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The music industry’s pie rats strike back

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My kids are big Richard Scarry fans, and one of their favorite books is a little paperback titled “Pie Rats Ahoy!” (Yes, these successors to Captain Hook are tiny rats who steal a pie from the seafaring hero.)

I thought of that punning title as I read the latest batch of headlines from the file-swapping wars. The RIAA and its member labels have now taken the final step (one I predicted nearly four years ago, as I recalled here) of declaring all-out war on the music fans who are their own best customers — and who have in recent years taken to file trading en masse because of the music industry’s price gouging and its pathetic reluctance to adapt to new technology.

As the RIAA slaps lawsuits on 12-year-old girls, while industry executives admit to the Wall Street Journal that they are unable to keep their own kids from trading MP3s, one of the most ludicrous figures being tossed around is the amount that the industry has supposedly lost thanks to piracy. A conservative guess by an analyst in the New York Times placed this number at $750 million. Music industry lobbyists have put the number in the billions.

These numbers are reminiscent of the old software-industry complaints about software piracy: They assume that each illegal copy of a program or a music file represents the loss of a sale — that if the alternative of piracy were not available, most or all of the pirated stuff would have been bought fair and square at full price. (By this logic, every time Free Republic members rip off Salon Premium articles and post them on their site, Salon could claim that every single Freeper reading them represents a loss of a $35 subscription fee.)

This is self-serving nonsense. First of all, it treats the digital realm — in which each additional copy costs essentially nothing to make and does not limit the original’s availability to its owner — as if it were the physical realm, where copying carries costs and stealing involves depriving the original owner of his goods. Even more importantly, it ignores the essentially transitory nature of much or most file-sharing — which music lovers use to sample music, to see whether they like it, and frequently just to listen once or a handful of times. Each download does not and cannot represent a lost sale. But the record labels have an incentive to artificially overstate the size of the pie-slice that online piracy has cut out, and they have done so with all the scurrying zeal — and comical ineffectiveness — of Richard Scarry’s rats.

I get all my online music these days legally from the great Emusic service. But back in the days of Napster I used the software to listen to bands I’d heard about and see whether I liked them. I bought more CDs as a result. This year for the first time in my life I have consciously decided to cut my music purchases way back. I won’t support the pie rats!

Upcoming events

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I’ll be out and about over the next few weeks:

On Thursday, Sept. 11 (!), I’m talking on a panel at Seybold on the effects of blogging on the publishing industry. It’s at 4:30 p.m. at the Moscone Center.

On Sunday, Sept. 14, I am again getting on stage with my friend Josh Kornbluth, whose wonderfully funny and moving show, “Love and Taxes,” is now playing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Every Sunday during the run of his show Josh has hosted these free conversations about tax policy. (At Berkeley Rep I believe the events are free to anyone who has a ticket stub from any performance of the show.) The last one I did, back in July at the Magic Theatre, with Leo Martinez of the Hastings College of Law, was extremely interesting. Josh’s new brainstorm is to start a movement — relating to his show’s insight that the taxes we pay actually support things that we need — under the banner “I. R. Us!” He’s even selling buttons.

On Saturday, Oct. 4, I’ll be part of a panel at BloggerCon, at Harvard Law School, along with Josh Marshall, Glenn Reynolds and Ed Cone, talking about blogging and journalism.

The morning after the eve of destruction

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This end-of-summer pause, as the headlines fly about the latest bombing attack in Iraq, is an appropriate occasion to revisit my “Eve of Destruction” post, which occasioned so much comment back in March. In particular, I look back at my summary of Thomas Powers’ prescient prediction of the likely course of events following from a U.S. invasion of Iraq: “…a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes.”

So here we are. The daily death of American soldiers has now become so commonplace it does not merit much coverage. The postwar period has now cost more lives than the active war. I trust that the reader who mocked my use of the phrase “sitting ducks” is now reconsidering his tone; what other phrase makes sense? Iraqi democracy does not seem in the offing in the short or medium term. We are incapable of protecting moderate Iraqis from extremists; we are incapable of protecting our own troops from random assault. Major bombings, like that of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad or today’s atrocity at the Najaf mosque, are on the rise.

Is it more money that we need? Since the Bush administration has made cutting taxes its top priority, it refuses even to admit that any Iraq-related expenses should be included in its budget forecasts. Is it more troops that we need?
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld insist that that’s not the problem. We should just sit tight and let them handle it. They Have A Plan. I guess they’re just not sharing it with us. Or with our allies. Or with the Iraqis.

There’s a limited set of possibilities here: Either the government has no strategy at all; or it has one that is not working; or it has one that is so devious or immoral or inexplicable that it cannot reveal it to its own citizens.

There is a monstrous credibility gap here — yes, the phrase is from the Vietnam era, the last time the U.S. government undertook to justify a chronically deteriorating military situation by making increasingly incredible statements. It took years for the press and the public to cotton to the credibility gap then; this time around, we ought to be a little more savvy.

Getting creative with RCS

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“Filchyboy” has just concluded a kind of performance art on the rcs.salon.com server, sending its “updates” page a series of URLs and linkwords that form a poem. Each line links to a page on his server.

If you find this interesting, check it out now — this is like Zen sand art, it’ll disappear as other people update their blogs and send the poem down the page… The poem doesn’t do that much for me, but it’s a neat little trick, and I have always admired the Brian Eno approach of using technology in ways that were not intended or imagined by its inventors.

Unclear on the concept

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One of the motivating notions of the blogging movement is the idea that blogs put individuals — including business executives — directly in touch with one another, bypassing layers of middle-people. That’s the idea, anyway. Or you can hire a PR person to send email to bloggers saying that you “read their blogs regularly” and “wonder if they’d be open” to you “posting an opinion.”

Both Mitch Kapor of the Open Source Applications Foundation and Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe — along with who knows how many other bloggers (not me, though!) — were recently on the receiving end of such an email. Clueless PR efforts are an ineradicable fact of life, and pointing out that said executive would have served himself far more effectively by popping these bloggers a quick email of his own — or posting comments on their sites himself — isn’t going to change the entrenched business practice of “have my secretary/PR person/other flunky do it for me.”

What’s most amusing about this incident is that Kapor, in a gentlemanly way, hid the identity of both the executive and the PR firm in question — but others in the comments to his post took key phrases from the PR letter and used Google to nail down exactly who exec in question seems to be.

Big Red

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Every now and then, very rarely, we encounter a story that is simply all good news. Such was this bit from yesterday’s New York Times, reporting on a paper that is supposed to be online in Nature (but I couldn’t find it just now). The online headline — “Study Spurs Hope of Finding Way to Increase Human Life” — lacks the critical piece of information that readers of the paper newspaper were treated to in the sub-headline: “Chemical Found in Wine May Hold the Key.”

Not just wine — red wine. The chemical, resveratrol, is found in higher quantities in pinot noir than in cabernet sauvignon (Burgundy devotees can rejoice), and grapes grown in more “difficult” circumstances — colder, more trying climates — seem to have more of it than grapes that had an easier time of it.

This news, of course, fits in with other research on the so-called “French Paradox” (low rates of coronary heart disease in European and Mediterranean cultures whose cuisine isn’t necessarily low fat or low cholesterol). It is also simply cause for celebration for those of us who like our glass or two of wine with dinner. In vino, veritas — and extra years, too.

Spam deconstruction contest

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This is cool: Mark Hoback of Fried Green Al-Qaedas is sponsoring a “Spam Deconstruction Contest” — and the judge is none other than Bill Griffith, the amazing creator of Zippy the Pinhead. (If there is a character anywhere well-suited to the appreciation of the finer points of spam, it would be Zippy.) Entries are due Aug. 26. Full info here. Prizes, too.

When I went to work for the old San Francisco Examiner back in 1986, I worried a bit about the prospect of connecting my career with a Hearst paper. What helped sell me on the Examiner was that it ran Zippy every day — at that time (and perhaps still?) a rarity among U.S. dailies.

Outlook is bleak

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Where do you want to go today? Anywhere but Outlook!

I got back last night from a two-day vacation to over 2000 emails in my inbox. Over 1300 were spams correctly tagged as such by our server’s Spam Assassin. Of the remaining mail, several hundred were” real” messages, and another several hundred were debris resulting from the latest round of Outlook viruses.

The good news is that that debris is coming to me as the result of *other* people’s being infected by the virus and trying to send mail forged under one of my (or Salon’s) addresses. I get the bouncebacks because of that forgery. But I don’t worry about being infected myself because (a) of course I never click on spam attachments — most spam never gets opened or even seen; and (b) I don’t ever go near Microsoft e-mail software.

Outlook is a joke. No sane computer user today should use it. If your company makes you use it, go to your CEO and explain how much time and money his company is losing by using it. I use Eudora; there are several other good non-Microsoft products depending on what platform you’re on. Both Mozilla and the Open Source Applications Foundation are developing or already offer free e-mail clients as well.

Kevin Werbach writes, “Either email is broken, Microsoft’s email software is broken, or those two statements are the same.” I don’t believe they’re the same at all. Microsoft email is broken, and it’s time for people to wake up and move on.

Blaster on stun

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Done patching your Windows system against the Blaster worm? Then you’ll have the time to read this piece from CSO Online: “Patch and Pray.” It uses the saga of the Microsoft SQL Server “Slammer” worm from last winter to explore why and how the whole patching process has gone astray.

  As the volume and complexity of software increases, so does the volume and complexity of patches. The problem with this, says SEI’s Hernan, is that there’s nothing standard about the patch infrastructure or managing the onslaught of patches…

There are two emerging and opposite patch philosophies: Either patch more, or patch less.

Vendors in the Patch More school have, almost overnight, created an entirely new class of software called patch management software. The term means different things to different people (already one vendor has concocted a spinoff, “virtual patch management”), but in general, PM automates the process of finding, downloading and applying patches. Patch More adherents believe patching isn’t the problem, but that manual patching is….

The Patch Less constituency is best represented by Peter Tippett, vice chairman and CTO of TruSecure. Tippett is fanatical about patching’s failure. Based on 12 years of actuarial data, he says that only about 2 percent of vulnerabilities result in attacks. Therefore, most patches aren’t worth applying. In risk management terms, they’re at best superfluous and, at worst, a significant additional risk.

Oh yes, this is the year after Bill Gates declared the crash “Trustworthy Computing” initative.