Obama appoints 5th RIAA lawyer to the Justice Department

[thewayne]

It's slightly stale news as it broke a week ago, but it's still worth note. Yep, Obama's appointed FIVE attorneys that have worked with the RIAA to the Justice Department when numerous civil rights groups are pleading with him to not do it.

*sigh*

I've never thought that Obama was the Second Coming, I just thought he had a better chance of not trashing the country than McCain. But this I definitely don't like.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/obama-taps-fift.html

Comments

[silveradept]

I think that safely ensures real progress will be halted for another four years. And that they will have another four years of statistics to persuade the government that they are necessary and their intimidation and lawsuit tactics are needed more than ever.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Biden has always been pro-Hollywood when it comes to DRM legislation and such. This especially sucks since it takes so long for legislation to be reversed. This is costing Obama some major cred in the geek community.

[silveradept]

Clearly so. Speaking of statistics, a Norwegian study says those who pirate are more likely to buy music. Naturally, the cabals are skeptical, but I think it's because they want it to say "those who pirate are more likely to buy OUR music", and I don't think that's ever going to be true.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I've seen studies like that before. There's two classes of pirates, broadly-speaking. One is: "I can download it for free, therefore I'm never going to pay for it again." The other is: "Someone said this band is cool, so I'm going to download their stuff and see if I want to buy it." The first is never going to buy it because they have no moral compunction against theft, unless someone steals something from them. The second group is definitely more likely to buy music because they're being exposed to more. If they don't like the band they downloaded, they'll probably delete what they downloaded and move on to something else. If they like them, they're likely to continue buying them.

I used to give a friend of mine copies of software that I had that I thought he would like. I trusted him that if he liked it, he would buy it, and I saw the manuals and disks at his house when I was over. But I wouldn't do that for just anyone.

The iTunes Music Store has a preview function where you can listen to 30 seconds of a song, I have no idea if the Amazon store or any others do that. That is an excellent feature, now if I could find a good recommendation service. I really should check out Last.FM.

[silveradept]

I think Amazon does. Pandora was supposed to be the most awesome music recommendation service, but I think they fell afoul of the cabals.

In both cases of pirate, though, I suspect that cabal-approved tripe is not what they will end up buying, though. The indie pirate will sample and buy what he wants, and the pirate without compunction isn't giving money to anyone.

[slashophile.livejournal.com]

What? You didn't think he was the SECOND COMING? Blasphemy! :P Glad to know I wasn't alone in that.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

It's not possible for any candidate to perfectly represent your political opinions/desires, IMHO, if you're a rational being (which excludes a lot of Fox News watchers ;-) ). McCain had a lot of negatives against me liking him as a candidate, chief among them his voting record and who they chose as his Veep, and no real positives in my book. Obama had a lot more positives, which is not to say that he had no negatives, but I counted Biden as a big negative specifically on his record with supporting Hollywood's DRM stance. Given the choice of the two, Obama was the obvious choice for me, so I have no problem blaspheming in that regard. :-)

WE NEED TO GET RID OF THIS DAMN TWO PARTY SYSTEM!

[deborak]

"Same as the old boss . . ."

Everybody sing!

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd be more inclined to say "not terribly different than the old boss..." :-)