Never been one to let the carrier drop

Okay, so, apparently we have a largish number of lawsuits and laws being passed to attempt to turn back the tide.

Memo to Hollywood & the Labels: You lost. Go die quietly, or come up with a game plan that doesn’t involve
a: Trying to make peer to peer file sharing illegal
b: trying to make it illegal for me to download copies of songs that I already own the CD of and the CD has become unreadable
c: Trying to render hundreds of thousands of already existing hardware MP3 playback devices obsolete

If you keep pissing us (i.e. the hackers and coders of the world) off, we’re likely to come up with things you’ll like even less than the current status quo. So just accept that piracy technology has existed for many years, some people are going to pirate and some are going to buy licenses.. and we don’t need billion-dollar indutries deciding who the next ‘in’ musicians are going to be.

I’m a recording artist, and I *cheer* every time your profit-hungry machine falls another notch. I won’t miss the labels at all.

You can’t stop us. You can’t even *find* us. We will build wireless networks. We will lay our own fiber. We will do whatever it takes to keep this ball rolling, and to free the music and movies of the world from unreliable mediums. To ensure that once you buy a movie, you have it for life, not just until some very unreliable storage medium wears out. To ensure that there is no such thing as a song going ‘out of print’.

As far as the ‘broadcast flag’ – attempts to use weak technological solutions never work. You can’t stop us from building things, you can’t stop us from buying things.

As far as children downloading porn.. that’s one of the things I’ve loved about the internet ever since I was a child. It sends a clear message: ‘We all enjoy this. Don’t be ashamed of it’. A message that it’s high time the members of the human family got. And if the net enables young, impressionable kids to control what content they see instead of having parts of the world censored by their parents.. YEEHAAAA!

I’m sure my parents would have not liked me to have access to the usenet groups that taught me I wasn’t ‘really sick’, but just a little different. Nonetheless, access to those groups has helped me be considerably less ashamed of who I am, and I think the world is better off for that. These same parents would probably like to be allowed to dictate their children’s sexual orientations – well, guess what, the world doesn’t work that way. So let’s all be *grateful* for the ability of children to download porn – face it, either they won’t be interested, or they’ll be satisfying a curiosity they already have. Children *aren’t stupid*. They lack experience, but they have the most intelligence they ever will [because they haven’t yet been sold by the world at large on the beauties of alchohol, a fine organic poison]

Personally, I hope that the children get it better than we do, and any information that helps them figure out the human condition and do a better job of being human – should be theirs. I would love to see the children solve the jealousy problem (if they’re all poly, and make it work happily, I’ll be envious)

I don’t know what the next generation will go through in terms of learning experiences before they take the helm.. but if my life is any indication to date, probably a lot of difficult things.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 25th, 2005 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.