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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Lies, Damn Lies, and RIAA Statistics
The Rule of Idiocy
Real Numbers From Music Industry
Self-motivated Learners
Friday, February 21, 2003
Unintended Consequences
The law has unintended consequences -- and our elected officials are finding themselves hoist on their own petard. It is routine and accepted procedure for Senators, Representatives, and even the President to sign-off on laws they don't understand (many they haven't even read) based on little more than simplistic summaries by junior aides and policy wonks, greased with current opinion poll results and lobbyist dollars. What this usually means is that We, the People take a drubbing while the gub'mint official moves on to the next big fund raiser.But now they've signed McCain-Feingold, apparently without reading it, and they are the ones dealing with the consequences. There is a certain poetic justice in visualzing a Congressmen with "A sort of slack-jawed amazement at how far this thing reached" as they come to terms with what they signed. It is good for consequences to fall on the master instead of the slave...
Does Congress understand its own laws? - Apparently, not. And the proof is that they didn't even understand the full implications of McCain-Feingold finance reform bill. At least, that's what this N.Y. Times article suggests. [Ernie the Attorney]
Lies, Damn Lies, and RIAA Statistics
More on the statistical malfeasance of the recording industry, courtesy of Tim O'Reilly and Mac Wizards Music. The Mac Wizards article uses the RIAA's own statistics (which our Congressmen are apparently incapapble of interpreting on their own) to highlight the industry's gross misrepresentation of fact.
In RIAA Statistics Don't Add Up to Piracy, George Ziemann of Mac Wizards Music takes an analytical look at the RIAA's reported statistics on the impact of file sharing. And what he comes up with is enlightening.Yes, CD unit shipments were down 10% in 2001. But in terms of revenue per title, 2000 was the best year in industry history. In both 2000 and 2001, there were fewer new CDs released than in any year since 1993, and revenues per title were WAY up (to over $500,000 per title, from a decade-long average around $400,000.)
George's tabular rendition of the unit and dollar sales for the RIAA over the past decade, taken from the RIAA web site, is a great resource for those interested in judging the RIAA's piracy arguments for themselves. [Tim O'Reilly]
The Rule of Idiocy
There appears to be a heated competition afoot for who can develop the most boneheaded attack on American liberty -- and it all seems to ooze out of Pennsylvania. Which is worse, former PA Gov. <strike>Uncle</strike> Tom Ridge's terrorist propoganda at Ready.gov, or this crackpot attack on the Internet by PA's self-annointed national social savior and Attorney General Mike Fisher ?
[...] Pennsylvania's attorney general, operating under a highly unorthodox state law passed last year, has so far instructed Internet providers with customers in the state to block subscribers from at least 423 websites around the world.The law is unusual because it places risks of a $5,000 fine on companies providing Internet connections to websites with illegal photographs, not on the pornography sites themselves. [...]
Is there something about being elected to a public office in America that deprives a person of basic common sense and a connection to reality? I'm not even worried about corruption anymore. I feel like I'm living an episode of the Twilight Zone.
Liberties Group Fights Net Block. The Center for Democracy and Technology will try to convince Pennsylvania's attorney general to disclose details about the state's unusual efforts to force Internet providers to block visits to websites containing child pornography. [Wired News]
Thursday, February 20, 2003
Real Numbers From Music Industry
More evidencethat looking at real financial numbers for the music industry is key to gutting their entire position on digital music sharing. We should not begrudge publishers legitimate fees for legitimate services, but we should never have let them recast the file sharing argument as one of protecting artists. It's a patently bullshit argument and will continue to fall under close scrutiny.
Who Gets Hurt When You Pirate Music?.There's a case study in the NYDaily News -- apparently a propos nothing but this Sunday's Grammy Awards -- that breaks down the cash flow of a hypothetical hit album by a hypothetical rock quartet. It illustrates all the people that get paid along the food chain, including some odd recoupable record company expenses, like a 25 percent "packaging deduction" and a 15 percent "free goods charge," off the top, most of which the label keeps.
The bottom line is that a gold record (500,000 copies) selling at $16.98 will gross roughly $8.5 million, of which each member of the hypothetical quartet will pocket about $40,000. (The case study doesn't take songwriting royalties into account.)
So for every $16.98 album you rip, you're costing a performing artist about 34 cents, and the lawyers, producers and labels about $16.64. [Over the Edge]
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Self-motivated Learners
Fascinating article in Silicon.com, as the father of a 13-year-old who has designed and managed her own US-based schooling from London describes the experience and draws from it lessons for everyone interested in propagating learning as a lifelong discipline. But in the end, we're back to the intrinsic need for self-motivated learners if all this is going to work.More and more, I think the role of public schooling in the US is to force-feed some rudimentary level of essential knowledge -- how to read road signs and cigarette labels, understand a credit card statement, fill out a minimum-wage job application -- and a dose of current political doctrine into people regardless of their motivation. It's a sort of self-preservation thing for society.
To be anything more than that requires a lot of effort and motivation on the part of the student. This really is the challenge with all learning, and not many students have this kind of motivation:
[...] Only the story doesn't end there. Far from it. My daughter is nothing if not resourceful. She took to the net and soon found tutors who specialise in preparing UK kids for US schooling and vice versa.Soon she was in a position to sign up for tutors twice a week and then do the rest of her schooling via distance learning, over the net. [...]
Few students show this kind of determination. Fewer still are the parents who know how to support and manage it. But it is something we must understand, and must learn to engender it in our students if we are to ever see the true benefits of extended learning tools.
Will elearning's day ever come?. E-learning - will its day ever come? Quote: "E-learning can work but it is not about the technology, which is now relatively cheap and available... What is important is providers understanding their customer base, making tools simple to use and having self-motivated users.[elearnspace blog]
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This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:06:57 GMT
