The recording industry should thank Apple | Digital Noise: Music & Tech - CNET Blogs
This post over at C-Net reminded me of a thought I had the other day:
From a computer-conscious music fans perspective, it appears that the labels purposely crippled their early digital efforts in hopes that their lawsuits would succeed, the genie would be put back into the bottle, and they could forget about this annoying Interwebs thing and go back to selling plastic discs with ridiculously high margins.
Now, Universal is going after Apple, complaining that its success with iTunes has given it too much power.
Compare this to the statement of the head of the head of litigation at Sony BMG during the Thomas trial:
Gabriel asked if it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music which they have purchased, even just one copy. Pariser replied, “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy’,” she said.
I wouldn’t expect everyone in the industry to share the same perspectives on the issue, but it sounds to me as though they would prefer that mp3 players go away so we would all go back to carrying bulky CD players. The mp3 format and players are clearly here to stay–what will it take for the industry to come up with a response that acknowledges this fact?
Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate - New York Times
This is an interesting piece about a number of recent quantitative studies which have found that, controlling for other variables, the death penalty can save more lives than it ends.
What interests me, that is not addressed in this article, is the question of what is it about the death penalty that is saving lives? There are so many possibilities (ranging from a number of effects from locking up harmful criminals, to the impact of the law’s expressed condemnation of murder and violent crime), all of which statistical studies might have a hard time separating out all of these variables. Also unexamined is whether there are other punishments that might have similar effects.
The Daily Show - New York Times
Kevin Martin’s op ed piece in today’s Times portrays the proposed relaxation of cross-ownership rules as good for journalism:
Without newspapers, we would be less informed about our communities and have fewer outlets for the expression of independent thinking and a diversity of viewpoints. The challenge is to restore the viability of newspapers while preserving the core values of a diversity of voices and a commitment to localism in the media marketplace.
Martin argues that the solution is that:
A company that owns a newspaper in one of the 20 largest cities in the country should be permitted to purchase a broadcast TV or radio station in the same market. … Beyond giving newspapers in large markets the chance to buy one local TV or radio station, no other ownership rule would be altered. Other companies would not be allowed to own any more radio or television stations, either in a single market or nationally, than they already do.
A newspaper purchasing a television station sounds fine because it would bring in more revenue and could possibly bring deeper journalistic values to the television newsroom. This sounds good until you step back and think about which direction the purchases would be more likely to go.
TV station owners have deeper pockets, and my guess is that they would be more likely to covet their local newspaper.
This scenario would most certainly not be a good thing for newspapers or the craft of journalism. While newspapers are already under financial pressure that has caused cuts in the newsroom, television news values could cut papers even more (why send two news crews to an incident when you can just send one). Television values also tend to sacrifice time consuming stories for “what sells.” Fewer stories about what’s happening in government, or what’s going on at the community level, would not be good for “their role as watchdog and informer of the citizenry, newspapers are crucial to our democracy.” Further, television newsrooms are less likely to be staffed with graduates of journalism schools who are trained to do hard journalism–the kind that television reporters often rely on, but don’t do themselves.
Chairman Martin: the press is not on your side for very good reasons.
New bill would punish colleges, students who dont become copyright cops
Ars posts a good summary of the bill I mentioned the other day.
What has been bothering me about this one is the question: why colleges? The only reasonable answer I can come up with is that they are service providers to a discrete population of younger savvier users who (one might think) would be more likely to infringe.
Yet, is this any basis for legislating against them? Armed robberies (I am guessing) might be carried out to a higher degree by lower income folks, but we do not pass gun control laws that specifically target this population. We know that there are probably a host of other factors that go into this correlation (things like financial need, desperation, and mental illness).
It seems to me that some of the factors at play here, other than being “at college,” is that the population is younger, more likely to have a computer, and is more likely to have an interest in many types of media. Under these same factors, we might require a dot-com company that provides internet access to follow the same rules outlined in this bill.
Democrats: Colleges must police copyright, or else | CNET News.com
New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also “alternatives” to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students.
With colleges feeling the financial pinch, some so hard that they are unable to provide services like blogs and wikis that might have immediate instructional benefits, one wonders what will be sacrificed to pay for media subscriptions.
