Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So check this out… the latest victim of the RIAA is a 12-year old girl living with her single mother in low income housing. I mean, I'm no fan of copyright theft (as someone who deals with it constantly), but suing 12-year olds for hundreds of thousands of dollars seems like a bad strategy… It just seems like a lose/lose scenario.

If I was the RIAA, I'd be more likely to go after the ISPs directly I think. After all, filesharing of this type causes a very specific type of bandwidth spike, and the ISPs would be lying if they didn't know exactly what it was — since it's costing them money. But they also know it's going a long way to selling broadband connections, so they support it — the ISPs are definitely playing a role in helping copyright theft in my opinion. Which is why they're so aggressively playing this “protecting the privacy rights” game. They don't care about that — it's just an excuse to make money. If they cared about privacy and IP rights, they'd say to the RIAA, “give us the trader's IP info and proof of theft, and we'll terminate their account, but we can't tell you who it is.”

After all, using your account to commit federal and international crimes is a violation of pretty much all ISPs' TOS, is it not?

To give another example, sites like Yahoo! Groups have tons of adult “communities”. These subsites are made up almost exclusively of content stolent from legitimate sites and media producers. Yahoo! doesn't charge for them per se, but they do run heavy advertising on them and thereby profit from this theft. Again, it's not as if they don't know exactly what's going on — they just don't care because they're cashing in on it at arm's length.

In order to stop them, you have to go through a lengthy (truly a giant pain in the ass) process to prove to them it's your photo — even if your logo, copyright, and so on is on the picture they demand to see “proof” of ownership and go back and forth with the lawyers in order to squeeze as much money from the theft as possible… Meh. I hope Flynt or someone destroys them one day.

Between 1964 and 1972 (eight years), the US spent $111 billion on the Vietnam War. Adjusted for inflation that's just under a half trillion dollars. On Sunday, Bush asked for an additional $87 billion, with the administration to ask for about $55 billion on top of that (more) — for the first time in US history that pushes the deficit to just over a half trillion dollars. At this point Bush's approval rating has dropped to below pre-9/11 levels, and is in fact the lowest it has been in his entire Presidency (more). So what's a government that doesn't have public support to do?

Ask yourself this — what person or institution that you not only don't like, but quite likely hate, do you support relatively unquestioningly? The answer of course is your boss; your employer. How many times have you heard “I hate my job” or “My boss is a moron”? And how many people quit their job because of it? Not many… most just do a bad job instead.

George “Big Government” Bush has figured this one out (more). Clinton reduced the size of government after Reagan and Bush Sr.'s inflated “Cold War” governments were deemed to no longer be necessary, but Bush Jr. has been pumping that number back up to the roof — up to 12.1 million employees as of October 2002. To put it another way, the US government directly employs between four and five percent of the population — add their families and you can bump that up to between six and ten percent. Add the surrounding businesses to that (ie. restaurants around a military base, whatever) and you're up to between ten and twenty five percent of the population.

It's a trend worth watching probably.

Oh, and by comparison, Walmart has about a million employees in the US.

As a final note, if you're living in the US, you are discouraged from repeating anything you read in this entry. According to Rumsfeld, any criticism of Bush aids terrorism (more, more). What, you thought that malarkey was over and done with? Think again! “If you don't vote for Bush in 2004, the terrorists have already won!“

Anyway, I have an update to work on.