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20 feb 07 Napster, Play for Pay, DRM, Digital downloads, media exchange, user rights vs artists/corporate media rights etc. You get the point. Elaborate and give us some insight into a possible solution...please? this requires too much thought. long gone are the days when i'd happily research integral theory, anti-realisim or the reiman hypothesis. now, i basically just want to go to bed as soon as possible. i have a great deal of free time -- more than i did when i would write on those other topics in some depth. the problem is that i've now become much lazier (in the past couple of years). plus, i'm currently having a heart attack, so that's not good. well, i guess it was just gas, or whatever; something innocuous. i think. oo, there it is again. doesn't matter. so i'm working on this big animation -- a "feature length" (at least i hope so) flash cartoon. except i'm not able to show it to you here, because it's going to get filed under "actual projects of boner x. hrabowski" (b.x.h. being me), whereas this here thingy is purely anonymous, so i can talk about my general disdain and contempt of all establishes social structures and norms, including you and your mom. i'm not sure, but i think a very determined and very resourceful google searcher could find some evidence (although perhaps not ultimately conclusive evidence), that i am this person. well, for one thing, if you google my name, you get another one of my websites right off, which leads you to believe that this is the whole of my internet persona. unfortunately, i cannot link to it for you. but if you know who i am, then google my name to go see it. it's where i'm eventually going to put my animations. i still get these in the mail sometimes:
Attn Beneficairy, We wish to congratulate you over your email success in our computer balloting sweepstake held on 9th February 2007. This is a Millennium Scientific Computer Game in which email addresses were used. It is a promotional program aimed at encouraging internet users; therefore you do not need to buy ticket to enter for it. You have been approve for the star prize of US $787:000:00 (Seven Hundred And Eighty Seven Thousand United State Dollars Only). Batch No:LF/53/849/HU Ticket No:UW/83/02/ED Lucky No: 52/658/95/AS Ref No: RJT/7438/LR Serial No: TM/YR38J/DA To claim your winning prize you are to contact the appointed agent as soon as possible for the immediate release of your winnings: DAVID JOSEPH CHAMBERS BAR RISTER DAVID JOSEPH P.C.28102 MADRID-SPAIN. TEL: +34 697 735 323 E-mail: advodavidjoseph@aim.com You must contact the appointed agent with your Full Names, Contact Telephone Numbers (Home, Office and Mobile Number and also Fax Number) via email to process the immediate payment of your prize. The Validity period of the winnings is for 30 working days hence you are expected to make your cla ims immediately. Once again congratulations !!! Best Regards, Ms.Anita Raynes i never know what to do with them. they're not really spam (no solicitation of penis pills, software, stock, or prescription drugs), and they're not really phishing (no fake banking website in which i'm supposed to enter my password), so i can't report them as either to google mail (their way of using user input to help deal with shady email). so instead, i often reply to these scammer emails in some silly way. i remember one guy a few years ago emailed me about a "missing trunk box" containing millions of dollars, etc etc, and ultimately its retrieval and my receipt of 10% depended on my setting up an escrow account, or possibly cheerfully sending over my checking account and routing numbers. anyway, i wrote back detailing my embarking on a trans-continental search for the missing trunk box through jungle and over mountain range. the scammer replied with "if you can help me please let me know", and that was the end of it. this most recent one i simply insulted in an ethnic and very offensive manner which i shall not repeat here. needless to day i drew on multiple cultural paradigms. racial and ethnic slurs are great for verbally damaging someone as much as possible, as cheaply as possible; they're the pipe bombs of textual weaponry. the best one for "white person" i've seen (aside from mocking the country of origin), is "redneck". this pisses some people off -- my redneck former manager at papa johns flew off the handle and threatened to knock a customer out when he was called this (he's now in jail for attempted rape and assault). of course, we have "cracker" and "peckerwood", but those are really reserved for use by african americans, and i won't presume to co-opt them. "honky" is so silly that i can see it enjoying a resurgence. anyway. the internet has permanently screwed intellectual property rights directly in the anus. i used to do napster, back in 1999. a good chunk of my current music collection is made up of those downloaded songs. it was napster over dial-up, too, so i earned each and every song i stole by staring at the 2k/second progress bar for 20 minutes. there was a period of drought after napster got shut down, but eventually i went nuts with distributed peer-to-peer clients like winMX, kazaa, and limewire, and harvested more songs. then, i ripped all of my CDs to mp3 with itunes. one day, i went over to a friend's house with my external hard drive and did a massive song swap (doubling each of our collections, approximately). i now have...let's see...3,292 songs, or 17.5GB, or more than half of my 30 gig ipod, which i can still never imagine filling, even though today i thought to myself "you know...i haven't stolen any songs in a while", and fired up limewire. then, i proceeded to download all of the good songs from michael jackson's "thriller" (billy jean, beat it, PYT, wanna be startin somethin, thriller, and human nature). if you want to keep from getting sued, just make sure you don't share music; essentially, you rip off not only the music producers, but your network peers as well. good deal. i use winamp to listen to my music when i'm on this computer, and only use itunes to organize my mp3 directory (G:\mp3), and of course to sync my precious, precious ipod. i saw a commercial today when i was watching a DVD: it was published by the MPAA (motion picture association of america), and it went basically like this: YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A CAR. well...frankly, the reason i wouldn't steal a car, tv, or DVD, is because i'd stand a good chance of getting caught and thrown into jail. i download (steal) movies on the internet because i can get away with it. remember, kids: it's only illegal if you get caught. actually, i don't download movies, for a few reasons: 1) it takes hours and hours and hours. 2) the quality is most often terrible. 3) they're sometimes in pieces (ie, you don't get the whole movie). 4) sometimes they don't work at all. 5) you can never find what you want. a good PR commercial for both the RIAA and MPAA would explain that it's such a terrific pain in the ass to find and download the songs or movies that you actually want that it's more cost-effective (if your time and stress-level is valuable to you) to simply go out and buy the CD or DVD for $10, order it on amazon, or steal it from borders. i'm not in a very socially responsible or philosophical mood tonight. but if the corporate forces can manage to keep intellectual property an extant concept for another fifty years, i have to hand it to them. maybe we'll see the day when bands operate on donations through their websites, and do their thing in the manner of hobbyists (see: open source programmers). shit, the best bands out there are the ones who aren't making any money, anyway -- sony, geffen, etc, going bankrupt would only mean no more brittney spears and justin timberlake. then, suddenly, the world would have to wake up and decide for itself what it really likes in music! the horror! maybe we'll see a resurgence of live performances and an appreciation of their value. hopefully, though, record labels will just get eliminated, DIY bands will spring up and music will be a lot more interesting. but i dunno. the xerox machine didn't destroy the print industry; maybe people will simply realize, as i said, that it's worth their money to go out and buy a CD, just because downloading the right songs is such a pain in the butt. certainly if CD prices came down ($5 a disk), then people would go out and buy them in truckloads. shit, i'd drop $20 a week on new CDs, just to take them home and rip them to mp3s and LOAD THEM ONTO MY PRECIOUS, PRECIOUS, PRECIOUS IPOD. the itunes music store sux0rs the cox0r, because tunes you buy (for $.99) are in this crummy format where you can only make five copies or something. note that for the most part it's the corporate record labels -- people wanting to protect investor profits -- who get their panties in a bundle about "piracy". for the most part (with a few exceptions), i don't believe musicians give much of a shit. i'm totally ignoring jazz and classical musicians and their publishers in my considerations. anyway, what i always hope for is a total revolution in the concepts of property and ownership when it comes to electronically replicable media (print, music, movies). how would i like it if someone stole from me? i wouldn't like it. |
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