Category: Technology

Posted on

Copyright and Copywrong

(From a discussion on usenet)

Skip this if you don’t want to be bored. But if you think the CD as the medium of distribution for music might soon be obsolete…

Actually, your point is well taken. I have often thought and said that I wish some days that the copyright-holders get exactly what they wish for. Because it would kill them off more quickly. What I believe is happening is that copyright holders want it both ways. They want to benefit from widespread exposure. Then they want to assert the right to not expose their work.

I firmly believe that if the government had required Microsoft to put effective copy protection on all of their products, we wouldn’t have the monopoly we have now. And I firmly believe Microsoft knew that, and that is why, when Word Perfect, for example, removed copy protection from their product, Microsoft almost immediately did the same. It is therefore hypocritical of Microsoft to demand protection from competition, by asserting their copyright. Compete!

And, in fact, you can easily see that Microsoft has been very circumspect on this issue. They know dimly what Google understands completely: there’s a lot of money to be made in giving away your product.

As for music, copyright holders want their music exposed, on radio and tv, in promotional tie-ins, scandalous newspapers, etc., etc. If you truly believe that Ashley Simpson gets her face on my local entertainment section because even a Kitchener, Ontario newspaper believes she is so talented she deserves it, God bless you, but I don’t. She is there because her corporate Svengalis want her “exposed”. They want you to see her face. They have established a very sophisticated and effective system of promotion that ensures that her face will be on magazine covers. They will also want you to hear her music– why else would you buy her CD? Most commercial radio stations only play music by artists they believe will obtain wide exposure through tv and magazines. One hand washing the other. They all profit by selling advertising, not music.

Since I have no intention of spending one red cent on Ashley Simpson products, I would have no problem with her corporate Svengalis being absolutely, totally successful in preventing me from being exposed to her music, her face, or her tantrums, without having paid for permission. Go to it! Please– be absolutely successful. Prevent her music from ever being downloaded to my computer, or played on my radio station, or her face from being on my tv, or in my local newspaper, unless I actually offer you money for it.

I have absolutely no problem with finding my music by reading reviews or hearing personal recommendations from people I know instead. I also like to support local talent.

But that, of course, does not happen. And up until recently, this system worked to the advantage of the big corporations, who could control access to the actual product, the CD. Now the corporations have lost control over the actual product, so the system is becoming unbalanced. But only if you believe that for the rest of all time, we must all consume music by purchasing a discrete material product, and music companies must only profit through the sale of that physical product.

That model has been made obsolete by technology and the music industry (and Hollywood and television) are crying the blues and they refuse to accept it. They are the carriage-makers of our era. They deserve to go out of business because they have failed to adjust to changing market realities. In retrospect, does anybody doubt that if the music companies had moved aggressively to make their entire catalogues available as paid downloads in a high quality format that they would not have made a killing? It took Apple to show them it could be done. But it might well be too late. As with prohibition, individual transgression has been replaced with a transgressive infrastructure that will not be easily suppressed.

Google, iTunes, eBay, and Amazon, and even Microsoft, are the new emblems of astute corporations that understand where the market is going and what it wants. All this wailing and gnashing of teeth is misplaced. The music industry should sit down together, face the fact that the old model of business practice is now obsolete, and move on to something new, or join the other dinosaurs in the museum.

Congress, despicably, in exchange for ready election campaign cash, is doing everything it can to keep an obsolete business model afloat– this from alleged believers in a “free market” (“free” for everyone else). It’s like requiring train companies to keep stokers employed. Or more like when a city in Bolivia tried to make it illegal to save rain water in order to help a private American company make a bigger profit with it’s monopoly on the water supply.

The museum is full of creatures that failed to adapt.

Finally, I absolutely believe that a very profitable music business model can survive downloading. How does Google make money?

The difference is, the Recording industry will have to work hard and use their brains. That might be asking too much….

A recent documentary film producer was asked to pay $10,000 for the rights to use a six-second cell-phone ring tone that was derived from the theme from ROCKY (Gonna Fly Now). Tragically, he couldn’t afford a team of lawyers, so he had to pay a negotiated amount less than that, even though he was not convinced that he had to pay, legally, for it’s use in a documentary.

That is not really farce anymore: it’s tragedy.

Posted on

Maximum PC Sells Out

Maximum PC used to be highly regarded in these quarters. It was the only major computer magazine that didn’t carry reams of Microsoft advertising. Shockingly, it also sometimes commented honestly on the many shortcomings in the Microsoft product line.

I nearly vomited when I read the “Ed Word” in the most recent Maximum PC. Slyly formulated, with a few token swipes at obvious defects, it is an otherwise laudatory puff-piece on Windows.

So much for the last glossy computer magazine that didn’t prostrate itself before Bill Gates.

And wait– what’s this I see– oh my god!! It’s an ad for “Age of Empires”, a Microsoft game!! Sheer coincidence? Sure. Just like George Bush looked into his mirror shaving one day and just happened to see the most qualified supreme court justice in the country standing right behind him, right next to Laura, his own personal lawyer, Harriet E. Miers.

So what’s happening? Is Maximum PC cashing out?

Byte Magazine bit the dust years ago, probably because there never was a market for intelligent dissenting opinions on computer technology.  That is a shame.

 

 

Posted on

Blogging

As you may or may not have noticed, I have stopped posting regularly here. I might take it up again. I might not. Please don’t confuse me with a blogger.

Not that I don’t enjoy blogs. I have read some of them. Some of them are interesting, and some are provocative, and some are even well-written. None of them are indispensable.

When I started the “rant of the week” back in 1997, nobody had ever heard of a blog. I don’t think my website actually fits the blog mold. I use an html editor and I only post sporadically.

I am not carrying on a long conversation with myself. In fact, it appears that I am carrying on this long conversation with nobody.

Now, we have all heard of blogs. Now there are a million blogs. Now there are too many blogs.

We don’t need them all. We can’t possibly absorb them all. We won’t care, shortly. In a few years, the term “blog” will be an insult. “Oh– you’re blogging!” Or, “where’d you read that? Somebody’s blog?”.

The great irony is that the pervasiveness of blogging is going to restore the impact of branded media. The only way to sort through too much information is to funnel it through something, and that something is likely to turn out to be the CBC or New York Times or CNN. Everything else will be white noise.

You will know when the days of blogging are numbered: Time Magazine will do a cover story on it and how important it’s going to be, soon.

Posted on

There Will Never be a Secure Version of Windows

You may have heard the announcements recently about a new version of Windows, “Longhorn”, and how it will incorporate all kinds of new security features, including something called “Secure Startup”. At a demonstration in Seattle in April, Microsoft demonstrated this new feature which allegedly makes it impossible to see any files on your computer unless the “Platform Configuration Registers” (PCR) match something called a SRTM (Static Root of Trust Measurement”). The article in ComputerWorld is a bit oblique about where the SRTM (how they do love acronyms in the computer world) is located. In a chip, I would presume. On your motherboard, it would seem likely.

The ostensible purpose of these security measures is to protect your data. That’s what Microsoft wants you to believe. It’s not true. The real purpose is absorb you into the borg. All right– partly kidding. What is the borg. in this case? The online world of customer-purchase-charge.

Microsoft might be evil but they are not clueless. They know that the computer is destined to replace the television. When it does, whoever controls the feed of information to your eyeballs controls an unbelievably immense resource.

Anyone who is familiar with the real world of Microsoft operating systems can only just begin to imagine a plethora of scenarios in which you wake up one day to find that all of these “security measures” have gone wrong and instead of protecting your computers from hackers is now protecting your data from you.

More likely, however, you will wake up to find your computer has been hijacked once again by any of a dozen legal or illegal users, all trying to stick their fangs into your infoblood. Yes– “legal” users too, like AOL or Real Networks, or Adobe or Microsoft itself. Yes, even after all the promises and all the claims, Microsoft will once again have sold you a house with giant symbolic locks on the doors– and no glass in the windows. Because, after all, if you want to let the summer breeze blow through your living room, you shouldn’t actually have to get up off the sofa and open a window yourself.

Someone once mentioned that governments react quickly and decisively to terrorism primarily for this reason: it attacks their monopoly on violence. It’s an interesting observation, and at least partly, if not wholly, true. The secret of pervasive government power is that whenever they really, really don’t like what you are doing, they can bust you, violently, if necessary. On the other hand, no matter how convinced I am that Bush is a lying, scheming dupe, I can’t go find myself a beat cop, stroll into the White House, and arrest him. I can’t even suspend the normal rules of due process and evidence– as Bush has done– in order to expedite the incarceration of the man. I can’t because the state doesn’t allow me to exercise coercive power. The state wants a monopoly on violence, the way Microsoft wants a monopoly on internet connectivity.

In the same way, Microsoft wants to stop pirates and hackers from getting onto your computer because they threaten its monopoly on your eyeballs. Microsoft wants to control what you see, where you go to, what information you read. When your TV finally gets linked to your computer, Microsoft’s logo is going to be on the corner of your screen, and you will use Microsoft search engines to find the tv schedule, and Microsoft will collect fees from Hollywood to ensure that you cannot skip through a commercial.

Microsoft’s solution is NOT — I repeat, because this is profoundly true– is NOT to stop your system from being hijacked, because the only way they could do that effectively would be to give the user control over his own computer.

Microsoft’s goal is to facilitate on-line commerce and to force your eyeballs onto the websites belonging to Microsoft itself, or it’s corporate partners.

If you don’t believe this is true, try to delete Internet Explorer or MSN. Or try to prevent Microsoft from contacting it’s own web site and checking for “updates”. Try to install a version of media player that does not refuse to play certain files because it deems them to be in violation of copyright laws. (If you think the competition might be better, try to install Real Player and tell it not to take control over all your media files.)

Try to tell Windows explorer not to try to automatically play files when the cursor lands on or hovers over their names.

I’m not saying it’s not possible to do these things (some aren’t). But it’s difficult, and you will often find that the minute you have to patch your operating system, Microsoft makes everything revert back to the defaults.

Ever get the message that some files are not the official Microsoft versions? Ever try to fix that problem?

Microsoft Windows is NEVER going to be secure, because the only way to make Windows secure is to let you go where you want to go with your browser, and choose what you actually see on your screen.

It’s not going to happen.

You might some day be duped into thinking that Windows has solved the security problem. You will be duped into thinking that because Microsoft will pop up on your screen with this news. That will be like a man walking into your living room as you sit there watching your tv to tell you that your house is now safe and secure.

You will not have asked to see this news, just as you will not have asked Windows to check for security updates at the Microsoft web site, and you will not have asked for Real Networks to monitor your browsing habits and you will not have asked for Adobe to send information back to it’s website when you start Premiere, and you will not have asked for a new version of Windows Media Player that no longer plays “unauthorized” digital music or video even if you recorded it yourself.

Windows will never be secure because Microsoft is not stupid. In fact, the marketing people at Microsoft are way smarter than you or I and they see the future and they know that big money in the future belongs to sites like Google who can attract your eyeballs. But I suspect they won’t genuinely believe in Google, which was very successful by taking the high road.

The original computer was a tool, which a powerful, knowledgeable user used to accomplish tasks he or she had chosen to perform. But since Microsoft began to dominate the PC world, there has been a very steady, very consistent trajectory to the development of hardware and software from the major corporations. That trajectory leads us directly to the opposite of the computer, television.

What made the computer revolutionary was that it actually gave the user control over information. And that is a revolution that cannot and will not be allowed to stand. You– meaning the large body of computer users and consumers that now have computers in their homes–cannot be permitted to obtain the information you want without a corporation carefully screening, manipulating, and controlling it. Because the goal is to convince you that Tucker Carlson “arguing” with Wolf Bitzer is about as diverse as your news sources need to be.

Tucker: So, you think Hilary is a control-freak, free-spending, pinko, feminazi?
Wolf: I disagree. I think she is a control-freak, free-spending, pinko, fembot.
Hilary: But I basically agree with all of President Bush’s policies!
Tucker: It’s working.

They will trumpet your power of choice. Did you want your news from CNN, NBC, MSN, or ABC, or USA Today? Do you want to buy your books at Amazon or Chapters? Do you want to go to a movie at Silver City or Galaxy? Do you want to buy Nikes or Adidas? A GM or Ford? Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson? Spiderman or Batman?

And they only way they can limit your choices to the array of acceptable corporate co-sponsors and flacks, is never, ever, ever give you control over your network connection.

Think about this. Seriously– don’t pass over this point, it’s a very, very important one: how do you shut off your internet connection? Do you know?

If your only answer is “disconnect the cable”, congratulations. You have entered a world in which your access to the internet is controlled by Microsoft. Your computer is now a television. The only difference is, while you’re watching it, it’s watching you.

Microsoft is not the only Jerk Out There:

When I downloaded and installed QuickTime so I could look at some videos, I was given the option of not installing certain features, like iTunes. Then Apple completely ignored my preferences and went ahead and installed iTunes and several other options anyway. Am I displeased? Are you kidding…

Posted on

Grace Slick and the Phantom Microphone

In the mid-1960’s, television realized that it had to acknowledge that there was something going on out there in reality-land that did not conform to the standard paradigm of the way big people do things in America– because there was money in it (which was exactly the way big people did things anyway) and so they deigned to acknowledge rock’n’roll and decided to occasionally allow a rock’n’roll band onto the Ed Sullivan Show or Hootenanny or Hullabaloo.

But what do you do with them? How do you pose them? What do you put in the background? How much do we have to pay them?

They discovered that if you played the recording while the band faked a performance of the song, you didn’t have to pay very much for the performance. It was technically promotion, not a performance. Union rules didn’t apply. So Dick Clark, who I really believe is the king pimp of all television pimps, week after week, on American Bandstand, featured musicians standing in front of real teens from America lip-synching to their own tunes. Did they think we were fooled? I don’t know. I’m not too sure.

Did they think we were stupid?  Without a doubt.

On Ed Sullivan, the bands usually (but not always) really played. You can see cords going from their guitars to their amps– a dead give-away in that era. If there are no cords– it’s lip-synching. Thank you Ed. And it is now time for you to stop introducing Jimmy Morrison and the Doors, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane, and Mick Jagger and the Stones, as “something for the youngsters of America”. Weird, wasn’t it? Dean Martin would come out and put all the adults to sleep with songs about pillows that you dream on, and then Mick Jagger would come out for the “youngsters” and tell them he couldn’t get no satisfaction.

The other way you could tell if it was really live was if you heard a mistake. And that’s what gives Grace Slick away in this performance of “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane. It’s real. It’s live. Grace misses the beat on “pill” and has to speed up to catch the beat on “one pill makes you small”. That is her smiling, I’m pretty sure, because she just made a mistake in front of 25 million people. She’s cute, isn’t she? It’s endearing. One minute, she is a poised artist, delivering the amazing goods, the number one hit single in America. Then, just for a second, she’s an embarrassed little girl again who turned the wrong way on the dance floor.

There are a lot of great songs from the sixties, and a lot of great performances. There are only a few performances of great songs. And there are even fewer performances that are so monumental that they seem to leap from their era and genre into a kind of stratosphere of transcendental moments in life. There was Hendrix performing “All Along the Watchtower”, and Dylan doing “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” in London, and the Beatles doing “Hey Jude”. There was Jimmy Morrison doing “Light My Fire”.

And there was Grace Slick performing “White Rabbit”. You have to hear Grace Slick’s voice to believe it. It is incredibly big and powerful and you might believe it could be heard above the electric guitars and drums even without amplification. The only other female singers I can think of with a voice of comparable size are Mama Cass Elliot and Janis Joplin. Grace was sexier than those two and the next top twenty female singers combined.

Grace Slick’s voice probably couldn’t have been small if she’d wanted it too. The first lines of “White Rabbit” are delivered with as much restraint as you could possibly muster for a Sherman tank of a voice. Then she builds, with an insinuating vibrato, like a whip being drawn back. She builds and builds until, by the last lines– “remember what the dormouse said…”– her voice is in full bore, a wall of sound coming at you like a freight train, tidal and relentless, slashing guitars just barely able to provide seething rhythmic foundation to this thing of power and explosive fury.

While Grace Slick was singing like this, the Grammys for best female vocal performance went to Barbara Streisand, Eydie Gorme, Bobbie Gentry, Peggy Lee, and Dionne Warwick. That’s why I haven’t paid any attention to the Grammys for about 40 years.

Grace Slick had beautiful blue eyes and long black hair. She was uncompromising— she quit Jefferson Starship when they went commercial. She drank too much. She got married and divorced, married and divorced. She had one daughter, China, who would be about 30 by now.

“White Rabbit” was written by Grace Slick, inspired by the Lewis Carroll book.

Alice discovers that one pill makes her larger and one pill makes her small. But the pills that mother gives her don’t do anything at all. That about sums up the 1960’s.

White Rabbit was used in a movie called “Go Ask Alice” which purported to show you the true experiences of a bad girl who did some drugs and thereby ended up as a teenage prostitute in Los Angeles and eventually died of an overdose.

If I recall correctly, it wasn’t a terrible movie. But we knew that mother made this film.

Grace Slick – Live

grace01.jpg (30294 bytes)

Grace just missed the beat.  Looking at yah with those very intense eyes.

grace03.jpg (21216 bytes)

Grace suddenly looks down.  You wonder why.  She was staring, fetchingly, right at the camera– right at you.  Then she looks away, as if she suddenly saw something important

grace04.jpg (41662 bytes)

Mystery solved– it’s a second camera.  She was coached to look at the camera but someone missed a cue and didn’t switch for about five or six seconds.  Dig the psychedelic background?   Higher consciousness, baby..

grace_plug5.jpg (20719 bytes)

Grace sings to an electrical outlet.  I’m not kidding.  This is from a performance in which the band lip-synched to “Somebody to Love”– there are no cords on the guitars.  So Grace decided to sing to an electrical cord instead of a microphone, and, yes, she’s laughing and making fun of the whole thing.

grace_plug3.jpg (26424 bytes)

From the same performance.  The tambourine player, back row, far left, is holding a cigarette in his left hand.  Notice there are no cords on the guitars.

grace04.jpg (41662 bytes)

One more from “White Rabbit”.  Costuming by Cecil B. De Mille.

Posted on

Diebold

Here’s another one I didn’t make up. Not kidding. This is true.

You are Walden W. O’Dell, a business executive. You make scads of money, so, of course, you support George W. Bush, because never has any president of any country ever produced so much money for the rich and asked so little in return as George W. Bush has, with his tax cuts, deregulation, and pro-industry policies.

So, if you’re Walden, you actually help raise money for George W., knowing that the hard work involved in a small price to pay for ensuring that Medicare is emasculated.

Mr. O’Dell is one of the “Rangers and Pioneers”, which is Boy Scout First Class, if you’re not already a Bush acolyte. That means, he not only gives lots of money, but he twists other peoples’ arms.

And Mr. O’Dell is president of Diebold. If you are a state government looking for state of the art voting machines– well, you’d probably look elsewhere. But most state governments are pretty stupid, so a lot of them bought Diebold voting machines. In fact, 8 million of the next votes for president will be counted on Diebold machines– that’s about 8% of the total presidential vote. Thank about that. How many of those votes would it have taken to alter the outcome of the 2000 presidential election?

If you were a Democratic candidate you might be forgiven for wondering to yourself— what the hell is going on here? How can the owner of the system that counts our votes also be a die-hard Republican fund-raiser? Wouldn’t it be more “seemly”, at least, if the owners and makers of these devices were a little non-partisan?

Not in this crazy world.

You don’t get too upset. You think, well, somebody’s obviously going to check these devices fairly regularly to make sure that there is nothing suspicious going on, right? There is a way, right, to take a random sample of voters and check to see that their actual votes matched up with the stored results?

Wrong. The only people allowed to check these devices are employees of the Diebold company. And they can’t check to see if the results match up because there is no paper record of the actual vote. Only the electronic record, which might or might not be accurate.

You should find that almost impossible to believe. I do. It sounds like a joke so bad, you don’t even pass it on to anybody. Parody is funniest when it is almost believable. The scene of a suspicious Democratic candidate checking into the results and finding out that Mr. O’Dell was not available for comment because he was busy attending a George W. Bush fundraiser… it’s too crazy.

A judge in Boca Raton, Florida, ruled that Diebold’s proprietary interest in its “trade secrets” (as if there was some work of genius in these relatively dumb machines) are more important than the voter’s right to know whether or not his vote has actually been counted correctly. You think a few hanging chads might have gone the wrong way? At least, we had ways of checking into those hanging chads. 50,000 votes on a Diebold machine could be switched to a different candidate and no-one would ever know.

At our last election in Ontario, Canada, a bunch of volunteers, including representatives from all of the political parties, sat in a gym waiting for my vote. I filled in the paper ballot in pencil and dropped it into the box. No machines. No computers. No software. No punch cards. No hanging chads. Couldn’t be simpler.

The results were known by midnight.

And couldn’t be less likely to result in the election of a George W. Bush.

Posted on

Acoustics

In spite of the fact that many American auditoriums in the 19th Century were based on European designs and traditions, there was never any conscious attempt to develop a “science” of building acoustics until 1898 when Wallace Sabine was commissioned by Financier Henry Higgenson of Boston to design a new symphony hall.

Until Mr. Sabine made a conscious effort to discover the objective properties of “good acoustics”, most American builders either modeled their designs on successful European buildings, or went with their instincts.

Carnegie Hall in New York was designed without reference to any acoustical science whatsoever. Apparently, it is quite good.

Many buildings are designed with reference to good acoustic principles. Then the buildings’ owners make a last minute change– add a balcony, or increase the width or something– and don’t go back to the architect for a re-reckoning of the acoustics. The results: disaster. The main auditorium at Redeemer College in Hamilton, for example, looks fabulous, but the sound is horrible. Choirs howl, instruments screech. (You don’t believe me? In all fairness, I must say that many people think the hall sounds just fine. I confirmed my impression with a music professor who led the choir that performed most often in that hall. I think we’re right.)

Sabine came up with a formula: the reverberation time multiplied by the quantity of absorbent material equals a constant that is proportional to the room’s volume.

Sabine then measured the reverberation time of some classic European halls, including Leipzig’s Gwandhaus and the Music Hall in Boston, and applied it to the design of the Symphony Hall. Symphony Hall is still around today and it is reputed to still have excellent acoustics.

Avery Fisher Hall (Lincoln Centre) had poor acoustics. The acoustical engineers tried and failed. They spent millions trying to fix it.

By the 1930’s, with the development of electronic amplification systems, the marriage of acoustics and structure began to fall apart. Today, whether you are watching a movie in a theatre or a live production at the Pantages Theatre, you will not hear the sound of the building. Everything you hear will be electronically processed and manipulated. That’s why singers can now project their affections for each other with breathless intimacy. That’s why people who can’t project at all– but can hold pitch– can now star in a musical production.

That’s probably a good thing. Why should only big people with voluminous chests get to sing? And I like the breathy, intimate sound of the quiet human voice. But don’t go away thinking that the building has “great acoustics”. The acoustics of the building are now largely irrelevant, as long as it doesn’t have vast hard surfaces to create feedback. What you are hearing is the result of electronic engineering.

Unfortunately, some shows now use taped or synthetic music to accompany the singers. Sometimes they use part of a real orchestra and a keyboard with synthesizer or digital recordings. People don’t like it a lot, so there is a bit of flimflam there– the producers want to keep their costs down by employing as few actual musicians as possible, but audiences want to feel that they had an “authentic” theatrical experience for their $75 a seat, so they put up a show of an orchestra.

In 1906, Julia Barnett Rice, who was married to the publisher of Forum Magazine, organized “The Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise”. New York had a “Noise Abatement Commission” in 1929. See? There was a time when people cared about ambient sound. I don’t think we care today. Maybe we’ve just given up on trying to control it. Until you’ve camped in the wilderness, you probably have no idea of how much constant, ambient sound you are inundated with. And I doubt that anybody fully understands how much stress this creates in the human nervous system.

One of these days, I believe we will find out that regular periods of silence are more effective than Prozac.

Did you know that “jazz” comes from the word “jass”, which was slang for “jasmine”, the smell of the perfume worn by prostitutes in the Storyville District in New Orleans? I didn’t know that.

Posted on

Complexity as War on the Consumer

There are two ways to cheat consumers. One is to simply lie to them. This method is fraught with peril, however. After all, there are still a few laws around that protect consumers from something called “fraud”, which is a fancy word for “lies”. And nobody likes to be called a liar.

And nobody needs to lie. The second method is safer, and just as effective.

Make it so difficult and annoying to exercise your rights as a consumer (or patient, or citizen) that most people will just give up and go away.

Complexity is your friend. Complexity is your ally. Complexity is a blunt force instrument of such potency that entire industries and professions have sprung up from it’s forehead like the children of Zeus: lawyers.

We see it in everything from operating manuals to software to insurance policies to health care agreements to employment contracts to amusement park disclaimers. We see it in the forms you fill out to claim the “benefits” you are entitled to under insurance policies or government funded entitlements. You even see it on every piece of software you run on your computer– the EULA (End User Legal Agreement) which means nothing to almost every person who clicks on “yes, I agree”. They don’t know what they are agreeing to. It doesn’t matter that they don’t know what they are agreeing to. The point is that there is a lot verbiage in there can be roughly translated as “you have no rights whatsoever”.

It’s a good turf on which to choose your battle. You will always have allies among those who believe the common folk should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, take a course or two in American law, or lay out $15,000 for lawyers. And you have many other allies among similarly interested corporations and government functionaries who know very well that they might be in the wrong but count on the numbing effect to make you go away.

Some companies even ask you to sign employment agreements that are absolutely illegal because they abridge rights that are guaranteed to every employee under state or provincial law. For example, the organization I work for, Christian Horizons, asks employees to agree that any “wrongful dismissal” issues will be settled by an arbitrator appointed by— guess who?– Christian Horizons. In reality, if you were “wrongfully” dismissed, you retain every right to bring your case to the Labour Relations Board of Ontario, no matter what you signed. I’m not worried because I happen to work for a good, ethical organization, but I still disagree with that provision of the employment agreement.

In this province, you cannot sign an agreement giving your employer a right to cheat you.

Why is there no Greenpeace or World Wildlife Federation or Amnesty International for understandability? We are trying to preserve the environment, unusual species, and the ozone. Why doesn’t someone form an organization to protect language from similar exploitation and abuse?

Complexity is more than a strategy to diminish our rights. It is an assault. To be human is to use language. The highest achievements of humanity, of nation, of history, of culture, is expressed in language. The most intimate human feelings, the great principles of morality and ethics, and even our spiritual aspirations are expressed in language. To pervert, twist, and abuse language, is to abuse humanity.

The strategy of these corporate lawyer hucksters is not really to express complex legal and contractual details. The real purpose is to express nothing, and thus, everything. You might have a right, you might not. The agreement might stand up in court, but more likely, it won’t.

Judges are not entirely stupid. Sometimes they say what everyone thinks: nobody reads those things and nobody understands them. Sometimes, however, they will say, “You should have read the agreement carefully.”

Yes, yes: here on page 59, paragraph 113c, section iii, it says that you accept liability for all damage caused by misuse intentional or not, or actions construed as misuse for the purposes of this agreement as specified in section ii, paragraph 78, notwithstanding any non-specified damages resulting from uses construed to be within specified actionable exceptions deemed applicable”.

But most people don’t know that judges will sometimes rule against these agreements. They assume that if they sign some kind of complex agreement, they are bound to observe the terms. Sometimes they are. It doesn’t matter. The lawyers enter the picture, like a long row of fat, disease-ridden can-can dancers, and the performance begins.

You don’t have to get to court, or to any kind of judgment or agreement. You just have to realize that it will cost you enormous sums of money to even make a contest of it.

The solution is quite simple. There should be a law that specifies that all contractual agreements, warranties, and conditions must be written in plain and understandable English. A panel of grade six teachers should be set up to review any questionable documents. This panel should be empowered to declare null and void any agreement that is not understandable by a reasonable person with a reasonable degree of effort. A consideration will be the fact that the average person is inundated with dozens or hundreds of these agreements every year, and can’t possibly spend every waking hour reviewing them all to see if he or she is in full compliance.

Added May 1, 2003:

The RIAA recently sued four students for facilitating the sharing of pirated music files on their university networks. However, as usual, it is reported that they plan to settle out of court. So they are using the potential complexity and inconvenience of court action to club the students into submission, without actually having to prove their case in court.

Wise decision on their part: they might not win. I have yet to read or hear of a single court case like this in which the RIAA actually won a judicial decision saying that copying of music for personal use is illegal.

I thought, at first, that this would be one– but of course! The inevitable out-of-court settlement!

Posted on

Get Your Own #%%!@## Format!

Here it is– another great solution to the movie and music piracy problem!

It’s so mind-numbingly simple, why didn’t George W. Bush think of it?

The music industry and film industry should get together and create new recording medium. It wouldn’t be very hard at all– the technology is there. There are dozens of modifications they can make to existing technologies in order to create a new medium that belongs only to them. A special type of DVD with special coding at the start that prevents it from being played in any existing DVD player. You heard me right– but hang on. I’m not crazy. They can call it the “Super Media Content Diskie” or “SMCD”.

The music and film industries will own this standard and will not license it to anybody but themselves. They will contract out with factories to produce a new SMCD Player. The codes required for playing a SMCD will be hard- coded into a special chip, and thus almost impossible to copy or hack.

Then the music and film industries will start releasing all of their “content” only on these special disks. You won’t be able to buy a SMCD version of “Titanic” or “A Few Good Men” or a CD version of Bruce Springsteen or Britney Spears. You will only be able to buy it on SMCD, for which you will have to buy or lease the SMCD player.

And thus piracy will end. No digital copying will be possible. No digital quality copies of songs or movies on the internet, though, of course, some people might be able to make passable copies by recording, with microphones or video cameras, right off the SMCD player screen. (The music and film industries have made it plain that while they’ve always been concerned about copying in general, from any source, it is really the digital copying that gets their goats.)

Problem solved.

It will never happen.

It will never happen because the music and film industries know damn well that they don’t really want a world in which they have absolute ownership and control over their product because in a world like that they won’t make any money.

The reason is very simple and obvious. The consumer would never accept such a system. And some smart musicians and independent movie makers would immediately realize this and start to offer their products on popular media like DVDs and CD’s. And the music and film industries would lose their power and control over the entertainment market and quickly capitulate and that would be end of that.

No, wait— there’s a better solution! The music and film industries can try to seize control of the existing technologies– VCRs, computers, CD recorders– and try to shove their copy-protection schemes down our throats.

And that is what is happening. No one is required to issue movies or music on DVDs or CDs. They do it because they know damned well that the public adopted those media because they were widely accepted standards. They were widely accepted standards because they were broadly licensed to many manufacturers and PC makers. They were broadly licensed because they were sold to us as media, not content. The music and film industries benefit enormously from those widely accepted standards. And that is why, if they don’t like the consequences of a broad, open standard, they should get the hell off it and start producing their own proprietary media that nobody can copy. If they don’t like the SMCD idea, they can go back to vinyl. If they don’t like the internet, they go back to AM radio.

It would be the best thing that could ever happen to the entertainment industry. You would get loads of Third World bands and movie-makers who would be more than happy to give up some protections of their materials in exchange for wide distribution and exposure. They would issue their stuff on popular media formats and would soon blow Hollywood out of the mass market. You would see Demi Moore and Bruce Willis traveling to Bombay to make a new action flick, in English.

This is why Apple is tiny compared to Microsoft. This is why Betamax never caught on. This is why the Laser Disk never made it. This is why Advantix film by Kodak will never succeed. This is why rock’n’roll succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations (the AM battery-powered radio).

The truth is that music and film industries don’t really compete with each other anymore, and don’t want to have to compete with anyone else. They price their products in lock-step with each other, and hate having to actually produce and develop new talent while they can still pimp off their old established stars.

And when their control starts to diminish, because of computers and the internet, instead of becoming leaner or meaner or more competitive– which requires work and talent– they start stuffing your congressman’s pockets full of cash and get the DMCA passed. Now they want congress to require all electronic recording devices to give control over what and when something can be copied to these pimps at the RIAA and MPAA (Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Pictures Association of America).

This is an outrage. It’s one of the five or six biggest scandals of the last twenty years. The Music Industry has every right to negotiate contracts with radio stations and hardware makers about how and when they can put their content on their media. Why the hell should the government step in and make laws to govern– and penalize offenders– an arrangement that should absolutely be a contractual agreement between the record companies and radio stations?

Their control of the world-wide entertainment industry is threatened by any technology that gives more power and control and choice to the consumer. Most consumers wouldn’t give a damn about Britney Spears if it weren’t for the monopolistic control the music industry has over radio, print, and television, but most consumers don’t know that.

They would find out in a hurry if something prompted them to start looking elsewhere.

Yes, I know it’s a symbiotic relationship. New technologies are often created by content companies (or at least companies that have a content division, like Sony and Phillips) at least partly for the purpose of creating new markets for their products. Sort of what I described here as “SMCD”. But Phillips also licensed their technology to many companies to make recorders, players, and car decks. So it benefitted by the very open standard that most content providers now want to kill.

It doesn’t always work that way– few people buy a minidisc to listen to pre-recorded minidiscs– but Phillips certainly intended the cassette as a mass market music media. But the relationship is ambiguous. For example, the recording industry needs radio and television media exposure in order to sell their products. Yet they now want to charge Internet Radio broadcasters for playing their music! Here we have the RIAA acting like a bullying monopoly. Why, for heaven’s sake, won’t some competing independent producers come along and offer their goods for free play on the internet? They would, but the RIAA of America is doing everything it can to not let them. They want their policy wishes to be the law, instead of a contract between themselves and the radio stations, which is what it should be. Because if it was only a contractual arrangement, then competing music producers could offer a better deal!

Posted on

Unenforceable Clauses

Marilyn Shafer of the New York State Supreme Court has just issued a ruling that all of us should celebrate.

Network Associates, a software company that makes anti-virus software, had a little clause in their customer purchase agreement that should sound familiar to most of us, in tone if not exact content.

The clause states that no customer may review the product purchased without the prior consent of Network Associates.

I know from my experience arguing with people on the internet that a lot of people firmly believe that a company can force you to agree to anything as a condition of buying and using their product. These people believe that there is some kind of absolute right of private property out there, that companies have no obligations to society other than to provide the product they promised on the terms they specified to the customer who agrees and pays.

But companies do not exist in a vacuum. Like you and me, they are part of a complex of relationships and obligations that constitute membership in a society. If you live in America, you have to obey the law, pay your taxes, and shoulder your share of the burden of providing roads and schools and policing for everyone– unless, of course, you are a rich person under a Republican administration.

In return for meeting your obligations, you receive enormous benefits. You receive protection from the police, medical care, education, roads, assistance in times of natural disaster, military protection from foes abroad, and so on.

If you don’t like that deal, you can, as they say, go live elsewhere.

Network Associates benefits from all of these and more. Their employees acquired their skills from publicly funded schools and universities. Their products are delivered on our roads and through our airports. They are protected by laws and police, from arbitrary search and seizure (until the Homeland Security Act was passed). They benefit from the enormous structure of laws and procedures that constitute our economic system. As a result, they have an obligation beyond the simple power of setting conditions of sale, to observe generally agreed upon rules of conduct in our society.

The Supreme Court of New York State has struck a blow for freedom of speech and consumer rights, and simultaneously raised the issue of whether these myriad conditions imposed by vendors upon customers are actually “enforceable”.

Not only did Judge Shafer rule that the clause was unenforceable. She indicated that there will be fines in the millions of dollars. She is going to punish Network Associates for trying to trick people into obeying a rule they had no business imposing on people.

I like this judge, and I hope you do too.