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SOPA DE MIERDA – An Open Letter To The Entertainment Industry

admin — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:12:47 +0000

I’m sorry movie and music industries, that you’re so goddamn stupid that since you can’t figure out how to make money with one of the greatest technological achievements in human history, you want to destroy it. No really. I feel bad that the mostly white, fatass males that run a multi-billion dollar industry that pays most of the hardworking working people struggling to get into it a pittance in comparison to their own incomes can no longer lounge in ease by the pool with a bevy of hookers. I’m also sorry that after buying Led Zeppelin IV on vinyl, cassette, and compact disc, that I copied it a few times for friends and personal use, and I’m sorry that after buying the “theatrical release” and multiple “director’s cuts” of Blade Runner on VHS and DVD, a friend gave me a copy of the Blu Ray version. Hang me. I’m sorry that when confronted with the terrible loss of revenue you’ve created with your own fucktardedness, the only solution you see is to grease the already slippery palms of Washington and lose even MORE money on doomed strategies. Because you know what? This little soup you’ve been cooking, this “SOPA DE MIERDA” as I like to call it, is probably going to be the last dish of crap you try to serve us. You see, there’s this OTHER recipe for entertainment we can ingest, and it’s been simmering nicely for a while now. It’s called INDEPENDENTLY PRODUCED MEDIA. We have the same tools you have now, and aren’t as greedy as you are. We can make more money than you ever paid us DOING IT OURSELVES. I mean, aside from all the great indy bands and films that have sprung up triumphantly in the wreckage of your business model, there’s USER GENERATED CONTENT. Let’s face it. Who wouldn’t rather watch funny cat videos for a hundred twenty seconds than watch crappy retreads like Cars 2, The Hangover 2, and a Conan the Barbarian remake for a hundred twenty MINUTES? Watching most of the movies your hallowed industry churns out these days is like a weirdly recursive cinematic bulimia, where one is forced to eat and re-eat the same meal over and over. I’m sorry, movie and music industries, when you’ve completed your grandiose acts of self-destruction, I won’t miss you.

Music Industry Plans To Pay Off Federal Deficit

admin — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 02:55:09 +0000

It’s been clear for a while that the established music industry missed the boat to the digital age, and that their innovative new business model is primarily based on suing the pants off their own customers and pirating music from their own artists. But if you’ve been following these bizarre attempts by the music industry to remain profitable, one thing that that might be troubling you lately is the way that the government seems to be operating as a tool for the entertainment industry to execute this doomed strategy. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security basically admits that it’s the private police force of the entertainment industry raises perfectly reasonable questions like “Is CD Piracy a Matter for Homeland Security?” And for the entertainment industry to pursue this kind of strategy more aggressively than ever – especially at a time when consumer piracy has declined almost 50% in three years – has personally left me perplexed. Until today, when I finally figured out the long-term goal of this bizarre partnership between agencies devoted to national security and the people who bring you wonderful and innovative products like Justin Bieber and Toy Story 3. They’re out to eliminate the federal deficit. How else would you explain the music industry’s $75 Trillion lawsuit against Lime Wire? Yes, you read that right. Seventy five trillion dollars. That’s enough to pay off the current federal deficit 45 times, if you’re curious.

Live Indignation & Ticketmaster Slavery

admin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:44:57 +0000

Few things have made me more ecstatic than the explosion of indy music over the past decade. But I still have one complaint. Ticket prices. While the average pop song has settled nicely at a price of about a dollar, and the artist generally takes a bigger slice of that dollar in spite of the lower unit price, concert tickets rose in price by over 80% between 1996 and 2003, and have continued to rise consistently since then. What’s behind this insane inflation of concert prices? Well, everyone’s pointing fingers, but most agree that it began over a decade ago with the aggressive and monopolistic practices of Clear Channel, who devoted most of their energy to decimating the diverse network of venues and promoters that used to exist. But as easy as it is to place ALL the blame on them, the fact is that “premium artists”, i.e.: dinosaur rock baby boomer idols like the Rolling Stones and the Eagles – are just as much to blame in many ways, by charging upwards of 300 bucks for shows, in order to offset their lousy album sales and still be able to stay in $2,000 a night hotels while on tour. Even a next generation act like Green Day can be accused of this greed, if you believe the numbers in this infographic; Green Day’s 65% cut makes the promoters and venues look like they’re being reasonable. It’s rough enough out there that even a well-established artist like Imogen Heap had to throw in the towel recently. And it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better, in light of the DOJ’s recent approval of the monster merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. I think it’s time we started to practice some asymmetrical warfare techniques against the concert ticketing industry. It would be amazing if a network of non-ticketmaster promoters and venues could pull it together. I personally would be out every night of the week if I could catch a decent band for ten or fifteen bucks on a regular basis. We’ve done it with record labels, lets change the game with radio and live music too.

Lawyers Gonna Put You In The Hurt Locker

admin — Sun, 16 May 2010 15:45:51 +0000

While the Iraq War has claimed at least 100,000 casualties, it looks like the makers of the Oscar-winning film about it are getting ready to claim another 20,000 or more. Only in this case, the lawyers will be doing all the shooting, and the casualties will be internet users like you and me who are nerdy enough to use Bittorents. It appears no-one at Voltage Pictures (the backers of Hurt Locker ) got the memo about how stupid it is to sue your customers, and so they’ve contracted US Copyright Group (who apparently didn’t get the memo about updating their vintage web site) to go after every one of the filthy pirates that swiped their movie . Don’t they know that even the MPAA has decided that Anti-piracy is passé and that it’s now to be called “content protection”? You may remember the relatively short-lived You Can Click But You Can’t Hide campaign (our parody below) by the MPAA a few years ago, which was a little different, and not nearly as insane as the practice of suing consumers en masse, which even the music industry has come to realize is absurd . Who knows when these industries will ever figure out that they’re fighting an assymetrical war (ironically, much like the one that the film is about) and that their “enemy” is the future and their inability to understand it, not the consumer. Just ask British entertainer Peter Serafinowicz, who expains in this Gawker piece why he’s going to have to sue himself for piracy. Do the Hurt Locker folks ( and me) a favor and buy their dang film through this link. Apparently they only grossed about $21 million in spite of the Oscar, which probably does more to explain these suits than anything.

Film Industry Is Only FCCing Itself With New Regulations

admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 23:58:36 +0000

It is with mixed feelings that I bid adieu to the MPAA and the major motion picture companies of America, because although some of the epic films that came out of….oh hell. Who am I kidding. I’m already planning a party. The desperate land grab for your hard-earned CD’s and song files that the RIAA and the established music industry attempted with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and DRM has spawned one of the most creative decades in pop music, and put more money in more artists’ pockets than ever before. Although smart pop media influencers like Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing are in a tizzy about the admittedly insane new “Selectable Output Control” power that the FCC is handing the film industry, the development should come as no surprise; I can only guess that the reason Cory is so upset is that he must be a cable subscriber. As an avid film lover, this will have little impact for me personally. As just one of the more glaring examples of why this should come as no surprise, one of the people who more recently spun through DC’s revolving doors was Catherine Bohigian, chief of the office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis at the FCC, who left in 2008 to take a job with the cable giant Cablevision. To me the most shocking thing about this recent round of nuttiness being promulgated by the in-some-ways shadowy MPAA is that it’s taking so darn long for the movie industry to undermine itself the way the music industry did. It shouldn’t take too long though; although the studios haven’t been aggressively suing their customers on a regular basis like the record companies, they do have a pretty batshit-insane shopping list for how to protect their market. And after witnessing the indy music industry explosion of the last decade, I personally don’t see any reason why this couldn’t happen with film. The film industry is doing exactly the same thing the record companies did; they’re routinely annoying their best customers, and sticking it to a key distribution channel in their maniacal grab for control of intellectual property. The RIAA did it with radio, the MPAA is doing it to theaters. And they’re doing this at a time when professional-quality production and distibution tools are within the reach of just about anyone. In my opinion there would be nothing cooler than a massive movement comprised of small-house indy film venues showing nothing but indy film in intimate settings using HD technology. I say go ahead and FCC yourself, MPAA.

So It’s Canadian Pirates vs. The RIAA, eh?

admin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:01:35 +0000

In their never-ending quest for most absurd litigation to make its way into the apparently oblivious judicial system, the record industry is stepping it up a notch. No, it wasn’t enough to steal from their own artists and corrupt the legal system, or to sue a single woman for $80,000 per allegedly pirated song (oh wait, it got reduced to a mere $2,250!), or sue dead people, people who don’t even own computers, and the entire radio industry. No, now they’re taking on the country that – as we all know – is home to the most ruthless criminal networks of the Americas. You know, Canada. Who knew that aside from being a country full of pretty nice people whose greatest crime may be occasionaly finishing sentences with “eh?”, Canada is also a hotbed of profit-robbing music piracy? As far as I knew, the only threat that Canada had brought to the established music industry recently was a really awesome indy scene, but the RIAA sees things a little differently. Fortunately, this may be one of the last times that you’ll have to endure wingnuts like me ranting about this; dinosaur labels like EMI are soon likely to be laying about in massive heaps gasping for their last breaths like their metaphoric counterparts at the end of the Jurassic period, as they continue to blame their $2.7 billion losses on piracy rather than their failure to adapt to competition. I tend to get a little over-the-top when I discuss this topic; for a much more sane overview from an artist’s point of view, check out this New York Times piece by Damian Kulash Jr. of the band OK Go, in which he calmly describes how EMI’s disabling of the “embed” feature on YouTube has probably lost them exponentially more than what they made by “protecting” their property.

Mexican Pop Star Makes Sony Walk Their Own Gangplank

admin — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:46:10 +0000

Sony, the company that tries to infect our computers with spyware & malware, that sues its customers to the tune of 2 million dollars for piracy, that has been investigated themselves for software piracy, and that is guilty by association of corrupting our judicial system, has gotten a tiny taste of their own medicine. Like me, you may not have heard of Mexican mega popstar Alejandro Fernández before, but today he’s sort of a hero. It seems that while Sony was in the process of screwing him out an entire album, he turned the tables by having police raid their Mexico City offices to seize thousands of his CD’s, audio masters, and artwork. Sony’s PR people seem to be getting less easily rattled these days; although they expressed that they were “shocked” at the multimillion dollar settlement in their favor when suing a customer for piracy, they apparently are only “surprised and disappointed” by the recent raid. Personally, I think we should all show our support by buying some Alejandro Fernández songs. And I think Sony needs to just chill out. Don’t they know that pirates are ten times more likely to buy music than other people?

Now that he’s got his music back he looks like he’s ready to kick Sony’s ass too:

Support Corporate Fascism – Buy A CD

admin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:01:14 +0000

If you’ve shared any music with your friends in a digital format recently, you might want to wipe your hard drive. That rascally RIAA is at it again, winning an absolutely psychotic copyright infringement case against a single consumer, to the tune of $1.92 million. Who knows how they expect Jammie Thomas to pay the nearly two million dollars she owes for the 24 songs she “pirated”….wait. Did I just say 24 songs for $1.92 million dollars? Yes. I did. That’s why I’m reviving the CopyReich Shop I created a while back. If this isn’t fascist behavior on the part of the recording industry, I don’t know what is. The stupid consumer won’t buy your crappy overpriced products? Destroy their life by suing the f*ck out of them! We just talked about the CopyFight last week; frankly I thought it was kind of a dead movement. Maybe it’s time we revitalized it. If you find the Nazi-esque images of the CopyReich Shop offensive, we also have the Copyfight Shop, which pokes fun at the Creative Commons license. And which is also perhaps due for a revival; it seems Instructables.com may be perverting it’s purpose to screw their content creators. By the way, here’s a nice flowchart if you’ve ever wondered how the RIAA decides to pursue these cases.

Copyright Law Isn’t All It’s Quacked Up To Be

admin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:19:22 +0000

It’s someone’s birthday today. I’d love to tell you about it, but I’m not sure if the use of his name (clue: he’s a duck) is a violation of trademark or copyright law. You see, the individual in question is a property (and you thought slavery had been abolished!) of a large media company that regularly protects its intellectual property with considerable aggression. Back in 2005, I got intrigued with the copyfight movement and created a couple of parody products on CafePress – the CopyReich Shop , which pretty heavy-handedly pointed a finger at the RIAA and MPAA’s fascist behavior, and the Copyfight Shop, which poked fun at the Creative Commons license. I suggested them for BoingBoing.net, and got this reply from Cory Doctorow: “This stuff is funny, Ian! I’m uncomfortable with the Nazi stuff, though — I’m a believer in Godwin’s Law and worry that the discreditation that accrues to its violators would outweigh the humor. Sorry.” I guess I was too edgy for the edgy. Oddly, CafePress didn’t mind the images, although recently they wouldn’t let me use these images. Maybe they’re anti-gay. Who knows. In any case, something that’s often overlooked when people discuss copyrights is who they were intended to protect, and what their purpose really was. In the United States, the government gave itself the right to copyright material ostensibly to: “…promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (US Constitution, Section 8, Clause 8). The idea being that if a creative person could gain an exclusive financial benefit from their creation for a time, there would be plenty of motivation to create wonderful things that would benefit mankind later, when these creations entered the public domain. In my opinion, this has all been completely perverted by the copyright extension act to protect the profits of corporations, at the expense of the individual. What do you think? Below are the images from the CafePress shops.

This image is from the shop that made Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing reject our suggested link:

This shop was intended to make fun of the communist nature of “open source” copyrights:

This is Mickey, who sadly is copyrighted until the end of time:

ABC Tells Pushing Daisies Fans To Stick It In Their Pie-Hole

admin — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:08:44 +0000

The entertainment industry in general (music, film, television) seems to me to have made some secret suicide pact with itself. The RIAA constantly suing its customer base, the film industry’s vain and annoying attempts at copy protection, and the television industy’s gift for cancelling top-rated shows with rabidly loyal viewers all suggest a weird death-wish. Which (because of the show’s name) is ironic in the case of ABC’s cancellation of Pushing Daisies, one of the better (and critically acclaimed) programs on TV in a while. I must confess to possibly over-identifying with the show because of the fact that when I was seven I threw the Frisbee that made my first dog get hit by a car (I’m serious. His name was Snoopy), but viewer’s and critic’s reactions seem to validate my surprise at the show’s early demise. Put Pushing Daisies prematurely six feet under with shows like Firefly, Deadwood, Arrested Development, Enterprise, and Freaks & Geeks. If you haven’t seen the Tim Burtonesque genius of Pushing Daisies, it is available on DVD. But since ABC doesn’t seem to care what we think, why should we care what they think? Go ahead and Bittorrent it. On the bright side of all of this, maybe now Anna Friel will have time to notice that I exist…