"The rock is gonna fall on us!" Harry Chapin.
"Brother Can You Spare A dime." Yip Harburg.
I was going through my files, and I came across three articles in the same JUNE 28, 2005 issue of THE NEW YORK TIMES. The subject: Piracy. The Internet was turning into a monster. The coy euphemism "file SHARING," was coming into popular usage, as more and more people discovered that their computer could download, first and most importantly, PORN, and then...mp3 files of music, and even movies and TV shows.
How wonderful! What "SHARING."
The New York Times could've called it what it really is: STEALING. File copying. Piracy.
If you define "SHARING," strangers duping music so nobody has to pay for anything DOES NOT QUALIFY.
SHARING is when you give something to somebody, and YOU NO LONGER HAVE IT. Like you share half your dessert. You are giving something up because you are GENEROUS.
SHARING music is nothing. You’re making a copy and giving it to a stranger, because YOU want that person to either like you, or fork over something you don’t want to buy.
Now that it’s the Christmas season, some assholes will be SHARING all the Christmas music so nobody will have to buy, and more record stores can go under, and less royalties will go to the artists. What would Jesus do? You know what he WOULDN’T DO.
The Times wasn't alone in having numb nuts about this soon-to-be-catastrophic problem.
Rolling Stone was actually reviewing blogs, and pointing readers to which ones had the "goodies."
One ex-writer for the paper, Dave Marsh, enthusiastically suggested this was a "new paradigm" of some kind, and by "sharing," it encouraged people to discover new music. Right, like you never heard of the Grateful Dead before...but were too cheap to buy their albums.
Yes, once in a while somebody would offer ONE song, or ONE album on an obscure artist, but mostly, no, blogs sprung up with people boasting about the hundreds and HUNDREDS of albums they were giving away.
While these idiots saw themselves as versions of Emperor Nero, unstoppable and kings of their domain, the RIAA fiddled. Lawyers got tangled up in their own red tape. Judges debated whether it was "sharing" or not. Little monsters like NAPSTER festered and grew bigger and bigger.
All of this, included the pathetic way piracy was mishandled, is in these Times articles.
Now, people shrug, "The genie is out of the bottle." And "you can't swim upstream." And "it's whack-a-mole."
No, it isn't, if corrupt politicians weren't drooling over GOOGLE money. GOOGLE owns YouTube and Blogspot, two prime sources for piracy. Not only don't they have any morals, they actually make it difficult for copyright owners, intellectual property owners, and artists to take down the abuse. The hoops are ridiculous. Google uses an impossible template that takes a half hour to fill out, and they'll reject the complaint without explaining why. That's just part of the frustration. They expect a separate complaint on EVERY single album, so if somebody posts a discography, the complaint must be done a dozen times or more. Even then, GOOGLE will allow the blogger to put the stuff back, or get a fresh blog. Over and over. Usually the blog is not even taken down, unless a rights organization stubbornly keeps telling an employee to SEND IN MORE FORMS, or if an artist sends a lawyer letter.
The power in the world now is in the hands of Fascist internet assholes like Suckerberg, and the nameless creeps at Google, Wikipedia, and other places. They have more power than record companies, film studios or famous stars, and they use it to keep the money pouring in. So far, efforts by a few senators to pass legislation have failed because these Internet fascists raise the alarm (shouting "Freedom of Speech!" and "Don't let them take your Internet away") and using the politicians in their pockets to quash the passing of good law.
These days, most everyone knows about the torrents, most of them run by weasels in Russia or Ukraine or other craven countries. Or by Swedes or Brits raking in the money while on an untouchable island.
What can stop this shit is effective blocking of websites. It's been done here and there, but not nearly enough. In the meantime, the courts waffle, the lawyers gouge, and the artists suffer and the stores that used to sell records and DVDs and things go under more and more.
Again, from June 28, 2005, when the scent was just beginning to get ripe...before it completely began to stink:
Sigh and say "oh well, the lawless Internet..." and what happens? Things get worse.
Like Photoshop fakes of actresses nude. Like fake videos that make famous people look ridiculous. Even Suckerberg from Facebook got one of his speeches re-done and thousands believed it. "Fake news," our leerless feader cries, and you know what, he's not exactly wrong. There are click-bait websites that will post anything to get ad dollars. There are websites that a ten year-old can easily find, where women are being abused...whether it's realistic video fakes, or hacked nude pictures stolen from a computer.
"It's all good."
People actually cheer Assange and other assholes who happily hack and expose anything and everything...for their own profit. The Swedish meatballs of Pirate Bay cheered their own anarchy and proudly posted any emails they got saying "cease and desist," even from indie movie producers BEGGING for the chance to make sales so they could continue making films. The cruelty and stupidity on the Net has reached epidemic levels.
It could've been halted back in 2005. Now...the New York Times is endangered; it could go the way of the Christian Science Monitor and have an Internet-only presence in the world. Many newspapers have disappeared. The way we get news, the way we get entertainment, the way we interact with each other on social media — have all been coarsened and poisoned by lawlessness. Facebook is another Scientology-like company that has no phone number or email (same as Google, among others). You can't reach a human. Because these Internet companies are inhuman.
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