Written by Becky Akers
Wednesday, 19 August 2009
Not long ago, Americans feared and ridiculed the police states cursing too many parts of the world. We worried that they might one day conquer us despite their poverty and general misery even as we mocked their totalitarian tactics — especially their “Papers, please” mentality.
Indeed, being forced to prove one’s identity to a bureaucrat on demand, having to carry and produce documents with personal information for his approval — or condemnation — seemed especially horrifying. One of our classic films, Casablanca, revolved around the deadly hassles of obtaining or forging such papers under the Nazis; episodes of Mission Impossible in the 1960s often featured the same detail as American agents outwitted sinister Slavic tyrants.
What tragic irony, then, that the U.S. government increasingly compels us to identify ourselves. And it’s an even greater tragedy that this command no longer terrifies Americans, let alone goads them to protest.
Until now. While the president and his cronies push the country toward full-fledged fascism, state legislatures have rebelled against a federal edict that establishes a key component of such tyrannies: the national ID card.
Congress passed the REAL ID Act in 2005 as a rider on a bill handing more of our money to the military. There was no debate about either the concept of a national ID or the details of implementing it — including the astronomical costs of forcing states to convert the driver’s licenses they issue into national ID cards.
That expense may explain the fiery opposition REAL ID sparked — opposition unprecedented in our lifetime. Some states forbade their bureaucracies to comply with REAL ID while others officially denounced the legislation.
Feds Firing Back
But the feds haven’t surrendered. Instead, they’ve drafted virtually identical legislation under an alias — “Providing for Additional Security in States’ Identification Act of 2009” (PASS ID) — with one difference: states keep more of the taxes they extort from us (or, as Government Technology puts it, PASS ID “reduc[es] costs by providing greater flexibility for states to meet federal requirements by eliminating fees associated with the use of existing databases”). Nevertheless, the last time a federal outrage generated this much fury, Northerners and Southerners went to war.
And an outrage it is. By whatever name, this legislation puts your driver’s license on speed, ramping it up into a national ID. It dramatically increases the personal information your license contains, the number of bureaucrats who can access that data, and the circumstances when the government will not only scrutinize your ID but then decide whether you may proceed with your business — or not.
Though REAL ID wasn’t and PASS ID isn’t explicit about embedding a tracking chip or including biometric data such as fingerprints or retinal scans in licenses, it’s likely both would occur sooner rather than later. And you’ll be flashing your card so much you’ll probably wear it around your neck rather than dig it out of your wallet: the feds will inspect it each time you so much as enter a location under their jurisdiction, including courthouses and airports. You’ll have to show it to open a bank account as well. That custom will doubtless spread to all financial transactions, even the most picayune, as Americans become inured to the constant order, “Papers, please.”
No wonder REAL ID provoked rebellion. But little of it was grass-roots: except for members of organizations like the John Birch Society or Campaign for Liberty, most folks still know very little about REAL ID or PASS ID and care even less; a few actually applaud a national ID because the government claims it fights terrorism. Rather, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which “defend[s] your rights in the digital world”) led the charge. Joining them were the governors of various states in a nigh revolutionary stand-off with the feds. That’s even more remarkable when we consider Washington, D.C.’s countless other anti-constitutional incursions over the last hundred years, most of which eviscerated states’ sovereignty just as much as if not more than REAL ID does. Yet it was REAL ID — not affirmative action and its contempt for freedom of association, nor environmental regulations that gut property rights, nor the massacres at Waco and Ruby Ridge — that finally galvanized states to defy the federal Frankenstein.
Why? Most of the governors opposed to REAL ID cited two reasons. They professed concern about our vanishing liberty — a concern strangely missing from their acceptance of other unconstitutional mandates, as well as their own tyrannical decrees. They also complained about its cost, which conservative estimates put somewhere around $23 billion. Yet D.C.’s dictators impose plenty of other unfunded mandates on states, and while governors complain, they don’t rebel.
Still, money likely motivated their mutiny. For one thing, the National Governors Association likes PASS ID because it believes the feds have learned their lesson and will put the dollars where their bill is this time. For another, states resented spending billions on REAL ID’s outlay, but that’s only a tiny part of the story. Licensing drivers is a gold mine for local governments, one so lucrative that they’re highly suspicious of federal interest in the process.
Indeed, the loot from licensing us, as well as the plunder from concomitant fees and fines, is so vast that no one knows the actual amount. That’s partly because governments conceal their profits lest bigger, badder governments steal from them what they stole from us: municipalities often hide how much they extract in traffic tickets for fear their state will demand a bigger cut. So even in our computerized age with its sophisticated methods of accounting, no one knows how much tickets alone filch from us. The National Motorists Association estimates the amount at somewhere between $3.75 and $7.5 billion annually — and that excludes parking tickets. Now add fees for car registration, driver’s licenses, license plates, title certificates, and inspections, as well as the taxes that encumber all things automotive (sales of cars, insurance, gasoline, and parking), to say nothing of parking meters and tolls. (Newsday reported that New York City alone collected 126 million tolls solely for crossing to and from the island of Manhattan in 2006; these ranged from a couple dollars for motorcycles to $36 or more for a truck with five axles.)
Picking our pockets on behalf of the State is one of licensing’s two basic purposes, regardless of its type: professional (doctor’s, realtor’s, broadcasting), fishing and hunting, driver’s. Linda Lewis-Pickett, president and CEO of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators in 2006, frankly admitted that “each state agency has looked at DMVs as revenue generators — ‘Come in and pay taxes and give us money.’” The driver’s licenses and plates those DMVs dispense also enable officials to track us to a billing address, no matter how flawed the issuing cop’s judgment, regardless of how we disagree with his assessment of our speed or the length of time we paused at a stop sign.
Paternal Regulations
Licensing’s other purpose is the control it grants rulers. There’s a reason licenses are also known as “permits”: what the government permits one day it may prohibit the next. Wielding the power to deprive a man of his livelihood or his ability to travel keeps him obedient and cringing.
If that doesn’t inspire us to question government’s licensing of drivers, perhaps the system’s inherent insult will. Licensing implies that we are silly children eager to drive without bothering to learn how; only the fatherly State saves us from automotive annihilation.
That paternal motif increasingly characterizes states’ interactions with drivers as they withhold this “privilege” to coerce our behavior, the way parents do teens. Many revoke licenses for a long list of infractions, not just those that pertain to driving. Minnesota will suspend a license for “truancy,” “underage consumption of alcohol,” or merely the “attempt to unlawfully purchase alcohol or tobacco,” “failure to pay child support,” and “out-of-state conviction.” Ohio repeals its permission to drive for “dropping out of high school, drug-related offenses, unsatisfied civil judgments, delinquent, unruly, or habitual drug user (juveniles), failure to appear in court on a bond, liquor law violations, medical condition that would impair your driving ability [and who decides that?], tagged as a ‘problem driver’ in the National Driver Registry, insurance noncompliance, unresolved out-of-state ticket, out-of-state alcohol- or drug-related offenses.”
DMVs not only exploit this authority, they brag about it. “We walk a very fine line with incredible power over people,” David Lewis, deputy registrar of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles, told author Simson Garfinkle in 1993 for an article published in Wired Magazine. Peter Nunnenkamp, manager of driver programs at Oregon’s Driver and Motor Vehicle Services agreed. “[Suspending a license is] the most effective thing that you can do without throwing them in jail.... And it’s fairly cost effective.” So much so that DMVs seldom struggle with delinquent debtors. “Last year,” Garfinkle wrote, “the Massachusetts Registry collected more than US$660 million in fees and fines; less than $600,000 came back as bounced checks — a whopping 0.1 percent. ‘How can you afford to stiff us?’ Lewis asks rhetorically. ‘Whatever it is you have, we’ll take it. We’ll pull your driver’s license. We’ll take your title.’” A capo in the mob sounds less menacing.
If government were honest enough to say, “Look, we want lots and lots of your money, and we also want to subjugate you,” most people would (we hope) deny it the power to license. So as usual, the State cloaks its motives in false solicitude. Licensing protects us, it claims — from selfish sportsmen who would hunt and fish our fields and streams to exhaustion, from broadcasters who would assault our ears with foul language, from reckless drivers. But is any of that true? And if so, if fishermen and radio announcers and drivers are as great a menace as rulers allege, are there more effective ways to protect us from their dangers than by licensing them?
In the case of driver’s licenses, the allegations about safety postdate licensing by several decades. Early drivers simply bought licenses without meeting any requirements whatsoever. In fact, folks often ordered them through the mail: no one tested eyesight, competence, or anything else. Only payment received mattered to the issuing government. Carl Watner at voluntaryist.com reports that by 1909, “twelve states and the District of Columbia required all automobile drivers to obtain” licenses. These generally listed the operator’s “name, address, age, and the type of automobile he claimed to be competent to drive.”
That contented many states for years; decades sometimes passed before they also forced drivers to satisfy a bureaucrat as to their vision and skills. Massachusetts and Missouri were both selling licenses by 1903, but only in 1920 did “Massachusetts . . . [pass] its first requirement for an examination of general operators,” and “Missouri had no driver examination law until 1952.” This at a time when both cars and roads lacked many of the protective features we now take for granted.
DMVs have come a long way since then. Modern ones administer driving and eyesight exams. They harp on seat belts and speed limits. They hang posters about defensive driving in their offices, then compel us to camp out there for hours while slow, surly clerks waste our time and money. That fools most Americans into equating licensed drivers with safe drivers.
Yet little research proves that licensing ensures anything other than increased revenues for government. Some studies purport to establish a link between licensing and safety, but two problems doom these. First, most of them assume rather than prove that governmental licensing equals safety (licensing by a private entity, perhaps an insurance company that requires proof of superior skill and prudence before staking its money on an applicant, would be another and very different matter). Then they compare two incomparable groups: licensed drivers, about whom we know a great deal (how many exist overall, their ages, their driving records, their places of residence, etc.), and unlicensed drivers, about whom there’s almost no information, collectively or individually. As the American Automobile Association warns, “[The] methodology [of researchers who study licensing and safety] has limitations.... [I]t is hard to arrive at reliable findings for unlicensed drivers simply because so little is known about them.”
And one set of such drivers actually establishes the futility of Leviathan’s licensing. The American Academy of Pediatrics reported last year: “No relationship was found between license status and reported crashes” among teen drivers — despite the fact that the unlicensed ones tended to drink and drive, speed, etc. It concluded that about six percent of them “drive unlicensed” — but “on average, they do not seem to have increased crash risk compared with licensed teens. However, they display increased unsafe driving behaviors, particularly lower rates of seat belt use, which puts them at higher risk for injury and death when a crash occurs.”
Meanwhile, many of the drivers Leviathan licenses are notoriously dangerous nonetheless. Not only are teens a hazard, as their insurance rates testify, so are elderly drivers. A study from 1998 noted that “some statistics show they are more likely to be involved in fatal accidents than all other age groups but those under 25.” Licensing does not quicken slow reflexes, and the visual tests most DMVs administer are so fatuous even patients suffering from cataracts and glaucoma can pass them. Then, too, we’ve all read about or known someone injured or killed by a drunk but licensed driver with multiple offenses to his credit. The bureaucrats who promise to protect us so long as we cede our liberty to them have failed abysmally.
There’s an army of them, too. The agencies connected to automotive transportation in each state — from those that build and repair the roads to those that issue driver’s licenses and plates to those that cruise the highways trapping unwary drivers and robbing them of even more money — are myriad and labyrinthine. They hire phalanxes of union members who protest each and every cut a state makes to their budget with the excuse that the “customers” they “serve” deserve better: when California recently tried to cut expenses by eliminating overtime — not jobs, mind you, just overtime — at DMVs, one employee moaned to ABC News, “We had to turn a lot of people away because we can’t serve them because we have to be out at 5:00 p.m. We cannot get no overtime [sic], so now we have customers yelling at us thinking it’s our fault.”
“Customers” should wise up. Rather than begging our rulers for longer hours and shorter lines so that we can more easily pay their extortion, we should demand that they quit charging us for a “privilege” we already own as a right.
Rights and Reasoning
Despite DMVs’ propaganda to the contrary, traveling by any means — walking; riding a horse, bus, train, or plane; driving a car — is one of the inalienable rights we possess by virtue of our humanity. Unless we trespass, we assault no one’s life, liberty, or property by simply moving from one location to another. The State has no moral authority to interfere.
Why, then, did our grandparents allow government to license cars in the first place? Didn’t this strike them as a bizarre and intrusive innovation? After all, no one licensed horses and buggies.
Unfortunately, inventors developed the internal combustion engine just as progressive politics with its veneration of Leviathan was hijacking the nation. Progressives convinced Americans who had formerly distrusted government that it was in fact their best friend, a benign giant protecting them in the frightening, rapidly changing world of electricity, telephones, airplanes, and automobiles.
Add to that the fear most people harbor for new technology, especially technology they can’t afford. Cars were playthings for the wealthy when they first appeared on the market — but noisy, smelly nuisances to everyone else. The folks whose horses shied as a newfangled automobile zipped past deeply resented this emerging industry.
And once Mr. Millionaire bought his car, where did he drive it? The early 20th century boasted very few paved roads.
These considerations spurred automotive enthusiasts to welcome government’s interest in their hobby. If the State approved of driving enough to license it, everyone must accept it, even those too poor to afford cars. And what politicians regulate, they usually fund, too. The magnates buying horseless carriages wanted all taxpayers, not just themselves, to subsidize the infrastructure their new toys required.
Since then, government has consolidated its conquest of our automotive lives — a conquest so complete most people take it for granted despite the State’s incompetence and even criminal negligence. It monopolizes the design and construction of roadways; meanwhile, we mourn roughly 42,000 traffic fatalities year after year. Deliberate carelessness like drunk driving accounts for some of these deaths, but others result when drivers follow the rules of the road as imposed by the State.
Bureaucrats heavily regulate automotive design and manufacture, too. Their latest mania is more miles to the gallon. But many experts blame the requisite flimsiness for more fatalities when crashes occur: cars built from plastic rather than steel reduce consumption of fuel but put occupants at risk. And government’s decades of ineptly micromanaging Detroit’s Big Three led directly to their failure and nationalization.
In short, an accident of history put government behind the wheel of all things automotive. But there’s no reason we should acquiesce in this. Certainly we should work to ensure that PASS ID suffers REAL ID’s same fate. But let’s go the extra mile and oppose the State’s licensing of drivers at all.
Whether in their current incarnation or REAL ID’s uber-version, driver’s licenses swindle huge amounts of our money while giving the State virtually unlimited authority and an excuse for spying on us. They also destroy the private market that would otherwise exist for authenticating one’s name and credentials — a market with virtually none of the fraud and identity theft that characterize the government’s monopoly of this industry. It would be a differentiated market, too, offering degrees of authentication for everything from cashing a check to entering a restricted area, rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of driver’s licenses that divulges our names, addresses, birthdates, height, and weight to every bank teller and supermarket clerk.
Indeed, frightening amounts of our personal data clog DMVs’ computers. Professor Margaret Stock of the United States Military Academy at West Point inadvertently makes that point when arguing that governments should issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. She writes that “driver license and state identification databases play” a huge “role” “in national security and law enforcement.”
“The collective DMV databases are the largest law enforcement databases in the country,” she continues, “with records on more individual adults than any other law enforcement databases. The collective DMV databases are the only comprehensive internal security database.
“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not yet have a comprehensive database on all adult residents of the United States.... When DHS wants to find someone, the primary government database it relies upon is the driver license database.
“When a person … applies for a driver license, that person … provides the DMV with a variety of valuable personal information — including a key identifier, the digital photo. DMV databases thus contain biometric information, and a wealth of other valuable information that is updated on a regular basis … by the individual who has the license.” She insists that other databases can’t compete with the depth and breadth of the DMVs’ — not the “state birth certificate databases,” which record a one-time event without updates, nor the “federal Social Security” and “Internal Revenue Service databases,” which lack “biometric information.”
Should government know this much about us simply because we drive cars we own on roads we pay for?
“Your Papers, Please!”
Monday, August 31, 2009
The New York Times on Government Website Privacy | Electronic Frontier Foundation
By Tim Jones
Today's New York Times includes their editorial board's take on revising government web tracking policy. Their recommendations align closely with those we made in coordination with The Center for Democracy and Technology earlier this month:
Officials say they recognize that people must be told that their use of Web sites is being tracked — and be given a chance to opt out. More is needed. The government should commit to displaying such notices prominently on all Web pages — and to making it easy for users to choose not to be tracked.
It must promise that tracking data will be used only for the purpose it was collected for: if someone orders a pamphlet on living with cancer, it should not end up in a general database. Information should be purged regularly and as quickly as possible. These rules must apply to third parties that operate on government sites.
The Obama administration is working to better harness the power of the Internet to deliver government services. That is good. But it needs to be mindful that people should be able to get help and be assured that their privacy is being vigilantly protected.
Last week, CDT's Alissa Cooper summarized our recommendations in detail on CDT's PolicyBeta blog.
The New York Times on Government Website Privacy Electronic Frontier Foundation
Today's New York Times includes their editorial board's take on revising government web tracking policy. Their recommendations align closely with those we made in coordination with The Center for Democracy and Technology earlier this month:
Officials say they recognize that people must be told that their use of Web sites is being tracked — and be given a chance to opt out. More is needed. The government should commit to displaying such notices prominently on all Web pages — and to making it easy for users to choose not to be tracked.
It must promise that tracking data will be used only for the purpose it was collected for: if someone orders a pamphlet on living with cancer, it should not end up in a general database. Information should be purged regularly and as quickly as possible. These rules must apply to third parties that operate on government sites.
The Obama administration is working to better harness the power of the Internet to deliver government services. That is good. But it needs to be mindful that people should be able to get help and be assured that their privacy is being vigilantly protected.
Last week, CDT's Alissa Cooper summarized our recommendations in detail on CDT's PolicyBeta blog.
The New York Times on Government Website Privacy Electronic Frontier Foundation
Last-Ditch Effort to Scuttle RIAA File Sharing Verdict | Threat Level | Wired.com
Last-Ditch Effort to Scuttle RIAA File Sharing Verdict
By David Kravets August 31, 2009
Jammie Thomas-Rasset
Much of Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s legal arguments following this summer’s $1.92 million Recording Industry Association of America file sharing jury verdict against her don’t have much weight or precedent.
Clearly, that a jury in June ordered her to pay $80,000 for each of the 24 music tracks she infringed on Kazaa is outrageous and shocks the conscience – and there’s no rational relationship between the amount of harm suffered by the recording industry and the award granted.
Thomas-Rasset wass the nation’s first sharing defendant to go before a jury. The RIAA has filed more than 30,000 lawsuits targeting individuals, and most have settled out of court.
That said, in their latest court papers, (.pdf) Thomas-Rasset’s legal team again is sticking to the argument that the whopping jury award is a due process violation – all in a bid perhaps to secure a third trial. (The first ended in a $222,000 judgment against the Minnesota woman, but a mistrial was declared after the judge conceded he gave faulty jury instructions)
Still, it is true that the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower courts have repeatedly reduced lofty jury awards based on so-called due process breached. But those were punitive damages awards, not statutory damages awards.
Those punitive damage reductions, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster, do not apply to Thomas-Rasset’s case – although Thomas-Rasset’s defense team suggests there’s always a first.
Punitive damages are the amount a jury awards to punish conduct of an offender. Up until recently, there generally has been no limit. But the Supreme Court has suggested that punitive damages should be limited to about no more than 10 times the amount of actual damages a jury awards.
Higher ratios, the courts have said, are due process breaches because defendants have no notice ahead of time about the lofty financial consequences of their actions.
But the law is crystal clear when it comes to the Copyright Act, the law under which the RIAA sued Thomas-Rasset. Juries can award up to $150,000 per violation. Punitive damages do not fall under the Copyright Act.
One of the only points in Thomas-Rasset’s brief that makes a compelling argument is that the Copyright Act, when amended in 1999, didn’t conceive of non-commercial cases the RIAA has been bringing the past six years.
“The notion that Congress decided that the award of statutory damages in this case was somehow appropriate or tailored to ensure deterrence is a fiction that the plaintiffs would have this court adopt. The Congress that enacted the statutory-damages provision of the Copyright Act could not have had the kinds of illegal but non-commercial music downloading here at issue in mind,” defense attorney K.A.D. Camara argues in recent briefs.
It’s true: There’s no doubt that a $1.92 judgment over $24 worth of music provides the clearest example yet of the abuses made possible by the 1976 Copyright Act, which Congress modified in 1999, at the behest of Hollywood and the recording industry, to carry a maximum penalty for a single infringement of up to $150,000.
That statutory penalty was intended to bankrupt large-scale commercial pirating operations, like organized DVD and CD bootleggers — not to put individuals like Thomas-Rasset in debt for the rest of their lives.
Still, the RIAA is crying foul.
After Thomas-Rasset refused to settle out of court, the industry is now demanding that Thomas-Rasset pay up. The RIAA is also seeking U.S. District Judge Michael Davis to issue an injunction barring her from future file sharing.
“Plaintiffs’ evidence showed that defendant knew what she was doing was wrong, that she did it anyway, and then lied about it for years. Through two trials, defendant still shows no remorse whatsoever for her actions and has made it clear that she has no intention of ever satisfying any portion of the judgment against her,” Timothy Reynolds, the RIAA’s attorney, wrote (.pdf) Davis.
Judge Davis of Minnesota could rule on the retrial and injunction issue any time.
Last-Ditch Effort to Scuttle RIAA File Sharing Verdict | Threat Level | Wired.com
By David Kravets August 31, 2009
Jammie Thomas-Rasset
Much of Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s legal arguments following this summer’s $1.92 million Recording Industry Association of America file sharing jury verdict against her don’t have much weight or precedent.
Clearly, that a jury in June ordered her to pay $80,000 for each of the 24 music tracks she infringed on Kazaa is outrageous and shocks the conscience – and there’s no rational relationship between the amount of harm suffered by the recording industry and the award granted.
Thomas-Rasset wass the nation’s first sharing defendant to go before a jury. The RIAA has filed more than 30,000 lawsuits targeting individuals, and most have settled out of court.
That said, in their latest court papers, (.pdf) Thomas-Rasset’s legal team again is sticking to the argument that the whopping jury award is a due process violation – all in a bid perhaps to secure a third trial. (The first ended in a $222,000 judgment against the Minnesota woman, but a mistrial was declared after the judge conceded he gave faulty jury instructions)
Still, it is true that the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower courts have repeatedly reduced lofty jury awards based on so-called due process breached. But those were punitive damages awards, not statutory damages awards.
Those punitive damage reductions, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster, do not apply to Thomas-Rasset’s case – although Thomas-Rasset’s defense team suggests there’s always a first.
Punitive damages are the amount a jury awards to punish conduct of an offender. Up until recently, there generally has been no limit. But the Supreme Court has suggested that punitive damages should be limited to about no more than 10 times the amount of actual damages a jury awards.
Higher ratios, the courts have said, are due process breaches because defendants have no notice ahead of time about the lofty financial consequences of their actions.
But the law is crystal clear when it comes to the Copyright Act, the law under which the RIAA sued Thomas-Rasset. Juries can award up to $150,000 per violation. Punitive damages do not fall under the Copyright Act.
One of the only points in Thomas-Rasset’s brief that makes a compelling argument is that the Copyright Act, when amended in 1999, didn’t conceive of non-commercial cases the RIAA has been bringing the past six years.
“The notion that Congress decided that the award of statutory damages in this case was somehow appropriate or tailored to ensure deterrence is a fiction that the plaintiffs would have this court adopt. The Congress that enacted the statutory-damages provision of the Copyright Act could not have had the kinds of illegal but non-commercial music downloading here at issue in mind,” defense attorney K.A.D. Camara argues in recent briefs.
It’s true: There’s no doubt that a $1.92 judgment over $24 worth of music provides the clearest example yet of the abuses made possible by the 1976 Copyright Act, which Congress modified in 1999, at the behest of Hollywood and the recording industry, to carry a maximum penalty for a single infringement of up to $150,000.
That statutory penalty was intended to bankrupt large-scale commercial pirating operations, like organized DVD and CD bootleggers — not to put individuals like Thomas-Rasset in debt for the rest of their lives.
Still, the RIAA is crying foul.
After Thomas-Rasset refused to settle out of court, the industry is now demanding that Thomas-Rasset pay up. The RIAA is also seeking U.S. District Judge Michael Davis to issue an injunction barring her from future file sharing.
“Plaintiffs’ evidence showed that defendant knew what she was doing was wrong, that she did it anyway, and then lied about it for years. Through two trials, defendant still shows no remorse whatsoever for her actions and has made it clear that she has no intention of ever satisfying any portion of the judgment against her,” Timothy Reynolds, the RIAA’s attorney, wrote (.pdf) Davis.
Judge Davis of Minnesota could rule on the retrial and injunction issue any time.
Last-Ditch Effort to Scuttle RIAA File Sharing Verdict | Threat Level | Wired.com
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Dave Lindorff: Living in a Police State
The Gates Incident
Living in a Police State
By DAVE LINDORFF
The point about the arrest Monday by a Cambridge Police sergeant of Harvard Distinguished Professor Henry “Skip” Gates is not that the police initially thought the celebrated public intellectual, PBS host and MacArthur Award winner might have been a crook who had broken into Gates’ rented home. Anyone capable of seeing a 58-year-old man with a cane accompanied by a man in a tux as a potential burglar might make the same mistake, given that a neighbor had allegedly called 911 to report seeing two black men she thought were breaking into the house.
But after Prof. Gates had shown the cops his faculty ID and his drivers’ license, and had thus verified his identity, and after he had explained that he had just returned home on a flight from China and had been getting help from his limo driver in opening a stuck door, the cops should have been extremely polite and apologetic for having suspected him and for having insisted on checking him out.
After all, a man’s home is supposed to be his castle. When you violate that sanctity, you should, as a police officer, appreciate that the owner might be upset.
But where it really goes wrong is what happened next.
Prof. Gates, who was understandably outraged at the whole situation, properly told the sergeant that he wanted his name and his badge number, because he intended to file a complaint. Whether or not the officer had done anything wrong by that point is not the issue. It was Gates’ right as a citizen to file a complaint. The officer’s alleged refusal to provide his name and badge number was improper and, if Gates’ claim is correct, was a violation of the rules that are in force in every police department in the country.
But whatever the real story is regarding the showing of identification information by Gates and the officer, police misconduct in this incident went further. Gates reportedly got understandably angry and frustrated at the officer for refusing to provide him with this identifying information and/or for refusing to accept his own identification documents, and at that point the officer abused his power by arresting Gates and charging him with disorderly conduct.
There’s nothing unusual about this, sadly. It is common practice for police in America to abuse their authority and to arrest people on a charge of “disorderly conduct” when those people simply exercise their free speech rights and object strenuously to how they are being treated by an officer. Try it out sometime. If you are given a ticket for going five miles an hour over the posted speed limit, tell the traffic officer he or she is a stupid moron, and see if you are left alone. My bet is that you will find yourself either ticketed on another more serious charge, or even arrested for “disorderly conduct.” If you happen to be black or some other race than white, I’ll even put money on that bet. (If you’re stupid enough to go out and test this hypothesis, please don’t expect me to post your bail!)
There is no suggestion by police that Gates physically threatened the arresting officer. His “crime” at the time was simply speaking out.
What is unusual is not that the officer arrested Gates for exercising his rights. That kind of thing happens all the time. What’s unusual is that this time the police levied their false charge against a man who is among the best known academics in the country, who knows his rights, and who has access to the best legal talent in the nation to make his case (his colleagues at the Harvard Law School).
Very little of the mainstream reporting I’ve seen on this event makes the crucial point that it is not illegal to tell a police officer that he is a jerk, or that he has done something wrong, or that you are going to file charges against him. And yet too many commentators, journalists and ordinary people seem to accept that if a citizen “mouths off” to a cop, or criticizes a cop, or threatens legal action against a cop, it’s okay for that cop to cuff the person and charge him with “disorderly conduct.” Worse yet, if a cop makes such a bogus arrest, and the person gets upset, he’s liable to get an added charge of “resisting arrest” or worse.
We have, as a nation, sunk to the level of a police state, when we grant our police the unfettered power to arrest honest, law-abiding citizens for simply stating their minds. And it’s no consolation that someone like Gates can count on having such charges tossed out. It’s the arrest, the cuffing, and the humiliating ride in the back of a cop squad car to be booked and held until bailed out that is the outrage.
I’m sure police take a lot of verbal abuse on the job, but given their inherent power—armed and with a license to arrest, to handcuff, and even to shoot and kill—they must be told by their superiors that they have no right to arrest people for simply expressing their views, even about those officers.
Insulting an officer of the law is not a crime. Telling an officer he or she is breaking the law is not a crime. Demanding that an officer identify him or herself is not a crime. And saying you are going to file a complaint against the officer is not a crime.
As someone who, although white, spent his youth in the 1960s and early 1970s with long hair and a scraggly beard--both red flags to police back in the day--and who had his share of run-ins with police for that reason alone, I can understand to some extent what African-Americans, and especially African-American men, go through in dealing with white police officers. I used to be “profiled” as a druggie/lefty/hippy and was stopped regularly for no reason when I lived in Los Angeles and drove an 20-year-old pick-up truck. I’d be pushed up against the vehicle, frisked, shouted at, talked to threateningly. I’d have my vehicle searched (without a warrant). And if I objected, I’d be threatened with arrest, though I had done nothing. Under those circumstances, you quickly learn to be very deferential around police.
Prof. Gates was simply experiencing the frustration that young black men feel routinely, and that I used to feel back when I had hair and chose to grow it long—the feeling of being at the mercy of lawless, power-tripping cops.
In a free country, we should not allow the police, who after all are supposed to be public servants, not centurions, to behave in this manner. When we do, we do not have a free society. We have a police state.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com
Dave Lindorff: Living in a Police State
Living in a Police State
By DAVE LINDORFF
The point about the arrest Monday by a Cambridge Police sergeant of Harvard Distinguished Professor Henry “Skip” Gates is not that the police initially thought the celebrated public intellectual, PBS host and MacArthur Award winner might have been a crook who had broken into Gates’ rented home. Anyone capable of seeing a 58-year-old man with a cane accompanied by a man in a tux as a potential burglar might make the same mistake, given that a neighbor had allegedly called 911 to report seeing two black men she thought were breaking into the house.
But after Prof. Gates had shown the cops his faculty ID and his drivers’ license, and had thus verified his identity, and after he had explained that he had just returned home on a flight from China and had been getting help from his limo driver in opening a stuck door, the cops should have been extremely polite and apologetic for having suspected him and for having insisted on checking him out.
After all, a man’s home is supposed to be his castle. When you violate that sanctity, you should, as a police officer, appreciate that the owner might be upset.
But where it really goes wrong is what happened next.
Prof. Gates, who was understandably outraged at the whole situation, properly told the sergeant that he wanted his name and his badge number, because he intended to file a complaint. Whether or not the officer had done anything wrong by that point is not the issue. It was Gates’ right as a citizen to file a complaint. The officer’s alleged refusal to provide his name and badge number was improper and, if Gates’ claim is correct, was a violation of the rules that are in force in every police department in the country.
But whatever the real story is regarding the showing of identification information by Gates and the officer, police misconduct in this incident went further. Gates reportedly got understandably angry and frustrated at the officer for refusing to provide him with this identifying information and/or for refusing to accept his own identification documents, and at that point the officer abused his power by arresting Gates and charging him with disorderly conduct.
There’s nothing unusual about this, sadly. It is common practice for police in America to abuse their authority and to arrest people on a charge of “disorderly conduct” when those people simply exercise their free speech rights and object strenuously to how they are being treated by an officer. Try it out sometime. If you are given a ticket for going five miles an hour over the posted speed limit, tell the traffic officer he or she is a stupid moron, and see if you are left alone. My bet is that you will find yourself either ticketed on another more serious charge, or even arrested for “disorderly conduct.” If you happen to be black or some other race than white, I’ll even put money on that bet. (If you’re stupid enough to go out and test this hypothesis, please don’t expect me to post your bail!)
There is no suggestion by police that Gates physically threatened the arresting officer. His “crime” at the time was simply speaking out.
What is unusual is not that the officer arrested Gates for exercising his rights. That kind of thing happens all the time. What’s unusual is that this time the police levied their false charge against a man who is among the best known academics in the country, who knows his rights, and who has access to the best legal talent in the nation to make his case (his colleagues at the Harvard Law School).
Very little of the mainstream reporting I’ve seen on this event makes the crucial point that it is not illegal to tell a police officer that he is a jerk, or that he has done something wrong, or that you are going to file charges against him. And yet too many commentators, journalists and ordinary people seem to accept that if a citizen “mouths off” to a cop, or criticizes a cop, or threatens legal action against a cop, it’s okay for that cop to cuff the person and charge him with “disorderly conduct.” Worse yet, if a cop makes such a bogus arrest, and the person gets upset, he’s liable to get an added charge of “resisting arrest” or worse.
We have, as a nation, sunk to the level of a police state, when we grant our police the unfettered power to arrest honest, law-abiding citizens for simply stating their minds. And it’s no consolation that someone like Gates can count on having such charges tossed out. It’s the arrest, the cuffing, and the humiliating ride in the back of a cop squad car to be booked and held until bailed out that is the outrage.
I’m sure police take a lot of verbal abuse on the job, but given their inherent power—armed and with a license to arrest, to handcuff, and even to shoot and kill—they must be told by their superiors that they have no right to arrest people for simply expressing their views, even about those officers.
Insulting an officer of the law is not a crime. Telling an officer he or she is breaking the law is not a crime. Demanding that an officer identify him or herself is not a crime. And saying you are going to file a complaint against the officer is not a crime.
As someone who, although white, spent his youth in the 1960s and early 1970s with long hair and a scraggly beard--both red flags to police back in the day--and who had his share of run-ins with police for that reason alone, I can understand to some extent what African-Americans, and especially African-American men, go through in dealing with white police officers. I used to be “profiled” as a druggie/lefty/hippy and was stopped regularly for no reason when I lived in Los Angeles and drove an 20-year-old pick-up truck. I’d be pushed up against the vehicle, frisked, shouted at, talked to threateningly. I’d have my vehicle searched (without a warrant). And if I objected, I’d be threatened with arrest, though I had done nothing. Under those circumstances, you quickly learn to be very deferential around police.
Prof. Gates was simply experiencing the frustration that young black men feel routinely, and that I used to feel back when I had hair and chose to grow it long—the feeling of being at the mercy of lawless, power-tripping cops.
In a free country, we should not allow the police, who after all are supposed to be public servants, not centurions, to behave in this manner. When we do, we do not have a free society. We have a police state.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com
Dave Lindorff: Living in a Police State
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Feds at DefCon Alarmed After RFIDs Scanned
By Kim Zetter August 4, 2009 9:30 am Categories: Cybersecurity, DefCon
LAS VEGAS — It’s one of the most hostile hacker environments in the country –- the DefCon hacker conference held every summer in Las Vegas.
But despite the fact that attendees know they should take precautions to protect their data, federal agents at the conference got a scare on Friday when they were told they might have been caught in the sights of an RFID reader.
The reader, connected to a web camera, sniffed data from RFID-enabled ID cards and other documents carried by attendees in pockets and backpacks as they passed a table where the equipment was stationed in full view.
It was part of a security-awareness project set up by a group of security researchers and consultants to highlight privacy issues around RFID. When the reader caught an RFID chip in its sights — embedded in a company or government agency access card, for example — it grabbed data from the card, and the camera snapped the card holder’s picture.
But the device, which had a read range of 2 to 3 feet, caught only five people carrying RFID cards before Feds attending the conference got wind of the project and were concerned they might have been scanned.
Kevin Manson, a former senior instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Florida, was sitting on the “Meet the Fed” panel when a DefCon staffer known as “Priest,” who prefers not to be identified by his real name, entered the room and told panelists about the reader.
“I saw a few jaws drop when he said that,” Manson told Threat Level.
“There was a lot of surprise,” Priest says. “It really was a ‘holy shit,’ we didn’t think about that [moment].”
Law enforcement and intelligence agents attend DefCon each year to garner intelligence about the latest cyber vulnerabilities and the hackers who exploit them. Some attend under their real name and affiliation, but many attend undercover.
Although corporate- and government-issued ID cards embedded with RFID chips don’t reveal a card holder’s name or company — the chip stores only a site number and unique ID number tied to a company or agency’s database where the card holder’s details are stored — it’s not impossible to deduce the company or agency from the site number. It’s possible the researchers might also have been able to identify a Fed through the photo snapped with the captured card data or through information stored on other RFID-embedded documents in his wallet. For example, badges issued to attendees at the Black Hat conference that preceded DefCon in Las Vegas were embedded with RFID chips that contained the attendee’s name and affiliation. Many of the same people attended both conferences, and some still had their Black Hat cards with them at DefCon.
But an attacker wouldn’t need the name of a card holder to cause harm. In the case of employee access cards, a chip that contained only the employee’s card number could still be cloned to allow someone to impersonate the employee and gain access to his company or government office without knowing the employee’s name.
Since employee access card numbers are generally sequential, Priest says an attacker could simply change a few digits on his cloned card to find the number of a random employee who might have higher access privileges in a facility.
“I can also make an educated guess as to what the administrator or ‘root’ cards are,” Priest says. “Usually the first card assigned out is the test card; the test card usually has access to all the doors. That’s a big threat, and that’s something [that government agencies] have actually got to address.”"
In some organizations, RFID cards aren’t just for entering doors; they’re also used to access computers. And in the case of RFID-enabled credit cards, RFID researcher Chris Paget, who gave a talk at DefCon, says the chips contain all the information someone needs to clone the card and make fraudulent charges on it — the account number, expiration date, CVV2 security code and, in the case of some older cards, the card holder’s name.
The Meet-the-Fed panel, an annual event at DefCon, presented a target-rich environment for anyone who might have wanted to scan government RFID documents for nefarious purposes. The 22 panelists included top cybercops and officials from the FBI, Secret Service, National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Defense Department, Treasury Department and U. S. Postal Inspection. And these were just the Feds who weren’t undercover.
It’s not known if any Feds were caught by the reader. The group that set it up never looked closely at the captured data before it was destroyed. Priest told Threat Level that one person caught by the camera resembled a Fed he knew, but he couldn’t positively identify him.
“But it was enough for me to be concerned,” he said. “There were people here who were not supposed to be identified for what they were doing … I was [concerned] that people who didn’t want to be photographed were photographed.”
Priest asked Adam Laurie, one of the researchers behind the project, to “please do the right thing,” and Laurie removed the SD card that stored the data and smashed it. Laurie, who is known as “Major Malfunction” in the hacker community, then briefed some of the Feds on the capabilities of the RFID reader and what it collected.
The RFID project was a collaboration between Laurie and Zac Franken — co-directors of Aperture Labs in the Britain and the ones who wrote the software for capturing the RFID data and supplied the hardware — and Aries Security, which conducts security-risk assessments and runs DefCon’s annual Wall of Sheep project with other volunteers.
Each year the Wall of Sheep volunteers sniff DefCon’s wireless network for unencrypted passwords and other data attendees send in the clear and project the IP addresses, login names and truncated versions of the passwords onto a conference wall to raise awareness about using wireless networks without encryption.
This year they planned to add data collected from the RFID reader and camera (below) — to raise awareness about a privacy threat that’s becoming increasingly prevalent as RFID chips are embedded into credit cards, employee access cards, state driver’s licenses, passports and other documents.
Read Full Story at Wired.com
LAS VEGAS — It’s one of the most hostile hacker environments in the country –- the DefCon hacker conference held every summer in Las Vegas.
But despite the fact that attendees know they should take precautions to protect their data, federal agents at the conference got a scare on Friday when they were told they might have been caught in the sights of an RFID reader.
The reader, connected to a web camera, sniffed data from RFID-enabled ID cards and other documents carried by attendees in pockets and backpacks as they passed a table where the equipment was stationed in full view.
It was part of a security-awareness project set up by a group of security researchers and consultants to highlight privacy issues around RFID. When the reader caught an RFID chip in its sights — embedded in a company or government agency access card, for example — it grabbed data from the card, and the camera snapped the card holder’s picture.
But the device, which had a read range of 2 to 3 feet, caught only five people carrying RFID cards before Feds attending the conference got wind of the project and were concerned they might have been scanned.
Kevin Manson, a former senior instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Florida, was sitting on the “Meet the Fed” panel when a DefCon staffer known as “Priest,” who prefers not to be identified by his real name, entered the room and told panelists about the reader.
“I saw a few jaws drop when he said that,” Manson told Threat Level.
“There was a lot of surprise,” Priest says. “It really was a ‘holy shit,’ we didn’t think about that [moment].”
Law enforcement and intelligence agents attend DefCon each year to garner intelligence about the latest cyber vulnerabilities and the hackers who exploit them. Some attend under their real name and affiliation, but many attend undercover.
Although corporate- and government-issued ID cards embedded with RFID chips don’t reveal a card holder’s name or company — the chip stores only a site number and unique ID number tied to a company or agency’s database where the card holder’s details are stored — it’s not impossible to deduce the company or agency from the site number. It’s possible the researchers might also have been able to identify a Fed through the photo snapped with the captured card data or through information stored on other RFID-embedded documents in his wallet. For example, badges issued to attendees at the Black Hat conference that preceded DefCon in Las Vegas were embedded with RFID chips that contained the attendee’s name and affiliation. Many of the same people attended both conferences, and some still had their Black Hat cards with them at DefCon.
But an attacker wouldn’t need the name of a card holder to cause harm. In the case of employee access cards, a chip that contained only the employee’s card number could still be cloned to allow someone to impersonate the employee and gain access to his company or government office without knowing the employee’s name.
Since employee access card numbers are generally sequential, Priest says an attacker could simply change a few digits on his cloned card to find the number of a random employee who might have higher access privileges in a facility.
“I can also make an educated guess as to what the administrator or ‘root’ cards are,” Priest says. “Usually the first card assigned out is the test card; the test card usually has access to all the doors. That’s a big threat, and that’s something [that government agencies] have actually got to address.”"
In some organizations, RFID cards aren’t just for entering doors; they’re also used to access computers. And in the case of RFID-enabled credit cards, RFID researcher Chris Paget, who gave a talk at DefCon, says the chips contain all the information someone needs to clone the card and make fraudulent charges on it — the account number, expiration date, CVV2 security code and, in the case of some older cards, the card holder’s name.
The Meet-the-Fed panel, an annual event at DefCon, presented a target-rich environment for anyone who might have wanted to scan government RFID documents for nefarious purposes. The 22 panelists included top cybercops and officials from the FBI, Secret Service, National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Defense Department, Treasury Department and U. S. Postal Inspection. And these were just the Feds who weren’t undercover.
It’s not known if any Feds were caught by the reader. The group that set it up never looked closely at the captured data before it was destroyed. Priest told Threat Level that one person caught by the camera resembled a Fed he knew, but he couldn’t positively identify him.
“But it was enough for me to be concerned,” he said. “There were people here who were not supposed to be identified for what they were doing … I was [concerned] that people who didn’t want to be photographed were photographed.”
Priest asked Adam Laurie, one of the researchers behind the project, to “please do the right thing,” and Laurie removed the SD card that stored the data and smashed it. Laurie, who is known as “Major Malfunction” in the hacker community, then briefed some of the Feds on the capabilities of the RFID reader and what it collected.
The RFID project was a collaboration between Laurie and Zac Franken — co-directors of Aperture Labs in the Britain and the ones who wrote the software for capturing the RFID data and supplied the hardware — and Aries Security, which conducts security-risk assessments and runs DefCon’s annual Wall of Sheep project with other volunteers.
Each year the Wall of Sheep volunteers sniff DefCon’s wireless network for unencrypted passwords and other data attendees send in the clear and project the IP addresses, login names and truncated versions of the passwords onto a conference wall to raise awareness about using wireless networks without encryption.
This year they planned to add data collected from the RFID reader and camera (below) — to raise awareness about a privacy threat that’s becoming increasingly prevalent as RFID chips are embedded into credit cards, employee access cards, state driver’s licenses, passports and other documents.
Read Full Story at Wired.com
Sunday, August 2, 2009
DefCon: ‘Credit Hackers’ Win the Credit Card Game … Legally | Threat Level | Wired.com
DefCon: ‘Credit Hackers’ Win the Credit Card Game … Legally | Threat Level | Wired.com: "Hundreds of “credit hackers” are legally gaming financial institutions by taking advantage of loopholes in the U.S. credit-reporting system, a security researcher says — warning that identity thieves could follow suit.
Christopher Soghoian, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, took a security expert’s eye to the tricks already in use by a healthy subculture of clever consumers who have managed to garner zero-interest loans and erase some information from their credit profiles. He’s presenting his findings Saturday at the DefCon hacker convention.
“The techniques outlined in this paper are not traditional hacking,” he said in an interview. “All that is being done is taking advantage of the formalized structure of the process.”"
Christopher Soghoian, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, took a security expert’s eye to the tricks already in use by a healthy subculture of clever consumers who have managed to garner zero-interest loans and erase some information from their credit profiles. He’s presenting his findings Saturday at the DefCon hacker convention.
“The techniques outlined in this paper are not traditional hacking,” he said in an interview. “All that is being done is taking advantage of the formalized structure of the process.”"
riaa biden - Google Search
riaa biden - Google Search: "Joe Biden, huh? Talk about strike three. 2000: Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman “loses” election. Flash forward to 2008 and this stuffy ..."
boycott-riaa.com - CD Prices
boycott-riaa.com - CD Prices: "CD PRICES
The RIAA talks about how the costs have risen since the invention of the CD player in 1983 (I could have sworn it was earlier than that). They talk about consumer price index and cost of living increases to point out the cost of a CD are inexpensive comparatively. Using their numbers of a price of 12.75 in 1996 to 17.99 ( my number) that's a 41% price increase in 5 years.
Now then, in the same period, the cost of mid range CD Players have come down from around $400 dollars, to around $100 for a single disc machine the costs of the technology, have come way down.
In 1993 cheapest CDR recorder you could purchase was about $4500, yes $4500! Today the cost of a top of the line CDR recorder is under $200. Do the math, (of course the RIAA will have to hire a bank of high priced accountants and CD prices will rise again) CDR Prices have gone from $20 EACH to less than $1.00.
You be the judge.."
The RIAA talks about how the costs have risen since the invention of the CD player in 1983 (I could have sworn it was earlier than that). They talk about consumer price index and cost of living increases to point out the cost of a CD are inexpensive comparatively. Using their numbers of a price of 12.75 in 1996 to 17.99 ( my number) that's a 41% price increase in 5 years.
Now then, in the same period, the cost of mid range CD Players have come down from around $400 dollars, to around $100 for a single disc machine the costs of the technology, have come way down.
In 1993 cheapest CDR recorder you could purchase was about $4500, yes $4500! Today the cost of a top of the line CDR recorder is under $200. Do the math, (of course the RIAA will have to hire a bank of high priced accountants and CD prices will rise again) CDR Prices have gone from $20 EACH to less than $1.00.
You be the judge.."
riaa - Google Search
riaa - Google Search: "EFF: RIAA Subpoena Database Query ToolInstead, the RIAA-member record labels are filing 'Doe' lawsuits against unnamed individuals and then issuing subpoenas to ISPs as part of the discovery ..."
MPAA and RIAA Information Page - A Resource on RIAA and MPAA Lawsuits and P2P Litigation
MPAA and RIAA Information Page - A Resource on RIAA and MPAA Lawsuits and P2P Litigation: "L a w O f f i c e s o f C h a r l e s L e e M u d d J r.
Providing Legal Representation to Individuals and Business Organizations"
Providing Legal Representation to Individuals and Business Organizations"
Negativland and the RIAA (archive)
Negativland and the RIAA (archive): "The following archive covers our somewhat successful 1998 skirmish with the Recording Industry Association of America. The Washington Post article has the most succinct overview of what happened. Also included are some links and text we considered relevant to the situation at the time."
The RIAA Prank: Do They Really Care About Kazaa, Grokster, and Napster?
The RIAA Prank: Do They Really Care About Kazaa, Grokster, and Napster?: "The Recording Industry Association of America has been making headlines with their recent threat to sue anyone engaged in digital piracy. Take a look at this photo"
strangle Web radio in its crib by imposing impossible fee structures
strangle Web radio in its crib by imposing impossible fee structuresFacts and Figures
Every Music CDR since the AHRA was enacted has a hidden tax built into the price! (2% of the manufacturers sales) This is supposedly to pay the artists for home recording. Who Collects the Tax? The RIAA under the auspices of the AARC. Who shares office space with the RIAA and has many of the RIAA employees working for it. I haven't been able to find one artist that was paid a cent of the money. 4% is set aside for non-featured artists, of the remainder 40% for the featured artist and 60% for the labels. To date I have not found one artist who has received one cent of this money. (Source: RIAA website)
In addition every CD recorder has a $2.00 surcharge built into the price that goes directly to the RIAA
The artists received not one cent of the money from the MP3.Com settlements of approx $158 Million to the labels. Who did??? The label themselves.
SoundExchange" the new digital rights collective for collecting royalties from internet play is a division of the RIAA. They did not distribute royalties in July 2001 as they were supposed to do, but instead decided to wait until next year.
85% of all music is released by 5 major labels (Sony, EMI, UMG, Time Warner, & BMG)
Federal Trade Commission (FTC Statement): "At any given point about 20% of the music every recorded is available legally." The rest is locked away by the labels depriving the creators of a potential source of income, the fans of the music they want, while creating a false market for the band "d'jour."
The RIAA on their website say the cost of CD's haven't risen as much as they could have read our take it.
Read the settlement statement of the FTC findings against the Big 5 concerning charges that all five companies illegally modified their existing cooperative advertising programs to induce retailers into charging consumers higher prices for CDs
See where the money really goes Steve Albini (producer of Nirvana's "In Utero) Interesting comment from Fox Entertainment Group (FOX) Chief Executive Peter Chernin, who has about as much of a clue as Jack Valenti:
"Film makers can offer their audience a choice of ways to see movies -- they can view them in the theater, rent them, or buy them. . .Music companies are much less flexible.. . .It's hard to buy one song. You're forced to buy the CD," he said.
"I'd like to introduce the recording industry to something called bottled water," said Jonathan Potter, executive director of Digital Media Association, in a recent interview commenting on Free vs Fee online music. His lobbying group represents music sites that are trying to promote and sell music over the Internet.
"It is not correct to assume that every time a copy is made, a sale is lost," said Gary Shapiro, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association. And, he also pointed out that many of the companies he represents, which make computers and other gadgets that enable people to copy music or download MP3s, have seen their sales fall much more sharply.
Every Music CDR since the AHRA was enacted has a hidden tax built into the price! (2% of the manufacturers sales) This is supposedly to pay the artists for home recording. Who Collects the Tax? The RIAA under the auspices of the AARC. Who shares office space with the RIAA and has many of the RIAA employees working for it. I haven't been able to find one artist that was paid a cent of the money. 4% is set aside for non-featured artists, of the remainder 40% for the featured artist and 60% for the labels. To date I have not found one artist who has received one cent of this money. (Source: RIAA website)
In addition every CD recorder has a $2.00 surcharge built into the price that goes directly to the RIAA
The artists received not one cent of the money from the MP3.Com settlements of approx $158 Million to the labels. Who did??? The label themselves.
SoundExchange" the new digital rights collective for collecting royalties from internet play is a division of the RIAA. They did not distribute royalties in July 2001 as they were supposed to do, but instead decided to wait until next year.
85% of all music is released by 5 major labels (Sony, EMI, UMG, Time Warner, & BMG)
Federal Trade Commission (FTC Statement): "At any given point about 20% of the music every recorded is available legally." The rest is locked away by the labels depriving the creators of a potential source of income, the fans of the music they want, while creating a false market for the band "d'jour."
The RIAA on their website say the cost of CD's haven't risen as much as they could have read our take it.
Read the settlement statement of the FTC findings against the Big 5 concerning charges that all five companies illegally modified their existing cooperative advertising programs to induce retailers into charging consumers higher prices for CDs
See where the money really goes Steve Albini (producer of Nirvana's "In Utero) Interesting comment from Fox Entertainment Group (FOX) Chief Executive Peter Chernin, who has about as much of a clue as Jack Valenti:
"Film makers can offer their audience a choice of ways to see movies -- they can view them in the theater, rent them, or buy them. . .Music companies are much less flexible.. . .It's hard to buy one song. You're forced to buy the CD," he said.
"I'd like to introduce the recording industry to something called bottled water," said Jonathan Potter, executive director of Digital Media Association, in a recent interview commenting on Free vs Fee online music. His lobbying group represents music sites that are trying to promote and sell music over the Internet.
"It is not correct to assume that every time a copy is made, a sale is lost," said Gary Shapiro, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association. And, he also pointed out that many of the companies he represents, which make computers and other gadgets that enable people to copy music or download MP3s, have seen their sales fall much more sharply.
Congrats, RIAA: Chilling Effects Have Killed Interest In New Digital Music Startups | Techdirt
Congrats, RIAA: Chilling Effects Have Killed Interest In New Digital Music Startups | Techdirt: "Congrats, RIAA: Chilling Effects Have Killed Interest In New Digital Music Startups
from the nice-work! dept
We've noticed that pretty much every single new and innovative digital music startup that pops up eventually gets sued by the record labels. The labels seem to view this as a part of basic negotiations -- and, in fact, many of the lawsuits have ended in partnership/equity deals. But, those deals tend to be suffocating. Given that (likelihood of getting sued or getting a deal that makes a profitable business impossible), is it any wonder that entrepreneurs are shying away from any sort of digital music startup these days, in favor of opportunities with no obsolete gatekeepers demanding huge chunks of whatever revenue they might one day make?"
from the nice-work! dept
We've noticed that pretty much every single new and innovative digital music startup that pops up eventually gets sued by the record labels. The labels seem to view this as a part of basic negotiations -- and, in fact, many of the lawsuits have ended in partnership/equity deals. But, those deals tend to be suffocating. Given that (likelihood of getting sued or getting a deal that makes a profitable business impossible), is it any wonder that entrepreneurs are shying away from any sort of digital music startup these days, in favor of opportunities with no obsolete gatekeepers demanding huge chunks of whatever revenue they might one day make?"
Boycott The IRAA!
Facts and Figures
Every Music CDR since the AHRA was enacted has a hidden tax built into the price! (2% of the manufacturers sales) This is supposedly to pay the artists for home recording. Who Collects the Tax? The RIAA under the auspices of the AARC. Who shares office space with the RIAA and has many of the RIAA employees working for it. I haven't been able to find one artist that was paid a cent of the money. 4% is set aside for non-featured artists, of the remainder 40% for the featured artist and 60% for the labels. To date I have not found one artist who has received one cent of this money. (Source: RIAA website)
In addition every CD recorder has a $2.00 surcharge built into the price that goes directly to the RIAA
The artists received not one cent of the money from the MP3.Com settlements of approx $158 Million to the labels. Who did??? The label themselves.
SoundExchange" the new digital rights collective for collecting royalties from internet play is a division of the RIAA. They did not distribute royalties in July 2001 as they were supposed to do, but instead decided to wait until next year.
85% of all music is released by 5 major labels (Sony, EMI, UMG, Time Warner, & BMG)
Federal Trade Commission (FTC Statement): "At any given point about 20% of the music every recorded is available legally." The rest is locked away by the labels depriving the creators of a potential source of income, the fans of the music they want, while creating a false market for the band "d'jour."
The RIAA on their website say the cost of CD's haven't risen as much as they could have read our take it.
Read the settlement statement of the FTC findings against the Big 5 concerning charges that all five companies illegally modified their existing cooperative advertising programs to induce retailers into charging consumers higher prices for CDs
See where the money really goes Steve Albini (producer of Nirvana's "In Utero) Interesting comment from Fox Entertainment Group (FOX) Chief Executive Peter Chernin, who has about as much of a clue as Jack Valenti:
"Film makers can offer their audience a choice of ways to see movies -- they can view them in the theater, rent them, or buy them. . .Music companies are much less flexible.. . .It's hard to buy one song. You're forced to buy the CD," he said.
"I'd like to introduce the recording industry to something called bottled water," said Jonathan Potter, executive director of Digital Media Association, in a recent interview commenting on Free vs Fee online music. His lobbying group represents music sites that are trying to promote and sell music over the Internet.
"It is not correct to assume that every time a copy is made, a sale is lost," said Gary Shapiro, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association. And, he also pointed out that many of the companies he represents, which make computers and other gadgets that enable people to copy music or download MP3s, have seen their sales fall much more sharply.
Boycott The RIAA
Every Music CDR since the AHRA was enacted has a hidden tax built into the price! (2% of the manufacturers sales) This is supposedly to pay the artists for home recording. Who Collects the Tax? The RIAA under the auspices of the AARC. Who shares office space with the RIAA and has many of the RIAA employees working for it. I haven't been able to find one artist that was paid a cent of the money. 4% is set aside for non-featured artists, of the remainder 40% for the featured artist and 60% for the labels. To date I have not found one artist who has received one cent of this money. (Source: RIAA website)
In addition every CD recorder has a $2.00 surcharge built into the price that goes directly to the RIAA
The artists received not one cent of the money from the MP3.Com settlements of approx $158 Million to the labels. Who did??? The label themselves.
SoundExchange" the new digital rights collective for collecting royalties from internet play is a division of the RIAA. They did not distribute royalties in July 2001 as they were supposed to do, but instead decided to wait until next year.
85% of all music is released by 5 major labels (Sony, EMI, UMG, Time Warner, & BMG)
Federal Trade Commission (FTC Statement): "At any given point about 20% of the music every recorded is available legally." The rest is locked away by the labels depriving the creators of a potential source of income, the fans of the music they want, while creating a false market for the band "d'jour."
The RIAA on their website say the cost of CD's haven't risen as much as they could have read our take it.
Read the settlement statement of the FTC findings against the Big 5 concerning charges that all five companies illegally modified their existing cooperative advertising programs to induce retailers into charging consumers higher prices for CDs
See where the money really goes Steve Albini (producer of Nirvana's "In Utero) Interesting comment from Fox Entertainment Group (FOX) Chief Executive Peter Chernin, who has about as much of a clue as Jack Valenti:
"Film makers can offer their audience a choice of ways to see movies -- they can view them in the theater, rent them, or buy them. . .Music companies are much less flexible.. . .It's hard to buy one song. You're forced to buy the CD," he said.
"I'd like to introduce the recording industry to something called bottled water," said Jonathan Potter, executive director of Digital Media Association, in a recent interview commenting on Free vs Fee online music. His lobbying group represents music sites that are trying to promote and sell music over the Internet.
"It is not correct to assume that every time a copy is made, a sale is lost," said Gary Shapiro, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association. And, he also pointed out that many of the companies he represents, which make computers and other gadgets that enable people to copy music or download MP3s, have seen their sales fall much more sharply.
Boycott The RIAA
DRM is ****, RIAA Says | TorrentFreak
DRM is ****, RIAA Says | TorrentFreak: "For years the RIAA has defended the use of DRM, much to the dislike of millions of honest customers who actually paid for their music. Now, in a shocking turnaround, the outfit seems to have come to the realization that DRM does more harm than good and has officially declared its death."
Has the housing market hit bottom?
Now that a number of recent housing reports are generating some incredibly positive headlines and the global economy appears to be slowly digging its way out of an enormous hole that was created last fall when the world nearly came to an end, the burning question on the minds of millions of people is ... Has the housing market hit bottom?
Has the housing market hit bottom?
Has the housing market hit bottom?
CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion » RIAA v. Joel Tenenbaum
CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion » RIAA v. Joel Tenenbaum: "Update (1/6/2009): Prof. Nesson and his students are going down to Rhode Island federal court today to protect Joel’s mother and father from having to surrender their personal computer (and the private information on it) from the RIAA’s hired guns. Learn more about it by reading our press release and following us on Twitter. More information as we get it!
Prof. Nesson and a crack team of CyberOne students is in the process of defending Joel Tenenbaum, a digital native, from the RIAA."
Prof. Nesson and a crack team of CyberOne students is in the process of defending Joel Tenenbaum, a digital native, from the RIAA."
RIAA Lawsuits - Expert Witnesses Fund
A fund to help provide computer expert witnesses to combat RIAA's ongoing lawsuits, and to defend against the RIAA's attempt to redefine copyright law.
You can directly support the work of the Free Software Foundation by becoming a card carrying Associate Member. This donation form is for directed donations towards a fund organized in coordination with Recording Industry Vs The People. Donors can enjoy:A tax deduction for donating to a registered 501(c)3 organization
A listing on our 'Thank GNUs' web page for donations of $500 or more (if desired)
The satisfaction of supporting the defense of the RIAA lawsuits
You can also mail us a donation. Read our Privacy Policy. In 2007 FSF is rated as 4 stars out of 4: 'Exceptional. Exceeds industry standards and outperforms most charities in its Cause.' by Charity Navigator."
You can directly support the work of the Free Software Foundation by becoming a card carrying Associate Member. This donation form is for directed donations towards a fund organized in coordination with Recording Industry Vs The People. Donors can enjoy:A tax deduction for donating to a registered 501(c)3 organization
A listing on our 'Thank GNUs' web page for donations of $500 or more (if desired)
The satisfaction of supporting the defense of the RIAA lawsuits
You can also mail us a donation. Read our Privacy Policy. In 2007 FSF is rated as 4 stars out of 4: 'Exceptional. Exceeds industry standards and outperforms most charities in its Cause.' by Charity Navigator."
Loan Servicers Work the Fine Print in Obama Foreclosure Plan | The Washington Independent
Even as the Obama administration presses the lending industry to get more mortgage loans modified, the practice of forcing borrowers to sign away their legal rights in order to get their loans reworked is a tactic that some servicers just won’t give up on.
Waivers requiring borrowers to give up any legal claims related to their mortgages, even in cases where borrowers may be victims of predatory lending, are showing up sporadically in loan modification agreements under the Obama administration’s Making Home Affordable plan, consumer attorneys say. They were stunned to find the legal waivers still being used, despite more than a year of efforts – including calls from lawmakers – to get rid of them.
Loan Servicers Work the Fine Print in Obama Foreclosure Plan The Washington Independent
Waivers requiring borrowers to give up any legal claims related to their mortgages, even in cases where borrowers may be victims of predatory lending, are showing up sporadically in loan modification agreements under the Obama administration’s Making Home Affordable plan, consumer attorneys say. They were stunned to find the legal waivers still being used, despite more than a year of efforts – including calls from lawmakers – to get rid of them.
Loan Servicers Work the Fine Print in Obama Foreclosure Plan The Washington Independent
DRM is ****, RIAA Says
"For years the RIAA has defended the use of DRM, much to the dislike of millions of honest customers who actually paid for their music. Now, in a shocking turnaround, the outfit seems to have come to the realization that DRM does more harm than good and has officially declared its death."
RIAA Radar
RIAA Radar: Home: "Why is it important to know if an album was released by an RIAA member or not?
That's possibly a fairly long answer, but just the highlights of the RIAA's practices involve price-fixing, blaming its poor financial state on unfounded digital piracy claims (and in turn, blaming and suing its own consumers), lobbying for changes that hinder technological innovation and change copyright laws, underpaying the artists it represents, invading personal privacy to enforce copyrights, and dismantling entire computer networks just because of their ability (of their users) to share copyrighted files. (Feel free to visit the RIAA and Boycott-RIAA.com to learn more!)"
That's possibly a fairly long answer, but just the highlights of the RIAA's practices involve price-fixing, blaming its poor financial state on unfounded digital piracy claims (and in turn, blaming and suing its own consumers), lobbying for changes that hinder technological innovation and change copyright laws, underpaying the artists it represents, invading personal privacy to enforce copyrights, and dismantling entire computer networks just because of their ability (of their users) to share copyrighted files. (Feel free to visit the RIAA and Boycott-RIAA.com to learn more!)"
Recording Industry vs. The People
Recording Industry vs. The People: "Recording Industry vs The People"
Maybe The RIAA Should Just Charge $22,500 Per Song
Maybe The RIAA Should Just Charge $22,500 Per Song: "The question begging to be asked: how is a song worth $22,500? Given that most tracks sell for $0.99 in iTunes, a 100x multiple would put the fine at $99 per song. A 1000x multiple would lead to a fine of $990. You might say that it’s comparable to being fined $100,000 for stealing a comic book, except that in this case it would be more like photocopying the comic and leaving the original on the shelf.
It’s a question the judge is looking into, reports Ars Technica:
Judge Gertner previously announced that she will hold a post-trial proceeding to determine whether the size of the award violates the US Constitution’s guarantee of due process of the law. While no federal court has ever invalidated an award of copyright statutory damages as constitutionally excessive, the record labels’ litigation campaign has spurred arguments that the Supreme Court cases imposing limits on punitive damages should be extended to statutory damages, which may contain a punitive element.
If a song is worth $22,500, the record industry is truly giving us a bargain by selling them for $0.99 on iTunes."
It’s a question the judge is looking into, reports Ars Technica:
Judge Gertner previously announced that she will hold a post-trial proceeding to determine whether the size of the award violates the US Constitution’s guarantee of due process of the law. While no federal court has ever invalidated an award of copyright statutory damages as constitutionally excessive, the record labels’ litigation campaign has spurred arguments that the Supreme Court cases imposing limits on punitive damages should be extended to statutory damages, which may contain a punitive element.
If a song is worth $22,500, the record industry is truly giving us a bargain by selling them for $0.99 on iTunes."
Consciousness Capitalism: Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet
Capitalism has raped the resources of the world. Now corporations are left to strip human experience from life, then rent it back to us.
A few years ago, compliments of the George W. Bush administration, I got an education in political reality. The kind of education that makes you get drunk at night and scream and bitch at every shred of national news:
"Do you see how these capitalist bastards have made so much money killing babies in Iraq? And how they are have brainwashed us and gouged us for every human need, from health care to drinking water?" I'd rage to my wife.
"It's just the way things are," she said. "It's only a system."
My good wife often thinks I have slipped my moorings. But she never says right out loud that I'm crazy because, let's face it, honesty in marriage only goes so far. Furthermore, I'd be the first to proclaim that she's right.
I have slipped my moorings, and am downright ecstatic about it, given what the collective American consciousness is moored to these days. Anyway, I am, as I said, ecstatic. When I am not utterly depressed. Which is often. And always, always, always, it is because of the latest outrage pulled off by government/corporations -- the terms have been interchangeable for at least 50 years in this country, maybe longer.
For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people's thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators such as a Hitler, or a good old bone-gnawing despot like Idi Amin. We get money syndicates in powdered wigs or Seville Row suits, cartels of robber barons and banking racketeers.
The corporate rackets of European white people, especially banking, have a venerable history of sanction, dating back at least to when William the Conqueror granted the corporation of London the rights to handle his English loot.
For all his cruelty (he skinned the people and hung their tanned hides from their own windows, and if that ain't the purest kind of meanness, I don't know what is!) William, just like Allen Greenspan and Bernie Madoff, understood that the real muscle hangs out in the temples of banking and money changing.
Even a thousand years before that however, nobody in their right mind dared mess with the money cartels.
DATELINE JUDEA, A.D. 26 -- Pontius Pilate to Jesus: "Look you seem to be a nice Jewish kid from ... where izzit? ... Nazareth? But you gotta quit fuckin wid da moneychangers, cause I get a piece of dat action, see? So stop dickin' with 'em. And especially you gotta swear off this Son of God, King of the Jews shtick. Ain't but one king aroun jeer, and you're lookin' at him. So lay off that stuff, and we can put this whole thing behind us, you and me. On the other hand, I got a couple of thieves I'm gonna do in tomorrow; and you can join 'em if you want. Your call kid. Now whose yer daddy?"
"I am the Son of God."
"Grab a cross on the way out."
On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ...
Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?
Our dependency on corporations at every level of the needs hierarchy is total. We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality. We cannot see around it or out of it from the inside. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life.
The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in.
With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish.
At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals.
Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."
And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war.
High and low, we have been transfigured into a society of performers behaving the way we are expected to behave as productive citizens. Production as measured by the bastards. And we cannot expect to find any Gandhis or Simón Bolivars among that high caste. One does not get there by leading salt strikes, nor does one appear in their boardrooms on behalf of the masses wearing beggar's cloth.
"The masses, the masses, the masses. Whatever are we to do with them?" laughed a political adviser friend, only half-jokingly. True, we've always been such a herd, always been given to self-imposed blindness of the whole. But now we are blindfolded. There is a difference.
During earlier times in this fabled republic -- and much of it has always been just that, a fable -- there were somewhat better odds of escaping such blindness. Now it is considered the normal condition; we see it as in our best interests to embrace such national blindness. In doing so, we all but ensure a new Dark Age.
Oh, quit bitching you fart-stained old gasbag. The next Dark Age is sure to have a wireless connection and an RFID sex hot line locator chip in your neck. The boys in Tyson's corporate are already doing it to chickens in the poultry market for a couple cents per bird. Just be glad you were born in America!
For sure it will be wired. Because the next phase of history's greatest ongoing screwjob, capitalism, depends on it being wired. With the demise of first mercantile capitalism, and now with industrial capitalism on the ropes everywhere, and after having wasted most of the world's vital resources, you'd think the whole stinking drama of greed and mass exploitation would necessarily draw to a close.
You'd think there would be nothing left to huckster after having pissed in most of the world's clean drinking water, gutted its forests and jungles, leveled its mountains for coal and minerals, and turned the atmosphere into a blanket of simmering toxins, well, you'd think it was time for the bastards to fold the game and go home with their winnings. No such luck.
Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.
Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.
Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!
Charge rents for your monopoly on the access. Manufacture artificial scarcity, even of human consciousness and experience by redefining and reshaping it. The tools here are legal means such as intellectual property rights, patents softwares ...
Cognitive capitalism by definition requires that mass consciousness be networked at all individual nodes. Each node is its own experiential realm of service relationships, entertainment, travel and the multitude of experience industries that are rapidly coming to dominate the global economy. Life as a paid-for experience, with none of the hassles of ownership.
Rent a Life, Inc.
(Actually, we've always rented our lives from the bastards, under such things as the pretense that mortgage payments were not just another gussied up form of rent, and so forth). If you've got the money to pay for access to their networks, it's great. I guess. If you're too poor, then you are left to fight it out in naked barbarian streets of the unwired. Given the choice, most of us would rather be inside the gates, not on the streets. But any rational person would fear the gatekeepers.
Already we are seeing cognitive mutations of our relationships with our homes, our communities and our idea of what the world is. I had an absolutely brilliant young man visit me in Belize, well known as a futurist on the Internet and avid player of Second Life. By his own admission, he could not find anyone in the entire country he could communicate with.
Community and the world are becoming concepts, images and ideas ungrounded in the earthly "thingness" and the attending husbandry and respect for such, and replaced by the ultimate purchased commodity, the experience of life itself. Each person becomes an experiential Empire of One. Occupant of a single node in the network, seeking personal validation through paid-for personal experience and free from the bonds of human cooperation and responsiveness. Free from material boundaries.
Experience products, compared to those of industrial capitalism, are dirt cheap for the bastards to produce. The hard costs, land, factories, labor, are outsourced (dumped) in China. Let the Mandarin capitalists own those burdens.
The Mandarin capitalists are deliriously happy to accept 'em. Because they can offset those costs in a million ways they'd just as soon not talk about. Like burning the cheapest sweat-labor coal in the dirtiest power plants they can build to power their workhouse chip factories. As in, Hey Chang! It's quitting time. Go beat those goddamned peasant workers back into their chicken cages for the night!"
Meanwhile, back here in the land of free, we are, as always, at least one water buffalo step ahead of the Chinese when it comes to enterprise. Consequently, we have moved on from Proudhon's property-as-theft model, to extortion.
The new extortion is conducted through creation of a state of artificial scarcity, which is done by turning the dials of your patents, softwares and intellectual property rights machinery, which is protected by your corporate legal goon squad.
The time for extortion through consciousness capitalism is ripe in both senses of the word. People in developed nations, America especially, are ditching material goods, the veritable mountain of Asian techno-junk, sweat-labor clothing, and gewgaws, not to mention the now-worthless, overpriced suburban fuckboxes they purchased to store all that stuff in.
Nothing is stranger, or sadder in a way, than watching the monolithic suburban yard sale that is now America suburban Saturday morning. Material assemblage might be a better word than sale, because there are almost no buyers, not even many "for free" takers. Just sellers. Everybody needs cash to pay down the plastic. Or eat. It's broke out there. (Although Europeans and North Americans don't really know the meaning of the word broke yet. Ask folks south of the equator).
Meanwhile, at the Twilight Zone Café, in Winchester, Va., Ernie, the retired backhoe driver takes another pull on his Old Milwaukee beer and says: "Now tell me this perfessor, didn't we bring all this on ourselves? Ain't we got some personal responsibility for what happens to us?"
Good question. Did we create this catastrophic system, or was it created by the bastards, and in turn re-created us?
How much is attributable to the smallness and ratlike sensibilities of ordinary men such as ourselves? Has human ingenuity and ability to mass replicate goods and information provided nothing more than a theater of operations for some macabre and prolonged last act in the human drama -- ecocide?
"Oh, science will come up with something," observes Ernie. "It always does."
I bite my tongue and don't say that I believe human ingenuity is much overrated stuff. But even assuming it isn't, and that we all get issued solar-powered houseboats during the global-warming meltdown, we're still gonna need oxygen.
Maybe Ernie is right, though. Maybe we did bring all this on ourselves by not accepting that new "personal responsibility," the Republican Party proffered a while back. But I'm blaming the bastards anyway, because first off, they've got all the power; and second, they've become obscenely rich off it; and third, I don't like the fuckers to start with. And it's not because I am jealous of their wealth either. I leave that mediocre sort of animal jealousy to realtors and super-striving dentists.
After a rather short stint in "the ownership society," material products are now increasingly replaced by immaterial licensed experiences. We will no longer "own" anything, much less attempt to own everything we can lay hands on. Which is good. But the bastards will finally own everything. Which is bad.
Certainly cognitive capitalism will relieve stress on the world's resources to some degree. A nation of cyber-vegetables trying to get laid or get rich in a Second Life-type experience may be easier on poor old Mother Earth, though she's probably be gagging at the thought of what we'll have become.
Malcontent that she is, Mother Earth has been unhappy with man's behavior for a long time. And after being, bombed, mined, poisoned and generally molested for so long, who can blame her for her opinion, which is that, "On the sixth day, God fucked up."
Three beers and a couple thousand words later, it's hard to disagree.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/141668/consciousness_capitalism:_corporations_are_now_after_our_very_beings/?page=entire "Capitalism has raped the resources of the world. Now corporations are left to strip human experience from life, then rent it back to us."
A few years ago, compliments of the George W. Bush administration, I got an education in political reality. The kind of education that makes you get drunk at night and scream and bitch at every shred of national news:
"Do you see how these capitalist bastards have made so much money killing babies in Iraq? And how they are have brainwashed us and gouged us for every human need, from health care to drinking water?" I'd rage to my wife.
"It's just the way things are," she said. "It's only a system."
My good wife often thinks I have slipped my moorings. But she never says right out loud that I'm crazy because, let's face it, honesty in marriage only goes so far. Furthermore, I'd be the first to proclaim that she's right.
I have slipped my moorings, and am downright ecstatic about it, given what the collective American consciousness is moored to these days. Anyway, I am, as I said, ecstatic. When I am not utterly depressed. Which is often. And always, always, always, it is because of the latest outrage pulled off by government/corporations -- the terms have been interchangeable for at least 50 years in this country, maybe longer.
For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people's thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators such as a Hitler, or a good old bone-gnawing despot like Idi Amin. We get money syndicates in powdered wigs or Seville Row suits, cartels of robber barons and banking racketeers.
The corporate rackets of European white people, especially banking, have a venerable history of sanction, dating back at least to when William the Conqueror granted the corporation of London the rights to handle his English loot.
For all his cruelty (he skinned the people and hung their tanned hides from their own windows, and if that ain't the purest kind of meanness, I don't know what is!) William, just like Allen Greenspan and Bernie Madoff, understood that the real muscle hangs out in the temples of banking and money changing.
Even a thousand years before that however, nobody in their right mind dared mess with the money cartels.
DATELINE JUDEA, A.D. 26 -- Pontius Pilate to Jesus: "Look you seem to be a nice Jewish kid from ... where izzit? ... Nazareth? But you gotta quit fuckin wid da moneychangers, cause I get a piece of dat action, see? So stop dickin' with 'em. And especially you gotta swear off this Son of God, King of the Jews shtick. Ain't but one king aroun jeer, and you're lookin' at him. So lay off that stuff, and we can put this whole thing behind us, you and me. On the other hand, I got a couple of thieves I'm gonna do in tomorrow; and you can join 'em if you want. Your call kid. Now whose yer daddy?"
"I am the Son of God."
"Grab a cross on the way out."
On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ...
Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?
Our dependency on corporations at every level of the needs hierarchy is total. We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality. We cannot see around it or out of it from the inside. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life.
The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in.
With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish.
At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals.
Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."
And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war.
High and low, we have been transfigured into a society of performers behaving the way we are expected to behave as productive citizens. Production as measured by the bastards. And we cannot expect to find any Gandhis or Simón Bolivars among that high caste. One does not get there by leading salt strikes, nor does one appear in their boardrooms on behalf of the masses wearing beggar's cloth.
"The masses, the masses, the masses. Whatever are we to do with them?" laughed a political adviser friend, only half-jokingly. True, we've always been such a herd, always been given to self-imposed blindness of the whole. But now we are blindfolded. There is a difference.
During earlier times in this fabled republic -- and much of it has always been just that, a fable -- there were somewhat better odds of escaping such blindness. Now it is considered the normal condition; we see it as in our best interests to embrace such national blindness. In doing so, we all but ensure a new Dark Age.
Oh, quit bitching you fart-stained old gasbag. The next Dark Age is sure to have a wireless connection and an RFID sex hot line locator chip in your neck. The boys in Tyson's corporate are already doing it to chickens in the poultry market for a couple cents per bird. Just be glad you were born in America!
For sure it will be wired. Because the next phase of history's greatest ongoing screwjob, capitalism, depends on it being wired. With the demise of first mercantile capitalism, and now with industrial capitalism on the ropes everywhere, and after having wasted most of the world's vital resources, you'd think the whole stinking drama of greed and mass exploitation would necessarily draw to a close.
You'd think there would be nothing left to huckster after having pissed in most of the world's clean drinking water, gutted its forests and jungles, leveled its mountains for coal and minerals, and turned the atmosphere into a blanket of simmering toxins, well, you'd think it was time for the bastards to fold the game and go home with their winnings. No such luck.
Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.
Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.
Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!
Charge rents for your monopoly on the access. Manufacture artificial scarcity, even of human consciousness and experience by redefining and reshaping it. The tools here are legal means such as intellectual property rights, patents softwares ...
Cognitive capitalism by definition requires that mass consciousness be networked at all individual nodes. Each node is its own experiential realm of service relationships, entertainment, travel and the multitude of experience industries that are rapidly coming to dominate the global economy. Life as a paid-for experience, with none of the hassles of ownership.
Rent a Life, Inc.
(Actually, we've always rented our lives from the bastards, under such things as the pretense that mortgage payments were not just another gussied up form of rent, and so forth). If you've got the money to pay for access to their networks, it's great. I guess. If you're too poor, then you are left to fight it out in naked barbarian streets of the unwired. Given the choice, most of us would rather be inside the gates, not on the streets. But any rational person would fear the gatekeepers.
Already we are seeing cognitive mutations of our relationships with our homes, our communities and our idea of what the world is. I had an absolutely brilliant young man visit me in Belize, well known as a futurist on the Internet and avid player of Second Life. By his own admission, he could not find anyone in the entire country he could communicate with.
Community and the world are becoming concepts, images and ideas ungrounded in the earthly "thingness" and the attending husbandry and respect for such, and replaced by the ultimate purchased commodity, the experience of life itself. Each person becomes an experiential Empire of One. Occupant of a single node in the network, seeking personal validation through paid-for personal experience and free from the bonds of human cooperation and responsiveness. Free from material boundaries.
Experience products, compared to those of industrial capitalism, are dirt cheap for the bastards to produce. The hard costs, land, factories, labor, are outsourced (dumped) in China. Let the Mandarin capitalists own those burdens.
The Mandarin capitalists are deliriously happy to accept 'em. Because they can offset those costs in a million ways they'd just as soon not talk about. Like burning the cheapest sweat-labor coal in the dirtiest power plants they can build to power their workhouse chip factories. As in, Hey Chang! It's quitting time. Go beat those goddamned peasant workers back into their chicken cages for the night!"
Meanwhile, back here in the land of free, we are, as always, at least one water buffalo step ahead of the Chinese when it comes to enterprise. Consequently, we have moved on from Proudhon's property-as-theft model, to extortion.
The new extortion is conducted through creation of a state of artificial scarcity, which is done by turning the dials of your patents, softwares and intellectual property rights machinery, which is protected by your corporate legal goon squad.
The time for extortion through consciousness capitalism is ripe in both senses of the word. People in developed nations, America especially, are ditching material goods, the veritable mountain of Asian techno-junk, sweat-labor clothing, and gewgaws, not to mention the now-worthless, overpriced suburban fuckboxes they purchased to store all that stuff in.
Nothing is stranger, or sadder in a way, than watching the monolithic suburban yard sale that is now America suburban Saturday morning. Material assemblage might be a better word than sale, because there are almost no buyers, not even many "for free" takers. Just sellers. Everybody needs cash to pay down the plastic. Or eat. It's broke out there. (Although Europeans and North Americans don't really know the meaning of the word broke yet. Ask folks south of the equator).
Meanwhile, at the Twilight Zone Café, in Winchester, Va., Ernie, the retired backhoe driver takes another pull on his Old Milwaukee beer and says: "Now tell me this perfessor, didn't we bring all this on ourselves? Ain't we got some personal responsibility for what happens to us?"
Good question. Did we create this catastrophic system, or was it created by the bastards, and in turn re-created us?
How much is attributable to the smallness and ratlike sensibilities of ordinary men such as ourselves? Has human ingenuity and ability to mass replicate goods and information provided nothing more than a theater of operations for some macabre and prolonged last act in the human drama -- ecocide?
"Oh, science will come up with something," observes Ernie. "It always does."
I bite my tongue and don't say that I believe human ingenuity is much overrated stuff. But even assuming it isn't, and that we all get issued solar-powered houseboats during the global-warming meltdown, we're still gonna need oxygen.
Maybe Ernie is right, though. Maybe we did bring all this on ourselves by not accepting that new "personal responsibility," the Republican Party proffered a while back. But I'm blaming the bastards anyway, because first off, they've got all the power; and second, they've become obscenely rich off it; and third, I don't like the fuckers to start with. And it's not because I am jealous of their wealth either. I leave that mediocre sort of animal jealousy to realtors and super-striving dentists.
After a rather short stint in "the ownership society," material products are now increasingly replaced by immaterial licensed experiences. We will no longer "own" anything, much less attempt to own everything we can lay hands on. Which is good. But the bastards will finally own everything. Which is bad.
Certainly cognitive capitalism will relieve stress on the world's resources to some degree. A nation of cyber-vegetables trying to get laid or get rich in a Second Life-type experience may be easier on poor old Mother Earth, though she's probably be gagging at the thought of what we'll have become.
Malcontent that she is, Mother Earth has been unhappy with man's behavior for a long time. And after being, bombed, mined, poisoned and generally molested for so long, who can blame her for her opinion, which is that, "On the sixth day, God fucked up."
Three beers and a couple thousand words later, it's hard to disagree.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/141668/consciousness_capitalism:_corporations_are_now_after_our_very_beings/?page=entire "Capitalism has raped the resources of the world. Now corporations are left to strip human experience from life, then rent it back to us."
Top Internet Providers Cool to RIAA 3-Strikes Plan | Threat Level | Wired.com
Top Internet Providers Cool to RIAA 3-Strikes Plan | Threat Level | Wired.com: "Two weeks after the Recording Industry Association of America announced it had struck deals with top internet service providers to cut off unrepentant music sharers, not a single major ISP will cop to agreeing to the ambitious scheme, and one top broadband company says it’s not on board.
The RIAA’s announcement came as it revealed it was closing down its massive litigation campaign, which has targeted more than 30,000 individuals for allegedly sharing copyrighted music on the internet. Instead of federal lawsuits, the RIAA claims it would now rely on a series of accords it had reached with 'leading' internet service providers, in which the ISPs have agreed to terminate customers the RIAA catches uploading three times, the association said."
The RIAA’s announcement came as it revealed it was closing down its massive litigation campaign, which has targeted more than 30,000 individuals for allegedly sharing copyrighted music on the internet. Instead of federal lawsuits, the RIAA claims it would now rely on a series of accords it had reached with 'leading' internet service providers, in which the ISPs have agreed to terminate customers the RIAA catches uploading three times, the association said."
MPAA Says No Proof Needed in P2P Copyright Infringement Lawsuits | Threat Level | Wired.com
MPAA Says No Proof Needed in P2P Copyright Infringement Lawsuits | Threat Level | Wired.com: "The Motion Picture Association of America said Friday intellectual-property holders should have the right to collect damages, perhaps as much as $150,000 per copyright violation, without having to prove infringement.
'Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances,' MPAA attorney Marie L. van Uitert wrote Friday to the federal judge overseeing the Jammie Thomas trial."
'Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances,' MPAA attorney Marie L. van Uitert wrote Friday to the federal judge overseeing the Jammie Thomas trial."
ISPs say they are not working with RIAA | RIAA Intimidation.com
ISPs say they are not working with RIAA | RIAA Intimidation.com: "ISPs say they are not working with RIAA
By micro99 at 26 March, 2009, 3:58 pm Last year the Recording Industry Association of America announced it would work with internet service providers (ISPs) to cut down on illegal music downloading in lieu of lawsuits. It appears that might now be happening, although the ISPs deny they are assisting."
By micro99 at 26 March, 2009, 3:58 pm Last year the Recording Industry Association of America announced it would work with internet service providers (ISPs) to cut down on illegal music downloading in lieu of lawsuits. It appears that might now be happening, although the ISPs deny they are assisting."
Slashdot | Answers From Lawyers Who Defend Against RIAA Suits
Slashdot | Answers From Lawyers Who Defend Against RIAA Suits: "What should we do to prevent needing your services? Another way of putting this is, how do we avoid getting sued by the RIAA?
Beckerman:
All of the cases that I have seen stem from people who are using a Fast Track sharing program such as Kazaa, Imesh, Gnutella, LimeWire, etc., having a shared files folder with copyrighted songs in it, even if the song files were obtained legally. So even making sure to pay for all of your downloads wouldn't protect you from a lawsuit. The only way I know to avoid the present litigation wave is to avoid having shared files of copyrighted songs."
Beckerman:
All of the cases that I have seen stem from people who are using a Fast Track sharing program such as Kazaa, Imesh, Gnutella, LimeWire, etc., having a shared files folder with copyrighted songs in it, even if the song files were obtained legally. So even making sure to pay for all of your downloads wouldn't protect you from a lawsuit. The only way I know to avoid the present litigation wave is to avoid having shared files of copyrighted songs."
How it feels to be sued for $4.5m | Music | guardian.co.uk
How it feels to be sued for $4.5m | Music | guardian.co.uk: "How it feels to be sued for $4.5mWhen I contemplate the above sum, I have to remind myself what I'm being charged with. Investment fraud? An attack against the government? No. I shared music. And refused to cave"
RIAA suit defense responses CDFreaks
RIAA suit defense responses CDFreaks: "What might really be the biggest uppercut to the RIAA would be some kind of grassroots campaign that took out major space in newspapers across the U.S., documenting obvious RIAA strong-arm tactics, designed to frighten and intimidate, rather than to defend against a real injustice (the assumption is large-scale music piracy). While such a campaign would cost much, and require great coordination in standardizing the documented cases and salient points highlighting obvious flaws, it might seriously curtail many frivolous lawsuits on the RIAA’s part, greatly reducing the ‘photocopier” lawsuit approach the organization currently embraces."
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