Tuesday, April 23, 2002

n., from bloviate: to speak or write at length in a pompous or boastful manner. Bloviate is most closely associated with U.S. President Warren G. Harding, who used it frequently and who was known for long, windy speeches. H.L. Mencken said of him, "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." [Dictionary.com] Remind you of anybody, Jack? 11:46:26 PM

A somewhat more restrained reaction than ours to Jack Valenti's bloviation comes from Seth Schoen over at the EFF's Consensus at Lawyerpoint blog Jack Valenti of the MPAA has delivered some very impressive testimony with a tremendous amount of Valenti's trademark (or should we say copyright?) rhetoric: "thieves", "pirates", "pilfering", etc. ... Look closely at [his] suggestion: Valenti doesn't say that we have to enforce copyright law in order to make legitimate sales viable. He says that, in order to make Hollywood feel comfortable with the Internet, we have to have not one, not two, but three government mandates on major categories of technology (digital TV receivers, video digitizers, and Internet software). 11:41:39 PM

Doc has been kind enough to point this out to us.  Good thing, too: our blood pressure was running a little low. Jack Valenti has struck back at reality with a long-winded press release. More at Politechbot, including the full text of Jack's testimony to a congressional subcommittee. A snippet: Brooding over the global reach of the American movie and its persistent success in attracting consumers of every creed, culture and country is thievery, the theft of our movies in both the analog and digital formats. Another: Promoting legitimate alternatives to digital thievery. Keep in mind that movie producers and distributors are filled with optimism over the prospect of the Internet as another new delivery system to dispatch their movies to consumers, at a fair and reasonable price (the defining of Œfair and reasonable¹ to done by the consumer). And of course those very consumers are the ultimate beneficiaries of these new distribution channels, as they will enjoy more choices for accessing the movies they want in high-quality digital format. I love that "dispatch movies to consumers" business. Here's the problem, Jack. We were never just "consumers." We were customers all along, and now we're in a position to become better customers than ever, because there is more technology than ever to create more ways of making and doing business together than ever. And you're kinda calling us thieves. Like here: As I said just a few minutes ago, it is the Internet, that all-embracing technological marvel, which is putting to hazard our attempts to protect precious creative property. Viant, a Boston-based consulting firm, has estimated that some 350,000+ movies are being downloaded from the Internet every day — all of them illegal. My friend Arne just ran the math on that, and told me this outfit is claiming 10^15 bytes (a petabyte) per day. Kinda hard to believe. And, Then there is the mysterious magic of being able, with a simple click of a mouse, to send a full-length movie hurtling with the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) to any part of this wracked and weary old planet. It is that uncomprehending fact of digital life that disturbs the sleep of the entire U.S. film industry. Arne just told me on the phone, "If we could make the Net operate at the speed of light, maybe we could move a petabye per day of movies." [The Doc Searls Weblog] You know what disturbs our sleep here at the Boulder Inquisition?  The mysterious fact that Jack Valenti is still walking, talking, and (one imagines) raking in Big Buck$ when he so painfully obviously doesn't have a thimbleful of a clue in his head.  And that our distinguished congressfolk are perfectly satisfied to sit and listen to even five minutes of twaddle from the mouth attached to the so-called mind that can talk with a straight face about "the Copyright Industries" and can piously pout that, "like virtue, we are everyday besieged." Well, lemme tell ya, Jack: we've gone back to read that pesky old Constitution, and we just can't find a way clear to interpret the clause establishing the law of copyright as having been intended to establish an "industry."  That makes as much sense as calling IBM "the flagship of the Patent Industries."  (Hmm, we may have to rethink our pooh-poohing of that idea.) And Doc's right, Jack: We aren't passive "consumers" of a "product" called "copyright."  We're sometimes your customers and your audience, and some of us are even creative people who get inspired by the art you profit from and exploit.  But above all, we're citizens and human beings, and the high-handed market manipulation that you're engaged in is messing with our fundamental human rights.  (You remember "endowed by their Creator with certain Inalienable Rights," don't you, Jack?) Remember back in '96-'97-'98 when some of our fatter and pastier-faced congressfolk asked us, "Where's the outrage?"  Well, where's the frickin' outrage now?  If a coalition of, say, environmental groups were lobbying Congress this hard for clean air protection half this burdensome and ham-handed, Tom DeLay and Trent Lott would be tap-dancing on the Capitol steps with glee over the political hay they'd be able to make by "defending" industry against "outrageous and heavy-handed government interference."  But when the outrageous and heavy-handed government interference is being advocated by people who have contributed enough cash to the campaign finance scam/system to bail out Argentina three times over (warning: hyperbole in effect!), it's the Righteous By God American Way! All we can say (before we check our B.P. again) is: We gotcha some outrage here, Jack! Therefore I, Dr. Bonzo, by the Grace of God Grand Inquisitor of Boulder, hereby declare the blovation of Jack Valenti to be anathema, and as such to be abhorred and condemned by all right-thinking people. Anathema sit! 11:27:11 PM

Over at TechCentralStation, Arnold Kling has written a beautiful piece on the ways that Big Music could be raking in money, if they really wanted to. He concludes: I suspect that fear of this sort of industry change -- and the potential loss of control -- is what is driving the behavior of the music industry today. However, eventually they will have to listen to the technology. [We caught the link over here at EconoBlog] I'd assert that the kind of third-party-unlimited-use-subscription-catalog he suggests could be combined with collaborative-filtering and collaborative-reviewing systems (a la LAUNCHcast and Emergent Music, respectively) to give the industry what it has lacked so painfully for so long: a frickin' clue about what people really want to listen to. 6:04:36 PM

Tom Tomorrow passes along this delicious quip from a New York Times article on Bush Administration involvement in the recent events in Venezuela: Asked whether the administration now recognizes Mr. Chávez as Venezuela's legitimate president, one administration official replied, "He was democratically elected," then added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however." (Or by a majority of electoral votes, or by a majority of the Supreme Court ...) 7:02:58 AM