Halloween at Naders
From Cox and Forkum:
Spamming for Freedom, Part 2
Some of you may remember receiving the message below from me 4 years ago about how the record labels could protect property rights to music in cyberspace by using decoy files.For anyone looking to defend property rights and make money at the same time, here's an interesting business model I discovered:A report in the paper today indicates it's finally catching on:The Tabloids, an Oakland-based rock band... recently launched stopnapster.com, urging people to sabotage Napster by mislabeling songs posted to the site. Music entrepreneurs and Internet saboteurs have already started circulating fake versions of popular songs on Napster.You could probably get this funded as an Internet business model. Get permission from bands to use their songs, and thirty seconds in start mixing in voiceovers of interviews with the band, etc. Then create all kinds of bogus music servers and spam the hell out of Napster, Gnutella, etc. with the fake mp3s. (Actually, I hear the Nettwerk label just did this with the new Barenaked Ladies single.)
Stopnapster.com also calls for releasing songs into Napster that have anti-piracy speeches inserted randomly into the music. For instance, you may be listening to Eminem when suddenly Charlton Heston begins reading a public interest message opposing song theft... "We're looking at the big picture here. Intellectual property is intellectual freedom," says Michael Robinson, the band's leader, a freelance writer and a marketing consultant. "The U.S. Constitution and the Internet are on a collision course. We don't want our rights ripped off," he adds. The Tabloids seek government regulation of technologies like Napster's. (From Digital Music Weekly,
The band gets advertising and fights theft, you make a little money selling the ads, and the Net gets clogged with so much music spam that it gets difficult and costly to find intact pirated tracks. If Napster raises technical barriers, you have a financial incentive to overcome them. And the pirates can't very well call on the law to protect them, can they?
Personally, I find something deliciously satisfying in the image of some young thug, smugly expecting to marinate his brain in the latest Eminem tirade he's swiped off the net, getting an earful of Charlton Heston. [Spamming for Freedom, July 4, 2004]
The music industry may finally be winning its game of music piracy whack-a-mole, thanks to the use of increasingly effective technological hammers....And while the RIAA has been smacking downloaders with lawsuits, individual record labels have contracted technological mercenaries to make using the peer-to-peer networks where people go to illegally download music more difficult. "The whole idea is to increase the frustration and take away the fun quotient of these networks," said an executive from one company that provides such services, Marc Morgenstern. His company, Overpeer, protects 70,000 music, video, and software titles from piracy by flooding the most popular networks — Kazaa, Grokster, and eDonkey, among others — with thousands of garbage data files bearing the titles of popular songs. The decoys appear at the top of user searches for the title. On searches for the most popular songs, fake files sometimes constitute 95% of the results. ["Music Industry Foils Pirates By Seeding Networks With Fake Files", NYSun]
What You Need to Know About Arafat and the United Nations
Writes blogger James Lileks on the U.N.'s Favorite Terrorist:All you need to know about Arafat was that he insisted on wearing a pistol when he addressed the UN General Assembly. And all you need to know about the UN, I suppose, is that they let him.Just in case you need to know more...
Arafat's Despotism: Innocent Palestinians are Better Under Israeli Rule by Yaron Brook
Remember the mayor of a Palestinian village, Zuhir Hamdan, who publicly stated that his villagers preferred to live, not under Arafat, but Israel? UN Declaration of Rights Destroys Rights by Glenn Woiceshyn
The concept of rights is older than the United Nations but relatively new in human history -- a predominantly savage and bloody history of war, murder, slavery, rape and looting committed by humans against humans. Such is "life" when people regard each other as sacrificial fodder for their needs, desires or superstitions.
What’s Wrong with the Majority
IRVINE, CA—"If the majority of Americans voted for a Christian democracy or a Jewish democracy or an Islamic democracy, i.e., a theocracy, in this country, would you accept it?" asks Dr. Andrew Bernstein, a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute. The answer to Dr. Bernstein's question is not just a choice between unlimited majority rule and the First Amendment's prohibition against the establishment of religion. "Those who advocate unlimited majority rule," says Bernstein, "not only endanger the First Amendment, they threaten all our freedoms and the very foundations on which this country is built. "America is not a democracy, i.e., an unlimited majority rule system; it is a constitutionally limited republic. And the primary limiter is individual rights. All of our freedoms, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of the press, are necessary conditions required to exercise our inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not matter what the majority wants, individual rights come first; the majority, no matter its number or religion, may not vote to ignore, take away or violate anyone's individual rights."Vote in U.S. inflames Europeans
From Cox and Forkum:
Judging from opinion polls, media reports and conversation on this side of the Atlantic, the overwhelming sentiment on what would be bad for Europe is another four years with President George W. Bush. In Britain, France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, Europeans appear to be united by an overwhelming antipathy toward Bush. ... European media are sending correspondents all over the United States in an effort to delve into the American psyche. "We want to understand why so many people are still on Bush's side; it's a kind of mystery to us," said Peter Frey, Berlin bureau chief for ZDF television in Germany. "We are asking the American people, 'Why are you voting for Bush?' We want to understand why he has this support." ... For many Europeans, it is not what Kerry would do as president that matters, it is the way they think he would do it. "The fact that Kerry has an attitude in which he feels he wants to consult the allies and is less arrogant in his relationship with allies, puts him in a much more positive light here," said Nathalie La Balme, program officer at the Paris office of the German Marshall Fund. "I don't know whether if Kerry gets elected anything will change. But in terms of attitude and perception and words, it would make a big difference."
Stolen Honor
The Stolen Honor is available online for free at http://www.stolenhonor.com/documentary/watch-video.asp From the site:Stolen Honor investigates how John Kerry's actions during the Vietnam era impacted the treatment of American soldiers and POWs. Using John Kerry's own words, the documentary juxtaposes John Kerry's actions with the words of veterans who were still in Vietnam when John Kerry was leading the anti-war movement.