As the Rolling Stones began their tour while welching on the more than quarter of a million dollar deal they made with my Friend, I started this e-Blogazine journal to document some of my experience of the fallout, and to create a forum for discussion and resources to reform the Music Industry. May Artists, Musicians, and Free People everywhere find it useful.
Got Something to say? Are You a Musician, Artist, or Person with an opinion about the Music industry, music downloads, contracts or royalties? Are You concerned about the RIAA and other industries' assault on our cyber-Freedoms? Copyright and Intellectual Property law? Well?
This site is our Music, played on a virtual sidewalk. This button is our hat in front of us. If You dig the Vibe, toss in a few coins so we might live. Thanks.
Wednesday the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) web site home page was replace by this version, in an escalating cycle of madness perhaps sparked after the Washington Post reported "at least one company acknowledges that it has been hired to distribute [bogus MP3] spoofs [throughout p2p file sharing services like Gnutella] as digested earlier on Stoned Out Loud.
Dan Gillmor's eJournal simply noted the exploit as "stupid and counterproductive," calling the vandals "jerks."
We at Stoned Out Loud tend to agree. An escalating cycle of exploits- they seed our p2p servers ("our" meaning "We The People..."), We hose their webserver...I mean, c'mon. As Rodney King so succinctly put it, "Can't we all just get along, now?" Sheesh.
But another side of me (personally) regards the tactics which the Industries (yes, plural, look at the membership roster of the WTO (World Trade Organisation)) are employing to stave off Cultural (and cyberCultural) evolution along it's natural path, and umm, yeah, this is a war. But let us not replace physical violence and disinformation/misinformation tactics with cyber violence and the like. Congress needs to get serious about realising that this is a new world order, and that they had damn well better side with the People, and not their corporate donors / sponsors. The alternative, if they do not, is that corporations will lose their fictitious standing as Legal Persons.
This is a personal opinion, but an informed one. The violence done to Individual Rights and Property Rights and Intellectual Property Rights, and to simple Human Dignity by "the Law" in the name of protecting the legal sanction of corporation as a "Person" is growing more indefensable every second. It's a doctrine of Law that has seen it's time come, and go.
Harumph. Sermon Over: Go now, and Sin no more. (D'oh! There I go again.)
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society "is a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development," according to their site's home page. Greplaw is their excellent discussion site for issues relating to "Geeks. Laws. Everything in Between.", and is a forum operated with slashcode. So if You go there and get that eerie feeling of deja vu, it's because You may have been to Slashdot.org before.
There are some excellent resources there. Recommended.
Online Democracy is proceeding apace. (I registered the trade name EDEN - Electronic Democracy Now in the town of East Lyme in the village of Niantic, Connecticut back in 1978 or 79, right when I got out of the Service. (grin))
You know, Jim Morrison said on the "Soft Parade" album, "You Cannot Petition the Lord with Prayer!"Even so, we sure as hell can petition the United States government for redress of our grievances and harms done or contemplated to be done, like the RIAA's sponsored legislation to make it legal for the big Record and Movie companies to attack p2p (peer-to-peer) networks like Kazaa and Morpheus and Gnutella, or to seed them with bogus mp3's, as we reported the other day. That's the great thing about having the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution. We don't have to put up with such foolishness. Now, there's a new tool to use
For example, the Government of the United States of America wants to put Spyware/Policeware on everyone's Personal Computer system. There is a petition there to oppose it. I signed it.
Once You sign, You can give a few email addresses of Your Friends whom You think might also like to sign. Then it sends them an email like this (I changed the greeting to "Yo Homies!):
------------ Yo, Homies,
I have just read and signed the online petition:
"Oppose the SSSCA (government policeware on your PC)" hosted on the web by PetitionOnline.com, the free online petition service, at:
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/SSSCA/
I personally agree with what this petition says, and I think you might agree, too. If you can spare a moment, please take a look, and consider signing yourself.
