licentious radio

Tuesday, April 16, 2002
[5:02:03 PM]

Google should recognize weblogs as a document and site structure, and link to the archive url, not the main page of the weblog.

This website gets a few hits a day off of Google queries -- often people searching for information about linux on the ipaq. I had some problems, and published the solutions. I'm very pleased that people can find it.

Alas, Google points to the current weblog url, not the archive url. If someone clicks on Google's link, they won't see the information they were looking for. At Google.com, they can go back and get it from Google's cache, but the Google search at Yahoo doesn't seem to give you the link to the cached article. Thus it would be better to point to the archive.

This would require a convention similar to the robots.txt convention. Google is perfectly placed to initiate the convention. Assuming it's reasonable, webloggers would quickly pick it up. The value of our weblogs would go up, as would the value of Google's search engine.

[2:13:24 PM]
Three Days that Shook the Media [narconews.com]: "AP, Reuters, the New York Times, and CNN, the worst offenders in the English-language media among many others, have had to radically adjust their coverage of the events in Venezuela precisely because online journalists worked overtime in recent days to break the information blockade and get the true facts to the international public."

They tell the story in rousing detail. It may well be that the internet can spread information in a way that would have made the coup in Chile, for example, harder to pull off.

They point to IntelBriefing.com: "...Pentagon sources gleefully revealed that the United States provided critical military and intelligence support to the Venezuelan military coup against President Hugo Chavez on Friday 12th April."

IntelBriefing goes on to list the specific U. S. units involved, where they were located, and what their missions were.

What's a citizen to think of this? Am I supposed to believe it? Am I supposed to *not* believe it? I'm not going to take the time to verify IntelBriefing's report myself. But Condi Rice's crew all say the U. S. didn't support the coup. Am I suppose to believe that? Ted Olson says the government will lie, and that's easy to believe in this case.

It's completely plausible to me that little Condi is playing coup d'etat, and that she's very bad at it.

(On the other hand, NarcoNews.com quotes Bill Vann reminding us that the first CIA coup in Chile failed, too: "That abortive action, just like the recent move against Chavez, showed how vulnerable the government was to a coup. It also provided a dress rehearsal for a real confrontation with the masses and allowed the principal figures in the military to determine which units could be relied upon and which could not.")

[11:08:46 AM]
Music industry. Here's the first key point about the music industry and their assault on their customers: illegal price fixing since 1996 caused CD sales slowdown [scriban.com]. You increase prices, people buy less. Duh.

The second key point is that people want to buy the hit song, but the music-industry pirates want them to buy the whole CD. RIAA companies killed off the single [scriban.com].

This is a case where file sharing *does* work against the greedy strategy of the RIAA pirates: people who want one song, but can't buy it, go off and download it. RIAA hypes one song, and fills up the album with junk that no one wants, effectively charging $19 for a single.

In fact, file sharing in itself would significantly increase CD sales. File sharing is free advertising -- targeted at your most enthusiastic customers. It would be a dream for any but the most corruptly oligopolistic markets.

It doesn't matter how many mp3s a person downloads, it matters how many cds they buy. The ability to download almost any song ever produced at any time of the day or night adds *incredible* value to the experience of listening to music. Same with the ability to put songs on your hard disk in a lower-quality format so you don't have to swap CDs in and out of the drive all day. Same with the ability to put together playlists from the set of all your music.

RIAA companies had an opportunity to offer and enhance this value to their customers -- the music lovers of the world. Instead, RIAA has acted like greed-obsessed, hate-filled, corporate fascists, out to make sure there is no value in music but what you pay the RIAA for.

There are three places where the RIAA can see itself as gaining by eliminating file sharing.

First, remember that these are oligopolists using price fixing and collusion with the oligopolistic radio industry to prevent music from non-RIAA sources from gaining any access to the market. You can't buy it if you don't know about it. The thing file sharing does that is most destructive to the RIAA oligopoly is to allow consumers to discover non-RIAA music. The internet also makes it easier for consumers to buy CDs from non-RIAA sources.

This is the aspect of file sharing that could ultimately force the RIAA to change: they would have to produce better music, responding to consumer demand, rather than forcing consumers to buy whatever the RIAA hypes.

Second, if they can get a tax on every device that could possibly play a song, why wouldn't they want to do that? They wouldn't have to work so hard selling music if 90% of their revenue came from the device tax.

Third, they clearly dream of a pay per play scheme where you not only pay up front, but you also pay every time you listen to a song.

As a consumer -- rather than an oligopolistic pirate -- I have no sympathy for these three issues.

There's a real problem that will come up eventually, though. Eventually, bandwidth will be available to let people download high-quality music, rather than the low-quality mp3s. This is likely to be years away, and is only a side-effect of the way ISPs charge for bandwidth. Basically, they charge you for how fast your connection is, and ignore how many bytes you send over the connection. If consumers had to pay a reasonable cost per byte, there would be less downloading altogether, and there would be incentive to download and share mp3s, rather than cd-quality music.

But this problem is still years away. The RIAA could have used this time to adjust to the future conditions. There are any number of ways to do it. Music lovers *want* to support the musicians. They want to participate in community. They want opportunities to show their loyalty and appreciation.

There should be no laws to protect the RIAA's war against its customers. There should be enforcement to end the RIAA's price-fixing, and the bribery of radio oligopolists to keep non-RIAA music off the radio. RIAA companies should change their business model to take advantage of the extraordinary riches that would flow to them if they will just give customers what we want.