ReadMe has this interview with me:

Peer-to-fear?

By suing college students who trade pirated songs, the music industry is making the point that illegal online music-sharing, or "p2p" (peer-to-peer) file-swapping, is bad for business and, if they catch you, hazardous to your financial health. P2p expert Siva Vaidhyanathan wonders if the issues are so cut and dried.

by Cyrus Shahmir

Late in April 2003, the music industry started cracking down on illegal file sharing, or peer-to-peer (P2P) media sharing, on the Internet. (Peer-to-peer file-sharing on the Internet is the transmission of digital information, an MP3, an MPEG, from one user to another. Often, these files are pirated and the owner of the original copyright recieves no credit or money for the transaction.) In an effort to convince users of downloading software such as KaZaA and Gnutella not to share illegal files, the music industry is targeting not only the creators of the file-sharing technology, but have singled out individuals or groups of individuals who pirate files and are suing them for outrageous sums of money. The casualties have yet to pile up, but the industry and artists alike are trying to make it achingly clear that file sharing is illegal, is bad for business and in the end will be bad for you. But are the boundaries so clearly defined?

Siva Vaidhyanathan is an assistant professor in the Department of Culture and Communication at NYU and is an expert not only on music copyright but is also an acclaimed thinker on peer-to-peer relationships in society.
His first book, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, examines copyright through the 20th century and its effects on creative production and the artistic restrictions copyright laws create in society.

His new book, Anarchist in the Library: How Peer-to-Peer Networks are Transforming Politics, Culture, and the Control of Information, is due out in 2004 and focuses specifically on issues like MP3 file sharing, how it is recieved in culture and how it is being regulated by government and private agencies. ReadMe asked Mr. Vaidhyanathan about some of the issues surrounding the music industry's heightened sensitivity to illegally shared files.

ReadMe: P2P file sharing has been singled out by record companies as a major threat to profits and a violation of copyright laws; is it truly a threat, or is the industry fearmongering, and if so, why?

Siva Vaidhyanathan: It is a potential threat to the industry, but it's too early to quantify. There are conflicting numbers and confusing studies that show that downloading either encourages or retards CD purchasing, or both. So, no one knows. There are too many factors involved in an economy and ecology as complex as music. We do know that the actions of the music industry have alienated their best consumers and degraded faith and trust in copyright laws. So it's the music industry that is destroying copyright law, not the fans.

RM: How is P2P file sharing different than, say, renting a VHS movie or copying a CD for your friend?

SV: The market effects can be the same, but the difference is that in the digital world, you can't get access to material without making at least one copy of it. So the digital medium has collapsed the distinction between access and copying, thus rendering access subject to government regulation.

RM: Do you feel that the record industry will ever completely stop piracy and P2P file sharing via the Internet? Or will it simply co-opt it, and if so, how?

SV: I can't predict anything. Anyone who tries to predict the demise of the music industry or P2P is fooling himself.

RM: Are other industries, such as the movie industry, threatened by P2P file sharing the way the music industry claims it is?

SV: No, not at all; not right now. Downloading video takes many hours and is frustrating, and the quality sucks. A lot of video files are mislabelled porn. [Besides], renting DVDs is pretty cheap and easy. Hollywood really has nothing to worry about.

RM: What about online tape trading associated with bands like The Grateful Dead and Phish, who allow people to tape their performances and trade them via the Internet? Is this a form of P2P file sharing? If so, will ultimately be squashed by the recording industry?

SV: Yes, it is the same process. The industry benefits from it over the long term. The industry just has not figured out or been willing to admit the similarities.

RM: Is there a flipside to the negative spin P2P has gotten? Is there any legitimacy to the claim, made by some underground musicians, that they get more exposure via P2P than they would if they were trying to build their careers in the traditional way, by touring and selling self-produced records at shows?

SV: It certainly hurts some musicians. It certainly helps others. It's [hard] to tell how it will all balance out over time.

RM: If P2P was allowed to prosper and there were no regulations to file sharing, will music-industry profits continue to drop, or are industry spokespeople exaggerating its effects on profit margins? What are the other factors in the economic equation that have resulted in a shrinking bottom line for major labels?

SV: Well, I can't predict anything about the music industry. There are moves they could make to embrace file sharing. They could do that and still fail. They could keep alienating their fans and eventually profit. One Backstreet Boys phenomenon can revive an entire industry.

Dear Friends:

Please come see Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig
give the fifth annual William J. Shanahan Lecture

The Great Hall of The Cooper Union
East 7th Street at Third Avenue
New York, New York

Monday, May 12, 2003
6 p.m.

The Talk is titled:
Free Culture: The Struggle to Liberate Creativity and the Internet from the Law

The Internet promised an extraordinary opportunity for innovation and creativity. Changes in the law are about the take that promise away. Professor Lessig describes the threat and proposes a strategy for resistance.

Lawrence Lessig is the author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and The Future of Ideas. He is also the chair of the Creative Commons project.

Here is Seymore Hersh in The New Yorker reporting on how all the lies of Rumsfeld, via Powell and Bush, have undermined the intelligence community and made us LESS SAFE.


According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.

Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction had been a matter of concern to the international community since before the first Gulf War. Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons in the past. At some point, he assembled thousands of chemical warheads, along with biological weapons, and made a serious attempt to build a nuclear-weapons program. What has been in dispute is how much of that capacity, if any, survived the 1991 war and the years of United Nations inspections, no-fly zones, and sanctions that followed. In addition, since September 11th there have been recurring questions about Iraq’s ties to terrorists. A February poll showed that seventy-two per cent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th attacks, although no definitive evidence of such a connection has been presented.

Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. “The agency was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,” the Pentagon adviser told me. “That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.” The goal of Special Plans, he said, was “to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see. Shulsky’s carrying the heaviest part.”

Even before September 11th, Richard Perle, who was then the chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, was making a similar argument about the intelligence community’s knowledge of Iraq’s weapons. At a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing in March, 2001, he said, “Does Saddam now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does. We know he has chemical weapons. We know he has biological weapons. . . . How far he’s gone on the nuclear-weapons side I don’t think we really know. My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we’re able to prove and demonstrate. . . . And, unless you believe that we have uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more than we’re able to report.”

Last October, an article in the Times reported that Rumsfeld had ordered up an intelligence operation “to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists” that might have been overlooked by the C.I.A. When Rumsfeld was asked about the story at a Pentagon briefing, he was initially vague. “I’m told that after September 11th a small group, I think two to start with, and maybe four now . . . were asked to begin poring over this mountain of information that we were receiving on intelligence-type things.” He went on to say, “You don’t know what you don’t know. So in comes the daily briefer”—from the C.I.A.—“and she walks through the daily brief. And I ask questions. ‘Gee, what about this?’ or ‘What about that? Has somebody thought of this?’” At the same briefing, Rumsfeld said that he had already been informed that there was “solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members.”



I was glad to hear Sen. Bob Graham launch into Bush on Sunday for ignoring Al Queda, global terrorism, anthrax, and homeland security in favor of this easy and non-threatening target in Iraq. At least Graham has the guts and credibility to say it: George Bush and his cronies have made this country LESS SAFE.

The Boston Globe did a great job documenting all this. But most reporters (including all the networks) ignored it.

At least Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune notes that "Media AWOL in noting irony of Bush's flight"

Published May 6, 2003

So much for that myth--the cynical distortion that has become conventional wisdom in many circles. During the presidential campaign of 2000, it started going around that Texas Gov. George W. Bush, then the leading Republican candidate, had significant gaps in his military record.
Specifically, that Bush failed to report for duty for an entire year toward the end of his hitch with the Texas Air National Guard.

The short version: In May 1968 the silver-spoon son of a U.S. congressman jumped to the top of a long waiting list despite mediocre scores on his pilot-aptitude test and was allowed to enlist in the Guard, a common way to avoid being drafted into combat in Vietnam.

In May 1972 he sought a transfer from Houston, where he flew F-102s on weekends, to a unit in Montgomery, Ala. There, he worked on the U.S. Senate campaign of a friend of his father's and, records indicate, blew off his military obligations.

Bush failed to take his annual flight physical in 1972 so Guard officials grounded him, the story went. He never flew again and received an early discharge to go to graduate school. His final officer-efficiency report from May 1973 noted only that supervisors hadn't seen him or heard from him.

Bush's campaign biography obscured or misrepresented these details. In the summer and fall of 2000, his spokesmen offered various and evolving explanations for what Democrats said represented a far bigger "character issue" than any of the windy exaggerations of their candidate, Vice President Al Gore.

"If he is elected president, how will he be able to deal as commander in chief with someone who goes AWOL, when he did the same thing?" Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey said to the Boston Globe, where veteran investigative reporter Walter V. Robinson, a former Army intelligence officer, wrote several major stories on the subject. "This stinks."

How can anyone who served in uniform take this draft-dodging president seriously?

San Jose Mercury News reports that Apple says online music sales are exceeding expectations.

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Apple Computer Inc. said Monday it exceeded record industry expectations by selling more than 1 million songs since the launch of its online music store a week ago.

``Our internal measure of success was having the iTunes Music Store sell 1 million songs in the first month,'' said Doug Morris, CEO of the Universal Music Group. ``To do this in one week is an over-the-top success.''

The sales affirm what analysts and industry executives have said of the Apple iTunes Music Store -- that it's one of the most consumer friendly methods yet of buying songs electronically and legally.

I have to concur with this enthusiasm. I bought two albums on the first day that the store was open. I got the 50 Cent album for $9.99! I hesistate to pay per song. But the per-album price is great. The format is good. The sound is excellent. Apple has the right idea: supplement CDs and MP3s because we might want to live in a world with choice and flexibility.

Your source for some clever dj remixes that use Madonna's "What the F---- Do You think You Are Doing?" soudclip that is flooding p2p systems is dmusic.com.

NPR's Morning Edition has a very good feature on the stupid state-based "Super-DMCA" laws that legislatures are adopting without actually reading or studying them. Among other things, these laws outlaw anonymous e-mailing.

The NPR piece quotes Ed Felten, who has been at the vanguard of the campaign to warn us about these efforts, and Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, Peter Givler offers an piece called Copyright: It's for the Public Good

By PETER GIVLER
I got my start in publishing as a college traveler and, except for one memorable year as a trade editor, I've spent my career in publishing talking, arguing, and working with academics --?authors, editors, editorial-board members, and even a few deans and provosts. I think I understand academic values well enough, and the challenge of trying to make this scholarly publishing serve those unbusinesslike ends has made my career interesting in more ways than I ever could have imagined when I started out almost 35 years ago, starry-eyed and in love with books. I often feel as if I'm trying to bridge two worlds; it's exhilarating, frustrating, deeply satisfying work, and I've never regretted choosing to do it.
It does have its trials, though. The academics I know are smart, interesting, delightful people, most of them, but they do have one raffish eccentricity: their wonderful eagerness to have opinions. About anything. Take their current arguments about copyright. To hear them tell it, copyright is a law invented by publishers solely to serve their own financial interests, a personal-use exemption to copyright law exists for the convenience of scholars, and any educational use of copyrighted material is, by definition, a fair use. And the most pernicious of all: Copyright and intellectual freedom are fundamentally opposed, locked, like good and evil, in a Manichaean struggle for the soul of the university. Trying to understand such discussions sometimes makes me feel that, instead of bridging two worlds, I'm becoming the Man with Two Brains.
I appreciate why copyright is controversial. A tight academic job market has ratcheted up the pressure to get into print just at the time when mounting financial difficulties have made it harder to publish books, library budgets are under tremendous pressure, and the rapidly changing electronic scene opens new possibilities and sets new challenges for scholarly communications almost daily. Copyright is implicated in all those problems, and the pressures are probably going to get worse before they get better.
But from a publisher's point of view --?and it doesn't matter whether commercial or nonprofit --?copyright is bedrock, the legal foundation of the business. So you would think publishers would be the first to tell you why copyright is important. Alas, we don't. Instead, we have presented copyright as a set of dense, technical rules about how to comply with the law without ever explaining why anyone should bother, as if the mere existence of the law made clarification of its purpose irrelevant.
That Big Brotherish air has been reinforced by Hollywood, the wonderful folks who brought us term extension for Mickey Mouse, and the laughably bogus copyright "Warning!" at the beginning of every movie you watch on your VCR or DVD player. Maybe those who believe in secret military bases and a United Nations bent on world domination also believe that the FBI, with Interpol panting on its heels, will come crashing through the door if they make an illegal copy of Home Alone. For the nearly normal among us, though, the idea is preposterous, and it only serves to undercut the idea that copyright is real and enforceable.
It is both, and I believe that publishers should enforce their rights in court. Litigation is, and should be, a last resort. But if publishers have failed to argue the good of copyright, we have often, in the past, failed to treat infringement seriously, as well. So I'm pleased about the two recent suits filed against copy shops in Florida and California, and I hope publishers will continue to seek creative new options for enforcement.

Givler is competely correct. First, no one who understands the value of reasonable copyright is seriously arguing against copyright. But no one should be suckered into believing that just because some copyright is good than maximal copyright is better. Second, those of us who criticize the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act are the supporters of TRUE copyright -- copyright that is humane, balanced, reasonable, effective, and worthy of public support and private adherence.

Third, copyright holders who worry about infringement SHOULD take suspected infringers to court, not bug and hack their computers.

Jack Valenti et. al. opposes copyright. He and the industry he represents want to intall technocratic regulatory systems that would be clumsy, counterproductive, and futile.

Copyright is for the public good. And those of us who speak up for the public should support it as it once was: a brilliant and humane system.