Live Ate

7/8/05 Update: Pink Floyd sales go up 1300% on the strength of their performance, give all the profits to charity and urge others to do the same... which Elton and others have done.
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Thank God they let Putin into the G7... it would have been tough getting the seven around the guitar and making it look like a $. As I'm sure my readers have discerned, I can be rather cynical and even have a button with "Hardened Cynical Bastard" encircling an Anarchy A. But, I am a fucking puddle when it comes to these charitable megaconcerts. During the post 9-11 concert at the Garden, I went through half a box of tissues.

I even enjoyed watching Madonna. Come to think of it, I always enjoy watching Madonna, and all the other big artists and when they all accumulate in one big show... I like it even better. Sure, watching these huge artists, especially Madonna, hype themselves as humanitarians is a bit much. But, it's the job of artists to raise awareness and that's basically what they're trying to do.

Of course I cried during Pink Floyd. I mean when Roger and Dave started smiling at each other, after all their bad blood and talkin bout Sid... after all these years... not to mention listening to them play these incredible songs together again after so long. Amazing!! I'm so glad they got Dave's hands as he finessed the notes out of Money, he's underrated as a guitarist, but, it takes a lot to sustain the notes. I gotta tell ya, I'm glued to the fuckin TV, even with the tape rolling. One terrific performance after the next. What's not to love?

I like the fact that they gave free concerts to raise awareness rather than doing outright fundraisers, as they did last time. The fundraising board I serve on took this approach to the big Palo Alto May Fete Parade, which traditionally ended with a fundraiser. We decided to use the after-event as PR , a free community day, and made just as much money... or at least a lot of money. You never know if you could have made more, but I love the gesture of giving freely. It means a lot.

Then again, you shouldn't complain if people want to make a buck in the open market, as Geldorf did after some of the lucky winners of tickets to the British show offered them up for sale on E-bay. Geldorf grumbled till the site took them down... as they always do anytime anybody big grumbles.

Goodbye Luther and Obie (Benson, one of the Four Tops).... you made great contributions to music... these guys were some awesome vocalists! So, both a happy and sad day for music. Maybe more sad than happy when you realize that the twenty years since Live Aid have not done more to eradicate poverty.

As far as I'm concerned, no one in the developed world should spend their time with unhappiness. We have so much. Wake up every day in squalor and wonder if you can get through the day, who of your family or friends will die today. That's a problem, one that most humans who've lived on earth have had. What we have here are not problems, they're fake problems, created by a system that thrives on greed. Buy into that and you've wasted an incredible gift. Count your blessings and love your life, cause, you lucked out.

I talk to so many people who seem to live in these little boxes of fear, so afraid of what they might lose. They never bother to think that they are already such a huge winner, all they really need to do is just enjoy their winnings.

Grokster Looking Better: At Least For Apple & Shawn Fawning

If you don't want to be sick, do not read this and definitely do not read this... just go back and read Ernest Miller some more, about how this is the best of all (terrible) worlds. He's right about Orrin, the decision is more likely to calm him down a while than rile him up.

Analysis

...is what I'm going to need, (sorry Tom Cruise, but, don't worry, I don't take legal drugs... I feel the same way you do about the Brave New psycho-tropics and have said so) to deal with the opinions of these fuckin octogenarians... when was the last time one of them even listened to music? Ok, enough about my mental state (sadness for all the poor shmucks who still haven't figured out how to get their music). I never saw the original Napster website. By the time I got a clue, all they had was sad news and T-shirts... at least I got one of those.

Now, if the lower court reconfigures according to guidelines, we've got some 40 years till the software degrades, which will affect the network. I'm sure they'll do what they can to keep people from finding the software. They are very good at creating obstacles (which is about all they can do since positive actions are anathema to them) and the hackers and light-bearers will find more and better, hopefully aggressive guerilla, ways to sidestep them. This battle is gonna make the Vietnam War feel like the Six Day War... it's just gonna be endless back and forth.

There is no way to stop the exchange and copying of digital files by savvy people, though they may be able to make serious inroads on the sheeple (thanks for that term Jesse, it is handy...sheep + people = sheeple). Then again, many are probably saying, as I was in the fall of '01, "Holy shit, I better get on the ball with this free music before it's all gone". Anyway, as long as people can type "free" and "music".. we should do just fine.

I liked Ernest Miller's summary of the comments today. Here's yesterday's, which is also very good. There's certainly a variety of opinion on the decision. I also liked this story by the Washington Post as it touches on the relationship between the Grokster case and the larger issues of who owns our channels of communication. Today's story also gives a good perspective on the new landscape carved out here for corporate culture. You didn't buy that "We the People"... bullshit did you? The legislature, the MJ and OJ juries, and now even the fuckin Supreme Court cares about powerful people, and who are the most powerful people? The big corporations.

It's too bad I don't do the DVD reviews any more because I did see a very interesting documentary recently called The Corporation which went into the history of the corporation and how they came to be regarded, and treated legally, as people. They have all the same rights that people do... the right to own property and do whatever they want with it. Originally corporations were entrusted with very limited rights to do public projects, but, after the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment offered certain rights to all people.

Of course, that was meant to help the former slaves achieve a place in society (we all know how that worked out...) and, in the years following the war there were over 300 lawsuits that refined and expanded the law. Oh, and did you know that only a few of those cases were brought by people of color? The rest were brought by corporations which soon wielded unbelievable power that benefitted the robber barons and their progeny. The film compared the new "people" to real ones and showed how pathological they are.

Corporations, by fiat, are pathologically selfish and will externalize any cost they can. There is one, and only one, acceptable goal... to profit. This is not about immoral people, it's about the way the system is set up. Neither the legislature or the Supreme Court see the problem with giving corporate America such unfettered freedom. It really saddens me that they can't make out the larger issues.

So, personal analysis, social analysis... oh, you thought I meant legal analysis. I can do that in two words: software and stigma. I guess I was in fantasyland thinking those Justices were gonna look at Rosso and those companies and just condone. I can't get past the immorality of the label's ownership but, the court can't get past the fact that they do own that stuff. And it was unrealistic to think that they would rubber stamp websites that actively culled Napster users.

It's amazing how conservative we've become. I mean, Napster was not lead by Malcolm X here. Hank Barry is about as corporate & sanitized an image as you're gonna get. He had spent his career up till then as a lawyer, he came out of the courtroom in a white shirt and horn-rimmed glasses for god's sake. Yet, he might as well have been standing there with his fist in the air. All they saw was rebellion and upheaval. This is about structure and rules. There is only one thing they all agree on in Washington... rules are rules and you follow the rules.

You can try to change the rules, which is primarily what we're about now, but, whatever rules are there... that's what you play by. They ignore the fact that the rules favor the biggest players so strongly that you do create unstable situations that foster revolt and which drag on the economy.

The court tried to nod to hardware and I would like to think a more traditional defendant would see the other side of the pendulum. I think we'll continue to see the California courts act reasonably. Still, it's gonna be a big chill. If you think the VCs are not watching this Hummer lawsuit, think again. Just think what they're up against now, after this decision. No one likes exposure and hassles.

The renegade ventures are not gonna get funded, not with so many available that just have the usual amount of IP baggage. Worse, the VC's are gonna be far less interested in entertainment. This saddens me because the barriers to entry have made entertainment a great area for venture money. Roger McNamee/Bono are doing quite well with it. Worst of all, the marriage of high tech and content is more fractured than ever and all kinds of blended deals are gonna suffer.

So, score one up for business as usual, for more consolidation and corporate control. The High Court had a chance to act that way but, in their minds these are just some dinky little companies leaching off bigger ones and Sony was... well, Sony. While I may be interested in larger issues, the court takes its defendants as it finds them and this wink and nod business about we don't know what they're trading, came off as coy and they went hard after the inducement aspect. At the same time we just did not sell on the substantial non-infringing use aspect, which shows a real knowledge gap on the part of the court.

The court saw Sony as a legitimate innovator that was gonna have some marginal negative impact on the content providers and saw these guys as being about theft. They were not persuaded by all the necessary, good and legal sharing because they probably believed Shawn fucking Fanning who told them he could sort it all out.

Grokster Not Looking Good

Still trying to digest the bad news here and get my hands on the decision..... At 8:40 AM I still have not seen the decision but the stories keep getting worse. I signed up for the Google alerts, so I can just read the same depressing few sentences over and over, without getting any real analysis. The major broadcast outlets, and even local stations, aren't covering the story. All they care about is dying Justices (more like dying justice) and Ten Commandments. I can just see Orrin shouting directives... "Get me the last draft of the Induce Act...now!"

At least I got to vent to the NY Times. I was called by Roben Farzad for comment for a story he is doing tomorrow. I started off with what this reversal of twenty years of innovation that has driven our economy is going to mean to us in the Valley and around the world. Then, after a brief, yet hopefully cogent, RIAA rant... he got a bit specific about my P2P activities and... I was frank.

As I've said before, I have a huge, handy, transportable library of music and I haven't paid a cent to the labels in many years. In fact, I'm in the black with them since cashing their settlement check for antitrust violation. Sure it was only $13., but, that's $13. more than I paid them... oh, was I supposed to buy a CD that year to qualify as one of their victims?? I don't have to pay them a cent to be one of their victims... I had to listen to airwaves dominated by MJ and Madonna... not to mention Mariah, for years, just like the rest of us. The whole world deserves reparations from these tasteless twits.

I must admit, I'm a bit worried about the exposure... these guys scare me, they are relentless. They guard their ill-gotten gain like the gold it is and they won't stop until they have drained every penny from Hummer, Bertelsman (did they settle?), Grokster and all the others, from the twelve-year-old Harlem girl on down... if you can go down from there. I mean, don't we even have any statute of limitations issues here? I thought they were short for torts... this poor girl they sued recently downloaded in '02.

Best I can tell so far, it looks like the court has been attentive to the promotional activities of the defendants, so there may be circumscription I'm not seeing yet. I'm still curious as to what basis they used to distinguish these facts from Sony. That fuckin Snocap brief has bothered me for a long time... "I can filter everything for you".... so, we'll see.