Robert Switzer

The Russian music store tells US citizens that purchasing music from AllofMP3.com is legal - probably.

read more | digg story

Heads up, media companies. Allofmp3.com is the dog that hunts. Pay attention — this is the business model that works: Low-cost downloads, large selection, no drm, multiple bit-rates and formats. Pre-paid user accounts create a very profitable float. Ask the banks and phone companies about the profitability of pre-paid calling and credit cards.

Russian intellectual property law uses a broadcast paradigm to deal with internet downloads, much like the ASCAP/BMI model in the United States. A blanket license is purchased, and the licensed business remits a small amount per broadcast or download instance to a central rights-management organization that then distributes these funds to the artist or their representative on demand, in much the same way that ASCAP/BMI distributes payments for radio broadcast royalties in the US.

Some high-profile figures in pop music have come out against allofmp3.com, calling it outright piracy. I have three questions for these people. The first question is, “How much airplay are you getting now?” the second question is, “Wouldn’t more exposure be a *good* thing?”. And the third question is, “If you haven’t been paid by the Russian rights management organization, has your record company or management *approached* this rights management organization and asked for an accounting?”

Large media companies are refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Russian approach to downloadable content. So none of the large media companies have even approached the Russian rights-management organization to demand payment on behalf of the artists they distribute. To do so would be to validate the legitimacy of the arrangement.

So the artists lose. Not because the Russian rights management organization has refused to pay, but because the media companies that represent these artists prefer not to demand payment, as doing so would legitimize the download-as-broadcast paradigm versus the download as physical product model that they prefer.

Meanwhile, the RIAA and the MPAA continue to conduct disinformation campaigns suggesting that allofmp3.com is illegal and that it will be shut down ’sometime real soon’ while allofmp3.com continues to do a land office business giving people what they want and getting paid to do so.

I suggest that anyone reading this go to allofmp3.com, read the faq there, and then make their own decision about the legality of the service on offer and act accordingly. I have.

I further suggest to artists that fear piracy that they should fear obscurity instead. Back in the day, a musician performed to promote the sale of recordings. Today a musician makes recordings to promote the sale of performances and merchandise, and the name of this game is high visibility. Downloads and other viral distribution channels build visibility, supporting the sales of concert tickets and merchandise.

Piracy can be defeated by creating a distribution structure that beats piracy hands-down on quality, consistency, and ease-of-use. And then pricing this service significantly below the opportunity cost of piracy. Allofmp3.com is the closest thing I’ve seen so far to a service that could eradicate piracy by beating it in the marketplace rather than the courtroom.

Will Google Book Search uncover long-buried literary crimes?

read more | digg story

It depends on how you look at it. A plagarist’s nightmare? Maybe. But perhaps the act of creation is, and always has been, a bit more collaborative than what our collective artist-myth has allowed us to believe.

If two works of scholarship are found to have a sentence or two in common, does this diminish the value of one or the other? If so, how so?

How original is originality anyway? Artists routinely borrow concepts and ideas from others who predated them, and call these influences. And, on a darker note, artists often borrow with impunity from contemporaries who have less visibility, less credibility, or a smaller media footprint.

A couple of months ago, a famous video artist — someone with work in the Museum Of Modern Art — was outed on an email list I subscribe to. This artist had copied the website of another video artist, altered the creation date to predate the original site, and had posted it on the Internet as his own.

It was an obvious and direct lift, not a parody or a commentary. The artist who had copied the site, older and far more famous than the doner artist, probably didn’t know about archive.org and how easily illuminated his borrowings might be.

Once outed, the response of the older, more famous artist was silence. No justification or explanation was offered.

Perhaps originality, like history and property, is the prerogative of the winners.

I think Google Book Search is a superb idea, though I don’t want to see digitized books under the control of a corporation replace paper books and public libraries.

Maybe what we’ll find out with tools like Google Book Search is that our ideas of originality in scholarship and art may need to be re-examined.

Civil rights groups filed a suit with German prosecutors on Tuesday seeking war crimes charges against outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the alleged abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons.

read more | digg story

Bill Maher just outed the head of the entire Republican Party, Ken Mehlman, as gay on CNN’s Larry King Live. See the video.

read more | digg story

My gaydar is definitely broken. I had no idea. Though when I broke the news to my wife, it was clear to me from the look on her face that I was probably one of the last to know …

Mehlman has been conspicuously absent from post-election coverage. I wonder what he’ll do, though there aren’t many options. He can either come out, or deny he’s gay. This is just too much fun. I predict I’ll be spending way too much time in front of the TV soaking up all the post-election coverage …

I’ve taken more than one cheap shot at Ted Haggard, and I’ve enjoyed more than one joke at his expense. And I’m not alone. A lot of people have had a lot of laughs at Pastor Ted’s expense.

According to reporting this morning on CNN, Ted Haggard will soon begin a 3 to 5 year process of ’spiritual renewal’. This process will include counseling, confrontation, and ‘the rebuke of godly men’.

What is going to happen to Ted Haggard now is no joke. Run Ted Haggard, run. Listen to who you are and heed what you know to be true about yourself and put as much distance between yourself and these people, these ‘godly men’, as you can.

Because these ‘godly men’ are going to beat you down until you choke on a bolus of your own self-loathing.

And I wouldn’t worry about going to hell, Pastor Ted. Because if you put yourself into the hands of these people, you’ll already be there.

Anyone remember when the Bushies called Rumsfeld Rumstud?

After 9-11, Donald Rumsfeld’s astringent, decisive, clear, no-nonsense platform manner certainly impressed. Like his pal Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld was someone who definitely looked and sounded as if he knew what he was talking about.

Shortly after that, I remember reading about Rumsfeld’s ambitious plan, called ‘Transformation’, that was designed to totally change the military from a slow, bureaucratic industrial-age behemoth to a light, fast, smart information-age force.

As I read about ‘Transformation’, I kept getting deja vu. I’d read it all before. The smaller-lighter-faster rhetoric read a lot like contemporary management theory, the kind of stuff written by business gurus like Tom Peters.

In a previous post, I talked a bit about how much Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the entire Bush entourage resembled the current state-of-the-art in corporate top management. It was all there — the imperial arrogance, the absolute refusal to acknowledge even obvious error, the magical thinking, the isolation, the yes-men echo chamber. And of course, they also exhibited the will to play as dirty as necessary to advance their pet agendas.

None of this should come as a surprise as Rumsfeld, Cheney and company had spent a significant portion of their lives as top executives of large corporations. And it’s equally unremarkable that the corporations led by these men were part of industries with significant government insulation from the vagaries of the free market these same men seem so rhetorically fond of.

In large, static bureaucracies such as large government contractors, pharmaceutical companies, and think tanks, the core competency is looking right, sounding right, and having the ability to vanquish and marginalize internal rivals.

And ole Rumstud was good at all of the above. Along with pal Cheney, he was able to slap down Colin Powell and contain Condoleezza Rice.

Unfortunately though, ole Rumstud finally found himself in a position where he would have to produce a specific, unambiguous result. And no amount of handwaving could get him off the hook, though it wasn’t from a lack of trying.

He still looks and sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about. Only now, even the dumbest among us recognize that the man is stone cold incompetent. A general who served under Rumsfeld put it this way, “Rumsfeld is incompetent tactically, strategically, and operationally”.

What the country needed during Rumsfeld’s tenure was a Secretary of Defense who could produce a specific, tangible result. And that result was quickly and decisively winning a war with a minimum loss of life — specifically the lives of our brave soldiers, but also the lives of innocent civilians.

In achieving this specific, tangible objective, Rumsfeld failed decisively. And now he’s gone, but I can’t help thinking about all the people who took responsibility for Rumsfeld’s actions in his stead, in the most personal and costly way imaginable — with their lives.

Montana, Missouri and Virginia are still uncalled. But the noxious Rick Santorum is history, at least for now. And the Democrats control the House Of Representatives. I’ll take that. It’s bedtime.

Yet another creepy, repressed, hypocritical, closeted right-wing evangelical Christian homosexual is exposed to the light of day. And this time, the person in question is the pastor of one of the largest evangelical Christian super-churches in the nation, as well as being the head (no pun intended) of an influential group of evangelical Christian pastors.

He’s been fired from his job, and of course all of his contemporaries are rapidly distancing themselves, while appearing to remain sympathetic.

Time Magazine last year called Pastor Ted one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in the country, someone who had the ear of President Bush. Someone who was in regular communication with the President via a weekly conference call.

I find it hard to suppress the contempt I feel for people like Pastor Ted, and by extension, the people who take him seriously, accept what he says, and most importantly, give him money.

Yet this very contempt feeds into and strengthens the virulent and toxic mimetic virus that fuels both the evangelical Christians and the authoritarian right.

Here is a link to a chilling excerpt from the Richard Dawkins BBC Documentary ‘The Root of all Evil’. In this excerpt Pastor Ted and Richard Dawkins square off on the Bible and on evolution.

Pastor Ted demonstrates complete ignorance about the mechanism of natural selection in evolution. Dawkins calls him on it, and Pastor Ted counters with one of the uglier and more virulent memetic weapons in the evangelical arsenal. He accuses Dawkins of being an arrogant intellectual looking to denigrate the beliefs of ordinary folks, People Of Faith.

Meanwhile, Pastor Ted also claims that the Bible contains ‘no contradictions’, a position that anyone who has actually read the Bible knows to be patently false.

Everybody’s entitled to an opinion, right? And Pastor Ted’s opinion is just as good as Richard Dawkin’s, right? So by pointing out that Pastor Ted doesn’t know shit about natural selection and evolution, and is in fact misleading his congregation about the nature of each, Richard Dawkins is exhibiting arrogance and disrespect for these just plain folks, these ‘People Of Faith’.

In my last post, I wrote indirectly about the cultural backlash that seems to be fueling both the growth of evangelical Christianity and the authoritarian right.

A large part of this backlash is fueled by what the constituents of this backlash believe to be a tyranny of false expertise that mitigates against all claims to specialized knowledge, valid or not.

So, by extension, all expertise is ‘just an opinion’, and just like assholes, we all have one. And Richard Dawkins, one of the most influential evolutionary biologists in the world, has no more authority with these people to speak on evolution than Pastor Ted.

We just finished watching ‘The Staircase’, a documentary about the high-profile murder trial of novelist Michael Peterson. Directed by academy award-winning filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, the film documents both the trial itself and the initial preparations by both the defense and prosecution.

The film is chilling in it’s depiction of a gross and cynically orchestrated miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the corrupt police, vindictive district attorney, and the backward, narrow-minded and ignorant citizens of Durham, North Carolina. I’ll cheerfully add this city, and perhaps the entire state of North Carolina to the growing list of places I’ll never visit.

We watched a porcine district attorney and his assistant, a screeching fishwife with an outlandishly bad makeup and fashion sense, drone portentiously about homaseckshuls and pure-dee filth. But more than that, we saw yet another righteous attack by the god-fearing silent majority against what they perceive as the tax-hiking, government expanding, latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, New York Times reading, body-piercing, Hollywood loving, God-mocking left-wing freak show.

Michael Peterson, a wealthy, urbane, sophisticated and cultivated man, had the double misfortune of losing his beautiful and loving wife to a tragic accident at home and then being mis-cast as a murderer and falsely convicted on limited evidence by a prosecution willing to stoop to the very lowest depths to play to the very worst instincts and prejudices of what might as well have been a rural, small-town jury.

Peterson, a successful writer, was forced to spend over $800,000 to defend himself against malicious and trumped-up charges entered against him by a vindictive and deeply bigoted prosecution. He was then convicted of first-degree murder in the absence of a murder weapon, witnesses, motive, or any compelling forensic evidence. In North Carolina, the penalty for first degree murder is life in prison without possibility of parole. Today, Michael Peterson is in prison, where he has already been hospitalized as the result of an assault by other inmates, and where he will remain for the rest of his life.

Michael Peterson wasn’t convicted of something that he’d done. He was convicted of something he might have done, could have done, or possibly wanted to do, based on who the prosecution and jury considered him to be. He was convicted because of who he was, and the atypical life that he led.

Michael Peterson, born in 1943, was the son of a career military officer and moved around quite a bit while growing up. In the early 1960s, Peterson studied political science and was editor of the student newspaper at Duke University in Durham NC, graduating in 1965 with a degree in political science.

Peterson dropped out of law school and took a job in 1966 researching arguments in favor of increased U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. The research led to Peterson’s four-year enlistment in the Marine Corps, He later saw combat in South Vietnam.

After the war, Peterson worked as a government consultant and lived overseas for 11 years.

In 1989, the Peterson family moved to North Carolina. Between 1983 and 1998 Peterson published three novels informed by his experiences in Vietnam: “The Immortal Dragon,” “A Time of War” and “Charlie Two Shoes and the Marines of Love Company.”

Peterson’s books received little critical acclaim, but they enabled him to buy a large house at the corner of Cedar and Sycamore Streets in a wooded, upper-middle class Durham neighborhood. Peterson continued researching and writing fiction while writing a column for the local daily newspaper, the Herald-Sun.

In the mid-1990s, Peterson met Nortel executive Kathleen Atwater, and her teenaged daughter Caitlin. Peterson’s children say they accepted Atwater because they saw a love connection between their father and Kathleen that their parents never had.

Leveraging the name recognition he had from his books, his community involvement and newspaper columns challenging the Durham establishment, Peterson made an unsuccessful run for mayor of Durham in 1999. In his columns and during the campaign, Peterson pointedly challenged both the Durham District Attorney’s Office and the Durham Police Force.

The Petersons were relaxing and enjoying a few drinks on a Saturday night in December of 2001. Sometime after Saturday night became Sunday morning, Kathleen decided to go to bed, while Michael stepped outside to check the pool lights. As she started up the narrow back stairway, Kathleen, tipsy on valium and wine and wearing flip-flops, tripped and fell backwards down the steps, hitting her head multiple times on the door jam and steps as she went down, resulting in several bloody scalp wounds. As she attempted to right herself, she slipped on her own blood and fell a couple more times, further injuring herself. Michael Peterson found her an hour or so later on his way to bed, and immediately called 911.

The medical examiner on the scene ruled the death an accident, but by the next day, the Durham police department had characterized the accident as ’suspicious’, obtained warrants, searched the Peterson residence during Kathleen Peterson’s Wake, and removed 66 pieces of evidence, including computers and data.

The Durham Police have a richly deserved reputation for incompetence and corruption. Witness the latest Keystone Kops escapades surrounding the alleged rape of a stripper by members of the Duke University lacrosse team. If a rape actually occurred, the slipshod investigative practices of the Durham police would frustrate bringing any actual perpetrators to justice.

As a journalist working for the Durham Herald-Sun, Michael Peterson was highly critical, often abrasively so, of the Durham District Attorney’s office and the police force.

Michael Peterson was also a known bisexual, apparently preferring male prostitutes for casual sexual contacts, while maintaining a loving and mutually satisfying relationship with his wife and immediate family, who were aware of his extra-marital activities and sexual orientation.

The Durham police, who probably had anecdotal evidence of Peterson’s bisexuality, wasted no time in going public with the details of Peterson’s sex life as it was verified by the data and email on the computers collected during the search of the Peterson home.

But even though it was proven that Peterson infrequently had sex with male prostitutes on a pay-to-play basis, no evidence of any kind was introduced that would indicate a love triangle between Peterson, his wife, and any other person, either male or female, that would serve as a motive for homocide.

The issue of Peterson’s bisexuality was cynically introduced by the prosecution as a manipulative device to shock and prejudice the jury against Peterson and the defense.

Homosexuality, real or perceived, is the new race-baiting. Witness the 2004 election. Gratuitous anti-gay marriage legislation was introduced on ballots in key swing states to mobilize a base of conservative evangelical voters known to be sympathetic to the Republican Presidential ticket.

The Peterson trial represents one of the most egregious, unvarnished and ugly examples of bigoted and ignorant backlash against an innocent person who had the misfortune or audacity to be different than or threatening to a socially conservative status quo.

The big question in my mind is why the ordinary people on the Peterson jury, and to a lesser extent, the ordinary people in the Durham Police Department and District Attorney’s Office felt so threatened by the mere existence of Michael Peterson that they were willing to ignore the rules of evidence and the obligation to impartiality that comes with jury duty, not to mention common decency to railroad a man who had already suffered one of the most damaging losses a person can experience. Michael Peterson will be in prison for the remainder of his life.

Onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer explained it to The New York Times like this: “Joe Six-Pack doesn’t understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn’t have a say in it.”

Thomas Frank, who is considerably younger, smarter, and better looking than I am has a partial answer to this question in his books ‘The Conquest of Cool’, and ‘What’s The Matter With Kansas’. He’s currently working on another book, due out in 2008, that further explores the question. I’ll be delving some into his take on backlash, as well as my own in future blog entries.