Welcome to My World

About a year and a half ago, a client of mine sent me an unexpected gift in the form of five books: Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card, and Titan, Wizard, and Demon by John Varley. The three Varley books were a trilogy, and I actually really enjoyed it. The two books by Card are the first in their respective series of books set in the Ender’s Game universe … I’ll let you guess which one started the whole thing

It’s important to note I didn’t pay for the books. They were shipped to me straight from Amazon, so it’s clear they were brand new, but money didn’t leave my pockets to cause those books to land in my possession.

I actually read the Titan trilogy first — when I realized how big the Ender’s Game series was, I decided to tackle a smaller pile of books first. When I finally got to Ender’s Game, I absolutely loved it, and immediately set about acquiring the rest of the books in both Ender’s Game series and the Ender’s Shadow series. To do this, I went to half.com … no point in paying retail for six books when I could snag them all for under $20 (including shipping).

Well, I suppose we should have expected this, but it’s still disgusting to actually see it come to light. In its ever-increasingly desperate efforts to convince the world that a person who downloads a copy of a copyrighted song is the worst kind of criminal in existence, the idiots at the RIAA have concocted a feature-length film (!) aimed at law enforcement agents, suggesting that intensifying prosecution of “pirates” will lead them to more “tantalizing” targets, like drug dealers, thieves, and terrorists.

Though they didn’t mention the term “Nazi” directly, did the RIAA just Godwin itself out of this argument? They’ve obviously made two bad mistakes here:

1. By suggesting that following the “antics” of a music pirate, law enforcement might find evidence of other crimes, like drug dealing, terrorism, etc., haven’t they just admitted that “stealing music electronically” lands really low on the priority list for reasonable law enforcement efforts?
2. They’ve just implied that every person who has ever downloaded a piece of music without tithing to the music industry is a terrorist. It’s a cheap shot, and it’s also pretty shitty. Methinks even more “everyday people” will see this steaming pile of bullshit for what it’s worth, even more so than the eyebrows that get raised whenever the RIAA sues a child or a grandparent.

Read some other opinions on the matter so you don’t just think I’m a wingnut Also, it shouldn’t surprise anybody at all that the Pirate Bay has already, well, pirated a copy of this video from the RIAA. Grab your copy here.

• A Wired article on the subject.
• Slashdot.org covers the issue.

I truly enjoy reading articles like this one, wherein we are reminded that just five years ago, movie executives weren’t blaming the creators, producers, actors, or even the green-lighter of such “gems” as Gigli for the colossal flops they were in the movie theaters.

Why did a movie like Gigli flop, you ask? At least, according to the movie executives? Unbelievably, they blamed text messaging and cell phones. They blamed people who watched these movies on opening night, and texted their friends (or e-mailed them, or called them, etc.) either after the movie, or sometimes during it, that it wasn’t worth the time or money to go see.

I laugh hysterically at the MPAA as I write this, since they’ve just been caught (and called out) committing a breach of copyright law.

When you are crusading against the American public for “rampant acts of piracy,” suing your own customers for pirating movies, you probably shouldn’t rip off a copy of Ubuntu, mutate it to have your name, logos, and “approved software” on it, and redistribute it without honoring the license (the GPL) it’s released under.

You also shouldn’t sue your bread & butter customers either, but the MPAA isn’t known for doing smart things.