The latest RIAA/MPAA tactic? Enlist a non-profit “justice” organization to create the most heavy-handed (and by the way, factually incorrect) propaganda in the form of a comic, distributed to 50,000 college students. Yes, file-sharing of copyrighted media can be quite possibly illegal; but this “educational” attempt seems right up there with “Reefer Madness” and those Jehovah Witness comic books. Though maybe seen in that light, it’ll become a future camp classic… And of course this is all done purely in the name of the protecting the artist, you and me, right?
You know, I was thinking that the comic has all the elements for a nice, pathos-laden chamber opera… takers, anyone?
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Shady Guy: Pssss. hey, you, ya you!
Ms. Robbins: Yes?
SG: You wanna buy some illegal shit?
Ms. Robbins: I, I don’t know.
SG: Some hardcore copyrighted shit, make you feel good……
Ms. Robbins: Well maybe just this once.
Ms. Robbins hands SG 100 dollars and at once 20 G-Men jump from surrounding rooftops and promptly take Ms. Robbins in to custody.
SG takes off shady garb and reveals G-Man uniform. He turns to the news camera: “That was one bad deal for Ms. Robbins. Don’t Do CI!”
CHORUS: We are the hollow agents, we are the agents of hollow.
COMPOSER I (to another composer at dinner table): Are you going to eat — uh, fileshare that?
CHORUS: We are the dreamer of dreams.
COMPOSER II: Um … no, you can have it.
CHORUS: Vengence is ours.
COMPOSER I: Cool. (takes it)
(suddenly bells and sirens go off all over the stage. Chairman Mao, Richard Nixon, Gertrude Stein, and Virgil Thomson all come on stage)
STEIN: Oh, yes he did it he did it oh yes yes yes he did hey yes he did and it was bad and yes oh yes he did it.
JAMES JOYCE (yelling from audience): HEY!! Those lines are MINE!
(all exeunt)
The latest RIAA/MPAA tactic? Enlist a non-profit “justice†organization
And where, exactly, does it state that this comic had any connection to the RIAA or MPAA?
Jeez, it’s a frickin’ educational pamphlet about the court system written for grade-schoolers. Wow. They picked a general topic that’s been in the news and would be familiar to their target demographic. Go figure.
Do y’all see conspiracies in everything?
It was written by a non-profit oragization; but if you follow these things at all, the particular overreaching and dubious legal assumptions illustrated have their source in ploys used by both the RIAA and MPAA. They’ve been creating nightmare “victim” scenarios: one for the industry as a whole, another supposedly for the artist, and now for the “perpetrators”. In each there’s an almost a sense of orchestrated hysteria, whose sole purpose is to use in their lobbying bids to secure even more draconian copyright lockdowns for their industry. And it wasn’t written for “grade-schoolers”; it was specifically targeted to colleges and universities. I think part of it was more to cow the schools themselves, as much as the students.
As a student of a music conservertoire, I use the college subscription to Naxos Music Library, a service that allows me to stream all of the music on the Naxos label, and those labels it owns. This is an enormous amount of music, probably more than 90% of the total classical repertoire. Without it I would be lost.
I won’t reveal it, but there is an extraordinarily easy way to obtain access to the service if you are a non-student. But it is a fantastically useful resource, and a source of immense pleasure to me. So far, I have revealed the ‘secret’, as it were, to only one other person, who I have immense trust in, and is a musician and thinker of utter conviction. But I’m sure anyone, if they tried for long enough, would be able to obtain access to the service.