RIAA-speak: artist promotion = crime

Mixtapes are a vital part of musical artist promotion, especially for certain genres such as rap. Unfortunately, the RIAA thinks that distributors of mixtapes that don't play by their rules should be locked up. That's what has happened to DJ Drama, whose "Gangsta Grillz" mixtapes are famous for breaking new artists. There is a bit of hope that there is an end in sight to this intimidation and stifling of artistic creation: the author of the above-linked NY Times article closes with:

It also seems clear that mixtapes can actually bolster an artist’s sales. The most recent Lil Wayne solo album, “Tha Carter II” (Cash Money/Universal), sold more than a million copies, though none of its singles climbed any higher than No. 32 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. That’s an impressive feat, and it’s hard to imagine how he would have done it without help from a friendly pirate.

Let's hope that the rest of society will soon wake up and see that the negatives of the RIAA's actions clearly outweigh the positives.

The military is now your personal accountant

It seems that the New York Times has revealed that the Pentagon has been doing a little peeking into the financial records of Americans. What makes this so troubling is that the military usually keeps out of cracking down on domestic activities, and focuses on important things abroad like instigating civil wars in Iraq. As Ars Technica points out, the CIA and the Pentagon have been requesting financial records of Americans from financial institutions and then feeding them into TALON, the data-mining anti-terrorist program. This makes all of us red-blooded Americans feel a bit safer, knowing that a computer program, which has the vast potential to register false positives, is now charged with labeling you a terrorist threat. Awesome. Not only that, but we get the peace of mind that comes along with the military and the CIA investigating us. I feel safe, because they never screw up.

Who benefits from DRM?

It sure ain't the labels anymore... say hello to the new purveyor of DRM, Apple!!!! That's right, by enforcing restrictions in the code of their m4p format such as preventing you from playing your iTunes store-bought music on any music player besides the iPod, Apple has effectively locked you in to the Apple brand through DRM. DVDJon has a nice entry on the topic.

Torrent entrapment by the MPAA

Good ol' Big Media is at it again! In their never ending quest to put art lovers in a perpetual state of fear, the MPAA decided it would be a good idea to upload fake torrents in order to harvest torrent users' IP addresses. Who knows what nefarious ends the MPAA will use this information for... do I smell another round of illegitimate, bullying lawsuits? It's unfortunate that the DMCA has given Big Media license to crawl the Internet acting like police. The only difference between the real cops and these pseudo cops is the real cops can't make as much money from extortion.