Three years ago, in the wake of the SOPA blackouts, the RIAA chairman and CEO Cary Sherman penned a strange sour grapes op-ed in the New York Times. He claimed that the overwhelmingly popular position against the proposal was based on lies, that “neutral” sites like Google and Wikipedia were violating their integrity by taking a stance at all, and most tellingly, that “misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it works.”
He would know!
In any case, there’s now a single-serving site dedicated to preserving that message. Take it from the RIAA: misinformation.works.
The music business tends to repeat itself. Conversations that seem completely intertwined with new technologies mirror those over earlier developments. Read Adrian John’s Piracy, for example, and see how closely the file-sharing debate followed the one about sheet music a century earlier.
Even with that background, the parallels between Taylor Swift’s widely discussedcomments about Apple Music earlier this year and Garth Brooks’ outspoken stance on used CD sales are striking. It’s hard to argue with Swift—she is, after all, a shrewd businesswoman, and who knows what the future holds—but the fact that Brooks’ fears proved so unfounded take some of the winds out of her sails. We may be at the end of history, and today’s problems might be totally unlike the ones we faced before, but probably not.
I’m sure you are aware that Apple Music will be offering a free 3 month trial to anyone who signs up for the service. I’m not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months. I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company.
This is not about me. Thankfully I am on my fifth album and can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows. This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success. This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt. This is about the producer who works tirelessly to innovate and create, just like the innovators and creators at Apple are pioneering in their field…but will not get paid for a quarter of a year’s worth of plays on his or her songs.
Brooks said that because no royalties are paid on the sale of used CDs, writers, labels, publishers and artists were being cheated. He said he would only supply chains that sell used CDs with his cassettes, and hinted that he might be working on another “format” to thwart such sales.
Brooks said he does not need any money, but lesser-known artists could suffer if secondhand CD sales take off. If used CD sales were to go into massive retail, he said, it would severely affect people in the recording industry, creating a sales loop that would profit only stores but not the creators, publishers and artists.
CD retailers, meanwhile, have argued that the cost of new CDs is too high for young buyers, and that selling used CDs exposes an artist’s music to different audiences.
For both Swift and Brooks—each among the best-selling acts of their generation—an emerging marketplace that makes music more accessible—but less well-compensated—was worth speaking out about. They both note that it’s not about them, but about the principle, and that the unpaid exposure would hurt new musicians. Both point to the middleman’s profits as an obvious evil.
To my mind, both artists are mistaken about the value of exposure and discoverability. Tim O’Reilly’s observation that obscurity is a greater threat to the emerging artist than piracy remains true; it’s also true that obscurity is a greater threat than used record sales, free trials, and most everything else.
But on the other counts, too, Garth Brooks was wrong. Used CD sales didn’t undermine the music industry and they didn’t keep new artists from finding audiences.
Taylor Swift was, at least narrowly, right. Apple Music should’ve been paying royalties for its free trials all along. But elsewhere, her skepticism about streaming and business models that include “free” might not be well placed. Unfortunately, because music licensing in this space is fundamentally more of a permissions culture than selling plastic disks was, we may never find out.
The Washington Post doubled down this weekend on its ridiculous argument for new encryption that uses a “Golden Key” available only to law enforcement under a court order. This proposal has a few weaknesses; perhaps chief among them is that it is literally impossible.
Given that putative authorities like FBI Director James Comey are willing to ignore the reality of how cryptography works, it’s weird but understandable that the Washington Post could basically disregard the feedback from experts about the same. Still, to see the editorial board of such a major outlet to tell the nerds to get back to double-checking how math works is frustrating.
Compounding that frustration is the fact that the Washington Post has basically no public escalation track for review. The Post‘s reporting on cryptography issues can be very good, but when the editorial board makes serious factual mistakes, they go unchallenged.
The New York Times has Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, who takes feedback from readers and says when the paper has erred. That’s not enough in itself—that the Times makes the same kinds of mistakes over and over is a pretty good indicator of its course correction ability—but it feels better than having no recourse. It also helps to defuse arguments from people (like Comey himself) who would cite the editorial approvingly if the paper’s own oversight has found problems with it.
Doug Feaver was supposed to hold the paper accountable, but he did little of that. Per this Media Matters breakdown:
Of his 28 blog posts since April 5, 2013, 26 consisted simply of Feaver aggregating reader comments from Post articles and columns without additional commentary. The other two consisted of a piece declaring the paper free of any conflict of interest regarding the Post’s Jerusalem correspondent and Feaver’s initial post chronicling the initial inquiries he had received in his position (“the biggest issue to come to my attention was the disappearing print button on the article pages of washingtonpost.com”).
As far as I can tell, Coglianese only wrote one post as reader rep, about the stock and mutual fund listings accidentally being left out of the Sunday Business section one week. Searching her name on the site produces nothing more recent than that, and no announcements that the reader rep role had been discontinued. It just faded away.
So as it stands, there’s no public representative at the paper noting that the Post continues to propose a physical impossibility in its editorial pages. Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine the conversation progressing intelligently while it continues to do so.
Disney Educational made a short film in 1983 that depicts the devil and an angel arguing over whether a young woman should learn about computers. It’s called “Computers: The Truth of the Matter,” and I got to see it at the Oddball Films archive on Friday as part of a screening of retro-computing shorts. I looked it up online later and found basically nothing, so I thought I’d write up a few words for future searchers.
The film starts with the young woman Jessica slipping into her school’s computer lab, excited for a few quiet moments alone to work with the machines. Her practice time is interrupted a second later when Luke, a devil-figure in a red fedora, appears in a puff of smoke and starts trying to dissuade her from learning, arguing that computers are hard and not really that useful anyway.
A minute later, the classroom door opens and blinding light appears behind it. Angelo, a chubby guy in white gold-trimmed sweats and a winged baseball cap steps out to argue the opposite, that computers are worthwhile to learn. When Jessica shows interest, he pulls her in and they teleport around seeing the applications of computer systems, and then back into the classroom to talk about input devices, CPUs, and output devices like displays and printers. At one point he shrinks the two of them down to walk on top of a microprocessor.
Image via [Oddball Films](http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/2015/07/computerized-yesterdays-technology-for.html)
Throughout this, the devil figure keeps interjecting that she doesn’t really want to learn, that computers are unpredictable, and so forth.
Eventually Jessica’s convinced, and the devil zaps out of the classroom. In the last shot, we see him at a fiery desk counting the tally at this point: millions of converts for Angelo, zero for himself. Of course, he’s keeping the tally on a computer. When he sees the camera come in, he tries denying it, saying he was watching TV and typing a letter.
The movie is funny in a bit of a forced way, and of course very little of the substantive material “holds up,” in the sense that it would be useful educational material in a computer class today. The high level stuff is still correct, but the examples are decades out of date. But I couldn’t disagree more with the folks in, say, this forum thread who claim that it’s no longer relevant and so shouldn’t be prioritized for re-release.
Films like “The Truth of the Matter” have a really important place in the history of computers. It’s remarkable to see the lessons it teaches, not because of the content itself but because of what it says about what was once assumed, or needed to be explicit. One line in this movie that caught me by surprise was when it showed a student working on a term paper, and the narrator remarked that even though it would get corrections and multiple drafts, she would only need to type it up once. Surely it’s worth something to get a glimpse into a world where that was a point that needed to be made.
Anyway, the film hasn’t been reissued, and glancing through Worldcat it looks tricky to track down a copy. I might try nonetheless. I’m also interested to see some of the other Disney Educational shorts from that era, like the 1983 “Skills for a New Technology: What a Kid needs to Know Today: Living with Computers,” or the 1984 “Ethics in the Computer Age.”
The tragedy that unfolded in Charleston this week is practically beyond words: a racist gunman committing what can only be described as an act of terrorism, taking the lives of nine people who had just invited him into their bible study community. Many people have spoken much more eloquently than I’m capable of about the white supremacist system that allows, encourages this kind of violence.
Because yes, as horrible as these murders are, they are best understood as a symptom of a larger environment than some terrible anomaly. And other symptoms are less obvious, but profoundly tragic.
[“The steeple of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, SC”](https://www.flickr.com/photos/hunky_punk/11050690653/) by [Spencer Means](https://www.flickr.com/photos/hunky_punk/) is licensed under [CC BY-SA 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/).
Wikipedia articles are, for better or for worse, a metric with a disproportionate impact on people’s perception of what is valuable. Thanks to its aim to be an encyclopedia of all human knowledge and its ubiquity at the top of search results, many people use it as a shorthand evaluation of importance. This isn’t a new observation—the organizers of the Art + Feminism Editathons, for example, have pointed to studies about how article lengths reflected gender bias on the site.
Before Wednesday’s shooting, the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston had no Wikipedia page. It’s a monumentally historic place—the oldest black church in the south, co-founded by Denmark Vesey, and has hosted the likes of Booker T. Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And yet, its absence from the Wikipedia belied that significance. Worse, it has knock-on effects: journalists absolutely refer to Wikipedia articles to quickly get up to speed on issues, and pundits look to it for context. The history of racist violence at Emanuel AME is critical context to this week’s news, but to Wikipedia readers it might as well have not existed.
Putting the page together was one way I that could contribute positively to that conversation, and—importantly—that I could do so without centering my own voice. Wikipedia authorship is imminently knowable but generally unknown.
On Wednesday night I started the article and asked on Twitter for people to help. Really, my contributions were minimal—I started a stub, found a picture, and put in some references. Over the last two days, over 40 different people have made over 150 edits to the page, and it is now a real and impressive article. Peter Murray, a library technologist in Columbus, made this amazing visualization of the page’s growth over just a few days. It’s not there yet, but it’s getting to be the article that such a beautiful and historic site deserves.
And in the last two days alone, the page has been viewed 36,000 times. This stuff matters.
