Hollywood continues to seek ways to reduce movie downloads

Whoever Hollywood is...isn't the creative artists who must derive some income from their work. Hollywood isn't serving them (realistically, they rarely do).

Hollywood seems be comprised of technological hillbillies - have these people never gotten off the Hollywood Hills farm? They built an industry, in-fact a culture, based on what seems to the average consumer to be free entertainment. We pay for this free stuff through higher consumer product costs, and sometimes pay double by paying for cable or satellite delivery that includes commercials we already paid for...but sometimes we prefer to be fat and dumb. Where we are swift and smart is adapting to new technology, and the internet has provided us with seemingly free entertainment.

This genie can't be stuffed back into the bottle. The people have spoken, and we will continue to hunt and gather stuff to consume - unfortunately, this of course leaves little bread for those of us who create this stuff. We keep using our unlimited curiosity and ingenuity to find this stuff, and there will never really be technology that will keep us from it - the entertainment companies, with Sony's recent debacle as a prime example, must get this concept as a start of a new system to encourage creativity while deriving revenue for their buisnesses and the creators of the art.

As an example, income for songwriters comes in-part from performance rights societies - ASCAP, BMI, etc., from licenses paid by broadcasters, venues, etc., and distributed to copyright holders. The big, bad, un-understood internet is the distribution mechanism just as radio and restaurants are. Radio and restaurants do not pay to own the music, as consumers of music do not (since consumers do not pay to own the music, just a licence for an image of that music, we must stop now and once and for all calling them "pirates" when they trade files). The Internet Service Providers must pay a similar blanket license fee for being the pipe.

When this license is paid (and hopefully distributed equitably), the issue of internet file trading goes away.

The only people who could possibly fight this are the ISPs, understandably, since it would cut into their bottom line one way or another. Ultimately though, without this, their bottom line will go away.

CNN.com - Cheney:�Terrorists win if U.S. loses 'nerve' in Iraq - Dec 6, 2005

No, Dick, the terrorists won when you took the war to Iraq. Your war for political and personal economic profit, based on lies, should never have happened - you know it, and you are lauging at us.

Please resign, and save this great country from further embarassment and isolation.

reviewjournal.com -- News - VIETNAM VETERANS: Goodman announces 'operation'

Dear Mr. Howard,

TMitchell@reviewjournal.com; KHoward@reviewjournal.com

Your recent article on Mayor Goodman's Operation Welcome Home contained a grossly wrong statement of fact - please correct and retract this.

You reported:

"When U.S. military personnel came home 30 years ago as the Vietnam War ended, many were told to take off their uniforms and put on civilian clothes or else face the scorn of an ungrateful public.
Angry crowds sometimes gathered to spit on them when they returned."

There are no substantiated reports of soldiers returning from Vietnam being spat upon.

Crowds angry at the war did gather. Some US low-level personell may have recommened civilian clothes instead of uniforms. A few misguided civilians may have directed their scorn at soldiers instead of politicians. But protesters spitting on veterans? Entitlement mentality wishful thinking, and a re-writing of history for a purpose.

I was too young to serve, but many cousins and acquaintences did. They all reported that they returned to a different America - one that did not have an unquestioning support for the war. Many felt, and still feel, disrespected for the duty they did for us, but none report anything like spitting.

In many ways, these soldiers were the victims, not of the public but of the politicians. They universally feel, as do todays soldiers in Iraq (two of my nephews included) that they should either be given a clear task and the proper support to complete the task, or that they be removed from harm's way.

I will be waiting for notice of your correction.

sf

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Oct-18-Tue-2005/news/3877922.html
reviewjournal.com -- News - VIETNAM VETERANS: Goodman announces 'operation': "When U.S. military personnel came home 30 years ago as the Vietnam War ended, many were told to take off their uniforms and put on civilian clothes or else face the scorn of an ungrateful public.
Angry crowds sometimes gathered to spit on them when they returned."

'Rudderless White House' Fights Miers' Choppy Seas - Los Angeles Times

Last November, it was obvious that:

The economic recovery was going slow and benefitting a small, and wealthy, portion of the US.

The war in Iraq was based on either lies or stupidity.

The insurgency and civil war in Iraq was increasing daily.

Top level Executive branch officials were suspected of or implicated in crimes involving national security.

Disaster preparedness was already under scruitiny.

etc.

Observing this rationally, no president with this record would be re-elected. Yet a (small) majority voted for him.

Now a majority of these people think he is doing a poor job. It was obviously the same job he was doing when they voted for him.

Was it just the response to the natural disaster? The worsening of the war in Iraq? Their obvious loss of real income/purchasing power? The millions that have fallen off the unemployment count, unable to find an equivalent job, or any job at all? Is George W. Bush a different, lesser, man than he was before the election?

Did they just figure out that he is not the man do do all this "hard work" moments after the election?

New York Daily News - Home - Michael Goodwin: She's already failed

So Harriet Meirs had an opinion - so what? She's entitled to that. It may or may ever mean anything in relationship to her (potential) Supreme Court opinions.

What should bother those on the right as well as the left is that her opinion was in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban most abortions in the US. The reasonable among us on both sides realize that abortion, gay marriage, and using turn signals on the freeway will never be a part of the US Constitition.

The very idea of any of these cultural ideas growing permanent roots in the fertile earth of this document is a wacky liberal interpretation of the Constitution, and (not very) deep down, every sane constitutional scholar (trust me, I'm not claiming to be one) knows this to be true.

Whether Harriet Meirs has ever failed (she seems to be generally successful in her vocational life by any objective measure), I just do not know. Maybe, just the fact that so many on the left and the right object to her should tell us that she actually is the right person for the job, who knows...

Rove Makes Fourth Grand Jury Appearance in CIA Leak Case - (AP) Los Angeles Times

Last Exit Before Toll, Karl, Last Exit Before Toll.

speaking from the center?

You can count me among the people who believe that the constitution spells out how we can have a free society and an appropriately-sized federal government.

That the government should stay off people's backs, and stay out out what it the states' rights to determine. That the federal government should provide a strong defense without primarily functioning as a profit-center for the rich and powerful, and without the strong defence functioning as a federally funded presidential campaign tool. That the federal government should never place discrimination in the constitution. That the federal government has no place in determining any personal medical decision. That my tax dollars can never be spent to market any religion, whether that of the majority or a minority, of the politically powerful or the disenfranchised.

You can count me among the people who have an education, opinions, and experience enough to form these opinions from a strong foundation, and among the people who respects the rights of others to have those opinions. You can count me among the people who respects others opinions because I have the self-respect to have confidence in my own.

You can count me among the people who voted against the current administration because there is not a single thought among those in the White House that supports the interests of the average citizen in terms of governance, the economic divide between rich and poor, and the balance between freedom and security, yet they were such effective salespeople that they sold a bill of goods.

You can count me among the people that agree that we are dangerously close to establishing royalty in this country - the inheritance tax, damage award cap, and social security issues are prime examples - and we are veering dangerously close to annointing our leader with king-like powers - the ability to determine who is and is not a legitimate enemy in a war, and what level of of torture is acceptable are prime examples. It makes my head spin that these radical ideas are supported by anyone who considers themselves conservative.

The very freedom to say things like this is under attack from Attorneys General, media moguls, and political leaders alike, and it makes my head spin that anyone who considers themselves conservative doesn't see this.

I certainly am fairly liberal on the environment and liberal in a constitutional-freedom sense about personal liberties, but also conservative in a small-federal-government way.

You can count me as one of the 49% who voted against the current administration's re-election because of commonly held beliefs, nothing radically left or right. Self-defeating, pathetically blinded ownership of radical right or left ideas is dangerous to our society.

Yes, count me as one who speaks from the reasonable center.

ambulance chasers and drunken doctors

The money, in the medical industry, goes straight to the top. Corporate executives are among the highest paid in the US. forty years ago, that overhead just wasn't there, and went to your local doctor.

The average surgeon in the US earned $78,000 last year - more that I make but it doesn't really seem like a lot. They spend nearly 50% of their time and profits administering paperwork for HMOs, insurance, Medicaid, etc. They did go to school longer than I did, and I want them to be well rested when they put a knife in me.

Insurance is expensive to them, but the rise in malpractice insurance precisely tracks the rise in insurance company profits - not court cases by ambulance chasers, not doctors drunkenly snipping out the wrong kidney.

We are swamped with immigrants in many parts of this country, and they indeed use emergency rooms for their urgent care needs, and this raises the price of hospital care for all of us. California is particularly impacted by this, and receives less monetary support from the federal government per capita than most states, when reasonably we should be compensated for this federal problem (California is not, yet, a soveriegn nation, and can't be expected to protect a federal border on its own).

Californians are also nearly twice as likely as residents of most other states to file a Workman's Comp claim. Since medical services are compensated at wholesale rates, this also increases medical costs for those of us who don't file WC claims.

IMO we, the richest nation in the world with the best Doctors, Nurses, and Hospitals, should make a system where we never deny the best medical care to anyone regardless of their ability to pay - anything less is shameful.

Restructuring, outsourcing, re-engineering, downsizing, subcontracting and forming alliances with friends ... and enemies.

As employees we make our own career and in reality can not expect the same kind of support employees did in our fathers' time. Employers have made a radical shift over the last two decades, and I'm not sure that it is for the better.

I do strongly feel that there is an engine driving this. It's a philosophical, political, and economic force, and as such driven by opinion, luck, and whimsey as much as business sense.

The force is determined by who gets the organization's revenue. This revenue is a dynamic amount fixed by the good old fashioned balance sheet. In the past (and with fewer and fewer examples these days, the US Military is one), revenues were distributed to employees, with the company head rarely directly getting more than 7 times the average employee. This resulted in stable companies in times of great societal change.

As FDR is credited with creating the middle class, Ronald Reagan is credited with creating an investor class. As corporate CEOs and CFOs found themselves in the position of both employee and investor, the tide quickly shifted away from stable companies with stable mutually loyal workforces (driving a stable economy) to dynamic companies with employees considered necessary parasites and the first expense to be cut. The result has been an undeniable widening of the gap between rich and poor, a huge societal experiment pretty much forcing married couples to form two-income families, and a perpetually un-stable employed-class.

Is this good or bad? Well, it just *is*, and again as you say, employees must deal with it, and this isn't something we are taught in school.

What's Up With Customer Service?

Ooh, don't get me started!

At home, I'm faced with a Canon digital camera that was $349 375 days
ago, I can buy today for $199, and Canon wants $115 to fix a software
problem that seems to be well known...Canon's choice will be: fix this camera under warranty, or return it un-repaired for my doorstop collection; I will then sell my Canon scanner and printer on eBay, along with the $200+ of accessories I bought for my Canon camera, and recommend actively that all my friends, family, acquaintences, etc. never buy a Canon product.

Oooh, cable TV. I called Comcast to upgrade my cable so I could receive the Lakers'
playoff games on TNT, only available on a cable tier that costs an
extra $29/mo above the one I currently pay for. 10 days later, the
upgrade finally pops on, after four one-hour phone calls where they
denied any guilt, and there is one playoff game left on TNT. Then, at
the start of that last playoff game, the cable service to my
neighborhood goes off, nuking my cable TV, High Speed Internet
service, and my VOIP telephone service. They have credited me about $1 so far...

One recent weekend, I drove to an audio production facility to lend a replacement unit of one
of our products so they could continue an important project while we
fixed their out-of-warranty unit, simply because it was the right thing to do.

I have to admit, we as consumers (both of mass-market consumer
products and mission-critical pro-audio products) have voted with our
pocketbooks to put ourselves into this position. Tantalized with lower
and lower prices (hysterically low if you consider historical prices
comparing today's gear with gear of 15-20 years ago), we buy into
*newer and better* products at ever decreasing prices while expecting
customer service from the manufacturer to meet our expectations based
on past products that were sold at healthy markups from manufacturing
costs. This trend has served to democratize the recording industry,
for example (I won't say it has improved the quality of recorded
output), but at the same time, it has trivialized the results that can be obtained by few people using the best gear.

Maybe the next cycle will serve to bring back some of the value to
consumer products as well as professional audio products. By building in enough profit to the
manufacturer or distributor to facilitate a return to a properly high
level of support, we might all benefit from a real improvement in the
quality of audio delivery. And we might create a few consumers in the US by giving them well-paying jobs.

Ray Charles "We Only Play One Kind of Music..."

"...the good kind."

I had the pleasure of doing some work for Mr. Charles last year. I supplied him with a nice piece of expensive recording gear, and this required that I interact with Mr. Charles and visit him numerous times. Each visit left me with a cool memory.

On one visit Ray gave me a large check, something like what I take home in a year. The production of the check was business like but seemed ceremonial. The presentation was what stuck with me: he put the check in one of my hands, shook the other, made as if looking me right in the eye, and he said "thank you" and moved on. Reputation as a cheap bastard aside, this is a man who knows the value of his hard work.

Another time, as I brought the system to his historic-landmark studio, he helped his engineer go through every box, making sure everything was included. He fished around in one box, came up with something, walked up to me, and waved a computer mouse right in my face. "D, why the hell are you selling Ray Charles a mouse?" Of course, he knew full well why, and, although it took me a beat, in a few seconds, we both broke out laughing.

Another time during a short visit, I said that I had to excuse myself, but my girlfriend was waiting for me - we had a date. Everyone in the room lit up. Ray came over to me and said "D, all of us have to agree that there is only one thing more important than business - p****!" No one had to tell me that I had hit upon Ray's second favorite subject.

My offhand question of what kind of music he had been recording here lately made him a little cranky, but after a breath he answered with this blog title.

I've worked with a lot of idols, famous and infamous, but no one who carried himself like Ray, or presented himself as honestly as he did.

Like all of us, in the end Ray lived exactly as long as he lived (not to little or too long), but I am grateful for his time here during my time.

Play on, Brother Ray.

the music that fixes an image

....Spring, 1976. Driving non-stop alone from Indiana to Boston. No tape player in-dash, no radio stations except for fire 'n' brimstone preachers. My mono cassette machine and a backpack full of cassettes beside me.

Dawn hits on this drive somewhere in Pennsylvania. Just as my energy was waning and I figured I wasn't going to get saved that night, I reached into the backpack and pulled out a tape without looking. Popped it in without looking.

It was music I'd never heard. Synth arppegio running up from nowhere, a woman moaning, sound effects...and just when the first drum hit of Breathe smacks, I turn a corner and the first light breaks around a hill to a scene of my highway flowing infinitely between the hill and a river.

I'll never forget the image, and I see it every time I play Dark Side of the Moon.

Pirates, Stereo, Mad Cows, and The Power of Words

In a time before personal computers and AIDS, I was told to come in after class by my English teacher in high school. She wanted to talk to me about some words I had used in class. These didn't include the F word, the S word, or any on George Carlin's list. They included pissed (as in "pissed off") and bitch (as in "bitched out").

She was probably in her forties, and probably considered herself hip to these kids, but was undoubtedly raised in a time when there was little wiggle room in school on the concept of "proper" language. She wanted me to say "ticked off" instead of "pissed off", and my concept was that words were free and shouldn't be constrained, while I pointed out that I kept myself from using the F word and the S word in school, because I was smart enough to know the rules and consequences on cursing. I considered her attitude prissy and closed, but I made the choice to follow the herd...

The media in general (I'm not demonizing the media, but I probably will be throwing the good in with the bad, in this case),

is using some words that are just plain wrong. They are taking the easy way out, not thinking this through, and probably in some cases (I'm not singling out Fox News) choosing words to sensationalize a concept.

*

Pirates. To pirate something was to steal something, derive income from it, and deprive income from it to the previous owner.

People who pirated were called pirates. The word pirate is from
Middle English (from Old French, from Latin prta, from Greek peirts, from peirn), to attempt, from peira, trial. It's generally accepted that the term was applied to criminals-at-sea because to live, they would attempt or try anything, presumably anything out of the accepted ethical and moral ways to live their lives. Current usage of pirate for someone who trades a file on the internet came by way of pirate radio stations, famously operating from waters off British shores, that didn't submit to government fees and regulations; pirate was a cute way to refer to these stations. These stations made no profit, but played music that the BBC wouldn't play, and besides infringing on legally assigned radio frequencies, caused little trouble.

Now, people who have an MP3 image of a music recording on their hard drive are called pirates. Where's the profit to this sharer? Where's the deprivation of potential profit or deprivation of use for the owner (let's assume that the potential marketing value of this availability is at least equal to the potential for loss). People selling mixtapes or bootlegging copies of other peoples' property to sell at flea markets or on the streets of Shanghai are certainly pirates. To call these people pirates provides the media with a way to stir peoples' emotions and give their audience a hook to remember this attractive issue from one relevant story to the next. To call them infringers (if this file sitting on their hard drive is indeed a copy of the copyright holder's intellectual property, or if this file is indeed a performance, both of which would be an infringement of the copyright holder's exclusive rights), would be more accurate wouldn't be as sexy. To call them file traders would be even less sexy, but if the file is sitting on their hard drive, are they even trading it?

*

The definition of Stereo: A combining form meaning solid, hard, firm, as in stereochemistry, stereography.

Origin: Gr. Stereos solid. See Stare to gaze. From the Greek "stereos" meaning "solid" - having three dimensions.

Two-channel, 5.1, 10.2, etc., are all examples of stereo audio. Our purpose and intent is to present music and sounds so that they appear as a solid audio image to the listener. Two channels have been in common use for half a century, but this limitation to two speaker was chosen mostly for marketing reasons: the consumer audio companies recognized the appeal of stereo sound, but chose to believe that people would only be willing to accept the addition of one other speaker (and amplifier channel) in their living rooms. Stereo sound had first been presented, in theaters, using three channels across the front. The three-channel stereo approach persisted in theater settings and in professional music production, and is thankfully finding its way to homes.

Six-speaker (or more) systems will of course never be accepted or applicable in every listening situation, but peoples' willingness to install these speaker systems in their homes for movie presentations has shown that there is a substantial market for music presented in better stereo than two channels can provide.

It's time to take back the word "stereo" and apply it any time a solid sonic-image presentation is desired, and not limit this word's usage to two-channel.

*

Mad Cow! The chance of getting Mad Cow disease is less than being struck by lightning six thousand times in your life. The media, needing something to talk about and again to hook people into coming back for more thrills tomorrow (same bat time, same bat channel), call this bug Mad Cow instead of BSE, the abbreviation of the real name of the disease. People get rabies every year and die; people put things up their rear end and die, yet nobody gets Mad Cow, and we could choose to completely avoid the issue by not eating beef if we wanted, and we still hear stories about Mad Cow every day.


The power of words ebbs and flows. Whether it is with great thought or casual indifference, the words we choose affect the impact and clear communication of our ideas. When we speak of the presentation of ideas we have to care to choose our words wisely. It is unwise in the popular media to choose inflammatory words which distort the impact of the described condition.

My high school English teacher should be proud of how I observe the power of words, and their effect on us.

RIAA and MPAA - Poor, Poor Pitiful Me

And with these trade organizations, it is me, me, me, me, and more me, please.

The music industry is a profitable but basically self-hating, failing organism. The business model built over the last 25 or so years, based on Album sales and indentured-servitude artist contracts, is based in another time and another place. The record companies' refusal to re-evaluate and re-structure, with current culture and technology in mind, is setting back art (or at least Pop Art) 25 years in the process, all to support funneling revenue to the top of the business food chain.

The movie industry has found ways, in the face of changing culture and technology, to prosper. Still relying on the blockbuster (not Blockbuster©) for profits to support the less-or-non-profitable releases, motion picture studios need to figure out a way to level the differences between profitable movies and non-profitable movies so more and better films can be made, but finds ways (like home/rental video releases andforeignn distribution) to recoup expenses from even modestly attended film releases.

These industries desire to be ten times bigger than they are, but they will never be pharmaceutical companies or automobile manufacturers. The potential for exponentially increased profits (and more yachts, tennis courts, and Lakers tickets for the execs) blinds these industries to how they may be able to ensure that there is a profitable entertainment industry for their grandchildren, and that our entertainment continues to become more...entertaining, and enlightening.

So what do they do to their best customers? Sue them! Tell them they are criminals for listening to free music! Whack away at the best marketing tools since the invention of radio and television.

The recent rulings against the RIAA's actions and specific sections of the DMCA are perhaps the first blows for sanity, and the future of music, in quite a while. Simply put, the RIAA isn't a special class, and potential violators of copyright law, whether on the internet, at a friend's house, or at your local public library, have to be treated at least as well as any other accused criminal. An ISP can't be responsible for what people do with its technology any more than Ma Bell could when Al Capone called to order a hit on someone.

Whether trading a file on the internet is indeed a violation of any law has not yet been tested in the courts. As someone who depends on the music industry for his living, I insist that there be a way to recognize when an artistic creation belongs to me, and a way for revenue generated by this art to reach me.

Copyright law is woefully inadequate to the task in light of today's technology and culture. The DMCA is a step backward to an economic stone age, where the caveman with the biggest club will win the prey; in fact, it puts that club in the hand of it's worst-case owner: the government. Anyone who considers themselves conservative and has expressed a desire for smaller government should have been howling at this travesty of personal rights since its first draft, but the DMCA was passed in an atmosphere of supporting a bigger, stronger government and political structure at any cost. Jefferson's ideal of limited copyright to encourage creativity yet not empower government or big-business monopolies over art should be the model to which we return.

The RIAA has positioned itself to gain enormous political power, through its recent appointment of Cary Sherman as president in particular, far beyond its natural reach in society. It has superficially liberal politicians, like California's Boxer and Waxman, basically on the industry teat, supporting the town-company like a company-town politician should.

These politicians won't have a broad voter base if the voters wake up and see how they protect, at least in this instance, the greed of the few over the need of the many; the ranks of artists and consumers far outweigh the privileged entertainment industry executive class.

The RIAA and MPAA do not in any way, shape, or form, represent the interests of artists and consumers They must realize that society and industry will be better served by more creative art and unfettered freedom, and act to support art and free exchange of ideas.

Good points in this letter to the LATimes:

"doctors, lawyers and insurance companies who benefit from this $30-billion extortion", "California employers pay two to three times more than the rest of the country and give legitimately injured workers the worst benefits in the nation".

I would bet that this business owner voted to recall the sitting Governor and voted to elect Schwarzenegger. She blames the state legislature for this situation, and I can't argue much about any negative evaluation of that snake pit. To blame our porky representatives for the greed and robbery of the insurance companies is ultimately disingenuous.

Insurance companies, barring 9/11 losses, are having a great year, and a great decade. They spread out your-and-my money by investing it, so their stock market profits have been flat over, say, five years. Is it any surprise that given the opportunity, and legal possibility, they raise rates when and where they can? Since WC insurance is required of employers by state law, state law should also reasonably regulate what the employers can be charged.

Given that studies show that Californians are nearly 50% more likely that the residents of other states to file WC claims, we have to know that human nature will rear its beautiful head when allowed. This does not mean that we can let Business Nature grab small businesses (who insures the insurers?...) and toss them (at least the cowardly, unimaginative and racist among them) to neighboring states.