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The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued four students separately last month for running services that searched computers connected to their college networks for MP3 song files. It may not be headline news material, but to me this is as scary as any other infringment on freedom of the individual. ZDNet reports that the students have agreed to pay around £10,000 each to settle online music piracy charges from the recording industry.
The service that one of the students run at Princeton university was more like Google than Napster, since it had simply searched computers that were hooked up to the campus network, whether or not they contained his software. The students also shared copyrighted music from their own machines. This case is important in that it is the first time the RIAA directly sued individuals, as opposed to companies, associated with what is called peer-to-peer piracy.
The settlement was reached without defendants admitting guilt. Each of them will be paying RIAA an amount totalling between $12,000 and $17,000 (£7,456 and £10,563), split into annual instalments between 2003 and 2006. The lawsuits as filed could have entailed damages (in theory) of up to $100m.
Matt Oppenheim, RIAA senior vice president issued a statement:
We believe it’s in everyone’s best interest to come to a quick resolution, and that these four defendants now clearly understand the seriousness with which we view this type of illegal behaviour. We have also sent a clear signal to others that this kind of activity is illegal.
According to the RIAA said that any future similar enforcement actions could lead to “stiffer settlement obligations”.
Now, I am not against copyright and intellectual property rights. I am, however, against a large entity using desperate measures to halt its falling profit margins. The music industry sales are falling not because people are copying music they ‘should be paying for’ but because the industry’s business models are no longer viable. For the RIAA to sue companies or individuals is like for an elephant to swat a few flies in the swarm. It can and will obliterate the few it hits but it can’t squash them all…
“To exist without enemies is to be a miserable jellyfish that stands for nothing.”
– Carter Laren, Capitalism Magazine
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
– Thomas Paine, Common Sense,1776
For a measure of the institutional senile dementia that grips the British state, you need look no further than here:
Government lawyers trying to keep the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin behind bars will tell a High Court judge tomorrow that burglars are members of the public who must be protected from violent householders.
The case could help hundreds of criminals bring claims for damages for injury suffered while committing offences.
In legal papers seen by The Independent, Home Office lawyers dispute Mr Martin’s contention that he poses no risk to the public because he only represents a threat to burglars and other criminals who trespass on his property.
They say: “The suggestion … that the Parole Board was not required to assess the risk posed by Mr Martin to future burglars or intruders (on the grounds that they do not form part of the public at large) is remarkable.”
“It cannot possibly be suggested that members of the public cease to be so whilst committing criminal offences, and whilst society naturally condemns, and punishes such persons judicially, it can not possibly condone their (unlawful) murder or injury.”
Whilst it should be clear from this that the lunatics have indeed taken over the asylum, the pathology at work here should be clear. Private property, far from being the bedrock upon which western liberal civilization is based, is instead seen as having no genuine value at all to those who see ‘The State’ as the axis around which all revolves and nothing whatsoever that is distinctly separate called ‘civil society’. Thus private property is seen as a distasteful aberration that does not really make any sense, at best ‘property which the state does not yet own’. Therefore to use force to defend that which has no real value is clearly unacceptable.
As the people who think that way have made sure they have a near monopoly on the means of violence and coercion, that does not bode well for… well, anyone who is not happy to just be an drone-like adjunct of the state.
The European Central Bank has said that joining the Euro would mean the end of the free NHS, reports The Times (we do not link to the Times). Apparently the April edition monthly report of the ECB said that:
Governments should distinguish between “essential, privately non-insurable and non-affordable services”, such as emergency treatment, and those where “private financing might be more efficient”.
In truth, the actual ECB report [pdf file] does not say anything quite so bluntly. The actual report is full of careful conditionals and non-assertions: “governments may have to rise contribution rates”, such co-payments could increase efficiency”, “pre-financing [of geriatric care] has been proposed” and “It has been argued that setting of budget caps…can improve overall performance”. (page 45) → Continue reading: “Euro means end of NHS”
I have only just noticed a really quite interesting and lengthy essay by Bill Whittle on Eject! Eject! Eject! called Victory:
This nation has been for many decades under direct and coordinated attack by fanatics whose failure to gain respect and attention through the force of their arguments have turned their level of rhetoric to such a shrill and hysterical pitch that years of it have seemingly driven some of them quite insane — insane to the degree that they cannot see that acid baths, state rapists, children’s prisons and daily torture and execution are not mere rhetorical flourishes — roughly equivalent to hanging chads and bulldozed Dixie Chicks CD’s — but a desperate and ever-present reality.
They did everything in their power to deny this reality, these Champions of Compassion, and Not In Their Name did these daily horrors come to an end. That is what six decades of freedom, security, tolerance and prosperity will do to some people: isolate them from the brutal reality of horror and torture to the degree that “evil” must be accompanied by sneer quotes and the motives of 300 million free and decent people are suspect while those of a small cabal of psychopathic mass murderers are not.
Whilst I think it is not a ‘coordinated’ attack and should be more realistically described as widespread but unsynchronized petulance, the toxic nature of these attitudes are no the less real for their lack of coherent direction. Bill’s essay is a lengthy but thought provoking read. Check it out.
On May 4, 1626 American Indians agreed to sell Manhattan island to European settlers for $24 in cloth & buttons. As with most free market transactions, all parties involved were satisfied with the deal: the settlers got land to homestead, the Indians received exotic manufactured goods that were beyond their ability to produce.
One of the great myths about anti-Semitism is that it’s only a problem for Jews. But if you were one of the people walking down the street doing nothing while European Jewry was being rounded up for slaughter during WWII, I hope you would not just have felt sorry for ‘God’s ancient people’ and left it at that. I hope you might have done something positive to help them. To stand by and do nothing while an evil psychosis sweeps your civilisation is not likely to be a very moral option. So maybe you would have felt honoured to risk and even sacrifice your life, like the eighty-three-year-old man I quoted above. Sometimes that is the only way to conquer evil.
Anti-Semitism is a problem for us all, because civilisation-destroying evil is a problem for us all. Would Marxist nutters be trying to take over Europe right now if Europe hadn’t annihilated a vast swathe of its own cultural topsoil sixty-five years ago? I wonder.
In considering the Holocaust, most attention has been given to its direct victims, as is appropriate. However, we must also consider that it was a form of self-administered lobotomy for Continental European culture
…as James C. Bennett said in this very good article.
It is not just that if ‘they’ start by looking for the Jews ‘they’ will end up looking for anybody and everybody. It is simply that good cultures and civilisations require decent moral human beings, and the destruction of those decent, moral human beings (who also happen in general to be intelligent, freedom-loving capitalist human beings, as you will notice from taking a cursory overview of their societies) by evil crazy ones has massive and terrible ramifications we can not begin to measure. Had the Allies bombed the death camps when they should have, or even (unimaginable!) gone into Germany with the full backing of America sometime in the 1930s with the explicit purpose of removing the dictatorship and instigating democratic rule, Europe might now be far ahead of where it is. Good ideas grow more good ideas. Evil destroys them. We might have evolved the kind of free market European collection of small capitalist democracies that we can only hope might happen in another fifty or a hundred years through some as-yet-unconceived democratic libertarian miracle.
And we might not be producing, or nurturing, people like these. Or Tom Dalyell, the Leader of the House accusing Blair of having built his war policy on “being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers”, rather than on any kind of moral or political substance. As Jack Straw (one of the “cabal”)’s spokesman responded: “If these reports are accurate, these remarks are too unworthy to be worth a comment.” I agree, in theory anyway. But Mr Dalyell also said, “I am not going to be labelled anti-Semitic.” Well, sorry Mr Dalyell, but you are anti-Semitic. Objecting to the influence of British MPs on the basis of their Jewishness can hardly be described as anything else. And I am amazed at the new respectability anti-Semitism has achieved since the growth of left-wing anti-capitalism inspired by the actions of good nations in the war.
Life is surely complicated for free countries. No arrest and torture for Mr Dalyell, of course. But when leaflets like ones that say this:
When this sudden explosion of American-Zionist violence is aiming to eradicate a nation’s existence, eliminating its vitality and sites of resistance, the only way to protect this nation is through acts of martyrdom.
…published in the UK, are found in the Gaza strip, it is clear that the freedom our society offers is being abused.
The kind of brain that can turn liberation into annihilation in one fell slander is not the kind of brain we want festering in the UK. I don’t know exactly how we’re going to deal with it, but we are definitely going to have to find ways soon. Otherwise the next suicide bomber might indeed turn up in Oxford Street M&S, and it might be you or me who gets blown to smithereens in the frozen ready-meals section. And the next person who tells me that targets should not attract trouble in the first place can go and live in Switzerland and get citizenship there and then write me an essay entitled, “What would have happened in WWII if the UK and the US had acted like us.”
Zionism: it’s not just for Jews anymore.
On Channel Four News tonight it was reported that the UK government is to ban childminders from smacking children from the autumn. What I found odd in the report was that apparently the UN thinks the government should go further and prevent parents, not just childminders, from smacking.
I don’t have strong feelings either way on whether smacking should be allowed. What gets me is that the UN thinks it is its job to decide whether or not it should be legal. Surely the UN’s role – if it has one at all – is to provide a forum to discuss disagreements between countries, helping to prevent wars. It should not be for deciding the domestic policies of individual countries.
If you want something cultural to read, I recommend postings numbers one and two of Nikos Salingaros week, over at 2Blowhards.
The postings are interesting. But even better, in my opinion, are some of the comments. I’ve posted tangential comments of my own about the “New Urbanism”, briefly on Transport Blog, and at somewhat greater length at my Education Blog. Meanwhile here are bits from two of my favourite of the Blowhard/Salingaros comments, so far.
First, here is “Tom”, replying to something Michael Blowhard had said about suburbs:
You are so right about the zoning, transportation department, fire department rules ossified since the 50’s creating inevitable horrible suburbia. I have done work in suburban areas and the results are completely predetermined by setbacks, maximum lot coverage areas, single use zoning, minimum parking space numbers and transportation department road standards. This is where the problems with modern architecture really are – a socialist/utopian attitude towards city planning. Even in many areas where they object strongly to this kind of thing, the solutions are always increased regulation – appearance reviews, stricter zoning, etc which just makes the problem worse. The reason all suburbs in america look the same is because there are two (i believe) companies that publish model codes for towns that they just buy off the shelf. The role of new urbanism should be fighting these standards.
→ Continue reading: Comments on Salingaros
The chaps who dismiss Bush as a moron forget that what counts is what a guy does when he’s not talking.
– Mark Steyn
I submit that it is a therapeutic, every so often, to remind ourselves about the horrors of communism.
A living testament to that horror can still be found today in Siberia. It is the road that runs from Magadan to Yakutsk, otherwise known as the ‘Road of Bones’.
It was built by political prisoners and slaves, countless numbers of whom were worked, frozen and starved to death in the process. Because the perma-frost makes the ground too hard to effect any burials, the bones of the cadavers were broken up and used as ballast upon which to build the road.
We will never know for sure how many lives were sacrificed to this ‘glorious people’s project’, but by repute, every metre of the road cost one human life. The road is 2000 kilometres long.
There are still many people in the world today who subscribe to this terrible, anti-human, homicidal psychosis.
Never forget. Never forgive. Remain vigilant and, above all, never ever, ever apologise for fighting back.
Last Thursday’s local council elections in England seems to have provided some evidence that the Conservative Party may still be twitching and not yet dead. They managed to pick up a whopping 566 seats nationwide, thus far exceeding all expectations, including my own. The Tories now control more local authorities than both Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined. I am far from convinced that this performance will reflect at parliamentary level but it does mean, for the time being at least, that Iain Duncan Smith keeps his job as party leader.
Scotland, though. Scotland is a very different and far more melancholy story. Last Thursday also saw elections to the regional assemblies in both Scotland and Wales but it was Scotland that returned the most worrying results. Even prior to last Thursday, Scottish politics is lock-down between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, both left-of-centre parties. Their main opposition comes from the Scottish Nationalist Party which is also (surprise, surprise) a left-wing operation. There are also a handful of squeaky, apologetic Scottish Conservatives who, it would seem, spend most of the time trying to keep their heads below the parapet (though, to be fair to them, they are seriously up against it).
Now one would think that the Scots had more than enough socialists to go round and keep everybody happy but, no. The biggest winner from the Thursday’s regional assembly elections were the Scottish Socialist Party, a class-war marxist outfit, who jumped from having one seat in the assembly to nine seats and a 5% share of the vote.
Apparently a growing number of Scots are getting tired of the milquetoast, watered-down version of socialism they have been getting and yearn for the real thing:
The SSP stands for the socialist transformation of society. To replace capitalism with an economic system based on democratic ownership and control of the key sectors of the economy. A system based on social need and environmental protection rather than private profit and ecological destruction.
The SSP do not control Scotland. Far from it. But they are now an electoral force to be reckoned with in that country and it means that an already left-of-centre administration is going to have to tack much further to the left to appease them and prevent their support from snowballing.
The country that gave Adam Smith and Andrew Carnegie to the world, is fast succumbing to the Endarkenment.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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