File Sharing = Terrorism?

This article originally appeared in the December/January issue of Bazooka Magazine.

The next time you decide to visit your favorite torrent website, there’s a chance you’ll see a big shiny Department of Homeland Security logo and message about how much prison time you can get for copyright infringement. In the last week of November, the DHS shut down and seized the domain names of at least 76 web sites for copyright violations. Most of the websites that were shut down were torrent file sharing sites, but at least one, torrent-finder.com, was a torrent search engine similar to Google. Operating under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which we can thank Clinton for), DHS was able to shut down these sites without a court order and without any requirement that the copyright holders prove that infringement was taking place. This is fucked up in so many different ways I don’t even know where to begin.

I guess the best place to start is the flawed premise that file sharing is the reason for entertainment companies’ falling bottom lines. I don’t have any research to back this up, but I’d be willing to bet that only about 5% of the files your average software pirate “steals” is something that they’d pay for if they couldn’t download it. If I really want to see a movie, I’ll pay to see it on the big screen; if a musician I like comes out with a new album, I want to read the liner notes and make sure he gets paid so he can make more great music; if I want to read a book, I want to read--well--a book, which I’ll never believe can be replaced by a computer file, no matter how many times Apple and Amazon try to tell me otherwise. Except for live or obscure stuff that isn’t available for sale, most things I get through file-sharing and similar sites are things I’d simply live without if I had to pay for. If I’ve got any confidence in something, I’ll pay for it, if only to avoid the trouble that comes with trying to download something illegally or pseudo-legally: the viruses, the mislabeled and damaged files, and the overly anal rules of most “invite-only” sites.

The real reason music companies are losing money is the simple fact that most albums are one great song, two decent songs, and the rest filler or shit. For example, I’ve paid for two Kid Rock CDs in my life. If you assume that a good album should have 8 listenable songs, that motherfucker still owes me about 10 songs. As for movies, most either follow bland formulas or cynically attempt to cash in on the success of the latest release that had something new or interesting to offer. Basically, the problem is that most of today’s entertainment is being created as a product, not a work of art. I’d wager that guys like Tom Waits and Robert Rodriguez who treat their work as a creative endeavor haven’t seen as much revenue loss as the Nickelbacks and Michael Bays of the world.

The commodification of creativity is at the root of another problem related to this whole mess: our nation’s copyright laws. While intellectual property laws have always aimed (rightly) to protect the commercial rights of the artist, they used to be tempered with the concept of fair use, which is based on the idea that art cannot exist in a vacuum and that enduring art belongs to the creative commons, essentially becoming “words” in the vocabulary of our “cultural language.” In the 20th Century, thanks in part to corporate ownership of creative works coupled with the insipid idea that corporations are people, the concepts of fair use and a creative commons have been gutted. We can thank the Disney Corporation for a lot of this. Whenever Uncle Walt’s creations are about to enter the commons due to copyright expiration, Disney uses its influence (and campaign contribution fund) to make sure the laws are changed in their favor. This has happened so many times that copyright laws are sometimes known as “Mickey Mouse Laws.”

The big problem with the death of fair use and the creative commons is that restricts the ability of subsequent artists to use cultural touchstones in their work. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are as much a part of our nation’s symbolic landscape as Daniel Boone and Abe Lincoln, but if you try to use the talking animals to comment on the American experience, there’s an excellent chance that you’ll hear from Team Rodent’s legal department. Even satire and parody, which used to fall firmly into the fair use category, are getting trickier to do without possible legal ramifications. If you don’t believe me, Google “Keiron Dwyer” +Starbucks. If you fail to see the cultural importance of satire and parody, I recommend watching The People Versus Larry Flynt. There’s a scene in there where Ed Norton explains it better than I ever could.

Even if the entertainment industry wasn’t morally bankrupt and our copyright laws protected the creator without stifling commentary, these shutdowns are still problematic in their potential for abuse. The sites were shut down with no court order, no chance for the site owner to prove innocence, and apparently no requirement for the DHS to even make a token effort to confirm infringement. With some of the sites, it’s debatable whether copyright violations have actually taken place. As far as I can tell, all that’s required to shut down a web site is for the DHS to say that someone has claimed the site violates their copyright. There’s no need to prove that a violation has occurred, or even that a complainant exists. The lack of any form of due process essentially gives the DHS a simple way to bypass the First Amendment and possibly other basic rights.

Last but not least, does anyone else find it a little odd that this particular branch of copyright enforcement falls to the Department of Homeland Security? Is there some secret Al-Queda plan to take over the country with bootleg copies of Jay Z albums? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Interstate Commerce Commission or the FCC or any of a dozen other agencies to be handling these duties? I can think of two possible reasons why the DHS is handling this. The first is that with the “War on Terror” going on, Homeland Security is the department whose actions most people are least likely to question, so they’re a good choice for ethically questionable operations like this one. The other possibility is that those in power are finally admitting, albeit subtly, that they consider protecting corporate profits, not protecting average citizens, to be the real role of government. Both of those possibilities kinda suck.

"I'll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that. See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that."--Billo the (Insane) Clown

Top Ten Predictions For The Future

The following articles was originally published in the November issue of Bazooka Magazine.

Rand Paul is Kentucky’s new Senator, and throughout his campaign he’s made a lot of vague promises about smaller government, lower taxes, and letting the magical invisible unicorn hoof of the free market fix all of society’s ills. Of course, Rand Paul is just one man, and even though the GOP won the House, the Democrats still (barely) control the Senate and Obama has veto power, so it seems likely that our government will spend the next two (or more) years so divided that only the most moderate new laws will make it through the gridlock. But let’s be honest: With the possible exceptions of Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, pretty much everybody in Washington is owned by the same group of corporations and lobbyists, they’re all more concerned with winning elections than improving the lives of average Americans, and the American people are easily swayed by catchy slogans, even when they contradict verifiable facts. This will allow some of the Tea Party’s unfocused anger to be channeled into actual public policy.

In order to determine what the Tea Party’s recent electoral success will mean for Kentucky and the United States, I’ve consulted the Zodiac, several lost volumes of predictions by Nostradamus, Aqua Buddha, the ghost of Thomas Jefferson, and TV’s Adam Carolla. The following predictions are absolutely, 100% guaranteed to come true.*

10. President Obama’s Health Care Reform will remain in effect. Sorry, teabaggers. There’s just no way the Health Care industry’s going to let that kind of easy money slip through its fingers. The House may waste countless hours (probably during the next election cycle) making a big show of trying to repeal “Obamacare,” but any actual legislation will be narrowly defeated in the House, killed in the Senate, or vetoed by President Obama. It will make for some great political theater, though.

9. In order to combat air pollution, Wal-Mart will be given trillions in government subsidies in exchange for locating all new stores within walking distance of a trailer park.

8. If you were planning to visit one of our nation’s beaches next summer and you’re not a tarball collector or wildlife suffering enthusiast, you should probably make other plans.

7. The social safety network will be completely eliminated, but new “voluntary charity contracts” designed to allow the wealthy to “help the less fortunate” will make it legal to essentially own a poor person.

6. In one of the Tea Party’s more controversial moves, the United States Army will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Halliburton.

5. You know how a bunch of state Attorney Generals tried to sue the federal government after Health Care Reform passed? Jack Conway’s going to remember that shit when Rand Paul starts passing crazy-ass laws.

4. April 20th will become “National Aqua Buddha Day.”

3. With the Department of Education de-funded, local schools will have to turn to corporate sponsorship in order to stay afloat. In sports news, the Tilghman Bloomin’ Onions (Paducah) will defeat the Tates Creek Submarinos (Lexington) in the state football championship by over 50 points.

2. With the Daily Show and Colbert Report writers unable to recap all of each day’s crazy in a single hour, Viacom will spin the shows off into the world’s first 24-hour fake news network. Shortly after the new network is announced, TMZ.com will release video of Jon Stewart softly weeping to himself.

1. The Tea Party will lose the 2012 elections by a landslide. With Medicare dismantled (and Medicare scooters a thing of the past) the people who voted them in this year just won’t be able to drag their old, fat asses to the polls in order to vote.

*Predictions not really guaranteed to come true.

The Agony of Victory

Earlier today, the House of Representatives held a vote to extend the Bush tax cuts only to those making less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. All but 3 Republicans voted against the measure because the tax cuts did not extend to the wealthiest Americans. Cheerleaders for what passes for the left in this country are calling this a victory. By voting to raise everyone's taxes if the rich don't also keep their cut, they say, the GOP is showing their true colors. Their base, who voted them in based on promises of lower taxes, is bound to take notice.

Call me a cynic, but I don't think this is the victory some people believe it to be because, let's face it, the GOP base is not swayed by reality. Soon-to-be Speaker John Boehner (who, for the record, said during the recent elections that he would vote for this exact measure if he had no other choice) has already called the vote "chicken crap," and there's a good chance that will be enough to convince the right that House Republicans made a wise, brave decision. If the GOP base happens to demand some reason for why their elected representatives voted in direct opposition to the purported party line, Fox and friends will drag out trickle-down economics and talk about how they really voted against raising taxes for "job creators."

The Republicans know this, which is why progressives should look on today's vote as a defeat, not a victory. If anything, today's vote is proof that the GOP knows it can do whatever is necessary to enrich the wealthy without fear of losing votes when the next election comes around. As long as the GOP spin machine keeps rolling, the bases will continue to vote against their own self-interest, no matter how blatantly the GOP screws them over.

To the liberals who are calling this a victory, I think the words of Winston Wolf are appropriate here: "let's not start sucking each others' dicks quite yet."

Dangerous Liberal Activist Foiled By Brave Rand Paul Supporters

This article appears in the November issue of Bazooka Magazine.

The morning after the final Conway/Paul debate on KET (the one where they both acted like snide middle school kids in the principal’s office), the first thing to pop up in my news feed was the video of moveon.org employee Lauren Valle being tackled and having her head stomped by Rand Paul supporters before the debate. The video was on a blog I haven’t been reading for very long (so I haven’t really gotten a feel for their reliability when it comes to fact-checking) and didn’t list a source, so I was initially skeptical about the video’s authenticity. Within a couple of hours, the story broke in the more mainstream media. I assumed that everyone could agree that stomping on a woman’s head while she’s down is a bad thing, but in doing so I underestimated the Tea Party’s capacity for rationalization and conspiracy theory.

The teabaggers started, predictably enough, with conspiracy theory: everyone involved in the altercation was a Conway supporter and it was all a stunt to make Paul look bad. Coming from a party that’s made James O’Keefe (the ACORN “pimp” and would-be Abbie Boudreau seducer) sort of a folk hero, I guess this makes sense--kind of like a company that engages in shady business practices assuming that everyone they do business with is trying to rip them off. Once the stomper was identified as Timothy Profitt, Paul’s Bourbon County coordinator who had been associated with the campaign for months, contributed $2500 to Rand Paul, and been thanked for his support in a Lexington Herald-Leader ad, only those who believe in Ringo Star’s New World Order mind control lasers stuck with the conspiracy theory angle.

With the conspiracy theory debunked, the teabaggers moved on to the character assassination of Lauren Valle, asserting that the fact that she had been engaged in numerous non-violent acts of civil disobedience and protest justified the beat-down. They were very happy to discover she had been arrested for trespassing during one of these instances, which led to the most ironic (definitely in the Alanis sense, and possibly even literally) comment of the whole discussion, from a commenter on the WPSD Facebook page: "She is a risk-taker and puts both her life and her liberty on the line, along with those she associates with, and poses a risk to whomever may happen along. Illegally boarding a ship,,, they could have been shot, they could have caused a major disaster just with that one stunt.” If you’re not laughing so hard you’re shooting milk from your nose (even if you’re not drinking milk), keep in mind that she was sneaking onto the ship to commit an act of vandalism as a form of political protest--kind of like a group of Bostonians (who later gave their name to a dangerous but hilarious political movement) did in 1773.

Another rationalization, tied closely to the character assassination game, is that Paul’s thugs believed that Valle posed a physical threat to Rand Paul. One video does show her waving her Republicorp sign in Rand Paul’s face as he drives by, but proving the teabagger assertion that she hit him (or nearly hit him) with it would require the kind of video enhancement technology that only exists in police procedural TV shows. To me, it looks more like she’s trying to turn the sign around so that her accomplice can get a picture of it next to Paul. The same video shows her coming around the front of the car after it has stopped (right before the smack-down), and to me she looks more scared than threatening (according to her story, several of the Paulbots were chasing her at this point, so I can’t say I blame her). There are so many holes in the “clear and present danger” scenario that it can’t be easily sorted while maintaining any narrative flow, so I’m going to have to break out a bullet list:

* To the teabaggers, the fact that Valle was wearing a wig (which according to her was part of the costume for her Republicorp “character”) is apparently probable cause to assume that she’s an assassin--some even pointed out that Squeaky Fromme wore a wig when she tried to kill Gerald Ford. While this may be true, if wearing a wig makes you an assassin, I can only assume that strip clubs are crawling with ninjas and William Shatner is the most dangerous man alive. This fear of wigs on the part of the Paulbots probably has some sort of creepy sexual component, but I’d rather not think about it.
* Valle claims that Paul’s supporters recognized her and were keeping a close eye on her before Paul ever got there. This does not fit with the “unknown attacker” idea, but does fit with the teabagger “she was a troublemaker” rationalization. If the Paulbots did, as Valle asserts and the character assassination defense suggests, know who Valle was, they should have also known that none her previous protest activities had ever presented a danger to anyone (except possibly herself). This also kills the “wig as assassin disguise” argument.
* If Valle were planning to harm Paul in some way, she had ample opportunity when she was a foot away from his car window. When the teabaggers took Valle down, Paul was long gone according to the video and eyewitnesses.
* Many of the “she was dangerous” defenses presume that the men who attacked Valle were part of Rand Paul’s security detail. So far I haven’t heard the men themselves or anyone in the Paul campaign claim that this was the case. Even if these men were acting in some official capacity and Valle was presenting a threat, the head stomping was excessive. Those who acknowledge that these men were not security present them as brave bystanders who were protecting their candidate, which brings us to:
* Lauren Valle is a small woman who was completely unarmed (unless you count a sign as a weapon, in which case everyone there was dangerous). Kind of makes you wonder if these men would have been so “brave” if it was a 300-pound linebacker and not a 110-pound woman (especially if you’ve read Amanda Marcotte’s excellent Guardian article “The Women-Hating Rage of the Republican Right,” which explores the misogyny inherent in Tea Party rhetoric and policy).

Some White Male Liberty Patriots dispensed with trying to defend the curbstomper and went right for the straw man argument, claiming that people wouldn’t be making a big deal about this if Valle had “attacked” Conway or Obama. While I’ll be the first to admit that progressives do have a few sacred double standards, they don’t generally apply when it comes to basic civil and human rights. That’s why many of us detest Barack Obama’s failure to end the human rights violations of the Bush era and, why the Volvo-driving hippies at the ACLU regularly fight on behalf of Christians who have suffered religious discrimination and those whose Second Amendment rights have been violated, and, more generally, why the left has such a hard time holding power. While the right proudly stand behind their leaders in power as they accomplish nothing (and in some cases act in direct opposition to their state beliefs), those of us on the left are quick to vote against those who aren’t doing what they promised, usually throwing our votes away on third party candidates who can never win in our corporate-owned political system. That’s why our government will probably grind to a halt due to political gridlock before Thanksgiving.

While Matt Taibbi (in his October 15 Rolling Stone article: “How Corporate Interests and Republican Insiders Built the Tea Party Monster”) has done a much better job than I ever could of highlighting the double standards of teabaggers (specifically those in our state), I do feel like I should point out how it applies to the curbstomper himself, Timothy Profitt. According to campaign donation records, Profitt’s wife works for Bourbon County High School, which is of course partially funded by the Department of Education that Rand Paul wants to destroy. For his part, Tim, who is only 53, lists his occupation as “retired/unemployed.” Since his address doesn’t match any of the Paris horse farms I’m familiar with and his wife still works, it seems unlikely that his early retirement is because he’s independently wealthy. I’m speculating here, but that leaves two explanations I can think of: Either he worked for an EVIL union and retired early with a pension or he’s drawing disability (due to the “bad back” that he used as a rationalization for stomping on Valle’s head). In any case, I’d be interested to know how Profitt managed to retire so early--I seriously doubt his wife’s supporting them both on the salary she’s getting from Bourbon County High. At the very least, Profitt is working hard to vote his wife out of a job (or at least a raise in the foreseeable future).

In addition to the teabagger double standards, I would argue that Conway/Obama supporters wouldn’t stomp on a woman’s head when she’s already down because the left is not constantly being conditioned for violence by their party’s rhetoric. The Tea Party thrives on things like thinly-veiled calls for violent revolution and Bible verses recommending the assassination of President Obama. It’s hard to believe that this violent rhetoric has no effect on those who buy into it, or that it doesn’t appeal to a certain kind of person. Which brings us to the other major player in the altercation: Mike Pezzano, the man who knocked Valle down so Tim Profitt could step on her head. Pezzano has been showing up at Paul events for a while now, and his big issue is “open carry.” For those not familiar with the term, it basically means that Mike is not content with being able to carry a concealed firearm. He wants to, to paraphrase Townes Van Zandt, “wear his gun outside his pants for all the honest world to feel.” I’m not saying that Mike’s overcompensating for anything, but I’ll bet he drives a Hummer and his wife needs a magnifying glass and tweezers to give him one.

I realize that Rand Paul can’t be held accountable for the actions of his supporters (though it would have been nice if his weasely statement hadn’t tried to make Conway supporters share the blame), but I do believe that the rhetoric of the Tea Party contributes to and encourages this kind of incident. I’m writing this a few days before the election, but by the time you’re reading it there’s a good chance (at least based on the latest polls) that Rand Paul will be Kentucky's new Senator. Like all politicians (a victorious Conway included, I’d wager), his professed ideals will quickly be subverted to the special interests who control Washington, but like all politicians he’ll have to keep up the rhetoric necessary to make his constituents vote against their own interests again next time around. Since the Tea Party is so hell-bent against the system, he’ll need to be even more vocal than most to hide the fact that he’s just another politician. While rhetoric rarely changes the way government works (as those of us who really wanted to believe Obama during his campaign can bitterly attest), it does have an effect on the voters, and, if the case of Lauren Valle is any indication, it’s not a positive one.