You heard me: stoned wallaby crop circles.
“The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,” Lara Giddings told the hearing. “Then they crash,” she added. “We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”
Reality. It’s a wonderful thing.
In an imaginary parallel universe where everything is the same but the Pirate Party doesn’t exist, I’d still be slightly optimistic about how the entire piracy vs private industry abuse fight has been going lately.
Three, or maybe four or five of you, may not have already heard how Jammie Thomas-Rasset was sentenced to pay $1.92 million for having shared, and thus infringed on the copyrights on, 24 songs. This sum — $80,000 per song — is so unsubstantiatedly princely that even one of the artists involved in the evidence who happens to agree with the verdict on principle publicly shames the claim and distances himself from these shenanigans.
The purpose of the ridiculous sums are two-fold:
a) To set an example and coerce people out of widespread behavior
and, to a lesser extent,
b) To recuperate some of the losses from an alleged statistically reliable, obvious and therefore missed conversion from “illicit download” to “karma friendly purchase”.
Both branches are demonstrably wrong. Let’s take a), the technical progress that enabled the behavior to appear can’t be rolled back, and people aren’t scared of being sued; in the extreme cases where they are, they are also either forgetful or resourceful. The funny business will continue no matter what happens.
As for b), this subdivides further. The conversion may look obvious on paper given that the business model is established, but there are several possibilities. We all know by now that there’s no guarantee that any download would have resulted in a purchase or for that matter even precluded a purchase. There’s no model to calculate an accurate number, so one has to be pulled from… somewhere.
And we also know that for the purported losses, which can’t be proven to not be imaginary, to be recuperated, if the given amounts are correct, they’d have to end up with way more money. The road towards that goal forks; either you search higher damages (which seems unlikely, given the unrest in everyone involved, including the judge, in accepting the sum as ‘fair’ already) or you file more cases, which to approach the sufficient volume would hold up courts that could have been righting more egregious wrongs, and which is practically hard since bringing each case involves effort and attorneys.
There may also be a slight pulling sensation in your public perception.
Let’s say even that the music industry is right: the claims are substantiated, and the sums, in the face of the sheer heinousness of the crime, are actually fair. Now what are they going to do? They’ve still got practicality, public opinion and increasingly their own pool of artists against them.
And artists aren’t fools. Some, maybe even most (it’s hardly a homogenous group), may feel threatened by the direction reality is heading. But many are taking precautions, and many more still are actually being made tenable by the recent development. Did you know that when you buy a cassette tape or a CD-R in Sweden, a small portion of the price goes, ear-marked, to a special music industry organization for composers? Did you know that, for anyone to cash in on that, and by way of being a large organization named in a prominent law, in effect calling yourself a composer in the first place because you’ll have trouble and be at a competitive disadvantage selling anything otherwise, you’d have to join that organization and accept their terms? And did you know that up until very recently, that blocked you from placing your works under Creative Commons-like licenses in order to explicitly allow things like remixes and sampling which not only has the potential of spreading your work and giving you more consumers and customers, but actually on a macro scale, thanks to the way the human mind works, is what creation is about in the first place?
I’m thinking about how this will play out into the future and it occurs to me that the wins are pyrrhic and elusive. The industry actually hurts less when they’re awarded losses. A reasonable win is too hard-fought and brings in too little money; other wins just turn your putative customers into new plaintiffs because they don’t want to deal with cold and bloodthirsty. The artists themselves are already headed en masse for the ejector chair and the good ship Independent.
At some point, either politicians are going to have to be lured into penning the industry more and more odious laws (which, per previous paragraphs, won’t actually solve anything but will happily trash the system while waiting, and per the very first paragraph and related efforts will only actually work for so long), or the matter will have to be dropped. Lumps taken. Sour medicine tasted. Lesson learned. Democracy restored. Lemonade, finally, made.
Following this week’s atrocious sell-out of freedoms and human rights in Germany under the pretense of “thinking of the children”, Social Democrat and Bundestag representative Jörg Tauss has resigned from the party in protest. He will now join Piratenpartei, the German Pirate Party, and act as the first Pirate Party national parliament representative ever, although not as elected from that party.
In the interests of covering every angle, there’s more that seems relevant to the story. One of the traditional crutches to sell the populace on the importance of censorship has been to prevent the spread of child pornography. Indeed, this week’s law was largely pushed by the motive that censorship will prevent the spread of child pornography, even if such a benefit would come at the cost of fundamental freedoms and be completely foreign to an open, modern democracy. However, Wikipedia’s Jörg Tauss article reveals some interesting prior entanglement.
I haven’t even heard of Jörg Tauss before today, so I’m not going to guess one way or the other. Chances are that Herr Tauss is opposing the censorship law for all the right reasons, just like the majority of the German electorate are; it’s in fact very likely. But given the background, a distant possibility becomes stronger: I can’t rule out that Tauss is guilty of the charges and is trying to save his own bacon by adopting a sensible position for his own gain. In that case, it’s regrettable, and a sad entry in the row of historic “firsts” that Pirate Parties have been stacking up lately. I know nothing, however, but I don’t want to be coy and selective in my reporting.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that for now.