Qui Bene?

J.D Salinger died today.

He was 93.

He was a writer; his claim to fame was the classic “The Catcher in the Rye“.

One good definition of the word “classic”, is “A book that people praise but never read“. I have never read any of his work, and I have no intention of doing so anytime soon.

So why the need to write an obituary? Simple. Now that he is no longer with us, it is time for “catcher in the Rye” and the rest of his work to take its place along with the like of Mark Twain, Jack London, Earnest Hemingway and Herman Melville In the pantheon of our culture known as the public domain.

But it won’t. Not for a while, anyway; under current law, copyright on books lasts for the life of the author plus seventy years – so “The Catcher in the Rye” will pass into the public domain on January 1, 2071“.

The purpose of copyright was to reward creative people enough to keep them creative, to provide them with enough reward for them to do more, but not enough to make them do nothing. For the next seventy years, however, who will receive the royalties?

Who benefits from such ridiculously long copyright terms?

This song is Copyrighted in U.S.,
under Seal of Copyright #154085,
for a period of 28 years,
and anybody caught singin’ it
without our permission,
will be mighty good friends of ourn,
cause we don’t give a darn.
Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it.
We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.
– Woody Guthrie

The Copyright Playbook

Based upon the behavior of the Music, Movie and Publishing industries – and the laws and treaties that they have foisted upon the rest of us – I have assembled the following hypothetical rulebook:

1. Intellectual Property is King, even when there’s no such thing
   We know that there is technically no such thing as Intellectual Property – ideas can not be owned, just expressions of those ideas – but anyone who points this out should be shouted down. This is because “a lie spoken often enough becomes the truth” (Herman Goering); so we should keep using this term until the great unwashed (aka our customers) start to believe it.
2. Longer is better. Forever is best
   Copyright on Books was originally 28 years, which was sufficient reward to authors to encourage them to write more books. It is not enough for us, however, and thanks to our efforts we – I mean “the artists and creators” – now enjoy life+70 years, which works out to about a century on average. The vast majority of Movies, video games and software programs make most of their money inside about five years, but we have managed to get 95 years of “protection”. That’s not enough for us; more would be better – but it’ll do for now.
3. Our Customers are Thieves and should be treated as such
   It is vital for the continued survival of our business model that all of our products should be locked down, encrypted and resticted wherever possible. The inconvenience to our customers is incidental. Should they choose not to purchase our goods, we should always blame the losses on piracy. To mis-quote Gollum “It has stolen the Precioussss… and we hates it for ever!“
4. The Internet is evil, and must be stamped out
   We have a long and distinguished history of fighting every new technology that comes along. From Piano Rolls to the Compact Cassette, FM Radio, the VCR, the Minidisk (thank God Sony went on to become one of us!), the CD Burner and the TiVo are just a few of the technologies that we have declared to be a threat to our business model, our profit margins and civilization as we know it. Our current nemesis is that piracy and file-swapping networn of tunes know as the Internet. We must mobilize our truthspeakers to spread the word that any technology that might conceivably be used to copy information should be labeled as “piracy” and shut down. The fact that they could be used for legitimate purposes is utterly irrelevant.
5. Everyone else should clean up our mess (aka “Externalities are good“)
   Our need to make a profit is so important that it is everyone else’s job to safeguard our income and business model, including:
   The Justice Department, who is expected to allow us to investigate without a warrant, threaten with impunity and prosecute without the inconvenience and expense of a Coutroom hearing, and assist us every step of the way.
   The ISPs, who are expected to snoop on their customers, cos we are that important.
   The TSA, who is expected to search travelers’ laptops and music players looking for “contraband” content (anything we don’t approve of or like), and sieze any hardware
6. Always assume the worst
   Every Computer is used only for swapping, trading and downloading copyrighted material.
   Every download is a lost sale.
   Every lost sale is a full-price retail sale.
   Every shared file has been copied one thousand times.
   The customer is always guilty. If they are not, just threaten them with expensive legal action until the problem goes away.

Now Reading: The Shack, by William Young

The other half of the story

I recently stumbled across an article called “The iTunes Effect and the Future of Content“, which refers to a paper of the same title published by Harvard Business School Associate Professor Anita Elberse

An excellent and well-written paper. However, it leaves out a few variables that I feel should be considered:

1. The declining value of music: Twenty years ago, long-distance phone service cost $1/min and people put “listening to Music” on their resumé/CV. Today, everybody and his dog has a cellphone and they expect free long-distance service as part of the package. In a similar way music has lost its value – for most of us, music has become a background soundtrack instead of a foreground activity.
2. A smaller slice of the pie: Twenty years ago, home entertainment options consisted of records/CDs, Television, Videotapes, Computer Games and… that was about it. Now we also have cellphones, smartphones, PDAs, MP3 players, Cable TV, Pay-per-view, TiVo, Game Consoles of varying sizes and sizes… all competing for a shrinking pot (we have less disposable income now than we did fifteen years ago) of entertainment dollars.
3. Price-fixing hurts profits:  Big Music seems to be in love with the $1/song price point. Actually, they would love to raise prices, but they are terrified of the loss of revenue if Apple refuses and walks away*. They are also terrified of lowering prices: it is axiomatic that the value of experience goods drops over time (which is why the Movie companies keep new releases away from Redbox and Netflix), but Big Music refuses to discount anything – the latest big hit on iTunes costs the same as, say, “Right Said Fred” by Bernard Cribbins (1962). Somebody (I believe that it was eMusic), halved their prices of downloadable music, and sales went up sixfold*. Since downloads are almost pure profit, this means that about three times as much money was made. However, the bold experiment had to be discontinued when Big Music refused to lower their “cut” (estimated to be 88c per song; Big Music isn’t telling) even though it meant making more money overall. Case in point: when Amazon recently put “Dark Side of the Moon” on sale for $2, I bought it, even though I am not a Pink Floyd fan. That’s $2 that Big music would not have made if they insisted on full sale price.
4. Their Customers hate them: After throwing their weight around for the past fifteen years, the music business has succeeded only in creating some truly awful legislation and spawning a generation that hates them and will work actively to hasten their demise. Inconveniencing your customers, buggering up their computers in the name of “Protection”, treating them like criminals  – and in extreme high-profile cases, suing them – is not a good way to win friends and influence people. Even if Big Music repented of this behavior now, the damage would take at least a decade to reverse (and if ACTA is anything to go by, repentance is the last thing on their minds). Protestations of piracy notwithstanding, Allofmp3 has proved that people are willing to pay to download music… just not as much as big music insists that their product is worth in everybody else’s eyes. Value is defined by “what a willing buyer would pay a willing seller“, not by how much the rights-holder thinks it is worth.
5. Industrial Inaction: The music industry’s unwillingness to come up with a standard format for marketing old music has resulted in the loss of millions – perhaps billions – of sales. Here are a few of the songs I have not been able to download a legitimate, DRM-free MP3 version from anywhere…
   Gerard Kenny – Living on Music
   Modern Romance – Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White
   Chas & Dave – Rabbit
   The Main Event – Gonna do My Best
   Tight Fit – Fantasy Island
   and, of course, “Right Said Fred” by Bernard Cribbins..!
6. Inability to abandon an out-of-date business model: The Music business was never about music. It was never about art: It was about selling plastic disks. Everything else – marketing, production and distribution – were built around this concept. This is why the music business switched easily from Vinyl to CD, but going from CD to digital was far more painful; ever since digital music and the Internet reared their ugly heads, Big Music has been kicking, screaming and throwing corporate hissy-fits. If they could wave a magic wand and make all forms of digital music disappear, they would. If they could make the Internet disappear they would do so in a heartbeat. But the world has changed, and they have not.
7. DRM hurts sales. Nuff Said.

Elberse has done an excellent job nailing down the facts, but she had missed the emotions involved and the way that they affect purchasing decisions. Those factors affect the underlying numbers in a way that is impossible to quantify. It’s just a shame that the comments area at the bottom of the page is broken.

* Source: “The Perfect Thing” by David Levy

Out with the old…

For some,  2009 was a banner year, full of blessings and fabulousness. For others – a lot more others – 2009 was a disaster. For us, 2009 was “the year of treading water”, a year in which not a lot happened.

Financially, we are slightly worse off due to inflation, and have not put a penny into retirement savings this year… but when I think of how many people lost their homes I am not complaining.

I thought that I would round out the yeart by rounding-up the year’s biggest winners and losers…

Winners

• Turf  Tailors: A local landscaping firm who did a wonderful job giving us a beautifully green and weed-free lawn. Highly Recommended.
• My Church: It is so nice to find a church that is focused on going into the world instead of hiding from it.
• Mozilla – for the excellent Firefox Browser, which has been a thorn in Microsoft’s backside for many years – long may this happy state of affairs continue!
• Microsoft – for finally fixing the disaster that was Windows Vista…

Losers

• My employers: They started the year by discontinuing the 401k match – no big deal – but then they followed it up by and my employers robbing me of six days of agreed-upon paid vacation. Legal? Yes. Ethical? Definitely not.
• Discover Card: They kept changing the rules until the card was not longer worth keeping. Byeee…
• Bank of America: Before the re-fi they had my old mortgage. After the re-fi, they have my new mortgage, but it’s a coincidence; they offered the worst re-fi deal that I encountered. Not actually evil, but so arrogant, incompetent and inconsistent that it amazes me how they stay in business.
• Microsoft – for finally fixing the disaster that was Windows Vista… then calling it “Windows 7 (it’s actually version 6.1) and charging their customers for the upgrade.
• The morons who send junk phone calls and junk text messages (which cost me money!) to my cellphone – even though the number is on the Federal  do-not-call list – while hiding who they are and how to avoid receiving any more of their garbage.
• Terminix: The bill for annual termite coverage is due on 12/31. So why do they send out a bill in September? And October? And November? Do they hate trees or something? Oh, and their website support is awful – when a saved Credit Card number was not acceptable (card had expired – but their system was not clever enough to figure this out). They sent me an e-mail. When I replied, it “bounced” as the sender’s address did not exist. I forwarded a copy to webmaster@terminix.com… but that did not exist either. Bloody idiots.
• Anyone who tells me how important my call is instead of answering the damn phone!

Windows 7: The good, the bad and the ugly

I’ve been playing with Windows 7 for quite a while. Public Beta, Release Candidate and Full version have all found their way onto three of my machines.

The Good:
It’s fast and light on its feet. It boots up and shuts down as quickly as XP and a heck of a lot faster than Vista. Two years ago, the pre-release version of Vista bought one of my machines to its knees; Windows 7 runs quite nicely on it. This means that 7 can be installed on a netbook; there is a reason why Vista was not preinstalled on the vast majority of netbooks; they weren’t “man enough” to run it.

The Bad:
Windows 7 has the same security model as Vista; even down to the annoying User Account Control (UAC), also known as “Are You Sure? Are You Sure? Are You Sure?“. This means that Windows 7 is not the stellar leap forward in security that Microsoft would like you to think it is. When patch Tuesday rolls around, Vista and 7 seem to have a lot of overlap.

The Ugly:
Microsoft has a long history of fixing an old product, adding a couple of new features and selling it to you all over again. They fixed Windows 95 and called it Windows 98 (then they broke it again and called it Windows ME). They “consumerized” (i.e., “prettied up”) Windows 2000 and called it Windows XP (and even then, it took them another two years to get the security to work right). Now they have fixed the main problems in Vista (too big, too slow) and called it Windows 7. What they should have done was offer every Vista user a low-cost (say $50) upgrade to 7, along with a public apology for the pain they inflicted on the world over the past two years.

The Bottom Line

• If you are buying a new machine, get one with Windows 7. If it has Vista, make sure you have a free upgrade.
• If you are running Vista and are less than happy with it, upgrade.
• If you are running XP and are happy with it, do not upgrade unless you really need to.

I would like to end with a history lesson. Pay attention to the version numbers.

Windows 95 (4.0), 98 (4.10.1998), 98SE (4.10.2222A) and Me (4.9?) were all part of the same family (though many have opined that “Me” was the bastard child).

Windows 2000 (5.0) was, im my exalted opinion, the best thing MS ever did. It was also the basis of XP (5.1); if you turn off all of XP’s dancing baloney, it looks and behaves much like Windows 2000.

Vista (6.0) was a good idea, waaay overdue (MS scrapped the code and restarted in 2004!) and poorly executed. If you don’t believe me, wipe a Vista machine, install XP and see how much faster it runs.

In a supreme twist of irony, Windows 7 is actually Windows version 6.1. Am I the only one who finds this funny?

Fair Use or Felony? You decide

Last year, I saw “Prince Caspian” in the theater. A few months ago, I purchased a copy on DVD. Since I rarely have time to sit in front of a TV, I decided to rip it to my iPod. That way I could enjoy it whenever and wherever I wanted.

Unfortunately, that was not as easy as it seems; thanks to the protection that the publisher had thoughtfully put on the disk, my preferred ripping tool did not work.

I am left with three choices:

1. Break the protection of the DVD. Designing a program to break protection is a felony under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). So is obtaining such a program, hosting the program, linking to the program or even telling people where to find the program.
2. Download a digital copy of the DVD from any one of myriad online sources – which is a felony under the DMCA.
3. Buy a digital copy from iTunes – which effectively means paying for something that I have already bought.

What would you do?

This illustrates how one-sided our copyright laws have become. Who is protecting my right to watch a movie I have bought and paid for? Why is there no exception for non-infringing domestic use? Why is there no exception for fifty-year-old movies (Think “Gone with the Wind” or “It’s a Wonderful Life“) that should have been placed in the public domain decades ago? Why is there no exception for downloading stuff you already own in another format?

The irony is that the real pirates – the knife-wielding gangs in the Far East and their ilk – can afford million-dollar DVD duplication machines, which simply copy the entire DVD – Protection, FBI anti-piracy warning and all.

Bah

Was Jesus REALLY a Liberal?

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that stated that “Jesus was a liberal”.

It made me think.

Naturally, the first question that I asked myself was “What is a liberal?” This is a difficult question for me to ask, as I am not one; the term seems to mean different things to different people at different times. It is a sad commentary on the theory of linguistic drift that the word “Liberal” today means the opposite of what it once meant; at the time of the founding of this country, a Liberal was someone who was concerned with Liberty. Nowadays such people are known as Libertarians. Today’s Liberals seem to be less concerned with liberty and more concerned with finding ways new and creative ways to get their hands on other people’s money.

My definition of a liberal is someone who believes in:

• A Strong Central Government that is responsible for solving Society’s problems.
• Public (Government) supervision of and responsibility for, “Vital” services, such as Retirement, Health and Education…
• …and High Taxes to pay for them.
• Special treatment for privileged minorities (women, homosexuals, the Poor/ underprivileged/unemployed etc.)
• Suppression of individual liberty “for the greater good” (unless, of course, you are a member of one of the aforementioned “special” groups).

Let’s see what scripture has to say…

• When a woman anointed His head with a bottle of oil that cost several months’ wages, his followers disapproved of the wasteful extravagance. His reply? “Why trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me”.
• He considered himself above paying taxes (Mt 17:25-26), though he arranged for a miraculous payment so as not to cause offence.
• He believed in helping people, but there is not one recorded instance of him expecting the Government to step in and solve the problem.
• He did not believe in “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” (Mt 20:1-15)
• He was put to death by the Government of his day.
• His followers went out and changed the world… in spite of organized Government persecution.
• He said “You will always have the poor“, a statement which drives a stake into the heart of classical Liberal doctrine, which believes that poverty can be wiped out if you just furnish those in need with enough resources and opportunities. Jesus apparently knew better.

Jesus was, by definition, apolitical. He never sought political change, and he never referred to the government of the day unless answering a specific question. Never once did he ever expect the government to solve any problem, a staple of modern liberalism.

In the final analysis, was Jesus a Liberal or a Libertarian; a Conservative or a Communist? The only answer that fits is “None of the above”. He claimed to be God, which puts him as far above our petty politics is we are above the democracy of the anthill.

So please, no more “Jesus-was-a-liberal” twaddle. Thanks awfully.

unHAPPY

The name of the proposed law is “The Humanity and Pets Partnered Through the Years Act“. Through some spectacular contortions this has acquired the acronym of HAPPY; though HPPTY is more accurate.

Whatever you call it, Pet owners are jumping up and down with glee at the possibility of getting a tax credit, and the Pet industry is encouraging support of the bill. But this is from the same people who gave us “cash for clunkers”; and we saw what a clunker that was. Both remind me of the Alexis de Tocqueville quote: “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money“”

This law is so wrong on so many levels. Let me count the ways:

• I cannot see how this law could or should be constitutional at the Federal level. There is no way that pet owners could be considered a privileged or disadvantaged class.
• How can it be that health expenses for kids is not tax-deductible (without use-it-or-lose-it FSA contortions) but Vet bills are?
• This law would require pet owners to retain all receipts for pet food, pet supplies, pet medication, vet bills. For most pet owners that means keeping all of their grocery receipts.
• This law discriminates against those who do not make enough to itemize their taxes.
• When the IRS started requiring the Social Security Numbers of dependents, the number of dependents dropped dramatically. Since Pets do not have SSNs, how would Uncle Sam know how many pets you really have?
• Even if your pet is legit, what is to prevent someone from claiming deductions for pet for years after they have died? Would you have to prove that the pet is still alive every year? What kind of bureaucracy – and how many additional Federal employees – would be necessary to support and police this?

Given that taxes are a zero-sum game (a tax break in one place means new or higher taxes elsewhere), why should those of us who do not have pets subsidize those of us who do?

What problem is this bill really trying to solve?

So what should be done here? Here are some suggestions:

• Make all medical expenses for humans tax-deductible, then you can extended the courtesy to pets. This will help those who incur large Vet bills.
• A one-time tax credit to those who adopt animals would be nice, and would provide an incentive to adopt rather than purchase (but this might backfire… visualize lots of adoptions in December and a huge number of animals out on the street on Jan 2).

Bottom line: Pets are a luxury. If you can afford one, best of luck to you. If you can’t, don’t get one – don’t expect the rest of us to subsidize your pet’s upkeep.

Thankful

I have much to be thankful for.

• Today is our wedding anniversary. That’s right, Milady has been putting up with my craziness for twenty-three years today.
• It is also six years to the day since we moved into our house.
• We have a roof over our head
• We have a fridge full of food.
• We are debt-free except for the house.
• We live on less than we make.
• I have a job that I live that allows me to make a good living.

That makes me luckier than about 98% of the world’s population

Office and Windows

When dealing with non-geeks, one of the commonest and most aggravating areas of confusion is that of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. So, I have decided to make a Public Service Announcement.

Windows is an Operating System. Its purpose is to get your computer to function. Without it, your computer will not work. It allows you to run programs, create and maintain files etc. Versions of Windows include 3.1, NT, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista and 7.

Recent versions of Windows come with different “Trim Levels”. XP comes in Home and Professional versions. Vista comes in Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate and others. 7 Comes in Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate (though I am sure that there are others).

Microsoft Office is a Suite of Applications (programs). It is not part of Windows! Sometimes your computer comes with it, but it is almost always an extra-cost option. Versions of Office include 98, 97, 2002/XP (Not to be confused with Windows XP!), 2003 and 2007.

Office comes with various trim levels as well. Student & Teacher Edition and Standard Edition are essentially the same; the former is a cheaper “catch-em-while-they’re-young” version. They both have the basic Applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc). Further down the line we have SBE (Small Business Edition), Professional and Ultimate.

Now you know.