The International Stamp Act

Recently, a lot of fuss has been made about the Obama Administration and their tax issue. While I, as a tax paying American, am not totally happy about it, there is a different group that I feel is much more deserving of the so called "Tea Parties" that have been thrown in our Treasury Department's honor: the entertainment industry.

In their most recent public display, they managed to get the gents at The Pirate Bay convicted of "assisting copyright infringement". While this is a quandary to the logical mind, as TPB was breaking no Swedish laws, one cannot help but observe that the media coverage surrounding the trial verdict serves as a wonderful smoke screen to get people's attention away from the recent Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement leak.

As reported on TorrentFreak, the ACTA treaty grants such power to the entertainment industry, it borders on the ridiculous. My question is this: how is no one outraged? Doesn't anyone care that a bloated industry is usurping progress for it's own interests?

One of their biggest arguments has been how much piracy hurts those who make the media being pirated. If this is true (which it is not, as many writers have pirated their own books, recording artists uploaded their albums and one visionary director putting his movie on BitTorrent), then the question becomes, why are artists forming anti-RIAA groups and agreeing to testify against the RIAA?

The answer is simply that the recording (and movie) industry is a bloated glutton, with label execs and distributors pocketing most of the money, leaving many artists with less (though by no means the pittance that many Americans earn). The true money sucking monster in this equation is the executive level in these industries. While it is true that some of them spend time scouting for talent and other such strenuous activities, they do nothing that justifies their outrageous wages.

Movie distributors are more to blame for the steep prices of tickets (I know I personally paid almost $25 for two tickets to see "Dark Knight," one of the few movies I feel was worth the ticket price), and snacks at your local cineplex. Basically, people that have no involvement in making the movie are making the big bucks, and those are the same people that are trying to push through a treaty that gives them the power to decide what punishment those convicted of "copyright infringement" pay. This is outrageous.

Some artists are fighting back. Radiohead, the same band that proved giving your fans free music does pay (as they made millions in donations from allowing a free, donation optional, download of their album In Rainbows), is now reacting positively to the idea of testifying against the RIAA in regards to abuse of copyright.

Now even the artists are fighting the system that managed to get TPB team convicted, but the suits at the labels and distributors are still pushing ahead, and their friends in political circles, especially the American government, need to be told that this will no longer be tolerated. Unless it will. Unless you want "entertainment" to become the meat grinder, force fed crap it's moving towards, that considers you as just a dollar/euro/yen sign.

Someone told me, in regards to Hugh Jackman's response to the Wolverine leak that "art does not lose anything in being reproduced, it does not lose power in being viewed several times; in fact it thrives on the multiple viewings, not how many times it was paid for. That is not art, that is a product, much like a Q-Tip. I'm not paying $10.50 for a Q-Tip, I'm paying for art."

Sony Entertainment VP Steve Heckler said it best nine years ago: "The [entertainment]industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams (you, me, and the rest of the idiots that pay these people's salaries)...It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what." He said that right before his company started putting rootkits on their discs as part of their DRM.

Supposedly DRM is to protect "the artist," but the rootkit allows anyone at Sony to access information on your computer remotely, without your knowledge or consent. There's no DRM on pirated content. The only person that's screwed over is the sucker that actually paid for the disc.

Get mad, revenue stream. Get mad, dammit.

-Xander