Stupid Stupid Stupid - #3 of a series

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gets caught issuing fraudulent DMCA takedown notices (including one for a work issued under a Creative Commons license).

Oh, now they're saying they weren't real notices.

Let's see if we can get one for "our very own"!
Asimov Asimov Asimov Asimov Asimov

I'm not one of those "information wants to be free" absolutists. Creators have the right to make money from their works. But the present "intellectual property" regime is far too loaded in favor of the corporations that make up the Content Cartel.

Too bad Bill Quick is on vacation. I'd bet he'd have some interesting thoughts.

Oh, and by the way guys, this post is Copyright © 2007, Old Grouch.
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More:

• Post and discussion at Making Light.
  
• The Stupidity of Worrying About Piracy, an article by John Scalzi, who notes

  ...today is the last day to get SFWA dues in, and I have to decide whether I want to bother. This isn't helping any.

• Nicely ironic comment at Slashdot by "Wordsmith"
  

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 21:38:00 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Your tax dollars at work - 2

Remember that fiber-to-the-home high speed data service that we were promised "by the year 2000?"

All 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia contracted with their local telecommunication utilities for the build-out of fiber and hybrid fiber-coax networks intended to bring bidirectional digital video service to millions of homes by the year 2000. The Telecom Act set the mandate but, as it works with phone companies, the details were left to the states. Fifty-one plans were laid and 51 plans failed.

...I find it hard to remember any company or industry segment ever going zero for 51. This is a failure rate so amazing that any statistician would question the motives of those even entering such an endeavor. Did they actually expect to succeed? Or did they actually expect to fail? We may never know and it probably doesn't even matter, but one thing is sure: they expected to be paid and they were.

Over the decade from 1994-2004 the major telephone companies profited from higher phone rates paid by all of us, accelerated depreciation on their networks, and direct tax credits an average of $2,000 per subscriber for which the companies delivered precisely nothing in terms of service to customers. That's $200 billion with nothing to be shown for it.
 -- Robert Cringely

In my "major metropolitan" location there's no DSL (lines too old/too long), and fiber is nowhere in the future. I think I'd like my $2000 back. Then I could use it for something useful, like buying beer.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 19:42:35 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Your tax dollars at work

This time, we're sending neoprohibitionist apparatchiks to a California resort for sun and fun!

Come next January when the top is up on my Mustang and I am shoveling my driveway, I will be warm in the knowledge that at least some of my federal tax dollars will be used to allow members of anti-alcohol groups to sun themselves at the Bahia Resort hotel in Mission Bay, Calif.
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Using a federal grant, the California Council on Alcohol Policy will hold a nice seminar for officials from tax-exempt groups that lobby the California legislature.

And what do you suppose they lobby the legislature for?

“This conference series has aided the development of a number of national and international initiatives, including … excise tax increase,” according to the conference website...

In its September 2003 report, the federally funded Institute of Medicine recommended raising alcohol excise taxes, stating that “top priority should be given to raising beer taxes.”

Gee, if business was doing this, it'd be called astroturfing.  But when our Betters in the bureaucracy do it, it's "for our own good."  Right.
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Quotes and info from Don Surber

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 15:27:35 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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When the lawyers take over your company

Johnson & Johnson, the health-products giant that uses a red cross as its trademark, sued the American Red Cross on Wednesday, demanding that the charity halt the use of the red cross symbol on products it sells to the public.

Johnson & Johnson said it has had exclusive rights to use the trademark on certain commercial products — including bandages and first-aid cream — for more than 100 years. -- AP Story, via International Herald-Tribune

Yes, you're supposed to protect your trademark. But there's absolutely no way J&J can achieve anything other than a Phyrric victory here. The public will punish them for their foolishness.

Where the hell was the board of directors?
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Via Slashdot

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 15:21:50 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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God forbid we might, y'know, be winning or something

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said Monday that a strongly positive report on progress on Iraq by Army Gen. David Petraeus likely would split Democrats in the House and impede his party's efforts to press for a timetable to end the war...

Many Democrats have anticipated that, at best, Petraeus and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker would present a mixed analysis of the success of the current troop surge strategy, given continued violence in Baghdad. But of late there have been signs that the commander of U.S. forces might be preparing something more generally positive. Clyburn said that would be "a real big problem for us." -- Washington Post

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 13:00:24 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Where the money is

Next time some university-type starts inveighing against "the rich," remember this:

Colleges and universities are our nation’s richest — and possibly most miserly — “nonprofits.”

[They] are sitting on a fortune in tax-free funds, and sharing almost none of it. Higher education endowment assets alone total over $340 billion. Sixty-two institutions boast endowments over $1 billion. Harvard and Yale top the list with endowments so massive, $28 billion and $18 billion respectively, that they exceed the general operating funds for the states in which they reside. It’s not just elite private institutions that do this; four public universities have endowments that rank among the nation’s top 10...

These endowments tower over their peers throughout the nonprofit world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is America’s wealthiest museum. But the Met’s $2 billion endowment is bested by no less than 26 academic institutions, including the University of Minnesota, Washington University in St. Louis, and Emory. Indeed, the total worth of the top 25 college and university endowments is $11 billion greater than the combined assets of their equivalently ranked private foundations — including Gates, Ford and Rockefeller...

A recent survey of 765 colleges and universities found they are spending 4.2 percent of their endowments’ value each year. Meanwhile, private foundations — which are legally required to spend at least 5 percent of their value annually — average 7 percent spending. -- Lynne Munson, Inside Higher Ed

Many educational institutions (and their endowments) pay no taxes whatever at the municipal level, creating a tremendous negative impact on their host communities.  This is compounded as endowments buy up campus-adjacent properties "for future expansion," then turn around and rent them out in competition with tax-paying landlords.

Perhaps it's time for some adjustments.
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Article linked by Glenn

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 15:42:01 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Let a hundred complaints bloom!

BlogCritics commentator John Bambenek has filed a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint against Kos Media, LLC., better known as DailyKos.com, in an attempt to get the site declared a political committee and therefore subject to FEC rules. Glenn Reynolds and David Freddoso don't like the idea, on free speech grounds.

As for me, myself, personally, my opinion parallels that of Volokh Conspiracy commenter "PatHMV's" thought about the federally-mandated 21-year drinking age:

This is probably a law which should be strictly and harshly enforced, so that it will be repealed more quickly. -- comment on: "Parents Guilty for Permitting Drinking In Their Home"

Let a hundred complaints bloom, let a hundred enforcement actions flower: If securing free speech means we'll have to re-pass the 1st Amendment with "...and we REALLY mean it this time!" appended, the sooner we find out, and get started, the better.
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Note 070724 17:03: Edited 2nd para to make it clear that PatHMV's opinion was only about 21-year drinking age, and not about FEC regulations. I knew what I wanted to say, just couldn't get the words down!

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 15:16:15 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Not sacrifice, but power

After posting this quote:

Chris Davies, a British member of the European Parliament, is proposing one of the most-extreme measures -- a prohibition on any car that goes faster than 162 kilometers (101 miles) an hour, a speed that everything from the humble Honda Civic on up can exceed. He ridiculed fast cars as “boys' toys.”

Glenn Reynolds asks:

Is it climate-protection, or social engineering? As I've said before, the hairshirt approach to environmentalism is a mistake, but some people can't resist it -- because for them, the hairshirt isn't a bug, but a feature.

But you can bet that Chris Davies and his friends in the номенклату́ра^[1] won't be among those who wind up wearing hair shirts. For Mr. Davies and those like him, it's all about getting jollies by issuing the decrees that control other people's lives. (And I count Mr. Davies a member of that group on the prima facie evidence that he is a MEP. Q.E.D.)
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^[1] in the Djilas sense. See also Live Earth carbon footprint, private jets for Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore's electric bill, etc., etc.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 15:55:21 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Welcome to Boston, Senators. Have some tea!

(O.G. scribbles a few notes about What Happened and What It All Means. Links added and grammar & spelling corrected as time permits.)

• Another Reagan moment? Breakdown of old political alliances. 20 years ago, who would have predicted the AFofL-CIO and National Review on the same side of a domestic issue! (Or any Republican Presidential candidate and Ted Kennedy.)
  
• Reaction much bigger than just the conservatives. Conservatives + talk radio listeners + other malcontents = still not enough callers to crash the Senate's switchboard. Where'd everybody come from? Who are they? (Political: Is this a coalition looking for leadership? Could it elect a president?)
  
• Bloggers.triumphant, justifiably. They blew the whistle on the Memorial weekend sneak-through, then provided the support (analysis, encouragement, expertise, linkage) to make the opposition fly. Mad props for beating out the D.C. establishment, but beware overreaching-- blogs didn't create the issue or the coalition that opposed it (see above), and the next issue will be different.
• Again, bloggers and talkers grabbed control of the terms of debate (inside the proponents' and the MSM's decision cycle, c.f. Rathergate). Usual accusations of "racism", attempts to define issue as opposition to ALL immigration, failed miserably. Can anything overcome the Army of Davids? (Effectively infinite manpower and infinite knowledge.) Next political contest: Blogs -vs- blogs, with the MSM three news cycles behind?
• With no question about the polling data, MSM smelled the coffee before the Senate did. Noted with amazement a couple of "bad consequences of illegal immigrants" analysis pieces on CNN Monday night. Also hysteria on WSJ's editorial page ("Immigration and the GOP") yesterday.  Also overnight articles indicating the bill was in trouble.
  
• How much did Kaus's called-for videos scare the politicians? Will the next McFeingold require shutting down the net 30 days before elections?
  
• Senate's ugly legislative process dragged into daylight. People knew it was there, but still didn't like what they saw. Multi-hundred-page bills voted on before they were even written, let alone read?
  
• Greater sophistication of the discussion: When earmarks were discovered in the bill, everybody already understood the issue. (And said, "Oh look, there's one for Ted Stevens, as usual!")
  
• One more step in a continuing process. Most presidents since Nixon have run against "the mess in Washington." Most voters have exempted "my delegation" from the overall mess. Will this change things?
  
• New paradigm: Internet-organized ad-hoc national efforts to defeat particular congresscritters. Would a similar campaign elect anybody?
• Risk-rewards ratio for the Republicans still seems way off. WTH were they thinking?
• Sen. DeMint: “When the U.S. Senate brought the Amnesty bill back up this week, they declared war on the American people.” Welcome to Boston, Senators. How would you like your tea?
• Somebody called the process "very European," and not in a flattering way. Insty calls 'em "inhabitants of Incumbistan."
• Next battle the People vs The Establishment? 1968 Redux? Liberals wanted "another Viet Nam."  Now they're the establishment. (Be careful what you wish for!)

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 23:52:01 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Your customer is... your enemy?

Looks like Big Music is right:

"The music industry is one of the greatest victims of consumer anger. Much of the illegal music downloading that takes place isn't done just because the music is free but rather because stealing music costs "the suits" money . In research we did for the entertainment industry, it became clear that music fans resent company executives for making too much money for themselves, too much profit for the corporations, and pampering and overpaying the "talent," and the way they express this anger is to download illegally to punish the industry." -- Frank Luntz, Words That Work

I can't believe that "stickin' it to the man" is the primary reason that most people download music-- it sounds too much like what I used to hear from shoplifting hippies back in the 1960s. Still, it's unsurprising that it's offered as a reason (or excuse), especially given the increased exposure of the industry's business practices. And that says something about the public's attitude toward the music industry.

Which should be a worry to Big Music's stockholders. In fact, there are a lot of stockholders who should be worried: Those who hold stock in communications companies whose officers want to monitor internet communications. Those with money in cable TV companies that try to weasel out of contracts. Or whose companies make inkjet printers that lie to users about how much ink is left. Or engage in other unethical (if not illegal) deceptive practices.

Because if you treat your customer like an enemy, sooner or later he'll probably reciprocate.
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The opening quote was featured in a post by Mark Ramsey, who's whistling past the graveyard: He hopes Big Radio might be spared from customer resentment because "Big Radio is free."

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 16:04:39 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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