This is pretty amazing, and galling. A jury in Minnesota (Motto: “We’re the New Montana”) decided that a woman they claimed pirated music must the RIAA $9,250 per song, for a total of $222,000.

Among the amazing aspects of this case:

• The RIAA did not have to prove that the defendant illegally downloaded any music
• The RIAA did not have to prove that the defendant was the person who pirated the music
• The RIAA did not have to prove that anyone downloaded the music, only that it was available for download

The RIAA in the past has said that each downloaded song should be penalized with $750, although they graciously accept $3000 quickie settlements from people they send semi-random threats to. Where the jury came up with $9,250 is a mystery. The jury refused to talk to the press as they left.

Either the defense lawyer was incompetent, or the judge was, or the jury was stupid. Or maybe a mix of all three. This is pretty astonishing. Needless to say, it was an easy case for the RIAA to win considering all of its aspects (especially the jury instructions), and the RIAA will doubtlessly try to apply the victory prejudicially over all of its future litigation actions, no matter what the differences.

To give you a picture of what the jury apparently bought into, Sony BMG lawyer Jennifer Pariser claimed that even ripping a music CD to your computer or making a backup copy was stealing, despite the fact that the law says the exact opposite. The RIAA also laid out all of their usual “we’re losing billions of dollars” fiction which has been repudiated by any research not paid for by the RIAA.

The RIAA also played dirty by claiming that the defendant had her hard drive replaced to destroy evidence, despite the fact that the replacement took place before the RIAA first contacted her.

I don’t know. Maybe the defendant was just completely unbelievable in her testimony. Maybe the plaintiffs put their massive legal resources to work and razzle-dazzled the courtroom.

The end result is, thanks to this jury, the RIAA is now completely emboldened, and now has a court-established precedent that works in its favor. The only hope is that this whole case can be appealed and won on appeal, based upon the questionable jury instructions–the judge told the jury that it was not necessary to find that the defendant had actually committed the infringement that she was being sued for.

One could call that a wee bit contentious.

After having skipped out of Apple’s iTunes Store, NBC seems to be flailing about a bit. They signed on to sell their shows on Amazon.com’s video sales service, and now have announced another “free” download service that is ad- and DRM-laden.

The Amazon.com Unbox service seems to be the most reasonable; it allows for more flexible pricing, which the networks of course desire. However, it is also restricted; it requires Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” DRM software–something also desired by NBC and other content providers–which pretty drastically limits viewing abilities. You can’t play the video unless you’re running Windows or opt for the TiVo option. The video cannot be played on iPods or even Zunes.

The “NBC Direct” route is set up to be a disaster. Not only is it so heavily restricted that you can only play it on NBC’s proprietary software and can’t use it on anything but a Windows PC, but it carries ads which cannot be skipped. Sure, it’s free, but so long as you’re allowing ads into it, why be so stupid as to watch it on NBC’s player where you can’t skip them? Why not just tape or TiVo the show? The “NBC Direct” idea is completely nonsensical.

Part of the reason NBC left Apple was over pricing. Apple claims NBC wanted to charge as high as $5, and other reports suggest that Apple wanted to lower the price on all TV shows to $1. Probably the NBC suggestion of $5, if it happened, was less a serious proposal and more an idea thrown out there. And I can certainly see content providers wanting to set their own prices.

The thing is, Steve Jobs is no idiot, and NBC would be well-advised to listen to him. Sure, he gets money from iPod sales, demands large profit margins for his own products, and does not lose money if the margin on TV shows sold on the iTS is slashed. I will give you all of those.

Nevertheless, Jobs is one of the best marketers around, and he stands to profit by selling more and more and more of NBC’s content. And more often than most people in the business, Jobs has been right. Case in point: music sales on the iTS. It’s wildly successful. But remember how the music labels had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into allowing for $1 song sales and no tiered pricing? Well, the iTS has been a rousing success, having sold more than 3 billion tracks in 4 years–over half of which sales occurred in the last one year–capturing 88% of the music download market, becoming one of the biggest outlets for music sales.

Like I said, Jobs is not an idiot. And selling TV shows for $1 apiece is similarly very astute. A lot of people have downloaded TV shows at the $2 price, but that can be sustained for only so long and at only so high a rate. Most people will begin to realize that at the end of a season of shows, they have only the shows to own, and they have shelled out between $40 to $48, depending on how many episodes there are in a season. In the meantime, the networks release the DVD set very soon after the TV broadcast ends, and one can own the whole season at higher quality, with all kinds of extras an add-ons, for less money. Payment for one is not transferable to another–you can’t apply the $46 you paid for season 1 of Heroes to the $40 price of the DVD box set. And if you want to watch the show in your iPod or other handheld player, you are limited to downloading via BitTorrent or another service, though you might have to process the file to squeeze it into a format the player can handle.

Yes, that fits nicely with the network paradigm of making viewers pay multiple times for the same content. But enough viewers are not stupid enough to make this a big seller. Jobs has the right idea: price the bare-bones, lower-quality version for lower, and people might go for the double-purchase a lot more easily. After all, $23 doesn’t seem quite so bad a price to pay for having immediate, portable, commercial-free access to a whole season of shows while you’re waiting for the feature-rich, expanded DVD box set to be released. A lot more people would go for that, and NBC would make a lot more money. In the meantime, a lot more people are instead turning to BitTorrent.

Here’s an even more radical idea: make the downloaded versions into the equivalent of a boxed DVD set. Offer the extra versions as extra downloads included in the price of a season pass. You can raise the price because you are essentially selling the DVD box set plus the ability to get it delivered a lot earlier, as the episodes air. Instead of $40 for the box set, sell the season pass equivalent for $50. That would represent a lower profit margin, but I bet increased sales would make up for it–and you would cut out the crowd who only buy one or the other but not both.

But here’s the biggest idea: drop the frakking DRM. Jobs was dead right earlier this year when he said that DRM was stupid. It is. It does not stop piracy one bit–in fact, it encourages piracy. Why? Because if you pay for the video, you have all these restrictions and roadblocks and limitations; if you download it for free, there is absolutely no restriction on what you can do with the file. DRM does not even slow pirates down, and it punishes paying customers. Why NBC and other content providers fail to see this glaringly obvious point is beyond me. Remove the DRM, and sales will rise, piracy will suffer. What is with these idiots at the studios?

In the meantime, if you aren’t in the BitTorrent crowd, expect to pay higher prices multiple times, and face higher obstacles to viewing where and when and how you like.

Last month, I discovered how a web host could come close to shutting you down because your site uses more server resources than it is supposed to. In fact, that wasn’t my doing–it was a combination of hotlinkers, image search engines, and spammers all hitting my site at once. But at least the web host contacted me with specific guidelines about what was going on, what levels of use were acceptable, and general guidelines as to how to achieve those goals.

It seems that in the U.S., the Telecoms are starting to crack down on users for using their Internet connections “too much.” The punch line: they won’t tell customers how much “too much” is.

Comcast has punished some transgressors by cutting off their Internet service, arguing that excessive downloaders hog Internet capacity and slow down the network for other customers. The company declines to reveal its download limits.

“You have no way of knowing how much is too much,” said Sandra Spalletta of Rockville, whose Internet service was suspended in March after Comcast sent her a letter warning that she and her teenage son were using too much bandwidth. They cut back on downloads but were still disconnected. She said the company would not tell her how to monitor their bandwidth use in order to comply with the limits.

“You want to think you can rely on your home Internet service and not wake up one morning to find it turned off,” said Spalletta, who filed a complaint with the Montgomery County Office of Cable and Communication Services. “I thought it was unlimited service.”

It looks like we’re talking about Internet over cable TV lines, where bandwidth is shared between many homes in a neighborhood. A few users could potentially be using huge amounts of bandwidth and spoiling things for their neighbors.

However, the real crock here is that Comcast is refusing to specify what the bandwidth limits are. The article does not state what Comcast advertises when it sells the product, or what is specified in contracts about bandwidth use. But they do note:

Companies have argued that if strict limits were disclosed, customers would use as much capacity as possible without tipping the scale, causing networks to slow to a crawl.

Frankly, I find that hard to believe. Companies almost always advertise a certain speed for their service, and cable companies are well-known for advertising limits far beyond what can reasonably be accessed–you sign up for a service touted to be 10 Mbps, but find you’re not able to get better than 1 Mbps.

But not specifying the cutoff point, where you could lose your service entirely? Imagine that the electric company calls you and tells you, “you’re using too much electricity; stop that or we’ll shut your power off.” And when you ask how much you should cut or how to do it, they say they can’t tell you. What are you supposed to do? The only way to be safe is to almost stop using power except for the bare essentials.

I am not a computer engineer, but I imagine that it would not be very difficult or expensive to install a bandwidth choker in homes that abused bandwidth limits. After all, there are Ethernet hubs which cut off at 10 Mbps, and they can probably be produced for very cheap–less than $10, I imagine. There must be even simpler ways of restricting bandwidth–the 10BASE-T Ethernet hub is simply an example that it can be done. So why doesn’t Comcast do this instead of cutting people off?

Probably because it’s easier, and because they can.

Not to mention that some years back, Comcast and the others promised everyone high-speed, fiber-optic networks in exchange for raising their rates. We said yes, they raised their rates… and now they not only don’t have those promised networks, but they are actually cutting off customers’ service for using more than an unspecified amount of bandwidth.

These are the people we’re supposed to “trust” by abolishing Net Neutrality and giving them complete control over our Internet experience. Yeah, good idea.

Net Neutrality is an utter necessity for the Internet. It essentially says, “everyone on the web is free and equal,” and keeps Telecoms from becoming despotic tyrants who can tell you what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and how much you can pay them for the privilege.

So naturally, the Telecoms want to control the INternet. There are two major dangers: first, creating classes of Internet speeds; and second, the Telecoms will be able to dictate what programs you use for accessing the Internet.

The former would mean that you will pay more and get nothing in return. Anyone who refuses to pay Telecom tolls will get tossed into the slow lane; everyone else will have to pay for the privilege of not being slowed down. You, the consumer, will have to pay more for stuff you do on the ‘Net, or pay something that you get for free today. Telecoms say “we should get paid for what we give,” but they already do. Everyone pays for bandwidth, including Amazon, Google, YouTube, and Apple. And you. The Telecoms simply want to charge you more.

The latter would mean that you won’t have perfect freedom to use the apps you want to use. It means that if you want to use Skype, but your Telecom has latched onto the idea that they can ban Skype and force you to use their app instead, they can do that. And they will charge you money for it.

Essentially, the Telecoms are saying, “Trust us! We would never do any of those things!” When, of course, those things are the only reasons to kill off Net Neutrality. Of course they’re going to do those things.

The Telecoms insist that they would never censor free speech, which might also be possible if Net Neutrality were killed off. A red herring–while some complain that this might happen, it is the least of the complaints. Few believe that the Telecoms would shut off free speech when they can make money off of it instead.

Anyway, the Democrats generally support Net Neutrality, and were instrumental in keeping Republicans from killing it off last year.

Not having the GOP in Congress to do their bidding, the Telecoms have turned to the last bastion of Republican power: the White House. And as the loyally-bought politicians that they are, they have delivered: the Bush Department of Justice has delivered an Ex Parte Finding which could have been written by the Telecoms themselves–and probably was. It makes all of their lame arguments, chief among them that Net Neutrality prevents Telecoms from charging for services, and using that money to improve services and provide new high-bandwidth connections.

Which is BS, of course–they will have absolutely no obligation at all to deliver squat in exchange for killing off Net Neutrality and essentially making the Internet their private money farm. And they won’t. Just like when they promised several years ago to improve services and provide high-bandwidth connections in exchange for raising their rates. We allowed them to raise their rates, and they blew us off when it came to improving services.

The DoJ “finding” is nothing more than pure Telecom warmed-over lies, and will result in nothing but the loss of what makes the Internet valuable.

Freedom and equality is what built the Internet and made it strong. Private Enterprise with rules and control is what we had with the “Online Services” of the early 90’s, like Prodigy and CompuServe–remember when you had to pay 25 cents per email? If that had remained the rule, do you think there would have been an Internet boom? Hell, no.

But apparently the Telecoms feel that now, people are addicted to the Internet, and they can charge anything they like and people will pay.

And the Bush administration is happy to whore for them.

Here’s a fact: we already pay full price for what we get. The Telecoms will not give us anything in exchange for Net Neutrality except price hikes. And killing off Net Neutrality is nothing short of taking a public resource and giftwrapping it for giant corporations to exploit–like those public lands we all own which are given to energy companies to mine and drill and then not even pay the miniscule pittance the politicians pretend to charge them for it.

So go to this site, find out where your representatives in Congress stand, and tell them, again, exactly where they should stand.

You may recall a few months ago when Bush’s “Freshly Stacked™” Supreme Court issued a decision that changed the way pay discrimination is treated. Up until that time, discriminatory pay was actionable for 180 days after the last occurrence; if your employer started paying you less because of your gender or color say, twenty years ago, and you just found out with the last paycheck, you could sue them. But Bush’s court re-interpreted that to mean 180 days after the initial decision was made to discriminate.

Under this new interpretation, it is virtually impossible to sue for discriminatory pay differences. It would force workers to constantly demand to see co-workers’ pay amounts, constantly checking whether there is a discrepancy, and once one is found, leaves them virtually no time to resolve the matter out of court. It even rewards employers guilty of discrimination for breaking the law for longer periods of time–ironically, if an employer can come before the court and say that they violated this person’s rights for longer than 180 days, they get off scot-free. It also encourages employers to create hostile, segregated, and intimidating environments to keep workers from discussing their pay.

The message was clear: employers got a huge green light to pay workers differently based upon sex, color, or whatever other distinction they saw fit.

This was argued as being an oversight in the creation of the original law; it would be hard to actually approve of discrimination, but hey, that’s what the law says, so what are you going to do? The problem is, that’s not what the law said–it was one possible interpretation of what the law said, and was not a necessary one.

So why get upset? Just have Congress amend the law, and we’re okay again.

Well, aside from all discrimination suits now pending being voided and decades of lawbreakers given a free pass, there is the slight problem of getting such legislation past the Republicans obstructionists in Congress and the Bush White House. Just today, the House passed a bill that did the right thing:

To amend title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to clarify that a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice that is unlawful under such Acts occurs each time compensation is paid pursuant to the discriminatory compensation decision or other practice, and for other purposes.

Great! All good, right?

Except, of course, that a lot of stuff has gotten through the House… but it’s the Senate where the Republicans are blocking everything, and this will be no different. Senate Republicans will use the filibuster (again, with utter hypocrisy) for the umpteenth time, and even if that hurdle is cleared, it stands to be vetoed (PDF) by the White House:

H.R. 2831 would allow employees to bring a claim of pay or other employment-related discrimination years or even decades after the alleged discrimination occurred. H.R. 2831 constitutes a major change in, and expanded application of, employment discrimination law. The change would serve to impede justice and undermine the important goal of having allegations of discrimination expeditiously resolved.

Yes, isn’t it horrible that an employer can be sued even if they have continued to discriminate for decades!

Translation: the White House read is that discrimination only occurs at the time the initial decision to discriminate is made. So, in principle, if I were to start refusing today to hire a black person based upon their race, and then continued to make the same decision every week for 20 years, I would only be guilty of discrimination the first time I made such a decision, and not the subsequent 1,041 times after that. Presumably, this is based upon the “I forgot I was continuously breaking the law” defense, that a business could not be expected to remain aware of an ongoing illegal activity beyond a certain time frame.

As I mentioned above, the decision was originally played as being essentially a typo, and that the Supreme Court regrettably had to point out that typo though nobody really wanted it that way–but the White House stance is now that they agree with the typo, they believe the typo was the best thing all along, and that the typo should be followed, because it wasn’t really a typo, it was actually a feature. It even goes so far as to claim that the Ledbetter Fair-Pay Act would be a “major change” when actually it would simply reverse the Bush Supreme Court re-interpretation, and bring the law back to where it has been for decades.

Really what the White House is saying is, “we like the fact that Roberts and our other stooges made it possible to discriminate based on sex and color and whatever else we like, and we want it to stay that way, otherwise it could cause all sorts of nasty legal problems for our bigoted corporate pals.”

My take: don’t expect fair pay to show its head again anytime soon–not until Democrats take a much bigger majority in the Senate and the White House as well. Which, hopefully, will be starting in January 2009.

One case where the RIAA not only failed to win a case but where the defendant is fighting back is Capitol v. Foster. In that case, Deborah Foster was sued by the music label for illegal music downloads, but proclaimed her innocence, fought, and won. While her countersuit did not go through, the judge did agree that the plaintiff was liable for attorney’s fees. Those were originally $55,000, but the RIAA, fearing a wave of such motions that could cause their extortion scheme to backfire, fought against it. They failed, and as a result of the continued fight, they now must cough up $114,000.

Not that Foster can expect Capitol or the RIAA to cough up what they legally owe as fast as the RIAA expects college students to cough up the money demanded of them, of course. After all, it would be a setback on another level: do you know how many college students the RIAA would have the successfully extort in order to get $114,000? Thirty-eight, that’s how many. That’s a lot of college students to shake down. And if the ruling stands and the RIAA eventually is forced to cough up, that means trouble: if just one out of every few dozen victims the RIAA tries to shake down fights back, the RIAA could be looking at a money-loser here.

The five conservatives on the Supreme Court have just handed down yet another abominable decision, this one rewarding bigots and established lawbreakers:

The court held on Tuesday that employees may not bring suit under the principal federal anti-discrimination law unless they have filed a formal complaint with a federal agency within 180 days after their pay was set. The timeline applies, according to the decision, even if the effects of the initial discriminatory act were not immediately apparent to the worker and even if they continue to the present day.

Essentially, it seems that the court has now placed a 6-month statute of limitations on discrimination: if you can get away with it for six months without being called on it, then you’re home free. How can this be seen as anything but a slap in the face for those who are discriminated against, and a pat on the back to bigots?

The ruling clearly says that you lose the right to sue for losses due to discrimination even if they are hidden from you. For example, you get a paycheck that is lower than your male or white co-workers, but you don’t find out about the disparity for some time. So unless you are constantly comparing paychecks with your better-paid co-workers, you cannot bring a claim later when you find out by some other means. It also means that you can’t even sure for discriminatory pay within the past six months if the disparity began more than six months ago.

Imagine someone is stealing from you, robbing your house every month. They break and enter and take something valuable, maybe a few thousand dollar’s worth of stuff each time. After seven months, you finally caught the person, and they fully confessed. So you report it to the police. “Sorry,” they tell you. “They started robbing you seven months ago, so they’re free and clear.” You protest: “But the statute of limitations for robbery is six months, and they have robbed me six times since then–including today!” But the police cannot help you. “We sympathize, but this was a long-term robbery over installments; since it started more than six months ago, they can keep whatever they took. You have to let them go, and let them take what they were trying to steal today to boot.” That is essentially the decision which SCOTUS just handed down, as it applies to worker pay disparities.

But it is much worse than just that: this ruling effectively cut the knees out from under anyone who is discriminated against in the workplace, and gave a free pass to discriminatory pay. From here on out, it will be close to impossible to sue anyone for discriminatory pay.

What it boils down to is that the Supreme Court of the United States has just handed bigoted or otherwise dishonest employers a clear set of instructions on how they can legally discriminate. How many workplaces have full disclosure of everyone’s salaries? Few, if any. Most people who are discriminated against don’t find out for years, if ever. All an employer has to do is bear down on employees discussing paychecks and the risk goes down considerably–and if they are found out, they now only have to worry about six month’s worth of pay disparity–a small amount relative to the legal fees of a lawsuit. [Update: my error–they don’t have to worry about anything if they’re caught after six months.] But chances are, they won’t be found out–they can just make up a false claim about why workers’ pay is different. They could claim to the employee who protests that the difference is merit-based, or some other excuse. Sometimes, it takes several different acts of pay discrimination over a long period of time before a solid-enough case for discrimination can be established–at least enough to have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning in court.

Discrimination, by nature, is almost never out in the open or clear-cut.

Even if worker pay is out in the open (have you ever worked in a place where it was?) this ruling still allows for incremental discrimination. All an employer has to do then is to make each pay variance small enough in itself not to be highly actionable. Who’s going to sue over, say, a $50-a-month pay difference every six months, especially when legal fees would exceed the difference? Even if legal fees are not an issue, how many people will risk making their workplace hostile to them and spend so much time tied up in legal proceedings over such a disparity? But over a span of 20 years, that’s a $2000 difference. By going slow and incrementally, employers now have an excellent legal cover for discriminatory pay.

But the ruling could be even easier to abuse. I quickly came up with a scenario which workplaces might now use: make a small pay disparity between workers, not enough for people to quibble over even if it is found out. Then, after six months, if nobody files a claim, then jack it up to whatever amount you want. Because the disparity started more than six months ago, if you are sued, then you can just reveal the first inequity and claim protection because 180 days have passed.

The rationale is that the person discriminated against waited too long to file the lawsuit–but how does that make it OK for what happened previously? The money is effectively being stolen from the worker, and the worker more often than not is in a position of lesser power and more fear. Many people are hesitant to sue for unequal pay because they are afraid that they will lose their job or at the very least, their workplace will become incredibly uncomfortable. So the discrimination continues until a threshold is reached and the victim simply can’t take it any longer–so they sue. But now they’re told, “because you didn’t come out right away and sue, you get nothing, and your employer gets off scot free.”

Ironically, your employer could even benefit by admitting to more discrimination. If you saw a discrepancy start five months ago, your employer could get off scot free if they reveal records showing that they violated the law for a longer period than you were aware of.

At the heart of the ruling was the interpretation of when the crime is committed. Under standing law, each paycheck was seen as a reiteration of a continuing crime starting with the first discrepancy. But Bush’s court twisted that around, claiming that the crime only took place the first time it was instituted, and not since then. Apparently, they felt that an employer cannot be expected to see differences in employees’ paychecks any time after the changes are made. This could fall under the “I forgot that I started committing a crime last year” category of defense. Question: if an employee embezzles from a company for more than six months, can they get off scot free? What if they do so by setting up an automatic system that does the work for them? No, I didn’t think so. This kind of robbery is only legal one-way.

This ruling means that if a worker wants to be protected against discrimination, they must constantly be paranoid. They are forced to persistently badger their coworkers about their pay, and rush to court once they discover a disparity. They no longer have enough time to first establish whether it was discriminatory, merit-based, an oversight, or something else. They no longer have enough time to collect evidence to prove discrimination, which often takes years. They are now forced to rush into court with the weakest of evidence, not even sure themselves that the pay disparity is discrimination-based. They risk alienating employers who might not be discriminatory, and risk damaging their own reputation as a worker that an employer can trust.

And in case you think that Bush, who claims to stand by the little guy, had no hand in the matter, then get a load of this:

Under its longstanding interpretation of the statute, the commission actively supported the plaintiff, Lilly M. Ledbetter, in the lower courts. But after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case last June, the Bush administration disavowed the agency’s position and filed a brief on the side of the employer.

The judgment completely ignores or disparages the nature of workplace discrimination, and represents less a legal opinion than a wealthy, conservative male’s cultural mindset. Yet another ruling from the Court that Bush Poisoned.

No, it’s not political this time. But it is a gripe. I sent my mom a bouquet of flowers for Mother’s Day. Used one of the online ordering services because it’s kind of hard to hand-deliver from five thousand miles away. The thing is, on their web site, FTD gives you prices for your gift with no hint of any extra fees. Of course, one would expect such fees–sellers often hide extra charges for as long as they can, to make you believe that the final price will be as low as they can get you to believe. But the “service charges”–revealed only after you’ve finished filling out most of the forms–were nearly half the cost of the bouquet. A little excessive.

Are there no laws that require up-front reporting on all costs, before the person has gone through most of the process? It’s more than just slightly dirty pool–wait until not only the person has already finalized their decision as to what to buy, but has also gone through so much of the process of filling stuff out that it is less likely they’ll turn back. It also means that it is much harder to comparison-shop, and before you can get to the full-charges page, you have to have given addresses, email, phone numbers, and all sorts of other spamalicious info.

Japan, interestingly, has taken things a step in the other direction: final prices must be revealed at the get-go. In stores prices must be advertised in their post-sales-tax amount–even a charge as obvious as that has to be spelled out. Why can’t the U.S. government require that? (Yes, I know they won’t, and we all know why. Isn’t cynicism swell?)

Happy Mother’s Day!

From a recent story on how the RIAA is sending out letters to hundreds, possibly thousands of college students, demanding that they cough up $3000 for music they’ve downloaded:

But the students coughing up the cash question why they’re the ones getting in trouble.

“They’re targeting the worst people,” UNL freshman Andrew Johnson, who also settled for $3,000. “Legally, it probably makes sense, because we don’t have the money to fight.”

Bingo. Hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly why they’re being targeted. It would not be surprising to me if the RIAA actually did a financial check on the people it sued, making sure that none of them were capable of a strong legal defense. The $3000 number in itself should be questioned: why that amount? Probably because it is just enough that many people would pay it, but not enough that putting up a legal fight would be worth it.

The perfect definition of a nuisance lawsuit. Though there is a better name for it: extortion.

Johnson got his e-mail in February, with the recording industry group’s first wave of letters targeting college students. He had downloaded 100 songs on a program called LimeWire using the university network.

The money to settle came from the 18-year-old’s college fund. He’ll work three jobs this summer to pay back the money.

Johnson compares what he did to people driving 5 miles per hour over the speed limit.

“It’s not like I downloaded millions of songs and sold them to people,” Johnson said.

There is a point to be made here. I have commented before that when it comes down to it, downloading music for free is illegal–you are getting value for no money. So why is it so common? Why do so many people, perhaps numbering in the millions, join in the activity? The answer was given by Mr. Johnson: because it is seen as equivalent to going 5 miles per hour over the speed limit.

Why that perception? It has to do with how we get our media. So often it is free. We get TV shows broadcast into our homes for free. We can videotape them and keep them. We can even record shows on a DVR which allows you to clip out the commercials and save the pure media to DVDs–essentially getting for free what you pay a lot for from the store. And that’s not illegal. (Edit: Okay, maybe it is illegal. But it is so widely considered as legal and so universally done that the distinction is academic–and it is never prosecuted. It simply proves the lines and perceptions are even more blurred than I thought.) You can do the same with movies. As long as it is broadcast to your home and you record them for your own viewing, there’s nothing wrong at all with that. You can do the same thing with music over the radio. We get free news on TV, radio, and the Internet.

So why is it illegal if I get the exact same media over the Internet? What is the difference between my getting a TV show from my TV, clipping the commercials, and saving it on a DVD, and getting the same show from a download service? The end result is exactly the same, no difference at all, except the type of effort I put into collecting the media.

Legally, the answer is fairly clear: one was obtained through a licensed distributor, packaged with commercials, which in fact paid for the product. That I was able to clip out the commercials was a technical loophole. Downloading from the Internet for free is different: the product is not licensed for distribution, and there is no payment made to the content owner for the distribution.

The thing is, this distinction is virtually invisible to the consumer. We tend to ignore commercials, see them as intangible, abstract things which are to be disregarded for the most part (unless there are talking frogs or whatnot). They are discardable. Take those away, and the distinction vanishes. That’s the “5 miles per hour” that Mr. Johnson was talking about. Because we have grown up disregarding and even looking with scorn on commercial interruptions and intrusions, seeing them as annoyances to be avoided and not integral tools for delivery of content, most normal people do not see them as something that makes or breaks any kind of legality.

If I can legally record a song as easily and identically as I can download it from the Internet, then there is no great moral warning flag telling me that what I am doing is wrong. So people are color-blind to the difference. That’s why so many people see nothing wrong with downloading music.

As I said, legally, technically, it is wrong. But does that change when massive perception says differently?

Now, here’s the interesting part: the same subtle shift also applies to the RIAA. Technically, what the RIAA is doing seems legal–it is suing people for illegally accessing their property. However, just as their legal targets are getting otherwise legal content in an illicit method, so is the RIAA. The methods they are using to get money from people are as illicit as the music their targets are downloading. Blindly suing thousands of people, not really knowing whether they deserve to be sued? Using nuisance-lawsuit methods to essentially extort money from people, designing the “settlement” so that people will give in even if they didn’t do anything illegal? Crafting legal tactics that keep their illicit strategy from being exposed in court?

In a very real way, the RIAA is doing something far worse than any of those college students. Even if the students that the RIAA is targeting know what they are doing is illegal, they know how frivolous an offense it is. The RIAA, on the other hand, knows exactly how dishonest and illicit it is to be doing what they are doing–just as they by now must be aware of the fact that illegal downloading of music has no actual impact on their income.

Edit: I would add one final note–piracy could be ended overnight by using the tools now available on the Internet. How? Targeted commercials. Content providers are now getting addicted to the sale of content that until now has been in that consumer-oriented “free” zone, paid for with commercials. But selling media begs for piracy, which will always win out, as Steve Jobs has noted. The way to defeat it: give away media for free, along with targeted commercials. We hate commercials because they are almost always for stuff we’re not interested in. But that’s so 20th-century–broadcasting commercials blindly to an audience where 97% of the viewers turn away in disinterest. The Internet allows for targeted advertising. Get people to register for all the TV and movies and music they can eat by filling out a survey, which includes the kind of commercials they like to watch, including stuff they plan to buy. If commercials were all movie previews and computer ads, I would more likely watch them, and so would most people. That could easily cover the costs. I outlined it in more detail here, almost three years ago.

REDMOND, Wash., March 26, 2007 — Initial sales figures from Microsoft show its new operating system Windows Vista made a splash in its debut. In the first month of Windows Vista’s general availability, sales exceeded 20 million licenses, more than doubling the initial pace of sales for its predecessor, Windows XP. These initial figures reflect the broad interest in the security and usability enhancements in Windows Vista.

— Microsoft Press Release

Well, yes and no. When Microsoft made this announcement, it failed to break down the “20 million” figure, making a lot of people suspicious of how they got that number. It sounded way high to a lot of people, and some of them started checking it out–and discovered that the number is as phony as Microsoft’s claims of “innovation.”

The claim is that Vista sold 20 million licenses in its first month of sales (presumably between the release on January 30 to the end of February), and they compare this to the 17 million licenses sold for Windows XP in the first two and a half months of sales.

Here’s how they cooked the numbers. First, they didn’t just count the first month. Included in that “first month” were all the sales for Windows XP starting from October 26, 2006, as they included a free or almost-free upgrade to Vista. Regardless of whether the upgrade was actually used, the numbers were added to the first “month” of Vista sales. So, actually, the Vista numbers are for four months of sales, and include many Vista licenses that were never actually claimed or delivered.

Second, Microsoft counted “sales in” figures instead of “sales out.” What that means is that instead of counting the number of Vista licenses that were actually sold at stores to customers, Microsoft counted the number of Vista licenses provided to stores, even if they were not ever sold.

Neither of these accounting tricks were used to inflate XP sales numbers. As a result, the comparison between the two numbers is invalid. An honest statement of the 20-million number would have to be worded:

While Windows XP sold 17 million licenses in the first two and a half months of sales, 20 million Windows licenses (including XP and Vista) were either sold or provided to resellers for sale in a four-month period starting at the end of October 2006.

Doesn’t sound quite so impressive, does it? But wait, it gets worse: computer sales in 2006 were almost double what they were in 2001, meaning that in order to keep even with XP sales numbers, Vista has to sell almost twice as many licenses. So, adjusting for inflation, as it were, Vista has “sold” only about 11 million copies in four months compared to 17 million sales of XP in two and a half months. And even the 11 million number still includes unsold stock on store shelves.

Pitiful.

The U.S. Postal Service is hiking rates again, but is making a big deal out of its “Forever Stamps.” The stamps, to be sold at 41 cents, will suffice for first-class postage for as long as the USPS exists.

The problem: the price of stamps rises at about the same rate as inflation in general–meaning that you get no benefit from the purchase. In fact, since you could invest the money and make interest off of it instead of holding on to stamps, the stamps will turn out to be a bad idea–and that’s assuming that the stamps don’t get damaged or lost over time. True, it would end the annoyance of buying 2- or 3-cent stamps to add to your old first-class stamps whenever there’s a price increase, but you may end up paying a lot more for avoiding that annoyance than is worth it. (Really, a single trip to the post office every several years and having to put more than one stamp on a letter? Heavens to Betsy, however have we survived up until now?)

The thing is, keeping them long enough to get any “value” out of them means keeping them for at least 2-3 years minimum, the shortest probable span between price hikes for stamps. You’d probably have to buy 5 years’ worth or more to have any “effect,” and the longer they are kept, the greater the chance that a lot of those stamps will be lost in one way or another. Seniors may go for this idea in a serious way, meaning that when they die, the stamps may not even be redeemed. Meanwhile, the Postal Service makes interest off that money instead of you.

This seems to be part of a new trend in government to take on business-like tactics. Take the U.S. Mint, for example, and their series of State Quarters and now President Dollar Coins. The idea seems less and less about providing a simple, basic public service, and more and more to market the service in the best possible way to get people to spend their money to put more cash in the government’s hands.

I suppose the trend started (or at least accelerated) in the Lottery Boom a few decades ago, instituting a kind of Idiot Tax (or, alternatively, a Fantasize-About-A-Rich-Life Tax). Remember how the states rationalized it by saying that all or most of the proceeds would go to public schools? Naturally, that was yet another fraud: if school districts actually wound up getting any money, it was snatched right back away again by de-funding the districts’ original budget–taking money out of one pocket while your putting money into another.

And like the Stamp and Coin campaigns, the lotteries similarly are financially smart business propositions for the state governments, who of course pay out the money over 20 years (giving you the option to take a much-reduced lump sum). Th odds of winning are so small, you get cases like this where the guy who actually beats the astronomical odds doesn’t realize he’s won for a month and a half. Apparently, he rationally believed that he had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, so irony stepped in and gave him the winning number.

In short, we seem to be seeing more and more get-revenues-quick marketing ploys executed by the government–ploys that probably get most of their money by getting people in the lower income brackets to buy into stupid ideas or otherwise throw their money away, into the hands of the government–which is steadily decreasing the tax burden of wealthy people. Add the fact that government is cutting services to lower-income citizens more and more, and you have an interesting combined effect.

So, what’s next? Government-sponsored Pyramid schemes? Casinos operated by the IRS? Privatized Social Security Accounts?

I’m not joking on that last one–it’s a pure gamble. The stock market gets depressed when you retire, and you’re SOL. But then, the attitude reflected by this new trend of Government-as-Sham-Business seems to be, “if you’re stupid enough to buy into it, then you deserve what you get out of it.”

Steve Job’s polemic on DRM drew many responses, but they’re essentially all the same: full of hot air and horse manure. As a representative sample, here’s the one from Fred Amoroso, CEO & President of Macrovision, a company that specializes in the production of DRM schemes:

DRM is broader than just music —
While your thoughts are seemingly directed solely to the music industry, the fact is that DRM also has a broad impact across many different forms of content and across many media devices. Therefore, the discussion should not be limited to just music.

He’s right. DRM should be removed from all media, not just music. DVD region encoding, for example, is in place for no other reason than to defeat the open marketplace and gouge customers in each region for as much as they can be shaken down for. And Jobs’ argument applies equally well to all DRM: it can be and regularly is broken, and so DRM, in every form, does nothing but hobble honest, paying customers so that the companies applying the DRM can cheat them. The entire argument that DRM has anything at all to do with piracy is bunk–it is clearly and simply about controlling media after a customer has bought it so that the paying customer must pay the highest price possible, and pay that price again and again for the same media.

DRM increases not decreases consumer value —
I believe that most piracy occurs because the technology available today has not yet been widely deployed to make DRM-protected legitimate content as easily accessible and convenient as unprotected illegitimate content is to consumers. The solution is to accelerate the deployment of convenient DRM-protected distribution channels—not to abandon them.

This is just one of the many places in this argument where Macrovision’s bias as a DRM-producing company shows through. The point Jobs made, the point which is absolutely and glaringly true and real, is that DRM will never work. So long as there is a clear picture and clear sound output at one end, pirates will always find a way around whatever DRM scheme is thrown at them. Macrovision just wants to get the perpetual contracts to make yet another DRM scheme when each successive one is defeated.

Without a reasonable, consistent and transparent DRM we will only delay consumers in receiving premium content in the home, in the way they want it.

There’s a bald-faced lie if there ever was one. The way customers want it is without DRM. What Amoroso is saying here is supposedly that DRM can allow a customer to choose between delivery systems and viewing devices. What he really means is that without DRM, a customer would actually be able to view media without restrictions–i.e., you buy it, you own it–and that’s the last thing Macrovision or the media producers want. They want to charge the customer for the same media again and again and again, as many times as they can. Pay once for viewing over cable, again for renting, again for buying to watch on TV, again for buying to watch on your iPod, and so forth and so on.

Abandoning DRM now will unnecessarily doom all consumers to a “one size fits all” situation that will increase costs for many of them.

Yeah, customers would really hate owning something outright after paying for it, without restrictions about how how and where and how often they can play it. That would suck. What Amoroso is probably talking about, however, is the idea that without DRM, one high price would have to be paid instead of many small prices. Which, of course, is BS. It all tracks back to the idea that somehow media can’t be made available without DRM–that if even one version is free and clear, it will ruin all other sales. But since most media is sold without DRM, and all DRM is breakable, and yet the media producers are still making many, many billions in a lucrative business, that’s clearly bull.

Besides which, it does not mean that DRM must be universally applied. Want to DRM a rental movie which is only intended to play 2 or 3 times? Fine. If I rent it, then I don’t own it, so DRM away; I don’t expect rental material to be permanent, or else I would wonder why NetFlix wanted their DVD back. You think that DRM is necessary for the subscription music services, where people pay for access and not ownership? Again, fine–if ownership stays in your hands, you may DRM till the cows come home. But if I pay to own the media, then keep your grubby little DRM paws off of it, thank you very much. I just paid your highest price, the “one size fits all,” and now it’s mine.

In fact, Amoroso’s statement itself suggests that the highest price to be paid deserves no DRM. The “one price fits all” he mentioned must be the highest possible price, and that price is for outright ownership–and Amoroso said plainly that such a price would be tied to “abandoning DRM.” Thanks, Fred! You just made Steve Jobs’ case for him.

DRM will increase electronic distribution—

… Quite simply, if the owners of high-value video entertainment are asked to enter, or stay in a digital world that is free of DRM, without protection for their content, then there will be no reason for them to enter, or to stay if they’ve already entered. The risk will be too great.

You mean like every single movie and TV show now made, which are all transferred eagerly to DVDs which have either no DRM, or DRM that is so easy to break that there is no practical difference? What horse crap. All music and all video is already in a DRM-free world, in that every single piece of media can be separated from DRM easily and effortlessly by pirates, which is supposed to be the whole purpose of DRM, right? And yet all these media producers just can’t wait to release their material because of the immense profits waiting for them despite the “devastating” effect of piracy (which, of course, is little or no effect at all).

In short, adding DRM will not increase the release of media at all, for the simple reason that all media which can be released, is being released already. You can’t increase the amount being released when everything is being released. And with DVD sales now exceeding box office revenues, the suggestion that movie studios would pull out of the DVD market if DRM were not available is so ludicrous as to be laughable.

DRM needs to be interoperable and open –

No need to go over this–the paragraph is simply a swipe at Steve Jobs, daring him to license FairPlay, with the insinuation that he’s the one ruining things by running a monopoly.

The rest of the statement is more PR gobbledygook, essentially saying that a reliable and pirate-proof DRM can be achieved (wrong), and the good people at Macrovision are just the people to do it. Blah blah blah.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: DRM has no relation to piracy, zero. It’s about shaking down paying customers for more. It’s like the guy who ties a string around a quarter so that after the vending machine accepts it, he can yank it back out; the content producers want to use DRM as the string around the media they “sell” to you, so that after you pay them for it, they can still yank it back and keep charging you for it.

This is one of the reasons I like Steve Jobs. He wrote (or at least published under his name) an article about DRM (Digital Rights Management software) on the Apple web site. DRM is what restricts your use of music or video from playing and copying freely. I have highlighted (boldface mine) the key parts of the following paragraphs:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

One has to wonder what the Big Four think of this letter. On the one hand, it must piss them off to be called stupid, albeit in such a subtle way. On the other hand, what Jobs says is so blindingly obvious, they should be perfectly willing to be called stupid. They should read this and say, we’re just not doing this right, we overreacted and have required this completely unnecessary system that does not stop piracy one bit and just hamstrings paying customers, and yet we stick with it either through continued panic or just because it’s there.

Of course, I then remind myself that we’re talking about the music labels here, the genius folk which constitute the RIAA. “Stupid” is their business. And the video content producers are not much different.

What Steve Jobs is saying here is, naturally, not a new revelation. Almost a year ago on this blog, I myself wrote about DRM-laden video:

The copy-protect and limitations on which OS, browser, and media players can be used are stupid as hell. We’re talking about movies that have already been ripped and are available for full-quality download over the Internet. So what is the copy-protect protecting? Not a damned thing. People downloading it for free from the Internet can do anything they want with the movie, watch it on any player, in any format. But paying customers hit all these restrictions. Stupid!

So what does DRM accomplish then, as Jobs asks? Here’s another take, again from one of my past blog posts on DRM:

Copy protection is never perfect; somebody always finds a way around it. The only people it really hobbles are the people who buy the product and want to use it legally.

And that has always been at the heart of the whole “digital rights” problem–the makers of the media try to control their product long after they sell it or give it away, for fear that after it is sold, it will be taken and redistributed or resold at a later time. That attempt at control causes problems because it tries to reach criminals by running over legitimate users. …

And that brings up the question of how much right the seller of a product has to follow a product after a sale. Not only for protection against illegal copying, but for control over what happens to a product and how it is used once it is privately owned. Because recent developments have companies using “digital rights management” to do far more than just protect against copying. …

They want to ride the illegal-download horse all the way into your living room, and assert permanent control over the media on the supposed grounds that it might at some point leave your home and go to someone else’s. But you soon find out that it is less about hindering criminals than it is about hindering you, limiting your abilities so you’ll pay them again to do what you should have been able to do in the first place. They don’t just want to control the distribution of the media; they want to control every aspect of how you use the media in the privacy of your home, which is far in excess of their actual rights.

And that, essentially, is what DRM is all about: an attempt to control and limit use so they can sell you the same thing again and again, and/or sell to different people at different prices so they can charge all the market can bear in each separate situation. For them, that DRM-free content is on CDs and elsewhere is not an argument to make everything DRM-free, it is a reason to make all the DRM-free content covered by DRM somehow. The content producers want the opposite of what Jobs is calling for. They have tried again and again to apply DRM to CDs and other media. They are frustrated that it has failed, but they will still try again and again.

Now, you can hedge Job’s remarks any way you like. You can point out that Jobs profits from the iPods and not the music, so the DRM is not as important to him. You can speculate that he’s saying this as a tactic in dealing with European demands that Apple’s FairPlay DRM be scrapped. You might even say that he doesn’t really mean any of this.

None of that, however, will make what he wrote not true. And at least on the face of things, one cannot blame Jobs for the DRM that chains the music sold by Apple to the iPod. Jobs is now on the record as saying that he wants those chains gone. It won’t change the minds of all the critics, but at the very least it’s pretty impressive that someone like Jobs said the kind of thing that he said.

The RIAA sued Patti Santangelo two years ago, but when she fought back, they eventually dropped the suit–only to switch over to suing her 16-year-old son, Robert, and her daughter Michelle, 20. Michelle failed to show up in court and so lost by default, but Robert is fighting back–not only by fighting the claim, but also by filing a counter-claim saying that the RIAA damaged his reputation, distracted him from school and cost him legal fees. Further:

The papers allege that the companies, “ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy” by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay.”

The RIAA responded publicly by issuing this statement:

The record industry has suffered enormously due to piracy. That includes thousands of layoffs. We must protect our rights. Nothing in a filing full of recycled charges that have gone nowhere in the past changes that fact.

Naturally, one can assume the claim is pure BS. As this blogger points out, the drop in sales was not due to piracy, it was due to the economy failing and the record labels simultaneously scaling back releases. The “thousands of layoffs,” if they ever really happened, were not connected to piracy, and the music industry itself was likely the most responsible for them.

In fact, when file-sharing began its meteoric rise, music sales were booming; this went on for a few years, in fact. The sales drop coincided with the aforementioned economic bust and the industry’s cutback in production, and there has been absolutely no correlation found between music sales and online piracy, according to this 2004 study reported in the New York Times.

So Robert Santangelo might have a strong case there. Go get ’em, kid.

Conservatives in Congress, and one imagines the White House as well, continue to fear the Minimum Wage Increase as if it were the harbinger from Hell.

Now, Republicans have already made it clear that they favor businesses over the people, under the flawed “trickle-down” paradigm that says if you shower the top of society with money, enough will eventually make its way down to the lower classes that they’ll get more money and then spend it to power the economy. I’ve argued before that showering the same money on the lower classes would cause the money to flow upwards far faster and with greater impact on the economy, making more business sense. But Republicans seem far less interested in what makes sense for the national economy, and far more interested in serving the immediate desires of the business community, which is a very different thing.

Their long-standing objection is that a minimum wage hike would hurt small businesses. Now, the term “small businesses,” when used by Republican politicians, should make a lot of flags go up. It is used by right-wingers as an excuse to defend big businesses, the huge corporations and industries that really stand to have their interests damaged. It’s a natural political maneuver; after all, one cannot garner much sympathy by saying that something will make a dent in the huge profits of giant corporations. No one would give a damn. So the small businessman is trotted out to say how he’ll be devastated by whatever new proposal is being opposed. Or he’ll be shoved in front of the cameras to talk about how this new tax cut for the rich will let him keep his business afloat, which would otherwise fall into bankruptcy.

It is a mistake to believe that small businesses are somehow the only ones paying minimum wage. I have a feeling that corporate giants have far more minimum-wage workers on their payrolls than all small businesses combined. And let’s face it, small businesses do not have nearly as much political clout as the megacorps. I doubt that Republicans are so consistently worked up about people who won’t make that much difference in the next election.

But let’s take the view that size doesn’t matter; let’s take a look at the situation as a whole. The question being asked is, will the minimum wage hike hurt businesses? My own take on this is that the premise of the question is flawed.

Why? Because the question is being asked as if the only relevant time frame is the moment that businesses will have to hike wages. That’ll cost a lot more, and that’s where the hurt will come. However, that’s only a fraction of the story, and ignores the whole reality. In order to see the whole picture, one has to begin right after the last minimum wage hike, and look at what has been happening since then.

Now, this time period is often ignored because it is seen as unchanging. The federal minimum wage has been frozen over the past decade or so, and as a result, that period is considered as having a null effect on businesses.

The key missing element is inflation. Conservatives love to use inflation to play with the numbers. The common ploy is to simply ignore inflation–easy enough to do, as it is a slow process and most people don’t really notice it. For example, in defending tax cuts for the rich and the trickle-down philosophy, Rush Limbaugh argued that despite tax cuts under Reagan, federal revenue doubled in the 80’s. That “doubling,” however, was chiefly due to inflation, not brilliant economic policy. Factor inflation into the equation, and the results are far less impressive. (The rest of that lie is covered here.)

The minimum wage is no different. Conservatives focus only on the immediate effects of a minimum wage hike, and they completely ignore the fact that from the moment after the wage hike starts, inflation starts cutting down that wage, giving businesses a slow but constant form of economic relief.

We hear all about how businesses will have to fork over more money now. We hear nothing about how businesses have had to fork over less and less and less over the past decade. It is as if businesses never enjoy that constant windfall.

It is even more ironic when one considers the plain fact that inflation is simply another way of expressing the idea that businesses are raising their prices. Businesses that pay the minimum wage raise prices but do not share the increased revenue with minimum-wage workers.

That is, they don’t until such a thing is mandated by the government. In the form of a minimum wage hike. In the end, it evens out. Which is why minimum wage hikes never really hurt businesses–unless you want to take the view that businesses are hurt because they can’t cut the wages of their workers to even further below the poverty line.

One thing that never makes sense about the minimum wage is that it is not keyed to inflation. At the very least, it should be. I believe that the minimum wage should be set to a level where a single person working 60 hours a week could feed, clothe, and house a family of four, and have the option of setting aside an additional small amount in savings–and then that wage level be permanently tied to the inflation rate, with gross adjustments every year. Maybe every ten years or so, the wage could be reviewed in case other factors challenge the standard of living, and adjustments made for that.

This policy would not only be civil, humane, and fair, but it would also do away with those horrible, immediate wage hikes that Republicans fear and loathe so terribly much. Because of how they just devastate small businesses.

The RIAA and the music labels have gained a reputation for playing hardball in their war against piracy and illegal song downloads. Among the most famous examples are how they sued a 71-year-old grandfather who rarely used his computer, and a 12-year-old girl who was an honor student and sincerely believed that she had paid for the music. The RIAA did not care who was actually responsible for the downloads, and even sometimes not bothering to verify whether downloads had occurred at all. They wanted to scare people by playing hardball, and the message was crystal clear: no one is exempt. You download our music, we sue you.

Well, there are exceptions, apparently. Specifically, if you’re rich and your daddy runs one of the record labels. Edgar Bronfman, head of the Warner Music Group, said that “I’m fairly certain that [my children] have [illegally downloaded music], and I’m fairly certain that they’ve suffered the consequences.”

“Fairly certain”? Clearly, the guy doesn’t want to fess up with any certainty in public, but it’s clear his kids did pirate music. As for the consequences? Were they sued for up to $150,000 for each song they downloaded? Well, no suit has been filed in court against them, so the “consequences” they “suffered” apparently did not involve what the rest of us seem to be liable to suffer should we break the same rules. Apparently it involved Bronfman explaining what he feels is “right and wrong” to his kids. “I explained to them what I believe is right, that the principle is that stealing music is stealing music.” Did he explain that stealing is a crime, and that his kids should cough up huge wads of cash or maybe go to jail? It is a serious crime, you know. But I guess Bronfman never got to that part. It was enough to explain to them that they were embarrassing daddy, so stop it or else he’ll be real disappointed in them.

Tell that to 12-year-old Brianna LaHara (now 15), one of the first to be sued by the RIAA and the labels; her mother paid $29.99 a month to KaZaA and misguidedly believed that because they were paying for the service, that they were not stealing. They didn’t even keep the music on their computers–they listened to it and then threw it out. But they were sued, and eventually settled for $2000. Most of the people sued are given this “offer,” which demands payment of thousands of dollars, knowing that the people will cough up the cash even if they are innocent, as lawyer’s fees alone will cost them more than that. (In some circles, that’s called “extortion.”)

The Bronfman children should have known better than any other kids in the world that downloading from P2P sites is illegal. And yet all they got was a talking-to.

Poverty is not an excuse here. College students who could not afford to pay the extortion settlement fees were told by the RIAA to drop out of college or instead go to a cheap community college so they could afford to pay the mega-billion dollar record labels a few thousand bucks.

OK, so you would not expect the head of a music label to sue his own family or relegate them to cut-rate go-nowhere schools–but it smacks of a cop letting his own kids of the hook when he catches them driving drunk or stealing something. A double standard. If anything, it plays up the fact that the RIAA’s campaign is not one of justice, but one of terror. Naturally, they are not going to sue each and every one of the millions who have downloaded from filesharing services. They just want to scare people into believing that it can happen, and that it might happen to them. And the RIAA has the clout to ram this kind of thing through–although satellite TV businesses who tried the same technique–mass-litigate suspected pirates of content then try to get them to cough up settlements–was ruled against, the technique found to be illicit.

Which lessens the hypocrisy not one iota.

When an automated phone “service” puts you on hold to wait for a live person, they start playing music. They then interrupt the music every thirty seconds (that’s what Citibank is doing to me as I type this, I timed it) for the exact same 17-second “we’re still busy” message.

What idiot came up with this idea? Why does it seem to be an industry standard? Does anybody find it useful to hear the same stupid automated message three times every two minutes?

It is annoying enough to be teased with music and then denied the ability to enjoy it (assuming the music itself is not annoying), but what’s really annoying is the fact that when the automated message starts, it makes you think that a service rep is answering you call. You’d think that even a firm like Apple Computer would have figured out how annoying this is, but they are the same as everyone else.

How about this: start the music (and stick with some nice, quiet jazz, that’s usually the safest), and then every one or two minutes, incorporate a message into the music (lower the music volume a bit, but do not stop it, so the person on hold doesn’t think that a rep is answering) which says that if you want to hear options without losing your place “in line” on hold, then press “0” or something like that; then return the music to full volume.

If the caller presses the number key, then play a message which tells them their options–they can choose a different option from the main menu, or better yet, get the system to estimate how long they are likely to be on hold. Treat this interlude as still being on hold, and the live rep can cut in at any time; allow the caller to go back to listening to music without having to wait longer for having accessed the menu.

All of this should be eminently possible. Most systems like this, especially for big corporations, know the approximate length of their calls, and so an estimate of call length should not be a big deal. The caller will be happy to have an idea of whether they’ll be on hold for two minutes or two hours; just over-estimate the wait time a little just in case the regular time is exceeded–this will even help by making it seem for most people that their calls are being answered earlier than predicted.

As for incorporating the message into the music and allowing the caller to take a no-time-penalty options detour, computers are absolutely capable of handling this kind of thing. Maybe I don’t know of some crippling engineering factor involved, but frankly, I doubt that. I think it is more likely that these places want to discourage callers, and making the call-in system less annoying would mitigate that.

One of the Mac’s selling points over Windows for business users has been the relatively low cost to maintain. With no viruses, adware, or spyware, and with the system so relatively easy to maintain, one could save a lot of money in IT costs alone by switching to Macs.

Somehow, this message never got across–probably because IT departments are the ones to advise businesses on which systems to purchase and employ. A stupid move, that–it’s like asking your auto repairman which car you should buy. Unless he can be trusted implicitly, you’re begging for him to recommend a lemon to you so he can make a mint off of you in repairs. Ask him if you should get a high-rated foreign job, and he’ll tell you no–not because the car is bad, but because he’s not familiar with it and you’d have to take your repair business elsewhere.

But now, with Microsoft looking at possibly dismal sales when Vista is released this month to businesses, they’re claiming that businesses can save a ton of money with the switch-over, because Vista will “allow companies to sharply cut the amount of time it takes to maintain PCs.” In fact, MS is stating that businesses could save $320 per PC per year–despite the fact that Vista machines would still require more IT maintenance than Macs would! What a savings you can get with Macs!

IT managers are quick to disagree:

“We manage 6,000 desktops and 1,500 laptops,” Taylor said. “At $300 per PC per year, that should add up to $2 million in savings. The only way we could actually save that would be to eliminate 30 people, which we’re not going to do.”

On the other hand, Taylor, whose staff has been testing Vista on 100 PCs for more than 18 months as part of Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program, agreed that many of Vista’s capabilities will boost automation and manageability, freeing up his staff’s time for more valuable projects.

It’s hard to see how to take that: this guy could be lying to save his budget. Note how he talks about retasking his people to other work instead of making cuts in his own department.

However you read his interests, it’s clear that he thinks Vista could save time on maintenance. Which means that Macs could save even more, and could have for a long time. So why not make the Big Switch? Well, in the case of the two parties quoted above, it would profit neither. It would only profit the businesses who use lots of computers. And hell, screw them.

As if there weren’t enough reasons not to get Vista already, Microsoft keeps coming out new ones. This time it’s one related to the license: Microsoft will limit the number of times you can transfer Vista’s license to a new computer. So let’s say you buy Vista for your existing computer, then you decide to get a Mac, for example, and license it to that. The next time you buy a new computer, or if you want to simply switch to a different computer, you’ll have to buy Vista all over again–even if you disable Vista on your older machines. Even if this will not effect you directly, the whole idea is offensive in principle.

This is not true on Macs–in fact, Mac OS X doesn’t require activation–hell, Mac OS X doesn’t even have a freakin’ serial number or “product key”! They just trust you to use it honestly. But they wisely do not even try to do anti-piracy measures which would probably accomplish little aside from massively annoying their customers. Now, it is true that Apple tends to care more about selling hardware–heck, before Mac OS 7.5, the Mac OS was always free. But in principle, Apple’s way is far more attractive.

The idea of individual ownership is quickly disappearing, and is being replaced by a system akin to serfdom, where the serf (you) is not allowed actual ownership, so that the master (the corporation) maintains control. As the information age develops, “license agreements” pervade in a way that limit your ownership of something. If you buy a movie on your computer, the studios want to limit the license agreement so that even after you’ve paid your money, the studios still control how you watch the movie, and on which appliances. While the claim is that they are trying to avoid piracy, that’s bull–they just want to limit it so they can sell you the same thing all over again in a different format, and still control what you “own.”

Examples of this abound. One variation is the “region encoding” of DVDs, which restricts the buyer of a DVD to play that DVD in the same geographic region where they bought it. For example, I live in Japan, which is region 2; however, I want to buy DVDs from the U.S., which is region 1. But when I try to play a region 1 DVD in a region 2 player, it won’t work; they want to force me to buy the DVD in Japan. Why? To fight piracy, they’ll claim. Again, bull. Pirates can easily, effortlessly get rid of the region encoding. They don’t want to stop pirates, they want to stop legitimate consumers from getting around regional pricing and release dates. If I buy DVDs in Japan, they cost about 50% more, and are usually released months after the U.S. release. Region encoding is not to protect from pirating, it is to protect the profits of the movie studios.

In short, any license agreement at the individual consumer level has one purpose: to make more money for the vendor by denying true ownership to the purchaser.

The whole “licensing” business is as if you bought a new car, but the “license agreement” only allowed you to drive the car to work, and you are forbidden to do shopping or leisure using the vehicle; for that, you need to buy another car. And just to make sure you follow the license agreement, the car dealer will have someone follow your car around to make sure you honor it, ready to disable your car should you stop off at the convenience store. That is the effective analogy for what these “intellectual property” vendors are doing.

Microsoft’s one-license-transfer-only policy could be equated to giving a car to a new family member. When you buy the car, you may sell it or give it to one person, but that person must then keep it or throw it away–the car may not be given to another person again, ever.

The Vista scheme is a sham because the transfer of the license to a new computer could be performed in a way that ensures the copy on the older machine is disabled. But the probable reason Microsoft is doing this is because their whole “activation” scheme costs them money in terms of hiring telephone operators to help people with the process; to avoid the extra cost of assuming you’re a criminal, they want to limit your legal property rights.

Here’s a radical concept: when you buy something, you own it. You can do whatever the hell you want with it. Since information can be duplicated, and that is a form of stealing, that can be forbidden rightfully. But beyond that, what you own, you control. This whole license crap is nothing but a way to deprive individuals of the right of legitimate ownership.

You know one other thing that’s better about Japan relative to America? No rebates. I hate rebates. They’re nothing but a sucky scam. At the very least, they represent a dishonest economic trick: speed up the money coming in, slow down the money going out. Instead of actually being a savings of some sort, it’s a way to keep money in the hands of the seller for long enough so that in large volumes, they’re making a lot of money off of the interest by keeping you from getting the rebate back for as long as they can manage to. Not to mention that they make more money from direct marketing by getting all your personal information and whatever else they can con you into adding to the rebate form.

But it doesn’t stop there. They also depend on laziness, impatience and disorganization to simply walk away with your money. They make a big deal about how you get this incredible saving, even to the point of advertising the price-after-rebate in huge numbers, and the fact that it depends on a rebate in the smaller print. That makes you lean towards buying their junk because you now believe in the after-rebate price and usually go for the lower figure. But then you have to fill out forms, get all the required bits and pieces together, mail the stuff, and then you face a 2-3 month wait, minimum (some people wait half a year). If you sent everything in before the time limit written in very small print. A lot of people will say the hell with it, and just eat the $50.

Sometimes people can’t get the rebate because they buy the product and throw out the bag and the packaging, leaving the rebate for later–and when they get around to doing the rebate paperwork, they realize that they need the receipt and some obscure tag from the discarded packaging. Not to mention receipts with more than one rebate item on them–you have to choose just one, because they each need to include the original receipt, not a copy. Not that all of this is made clear, you usually then have to go through major hoops to figure out how to handle non-straightforward situations.

Sometimes the rebate process is even more convoluted than that. One of my first experiences with rebates was with Warner Bros. DVDs, but it was so serpentine and confusing that I just gave up on it. Look at the people in this thread… first buy a whole bunch of expensive DVDs, then buy another set, but it has to have a sticker, and there are some forms inside, but not all sets have them, and there’s a web site, but it doesn’t work… and that’s just getting started. You know that there’s a very good chance that the rebate will be late or just won’t come and you’ll have more pain and frustration if you try to track it down. That’s when most of the people who paid for the crap in the first place throw up their hands and declare that’s it’s not worth the freakin’ hassle.

This article in Slate goes into some of the details of rebate scams. Ever wonder why most rebates are for $50 for electronic goods? Probably because it’s a cutoff point. Some rebates see 90% of buyers fail to cash in; the more lucrative the rebate, the more people ask for their money back. Some rebates fool you with dates, some require near-instant cashing… the scams are varied and creative. You know that every time a “rebate” is constructed, experts figure out the best way to maximize the chance that buyers won’t get their promised money. And the scam is growing, worth $1 billion in 1999, and $4 billion in 2003. Rebate scams abound.

That’s why I’m glad they haven’t caught onto the whole rebate deal in Japan, and when I see a “rebate” deal in the U.S., I treat it as science fiction, and add the rebate to the price to see what I’ll really be paying. Frankly, I’d sooner try to check out what that Nigerian oil executive wants with me.