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A lot of people who favour ‘free file sharing’, (aka ‘The Pirates’) like to use the Booze/Prohibition argument.

Hey, people drink so if you don’t make it legal people will bootleg it.

This is similar to the “People copied cassettes back in the day, so why can’t they copy CDs now you hyopcrite?” argument; filled with more flaws than swiss cheese. (OK, maybe yer average Emmentaler has more holes than flaws, but hey everyone misuses their analogies, right?)

And that’s the point.

Yeah, people have been drinking since before Bacchus. Gettin’ high is a basic human need. End of story. And people have probably been copying art since the days of cave paintings. But everyone except William Burroughs recognises that crack is different from beer. The ‘quality’ (the intensity of the high) is very different.

I’ve been making beer for a number of years. One myth is that the first beer maker was some Egyptian who left his maypo out after breakfast and forgot about it. A few weeks later, he decided to drink the […]

Look, down deep, people are either liberal or conservative. You know it. I know it. We feel a certain way about things and then grow our ideas to fit those predelictions. I felt P2P was wrong the day I first checked out Napster. But for years I couldn’t articulate it well. Maybe I still can’t.

I kept hearing supposedly reasonable people talk about the good side of P2P their arguments sounded like Saruman speaking from the tower. I thought back to my youth and the massive collection of cassette tapes I kept from parties, gigs. The library. Why was that OK and not CD copying? Or MP3 sharing? The arguments from the pirates strike me as absolutist; because there is no intrinsic difference between what I was doing in 1975 vs. what kids are doing today, I am a total hypocrite for decrying copying as ‘wrong’. But absolutism is a false logic. And here’s where I’m at now. I think there are four problems with this ‘copying is copying’ mentality’.

1. It’s […]

Let me count the ways. 😉

Look, you don’t need me to pile on about ‘Idol’. But most of the criticism seems to focus on the bad auditions as freak show and the winners as empty shirts. I’m not too concerned about that. One more ‘reality show’ freak-fest more or less ain’t gonna improve the zeitgeist. And another Milli Vanilli more or less isn’t going to kill the music biz any deader than it already is. No, what bugs me is what it’s doing to our brains. I call this The Three Stooges Argument.

Those of you old enough to remember The Three Stooges (has there ever been as meaningful comedy since Aristophanes?) are also old enough to remember the controversies as to whether or not the sight of a guy getting shot in the ass by a .38 (puff of smoke coming from his pants, cue frying pan sound effect) would lead to an increase in violence in the streets. I dunno whatever became of that… although I have always wondered […]

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