Zac Shaw's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
from the life-of-a-troll dept
What's it like to be in the crosshairs of a troll?
Surely it's a familiar feeling for many in the Techdirt community. I know I spent my week (as I often do) fighting back disgruntled defenders of dying business models in the music industry. Wherever I voiced my support for the inspiring message of crowd funding champion Amanda Palmer's TED talk, the wave of troll comments was tidal.
When the trolls mob, I remember what Upton Sinclair said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Troll battles are no big deal for those of us who fight daily to expose the truth about doctrines and dogmas that stifle progress in society. We will always be enemies of those whose salaries depend on exploitation. But this week, über-troll Prenda Law took the fight to a new and "rather incredible" level, issuing a subpoena for IP addresses of every visitor to troll-critic blogs for the past two years. The copyright-trolling legal maneuvers that Prenda Law is widely hated for are unmatched in their allegedly exploitative, ethically bankrupt extortion of innocent Internet users.
You and I may have thick skin for these bastards. We often wear the troll-hate as a badge of honor, an indication we are on the righteous path. But the poor average internet user is not similarly steeled to the abuse. The sad truth is that we are increasingly living in a world where everyone is being trolled.
For example, software consumers are being trolled by companies like Electronic Arts, whose insistence on the most draconian, always-connected DRM possible renders their much-anticipated $60 Sim City revamp worthless. Lest I suggest we are becoming a world full of victims, the outpouring of negative customer reviews shows an encouraging unwillingness to be silently victimized, and at least some developers get it. Treating your customers as criminals is the essence of corporate copyright trolling.
But even our troll-fighting heroes are not immune to becoming trolls themselves, given enough time and money. When Teller sued a fellow magician for copyright infringement, one had to wonder if the purveyors of the fine troll-busting TV show Bullshit! would now have to do an episode about themselves. No wonder the defendant thinks it's a joke.
All of these examples are mere skirmishes compared to the all-out pre-emptive nuclear war being planned by global copyright troll elite. Anyone familiar with copyright knows that multinational treaties form the basis of the law. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the next big revision to international IP agreements, is now in its 16th round of secret negotiations. We are finally starting to see a serious push-back from a large, diverse group of organizations. But is it too late?
Meanwhile, copyright maximalists continue to dominate the US legislative branch, drowning out the few reasonable voices calling for Internet freedom to be protected.
I'm not talking about waging a War on Trolls here. We're merely defending ourselves and our society from those in power who seek to undermine any challenge to that power. That doesn't mean just taking down trolls, it also means building new bridges. We must endeavor to spread the word beyond our Techdirt inner circle and to the victims at large. Video games and magic tricks are mere slivers of a widely splintering culture. The thicker our skin grows against these troll attacks, the greater our responsibility to lead the fight for all.
LOL
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zacshaw/dead-unicorn-pandemic-lp
Amanda Palmer haters
http://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/19iuem/amanda_palmers_ted_talk_not_a bout_making_your/
Make sure to read the correction at the end of the New Yorker piece -- Palmer actually DID pay the backing musicians, even though they volunteered for free without coercion. She directly responded to the criticism transparently.
As if a bad decision she made regarding paying backing musicians completely invalidates the fact she was able to take the same 25,000 fans that were worthless to the record label and turn it into $1.2M to fund HER DREAM!
I know dozens of musicians who would jump at the chance to tour for free as Amanda Palmer's backing band. Why? Because the value is in the network they create on tour, not the money they get paid on tour which after buses, catering etc. usually leaves a band in the hole or break even. It's their decision to make, whether you think it's a bad one or not. Duh, look at the $1.2M on Kickstarter. She got that from touring and connecting with people in meatspace AND online. The backing musicians know if they come into every market in the nation as part of Palmer's pack, some of that perceived value is going to rub off on them.
Again, as if a bad decision on paying background singers somehow invalidates what is fast becoming THE template for future success in the music businesses?
What happens when someone who DOES pay their background singers makes a quarter mil on a 100K campaign? Oh yeah
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1268472090/brand-new-mindless-self-indulgence-record
I'm convinced failed musicians and label execs troll the comments here on their lunch breaks. Are your souls so crushed you've been reduced to a Tourettes-like stream of puerile whining?
The only thing it's changed for me, as I'm sure many in Techdirt community already knew, is to quickly skip over all anonymous comments. It's like an echo chamber for logical fallacies and banality.
Amanda Palmer for RIAA President
As someone who's slept on a few of the same floors she did while on tour, I can tell you there's a reason Amanda Palmer is THE modern-day hero for musicians. Social bonding has always been the purpose of music. It's always been why we play. To say music is entertainment is like saying food is deliciousness. The nourishment music gives comes from shared experience -- literally SHARING MUSIC -- and yet for the last 100 years we've minimized that decade by decade until most came to think of music as purely an entertainment product.
The purpose of music is not to make people rich. The purpose is social bonding. If you accomplish social bonding -- the purpose of music -- it's human nature to reciprocate, to acknowledge value.
This is what all the folks at Trichordist and other musicians nostalgic for pre-Napster days have sadly forgotten in their holy war to force fans to pay for access to the music they originally created hoping for wide exposure, wide social bonding. They'll hide behind "it's about the music, man" but it's not about the music for them. They're obsessed with all the money they're losing. They're looking for someone to blame -- the fan, the industry, other musicians -- but they have no one to blame but themselves. They are losing money because they no longer are making connections. They are actually being negative and trying to put people off. I know I change the channel immediately when a Cracker song comes on. Wait, I always did that.
Re:
Crowdfunding rules
Unfortunately, the rights morass is such a tough pit to crawl out -- the inability to "undo" a century of bad deals and poorly defined authorship (particularly in music) and rescue any sort of viability from the once-unstoppable strategy of exploiting catalog. That's the real issue that deserves more attention than file sharing. We can't pretend to solve future copyright problems if we can't clean up the mess we already made.
I think eventually not much will change in the copyright world -- the powers are to large and entrenched -- and crowdfunding will slowly but surely take over as the primary way content creators are compensated. The authorship problem is not immediately solved by crowdfunding, but it's a powerful way to circumvent the so-called "protection" of copyright that often turns into a prison, both for authors of the work and new authors that require use of the work to spur new creativity.
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