davidkin hollywood

L.A. Times today: "Music Pirates Delivering Loot Via AOL Public Sites"

The word "pirate," or some variation thereof appears 18 times, representing 1.76% of the words in the article.

The article quotes AOL reps, the RIAA and a piracy expert. No "pirate" was interviewed for the article.

Missing from this article is context. Just who are the pirates? Why is what they do so bad? The piracy expert says that pirates have been hijacking (there's a completely neutral word, eh?) computer networks for years.

Somewhat related to this is Apple's rechristening of their free iTools, which included 20MB of free disk space, as a subscription-based suite of services cleverly named ".mac". As several people pointed out on the TidBITS Talk mailing list, a large part of the decision to go to a for-pay service was the unmanageable amount of illegal software trading (warez) happening on the free iDisks. I don't doubt that AOL is experiencing the same thing, many orders of magnitude worse.

Still, the tone of the article is very monochromatic. It's the pirates who are the problem. No attention to a record industry that is doing its best to legislate its artificial existence in an age where its prime utility, distribution, is a solved problem. It is L.A. after all, the Detroit of entertainment.