Blackmoor Vituperative

In a stunning about-face, the Recording Industry Association of America is set to abandon its long-held policy of mass lawsuits against file-traders, opting for deals with ISPs that could eventually result in users’ Internet access being terminated.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the RIAA has reached preliminary agreements with major ISPs. Under the deals, the RIAA would email an ISP when it detects a user illegally serving up music. The ISP would forward the note and ask the user to stop. After a few follow-ups, the user would notice his broadband service is appreciably less broad, and ultimately would simply be cut off.

Helping to transition the industry to this point has been New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, whose office kept the RIAA and ISPs talking. “We wanted to end the litigation,” said Steven Cohen, Cuomo’s chief of staff. “It’s not helpful.”

But the RIAA will not be dropping the many, many cases still outstanding. Recording Industry v The People, Ray Beckerman asks:

Meanwhile, what about the unfortunates who are presently entangled already in these unjust lawsuits? Why won’t the RIAA drop those cases too? If it was bad business to start them, why isn’t it bad business to keep on throwing good money after bad? I hope consumers will remember this 5 1/2-year reign of terror, and will shun RIAA products, and I hope the legal profession will place a black mark next to the names of those “lawyers” who participated in this foul calumny.

For its part, the RIAA says the litigation strategy was a success. Chairman Mitch Bainwol, said, “Over the course of five years, the marketplace has changed,” meaning people are much more shy about engaging in P2P filesharing.

(from RIAA to drop mass lawsuits against filesharers, ZDNet

Is this an improvement? Perhaps, but only if it means that RIAA has decided that suing their customers is now and forever a vile, business-impairing practice. Frankly, I do not give them that much credit. And remember, sharing is not piracy.

Philip Morris USA announced Friday that it was laying off a metric buttload of employees. It is clear why this was necessary when one looks at the numbers.

Philip Morris USA employs (employed) around 7,500 people. In the third quarter of 2008, Philip Morris USA’s revenues from cigarettes and other tobacco products increased 2.8% to $5.08 billion from the same quarter last year. Operating companies income increased 5.7% from last year to $1.37 billion. [1]

1.37 billion per quarter * 4 quarters / 7,500 employees = roughly $730,000 profit per employee per year. (This assumes that the income is the same for the other three quarters, which it isn’t. But it’s close enough.)

Less than a million dollars profit per employee? GASP! Clearly, some fat needed to be cut!

Amazon.com is having a huge sale on DVDs. Here are some that I plan to pick up:

Aqua Teen Hunger Force – Season One (regular $30, on sale for $13)
Aqua Teen Hunger Force – Season Two (regular $30, on sale for $13)
Aqua Teen Hunger Force – Season Three (regular $30, on sale for $13)
Aqua Teen Hunger Force – Season Four (regular $30, on sale for $13)
Ren & Stimpy – The Complete First and Second Seasons (regular $40, on sale for $23)
Ren & Stimpy – The Lost Episodes (regular $27, on sale for $16)

More misdeeds of the Digital Rights Mafia…

The Recording Industry Association of America has done a number of distressing, disgusting, and disgraceful things in its never-ending quest to fill its coffers with ill-gotten gains from every American with an internet connection. The news out of Pittsburgh, however, carries what we have to class as the most depraved stunt we’ve seen them pull so far.

According to the Pittsburgh ABC-affiliate, the latest amusement for the vampiric-nitwits in the RIAA’s legal department has been to sue nineteen-year-old Ciara Sauro for allegedly sharing an industry-crushing ten songs online. […] The evil file-sharer they’ve decided to go after is no iPod-toting high school student with a P2P fetish — she’s a disabled pancreatitis patient who has to be hospitalized weekly while she waits for an islet cell transplant. Now, thanks to the RIAA’s steamroll-for-justice campaign, she’s on the hook for $8,000 — in addition to the mounting medical bills she and her mother already can’t afford to pay.

[…]

Although we really didn’t think it possible, we’re left with an even lower opinion of the RIAA than we had before — and a few choice phrases we’re too polite to print. The acrid taste left by their actions is tempered, though, by the knowledge that Ciara Sauro now has an experienced advocate of her own. We wish her a speedy resolution to the matter at hand, a healthy transplant, and a rapid recovery.

(from Linux Journal, RIAA preys on teen in need of transplant)

A bit of promotion for the car manufacturer bailout:

I just saw the most horrific, disturbing commercial I have ever seen. I wish I could find it online so I could share it with you, but Google fails me this time.

A woman appears whose face seems frozen in mid-grimace, her smile twisted and gaping like the Joker if he had been done properly. Slowly the camera spins around, revealing that the back of her head is gone. Her entire skull has been hollowed out and made into a little Barbie’s Home Theater room.

This is unbelievably ghastly.

I posted a blog a week or so ago, bemoaning the scarcity of PBEM role-playing games. Well, I have looked high and low, and I am ready to call it: play-by-email roleplaying games are dead.

They have largely been replaced by multiplayer computer games like City of Heroes and World of Warcraft. These are not role-playing games, but apparently they are an adequate replacement for most people.

What few pitiful role-playing games are left aren’t played by email. They are played on forums and web sites. Some of these forums are reasonably well put together, like RolePlay OnLine. Some are nightmarish monstrosities that make even the simplest task all but impossible, like Lost Coast Gaming, which is damned near unusable. Why do people prefer these sites to something like YahooGroups, which offers more functionality and is much easier to use? I am mystified.

But it is what it is.

Goodbye, PBEM roleplaying. You will be missed.

In an example of gross injustice on a Kafkaesque scale, the case against Connecticut teacher Julie Amero has finally closed. After being dragged through the mud for four years, she accepted a plea agreement. She will pay a $100 fine, and her teaching credentials will be revoked. In return, the State prosecutors are dropping the four felony charges against her.

Ms. Amero has had her life and livelihood severely disrupted, if not destroyed, for nothing more than being the only adult in a room with an infected computer. And it is worth pointing out that despite the utterly twisted quasi-religious American cultural attitudes toward nudity, not a single child was harmed. Not a single one. The only victim in this case was Ms. Amero herself.

I have a follow-up on my migration from from Outlook to Thunderbird. I had selected GCALDaemon to keep our Thunderbird calendars in sync with each other, but in use this had a few problems. For one thing, every time GCALDaemon synced, it would freeze Thunderbird. This was annoying. Further, there was some kind of permission problem regarding new calendar events: once created, we couldn’t modify them. This was really the deal-breaker, and why I started looking for an alternative.

So I have uninstalled GCALDaemon and replaced it with the Provider add-on for Thunderbird. This has its advantages and disadvantages. For one thing, it is considerably easier to install than GCALDaemon, although the instructions provided by bfish.xaedalus.net help make it even simpler. On the other hand, it has one drawback which GCALDaemon does not: it has no offline cache. This means that when we don’t have an active Internet connection, we won’t have access to our calendars. However, this is rarely the case, so it’s a drawback I am willing to accept.

So far, everything has gone really well.

It has long been obvious to anyone paying attention that the Digital Rights Mafia (aka “DRM”), the media robbers barons, and their government shills would happily twist our legal system into a pretzel in order to serve their own interests. It should come as no surprise that they are now working behind closed doors to subvert the governments of the world on a grand scale. It’s called ACTA, and it’s a significant step in the elimination of what we generally call “civil liberties” — the rights guaranteed to US citizens by the documents on which our government is founded.

SPECTRE could only hope to have this kind of influence.