Life under Capitalism

You wouldn’t steal the music for your anti-piracy ad

Published on December 3, 20112 Comments

Dutch copyright advocacy group BREIN asks composer Melchior Rietveldt to create the music for an anti-piracy ad to be shown at a local film festival. That’s in 2006. A year later Rietveldt notices that his music is used in another piracy ad, one put on dozens of dvd titles in the Netherlands:

The composer now claims that his work has been used on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs, without him receiving any compensation for it. According to Rietveldt’s financial advisor, the total sum in missed revenue amounts to at least a million euros ($1,300,000).

The existence of excellent copyright laws and royalty collecting agencies in the Netherlands should mean that the composer received help and support with this problems, but this couldn’t be further from what actually happened.

Soon after he discovered the unauthorized distribution of his music Rietveldt alerted the local music royalty collecting agency Buma/Stemra. The composer demanded compensation, but to his frustration he heard very little from Buma/Stemra and he certainly didn’t receive any royalties.

It gets better:

Earlier this year, however, a breakthrough seemed to loom on the horizon when Buma/Stemra board member Jochem Gerrits contacted the composer with an interesting proposal. Gerrits offered to help out the composer in his efforts to get paid for his hard work, but the music boss had a few demands of his own.

In order for the deal to work out the composer had to assign the track in question to the music publishing catalogue of the Gerrits, who owns High Fashion Music. In addition to this, the music boss demanded 33% of all the money set to be recouped as a result of his efforts.

So an anti-piracy group doesn’t ask permission or pay a composer to use his music and the group that should be protecting his rights actually has its boardmembers attempt to extort him…

is this commercial racist?

Published on November 18, 2011Leave a comment

I saw this commercial for the first time on tv tonight and I thought, hang on, is this, if not quite racist, at least a bit dodgy? Beheaded male and female Black bodies and stereotypical African imagery, all very sensual to sell a brand of chocolate called Afrodisiac? When the reality of chocolate production even in 2011 still depends for a frighteningly large extent on slave labour, including child labour in cocoa production in West Africa? To be fair Kraft foods, the owner of Cote d’Or, has signed the socalled Cocoa protocol which aims to child labour in cocoa production altogether, but as the Wikipedia article says, “ten years after implementation, it is unclear if the protocol had any effect in reducing child labor”.

So yeah, it makes me a bit uncomfortable watching this.

Truth will out

Published on September 28, 2011

Of course this video is bagatalised, made fun off, “revealed” to be a fake, dismissed as “old news”. All of which should not distract you from its message, which is not so much what this douchenozzle says but what it means. There’s no such thing as “the markets”, there are only people who have no problem profiting from sending the whole of Europe back into recession again.

(Via Vuijlsteke.)

Real names and other dangers

Published on August 29, 2011

On the subject of Google’s childish insistence on “real names” for its new Google+ service, jwz is scathing, but it’s this comment that gets it right on what mature online communities need to remain civil:

In 20+ years of online communication (much of it with people I either have never met, or only later met) I’d have to say the only reliable predictor of civil discussion is stability of identity, which allows reputation to work. You want people to use the same identity by which they are regularly known, so you can recognise it’s the same person again. As you note this worked just fine for most of USENET’s existence, through most of LJ’s existence, and across a wide range of BBSes prior to that. It even works across a diverse, but loosely related by theme, set of blogs, and their comments, providing there’s a general understanding that people will continue to use the same identity on all of them.

It’s not the only thing you need for a decent online community — you also need a good system to block the numpties, either through active but fair moderation or on the user side ala Usenet’s kill lists — but what you really don’t need and what’s in fact counterproductive is to insist on “real names”. Insisting on that is just another unnecessary hoop for people to jump through to start participating and only an idiot won’t realise that for very many people for very good reasons this is one hoop too far.

But of course Google and Facebook and all the other socalled social media sites are not interested in creating a proper online community, but rather an exploitable resource to sell to advertisers, for which purpose “real names” are much more valuable….

This was on my mind today

Published on July 15, 2011

In the midst of his vacation, Timothy Burke had to take an unforseen trip to the emergency room. Not a nice experience at the best of times, but this was in America and things are done differently there than in civilised countries:

After waiting two and a half hours, I began to get the picture. The nurse on duty repeatedly called patients who were not present, who had checked in and then left later on. At first I thought it odd that they kept calling and calling for almost thirty minutes for people who were very obviously not there while not calling cases of people who were present. Every once in a while, someone who was there was called and seen, though in a few of those cases, the nurse on duty simply took vitals again and sent them back to the waiting room. At the limits of my endurance, I finally went up to ask how long I might expect to wait. “We’re still seeing cases that checked in between one or two p.m. today,” I was told. Meaning it might be four in the morning before I was seen, I asked, stunned? Yes, that’s very possible, said the nurse. I gave up at that point: infection, disease, whatever it was, if I was going to continue to worsen overnight, I’d damn well go back and do it in my hotel room and hope for better in San Francisco. (Which I found, thanks in part to my Facebook friends.)

And why it’s on my mind is because I read about while I was waiting around an emergency room myself, as once again poor old S. had to be taken back into hospital. In our case though she was seen and helped within minutes and was it just the medicial process itself of getting her stabilised, getting an I.V. hooked up, blood tests, x-rays unsoweiter that took a long time. Bureaucratic nonsense? Much less. So whenever I’m starting to wallow in self puity I remember things could be much worse and we could’ve had all this shit in America and we’d been bankrupt or dead by now.