waider

I only have a 256kbit uplink and I'd rather not flood it...

This is the pre-movie anti-piracy thing I mentioned some time ago that, well, I really like the music. And I think it would be awesome if someone on the intarwebs were to do something with it. Also terribly ironic. So, you know, once you've leeched it off my petty website you can fling it far and wide and maybe someone out there will do something entertaining with it. Or you can just grab it and listen to the music, because I think it's great.

From c|net's RSS feed right now:

MPAA could learn from RIAA
The film industry should learn to deal with piracy the way the recording industry is--by making legal means of getting movies easier and cheaper. (link)

Hmm. Could've fooled me. I thought the RIAA was all about issuing individual lawsuits, breaking standards in an attempt to prevent disk copying, lobbying congress to shut down peer-to-peer technology...

Keith Winstein, among other things the author of a six-line program to circumvent CSS, got to talk to Jack Valenti (MPAA head, now retired, I believe) and Rich Taylor (the MPAA's PR guy) for all of ten minutes, and then wrote up some excerpts of the conversation for The Tech. It is not, as BoingBoing bills it, Winstein running circles around Valenti. It's far better explained in Winstein's opening paragraphs:

When the MPAA called to ask if I wanted to talk with [Valenti] for ten minutes last week, I finally had my chance to take a shot at reaching some tiny mutual understanding.

Cory Doctorow's unhelpful commentary (titled "MIT makes Jack Valenti look like an idiot") is exactly the sort of stupidity that prevents mutual understanding from being reached, and Doctorow unfortunately engages in this childish "COPYRIGHT BAD!" stance every time there's a copyright-related issue in BoingBoing. Personally, I'm not in favour of the more draconian copyright measures, such as the DMCA, CSS, and the Broadcast Flag, particularly when they are effectively treating all consumers as criminals. To use Jack Valenti's own reasoning: by implementing something like the Broadcast Flag, you're legislating against the minority who wish to break the law. And "[y]ou can't have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved. You can't do it that way." I'd love to see more of Winstein's interview, and more to the point I'd like to actually see Valenti & co. sit down with a group of people like Winstein - intelligent, and seeking openness, but not the sort of bible-thumping sloganeer frequently found in the "Information Wants To Be Free!" ranks - and have them bash out these issues a bit more.

You know, there's a fair-sized effort by many people to overturn the view that all us geek types are a bunch of freeloading pirates doing our damndest to rip off the MPAA, RIAA, and anyone else whose stuff we can get into digital format. And then the morons at Wired go and produce a page like this. Idiots.