaves the music industry with earning nothing?  I think I’ll take curtain #1, Monty!

The music industry is going berserk with the online industry because I think they feel like they finally have a way to track stuff.  The amount of piracy that went on while I was in high school was astronomical.  We were all constantly taping off CDs for each other, passing them around, taping music off the radio and so on, but the industry could do nothing about it because they had no way to track it.  Now comes the Internet and they have ways to see how many times everything gets played, how many times something gets downloaded, and they have gone absolutely bat crazy with trying to figure out how to squeeze every penny they can out of it.  Remember when they wanted a percentage of each iPod sold because Steve Jobs couldn’t sell them if it wasn’t for the music to put on them?  Yeah, prove to me they aren’t trying to take insane amounts of money they shouldn’t be able to.

As I see it, the problem here is that the industry is forgetting that without the ability to discover new music, they won’t have any sales.  I have no desire to listen to commercial radio and be forcefed they drivel they program.  Sites such as Pandora are amazing because they learn from you and what you like, and then they will recommend new music based off of that.  I have discovered several bands I had never heard of via this site, and now it may go away because the music industry just simply can’t control their never-ending greed.

Perhaps this actually is there plan.  Perhaps they want to be able to dictate how we discover music so they can continue to force us to listen to the likes of Britney Spears.  There is something horribly broken in the music industry, and it isn’t a couple of stolen MP3s from the likes fo sites like Muxtape, or from Pandora not paying enough in royalties, it is from the music industry having this omnipotent style attitude that essentially everyone in the world works for them.  Enough is enough.

In the above linked article about Pandora, towards the end, there was this quote from a musician (you know, the people this is supposed to all be about?) that I think sums it all up pretty well.

Matt Nathanson, a singer-songwriter who has recorded for both major and independent record labels, said he is worried that the demands placed on Internet radio could “choke” the industry before it gets its footing.

“Net radio is good for musicians like me, and I think most musicians are like me,” he said. “The promotion it provides is far more important than the revenue.”

There you have it folks.  True, this is just one musician, but this is still an actual musician saying that this is more important as a promotional tool than a revenue stream.  Every industry has promotional tools, why does it seem the music industry can’t have one without taxing it to death?  And if they aren’t taxing it to death, they want to sue people who listen to music… or they want to dictate how you can listen to it via Digital Rights Management (DRM)… or they want to impose a tax on all Internet subscribers to help cover “the cost” of piracy… the list of endless as to how this industry is attacking the consumers.

It is time you finally voice your opinion on this in various manners.

• The best way possible by skipping buying a new album, even if it is by your favorite artist, go to their concerts instead, buy their tshirts, make sure THEY get the money, but try everything you can to make sure the companies don’t see a dime.
• Write your congressman, let them know you think this new royalty scheme is a joke.
• Write the music companies themselves and make sure you tell them of your intentions.
• Blog about it, spread the word.

It’s up to us folks, how much longer will we stand for an industry that so clearly hates us, but isn’t essential to our everyday well-being like food or water, dictate such insane policies?

The record industry is making me slam my head into the wall again.

Our friends at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Society of Singers, Rhythm & Blues Foundation, Recording Academy and others make up a coalition named musicFIRST.  According to David Kravets at Wired, said coalition has decided that it is time that AM and FM radio stations stop getting a free-ride of playing music without compensation to the artists.

You see, for the past 80 years, radio stations have played all of the music you hear for free.  The musicFIRST has now determined this is the equivalent of piracy due to the fact that radio stations earn advertising revenue from the music.  The radio companies claim that it is not piracy due to their playing the music acts as a promotional tool for the recording industry.  Martin Machowsky, a spokesman for musicFirst, said, “Today we gifted them a can of herring, about their argument that they provide promotional value. We think that’s a red herring. Nobody listens to the radio for the commercials.”

This issues is due to be addressed by the United States House of Represnitives, and should it pass, the new law could cost the radio industry in the neighborhood of $7 billion dollars annually.  According to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the AM-FM radio industry grosses $16 billion annually, so you are looking at nearly half of their annual revenue going to the recording industry.

If you hadn’t guessed, I’m against this.  Yes, the radio stations sell advertising and earn a revenue from the playing of the music, but it is no red herring that this is the single biggest promotional tool the recording industry has.  Why do you think bands focus so heavily on the songs they release as their singles?  They know those are what will be played on the airwaves and help sell their albums.

What gets under my skin is that the record industry obviously knows what a powerful promotional tool radio is due to the long history of “payola“.  For those unfamiliar with the term, this was a practice started in the 1950’s where DJs received bribes to play and promote certain songs by artists.  This practice was still well known to happen up through at least 2005, and I highly suspect that it still hasn’t disappeared completely.  If radio wasn’t such a useful entity to the record companies, why would they make these payouts to have certain songs played numerous times?

If radio stations are facing paying such enormous fees for the music, what makes the recording industry not think that stations won’t make tweaks to their format to lower the amount of music they play?  Changes to talk radio formats, playing of more music in the public domain, more remote broadcasts from paid sponsers, an increase in the number of ads verses number of songs played per hour and so on.

While small stations and public broadcast stations will pay a flat fee of $5,000 a year, this is still going to put a hurt on a lot of mid-sized stations.  They will either be faced with selling out to large conglomerates like Clear Channel Communications, or they will simply close their doors, lowering the number of promotional opportunities for an artist, and, in turn, lowering the amount of money the industry collects.

The system was not broken, and it certainly did not need fixing.  The recording industry can claim all day long this is about protecting the artists, but how have they survived for 80 years without this revenue stream? I don’t care how they try to disguise this, but it is just yet another move in the industries endless march of greed. They simply can not let any potential revenue stream set idle, they have to continue to milk every potential source of income they can, and damned the consquences.

This belongs in the pantheon of bad ideas, and all one can hope is that this will never make it out of committee in Congress, but there is every chance that it will.

For those who don’t know who Herb Tarlek is, he was the slimey station ad sales guy on WKRP in Cincinnati.

I noticed that as much as I talk about music, I rarely mention who I listen to. There’s the odd piece here or there that mentions it, but never anything concentrated. So I thought in an odd change of pace, I would share with all of you the latest bands I’ve found that I’m listening to on a regular basis.

I first caught Vampire Weekend on Saturday Night Live this season, and I honestly can’t tell you why I like them. Their name certainly doesn’t speak to their sound, and they aren’t the normal style for me, but their self-titled debut album is infectious. You can also check out their song A-Punk for another sample of their work.

I would have liked to have embedded the original video for That’s Not My Name by The Ting Tings, but for some reason they won’t let you. Either way, I first found out about this band from one of their songs being featured in an iPod commercial, and I was hooked on Katie White’s vocals. She doesn’t so much sing as talk the lyrics, but there is a raw, just-about-to-lose-control, primal feel to her. You can feel a real underlying set of punk roots in their music, especially towards the end of That’s Not My Name. You can also check out Great DJ for another sample.

I just found out about The Pipettes last night, and unfortunately I’ve learned they already have rotated most of the members due to being a managed band. (i.e. someone came up with the idea and hired singers) Nothing horribly original here, but is fun to harken back to the girl bands of the 1950’s and 60’s. You can also check out Because It’s Not Love(But It’s Still A Feeling), ABC, Judy and Dirty Mind.

Don’t forget, whenever possible, avoid supporting the RIAA by buying used CDs, trading on LaLa, or trying one of the sources I mentioned for free music.

You know, I was just thinking, “Hey, self, you know that border guards have way too much free time on their hands! They need something to do that will impossibly clog up people crossing the border into some countries in anything even remotely resembling a reasonable time!”

Oh… thank you, G8!

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been revealed to be a secret proposal that is being worked on by the G8 nations that would empower border guards of the member nations to search through the contents of electronic devices such as iPods, laptops, phones and more for any material that infringes on copyrights. This includes, but is not limited to, files you have ripped from physical media you already own such as CDs and DVDs. If any infringing material is found, you can be fined, have your device seized and even possibly destroyed.

Apparently ACTA was originally thought of for going after large scale piracy, but at some point the whole proposal has gotten drilled down to individual users True, the total final document as not yet been revealed, and it is hard to believe it would stand up in court as the searches are reported to done without benefit of having a lawyer present, but this just screams an endless headache to me.

As if going through customs wasn’t already a big enough of a pain, now they can slow the process down even more as you explain where every file on your iPod came from. Am I now to travel with receipts for every file? Add in the point that they say this will even cover music you ripped from your own CD collection (remember boys & girls, we’ve been told that is stealing), and essentially every iPod crossing the border will have some form of “copyright infringing” file on it.

Is it just me, or do you think border guards have about 5,000 more important things to concern themselves with than someone with a couple of Beatles songs on their iPod they took off their own CDs? Yes… I’m looking at you, President Bush! This proposal would also require Internet service providers (ISPs) to turn over all private information about an individual with no more cause than suspicion of copyright violation.

Essentially, ACTA will turn us even more into a big brother state than ever with people digging through your cyber-life, even on your non-connected gadgets, all in the name of “copyright protection”. I’m sorry, but I have a news flash for everyone: copyrights don’t matter THIS much. I’m all for protecting copyrights, but there comes a point where it is just not worth it to protect some large corporations “intellectual properties” by inconveniencing everyone and their brother at security, treating everyone with an iPod as a potential criminal and then confiscating their devices. Simple solution though, I will simply never travel with my iPod because I simply do not want the hassle of explaining 120+ gigs of music to someone. That many hours of my life is not worth listening to The Ramones on the plane.

What else bothers me about this whole thing is that it was being worked on in secret. It wasn’t until some folks in Canada got wind of it and filed demands for information that it even came to light. Gee, why are you hiding such materials? Because you know it’s ignorant and the general public would never approve it? As the National Post points out, this would be a federal trade agreement, and as such does not require any sort of public ratification to be enacted.

If all goes according to plan, this proposal will be discussed in July when the G8 meets in Japan. We can only hope someone with a brain finally says, “wait a tick…”

Recently, Pete Cashmore, my boss at Mashable, had a chance to chat with well-known rapper, Chamillionaire. I know, it made me scratch my head also until I watched the video, and then it actually made sense.

It seems that Mr. Millionaire (er…) has done his homework on digital media and is embracing it on a personal level. He wants to be where the kids are, and that’s on sites such as YouTube, MySpace and so on. All-in-all, he seems to be honestly into the new media space as opposed to those who say they are, but immediately buckle under questioning, so kudos to him.

As for what got me to blog about this, at around the 2:43 mark, Pete asks Millionaire (okay… there’s something I never envisioned writing…) about his ringtone sales. The digital ringtone for “Ridin’ Dirty” sold over 4 million units, making it the most successful ringtone to date, while his actual album sold 1.4 million copies in comparison and this is where the “dirty little secret” I refer to comes in.

As you can see, he addresses the fact that if someone goes on to a download site and purchases 9 of his 10 tracks, the record company does not report this as an album sale because the consumer did not purchase the full album. Fair enough, you can’t argue with that logic. The problem is that record companies continue to always point to “declining album sales” as how badly the industry is doing as a whole.

However, were are the metrics to factor in the singles sales? While certainly not an infallible system, what if lets say an album has 10 tracks on it, when 10 singles are sold from it, no matter if it’s the same song 10 times, it could be counted as an album sale. I am not in love with this idea, but it is certainly better than droning on and on about how piracy is killing “album sales”.

This is also a clear indication of what I have been saying for years: Why should people buy a full album when the majority of it will be fluff? Services such as iTunes have finally put the power into the hands of the consumers, and they are voting with their wallets, telling the music industry that they will no longer be force fed the pablum that they pass off as “quality” any longer. If artists would focus on quality as much as they do their images, they would see single sales convert far more easily in to full album sales, making everyone involved happier.

Chamillionaire is 100% correct in his comments, and one can only hope that someday, those suits at the record companies will listen when their artists speak up like this.

-slowly bangs his head on his desk-

Why does the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) insist on being such monumental asses? Is it a game to them? Some sort of, “Hey, let’s see if we can get away with… THIS” game of chicken they play with the music industry as a whole?

Their latest target is a company named Project Playlist that lets users, as their name implies, build playlists of music from various sources. The company does not host any files, pays royalties to performance bodies, and clearly states that they attempt to only index sites with legal music files.

Project Playlist, Inc. aspires to index and organize the music on the Internet in a responsible and efficient manner, and is therefore committed to copyright protection. Accordingly, our search engine is based upon our growing index of links to music files legally posted on the Internet for promotional or other legal purposes. Our music player allows performance of music files through streaming technology and “in-line linking” of series of hyperlinks. In that way, we make it easy for our users to create a playlist that points to a series of music files hosted on third party websites. We do not control those third party websites. We do not host music files. We do not allow uploading or downloading of music files to projectplaylist.com. We are not a “file sharing” site, peer to peer or otherwise; and we do not support or endorse illegal copying of music.

So even with all of this, and being the chosen music player of MySpace, where artists willingly post their music for promotional purposes, the RIAA has chosen to sue them.

They are using the argument that Project Playlist facilitates the piracy of third-party websites by allowing people to play the music files from these sites, which PP clearly says they do not want and will comply with any take-down notice they receive from an artist. The RIAA also tries to claim that PP pays no compensation, even though they list on their site exactly how they do pay royalties.

To me, this is like suing Apple for their iPods playing pirated music, or how about going after the makes of blank CDs for passing around pirated music on their media? The RIAA seems to have two modus operandi now: find anything online since it’s easier to track and then sue the pants off of them.

I would love for someone to tell me what exactly the RIAA does now outside of suing. I mean, do they actually play any sort of productive role in the world of music, or is strictly now about how many people they can sue? I know they are supposedly about protecting the rights of musicians, and safe-guarding the copyrights of their works, but what about when all they do is antagonize the fans?

The coup de grâce of this whole thing is how all of this money the RIAA takes in is not getting to the musicians they are “protecting”. This has been discussed for a couple of months now, and, to the best of my knowledge, has not changed. So, where is all of this money going? They keep suing, they keep winning, where is all of the money? I mean, the RIAA is there to help the artists, isn’t it? And when they sue in their names, doesn’t that mean those artists should reasonably expect a payment?

Snarkiness aside, and this is just my observation, I think the RIAA knows they have hit on a money making scam the likes of which the world has never seen before. I mean, if you can go around suing people for any number of reasons that you can seemingly make up as you go along, do it for the “artists”, and then find ways to not pay it out, wouldn’t you?

All-in-all, you just have to look at this organization and wonder what the next target will be, because there is obviously no end to their war to alienate every music fan ever.

In December of last year, I discussed that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had changed their position on the legality of making MP3s from your own CDs. While they had at one time said it was okay, in recent court cases that have been taking the tact that it is technically illegal to do so.

This is where it gets funny. As of this moment, and keeping in mind that you can not rip music from your own CDs, there is no legal way to have the music of the Beatles on your MP3 player. Yes, a deal is now in place for their music to be sold on iTunes, but it has not taken effect yet.

So, what should the RIAA do if someone famous, say, oh, I don’t know, the President of the United States, admitted to having Beatles songs on his iPod?

Credit goes to 9to5Mac for finding this. Now, I’m actually not saying the RIAA should go after him, but I do think this demonstrates just how silly this whole idea is. I certainly don’t think President Bush went on a torrent site and downloaded the songs, and probably some intern ripped the music from the President’s CD collection for him, but that just shows people don’t think twice about such an action, and in my thinking, they shouldn’t have to.

However, if the RIAA is going to make such a stink about this act, and even try to use it in court hearings, then I want to know they went after this evil-doer that has admitted publicly to having music on his iPod that could have only gotten there by illegal means. Come on RIAA… you seem to have big brass ones when it comes to picking on the common folk, you got what it takes for this case?