The MPAA are not the bad guys. WE are the bad guys.

This "Digg" news story is just one example of the ongoing war between the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry of America, and their customers/thieves.

What bothers me about this fight isn't so much that people are stealing movies and music. Full disclosure: I've done it. I remember way back as a kid pressing record on the tape deck so that I could tape songs off the radio. Bad sound. But good times.

No. What bothers me is the idea that some people, like the people in that DIGG thread, are starting to think that aren't doing anything wrong if they download. This is nonsense. It is theft. Look, we all do bad things. Everyone. If I was the pope, I'd forgive you. But the record and movie companies have every moral right to try to sell the product that they spend money creating. They are being very forward thinking in doing so, by the way. Convergence is upon us. It is already possible to download a first run movie while it is still in theatres and watch it on your holy-shit sized television. It just isn't perfectly easy. But better quality and ease of use is coming in all areas of that chain.

This isn't like open source software either. I mean it could be. If you and your Internet friends want to get together and create open source free movies to compete with the Hollywood studios, go right ahead. Same with music. Just don't make me watch or listen to them.

Pirate Bay - the new big thing in thievin' - sees itself as the anti-hero. It sees itself as the heir to pirate radio. But there are two things wrong with that. First, pirate radio wasn't justified either. It's perfectly acceptable for the government to regulate the amount of limited FM bandwidth there is. But secondly, even if you disagree with the first point, this isn't someone ranting and saying expletives on the airwaves. This is people choosing that someone else's hard work should be enjoyed for free against the wishes of the person or people who did the hard work. Charming.

You'll notice that I'm not getting into statistics like the ones that say that more digital media is bought by the downloaders and that business has never been better. It's because I don't care. That information is in the hands of the relevant service providers. It is theirs to do with, tactically, as they wish. My guess is that they don't think that's a situation that will continue indefinitely. But again, deciding what to do with that information is their prerogative. They are the creators.

I also know that the existence of this phenomenon is spurring changes and innovations in the industry. Great. But smallpox spurred innovations in medicine. It doesn't mean I need to send it a thank you card.

In any event, I know we'll still steal some. We often can't afford all the music we would like. The ability to do it is there. And it is hardly the worst of all crimes. The market is not going to stop being the market - free stuff will beat out low or high price.
But if you are doing it don't be smug about it. You're no hero.

Guilty means Guilty! ... Really?

John Ibbitson writes in Wednesday's Globe and Mail with respect to Larry Craig: (and don't bother with the link, it's behind their silly subscription wall)

 

"Sorry Senator: Once you plead guilty to an offense, you admit to the truth of the allegation. We can argue over whether the sting operation was harassment, but Larry Craig can't claim innocence. He's guilty as sin, as he admitted in open court."

 

Notice how de jure became de facto there?  I guess Ibbitson would be just as quick to swear to the high heavens that OJ was actually not guilty. After all, an open court found him not guilty AND he plead not guilty.

 

The fact is that MILLIONS of people in front of MANY courts have pled guilty for a MULTITUDE of offenses that they didn't actually believe they were guilty of. When I briefly worked as a lawyer, I watched people in the Brampton courthouse plead guilty to spousal abuse just to get back in their house and others who would plead guilty to sexual assault rather than go to trial to argue "honest but mistaken belief". Oh sure, they would say the right things to their lawyer and their judge but the fact is that for money or reputational reasons people plead guilty without FEELING guilty all the time.  I know they have to tell the judge they really did it and they're really sorry. But when someone wants to make a problem go away, one often does so.   

 

That doesn't mean that Larry Craig is innocent. He probably isn't. But saying that someone is actually guilty because they pled guilty is either deliberately disingenuous or highly naive.

Random Notes That Will Make Me Sound Like a Lifelong Leftie

• Hey. Quebec police. You are idiots at best and dangerous at worst. Seriously. What were you thinking? I understand putting undercover officers in place, but did they need to a) look like cops and b) dress like black flaggers.
• Hey Ontarions: I don't like panhandlers either, but don't go using one murder as justification for anything. If you want to ban the class of people who commit the most murders, they are called "husbands".
• Hey Barack Obama and Ron Paul supporters: Sending each other emails on the internet is not gonna cut it. You'll have to leave your mom's basement and knock on some doors.

Funny Cartoon

http://www.slowpokecomics.com/strips/politics101.gif

Libel Chill

Some friends of mine are being playground bullied in a libel suit. This is an important issue to anyone that cares about freedom of expression and the ability to have your say on the internet. If you blog or use online forums this means you. Check out this story from the National. If you can throw a few dimes towards their legal defense fund, even better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXsc3gFGIpA

Incidentally, hopefully at some point the person launching the lawsuits will figure out that launching the lawsuits has been worse for his reputation than the initial unflattering comments, and he'll go... sue... himself.

Access to Justice

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and all around kick ass human being Beverley McLachlin is on the front page of the Toronto Star a few days ago calling for a review of access to the justice system. According to the article McLachlin "has issued a call to action to governments, lawyers and judges to find solutions to the access-to-justice "crisis" imperilling the country's legal system, which is now too expensive and complicated for the vast majority of Canadians."

 

I wholeheartedly concur. And for those of you waiting for one of those Cicero moments where I set up up just to knock em down, this isn't one of those articles. I find no fault with what the Chief Justice said. I'm just scratching my head trying to take up her call to action and figure out ways to solve this intractible problem. She has called governments and lawyers to action. Well, I'm a lawyer who works for the government doing public policy so I think I'll try to answer her call. I'll fail utterly of course. But hell, better to die on our feet than live on our knees, right, brothers and sisters?

 

Like most things in the world, the justice system is the way it is for rational, reasonable reasons. It does no good to just wag a finger of blame at slow moving judges or overpriced lawyers. Tweaks to the present system won't change some basic truths of access to justice.  Let's break down a few of these truths and see what we could maybe do about them. First let's look at how slow the wheels of justice turn. Why is that? Well. The Justice System is a government program.

• Government programs cost money.
• That money usually comes from tax dollars.
• There are only so many of those tax dollars available.
• There are lots of competing priorities for those tax dollars.

We don't have enough tax dollars to pay for everyone's lawyer AND everyone's doctor - and we're already paying for everyone's doctor. only way to lower the costs of the justice system is to make it a little less...well... just.  Litigation of all types could be very inexpensive if it justice was doled out by Judge Judy clones and no lawyers were present.  (Some might suggest that for a while we almost had this model with the financial list and Justice Farley, but I digress.) Litigation worth any amount of money is just the opposite. The procedural fairness provided is so exhaustive that it is getting in the way of substantive fairness. Wrong decisions get reached AND people can't afford to defend themselves.  No one I know could afford to defend a lawsuit.  Could you?  I have friends who are being sued for libel currently, by some rich guy, for things that got posted on an internet message board. This causes them a great deal of worry - not because they believe they did anything wrong - but because it doesn't matter if they did anything wrong once the cost of defending a lawsuit is involved.  So the answer here is to simplify process as much as possible. I don't know where the sweet spot is, but part of it is likely removing some of the procedural safeguards from the civil procedure rules and loosening up the laws of evidence. We're headed in that direction already with some simplified civil procedure for cases up to a certain value and streamlining of hearsay rules and the like, but more could probably be done. (At the cost of some procedural fairness of course.)

 

The second thing we could do to make things cheaper for litigants is to bring the practice of law into deeper disrepute. Is that even possible, you might ask? Well - if we removed all marketing restrictions from lawyers they could compete based on price. It would lead to awfully tacky looking Cellino and Barnes ads but prices might drop a bit. We've done some of this already by loosening the rules on contingency fee payments for personal injury lawsuits but the payouts are still too low in canada for a real sleazemob of ambulance chasers to afford to blanket our tv with ads. Probably a good thing.  

 

A third idea might be to have the government court system privatise part of itself with an increased focus on private arbitrators for corporate disputes. When corporation with eight zillion dollars A sues corporation with eight zillion dollars C why does the taxpayer need to get involved. Create a giant private arbitrators list. Give their decisions the authority of judicial decisions. But make the corporations pay 100% of the arbitrators costs and find their own private venues. Honestly, I don't know if that would make anything cheaper for anyone, but it might help to speed things up in the section 96 courts.

 

All of those ideas above, are, likely stupid ideas. They all give rise to problems that may outweigh the one they are trying to solve... especially since we may not even want to encourage people to access that much justice. We call that a litigious society and we frown on the Americans for it. But I hope it gives you some idea of the intractability of the problem. I'm sure Justice McLachlin is open to your own suggestions, dear reader.

Toronto should do this.

http://www.nyjournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070815/NEWS05/708150356

For the record dear readers...

...I've now written and trashed THREE blog articles that I didn't think were worth reading.

Mainstream Media still doesn't get it. And by it, I mean the Internet.

Have a look at this news story.   It's the news story about the civil service report that caused the fun debate over at Daifallah.com that I sent you too in the last post. But in this post I'm not interested in the substance of it. I'm interested in the lack of links and specificity. CTV reports:

 

"Canada's public servants earn an average salary far higher than those in the private sector, while the core public service workforce has swelled to its largest size in a decade, according to a new report. The Treasury Board of Canada posted the 800-page study on its website last week."

 

There's no title to the report and no link to the report from CTV's website.

 

This mean's that CTV is either collectively very stupid or that it still wants to tightly control the dissemination and interpretation of information. I'm guessing it's the latter.

 

This is hardly the first time I've seen this. I can't begin to quantify the number of times I've read an online article written by a mainstream media publication that failed to include relevant links. The exact same thing happens in news stories in the printed paper. A story is written about something fantastic happening on the web and the url of the website isn't included.  In 2007 this is completely unacceptable. I know that media does not want to be a free advertiser, but in this case it is failing to serve it's customers who are hungry for information, and, whenever possible, for direct access to the primary source of that information. I am already starting to get more of my news from Google or from aggregators like   www.fark.com and www.digg.com or from topical online magazines like  www.slate.com and www.salon.com and www.huffingtonpost.com than I do from the Globe and Mail or CNN or CTV.  If mainstream media doesn't want to keep up, that's fine. It'll just get left behind. That's cool. We don't really NEED old time MSM companies  if they won't keep up with innovations as basic as a hyperlink.  I don't own a buggywhip either and I don't really miss it.

 

 

 

 

Civil Service Squabble over at Daifallah.com

http://www.daifallah.com/blog.htm 

 

Go over and read Adam's post on "Bloated Bureaucacy" August 1st. Then read the comments. I reply to him there.

God Bless XKCD