This is Joe Clark, a writer in Toronto, working on a very interesting book on copyright reform. It refutes a lot of the extreme points of view on both sides of the ‘great divide’.

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 […]

The thing I am learning, much to my cost, is that this business we call ‘show’ is flipped on it’s head. See it used to be that one toured in order to sell content. More and more now one basically gives the content away in order to get people to either:

a) Go to shows

b) Purchase swag

c) Promote a corporate tie-in

This is a bargain with the devil for any number of reasons, which I’ll delve into another time, but for now the question is ‘how did we get here?’. And the answer is simple: we got pimped.

Remember when ATM machines first hit? They were free, Free, FREE! Not so free anymore are they? We got used to them and then, like any good dealer, the banks then started charging. Good plan.

Now Google came along and gave us something very cool and very innocuous. They got us used to searching for stuff for free. And since we could search for stuff for free, we tended to seek out free solutions. And so […]

First of all, sorry, sorry, sorry for so many things recently. Where to begin?

–No the old blog posts are still not ‘back’.

–No you still can’t post. You still have to e-mail.

–Yes, I am working on all this stuff. It may seem like nothing’s happening, but really, a lot of stuff is happening.

Today’s little ditty is in regards to an episode last Friday (only 4 days behind schedule? Wow, I’m getting faster by the minute!).

A couple of you started telling me that you had noticed that your Pandora stations were no longer ‘suggesting’ my stuff in the course of playing stations starring artists that should eventually be flagged as similar to what I do… eg. Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel or perhaps Talking Heads. But… nada… nichts… bupkus. Dadai.

So I contacted Pandora and was told by one person that they could no longer find me in their database. (?!?) I informed the nice young lady that I was playing the JC Harris Station while we were talking. Now how about that? […]