The State of The Music Industry & the Delegitimization of Artists

Part I: Music Purchases and Net Revenue For Artists Are Up, Gross Revenue for Labels is Down

Upcoming chapters:

Part II: The Impact of DMCA Streams and why they should be considered

Part III: How a skewed perspective delegitimizes artists

Part IV: The Growth Phase is Over? Improved Label Margins.

Part V: When Good Laws Turn Bad

Part VI: The Hills are alive…..

Did you hear? The success artists are having doesn't count. The music industry is over. Fewer albums are selling; revenue is down; the music being released is “crap”; everyone just steals music; the subscription services didn't take off; the RIAA is suing music fans; there are huge layoffs at the major labels; artists sell no music and make no money….it's a broken record.

The problem is, most of this is simply not true. Even worse, this perspective delegitimizes and hurts artists and the music industry. There is a lot “right” going on.

Based on what we have been hearing, most have no idea that music purchases are up over 50% from 2006 to 2009...

Continue reading.

Jeff Price @'tunecore'

Assange's Sweden case: The lawyers speak up

Noam Chomsky: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal "Profound Hatred for Democracy on the Part of Our Political Leadership"

HERE

Murun Buchstansangur

(Thanx Leisa!)

Julian Assange on 'conspiracies'

HERE

Sharing is NOT always caring...

Missing the point of WikiLeaks

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on WikiLeaks

First of all, I would say unlike the Pentagon Papers, one of the things that is important, I think, in all of these releases, whether it’s Afghanistan, Iraq or the releases this week, is the lack of any significant difference between what the U.S. government says publicly and what these things show privately, whereas the Pentagon Papers showed that many in the government were not only lying to the American people, they were lying to themselves.

But let me – let me just offer some perspective as somebody who’s been at this a long time. Every other government in the world knows the United States government leaks like a sieve, and it has for a long time. And I dragged this up the other day when I was looking at some of these prospective releases. And this is a quote from John Adams: “How can a government go on, publishing all of their negotiations with foreign nations, I know not. To me, it appears as dangerous and pernicious as it is novel.”

When we went to real congressional oversight of intelligence in the mid-’70s, there was a broad view that no other foreign intelligence service would ever share information with us again if we were going to share it all with the Congress. Those fears all proved unfounded.

Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think – I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets.

Many governments – some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation. So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.

Full transcript

HERE

(Thanx Son#1!)

HA!

jeremyscahill Shit. Amazon just canceled my order of 250,000 classified cables. Should have bought the Kindle version. #cablegate

Death by a Thousand Cuts

WikiLeaks cables: Chechnya's ruler, a three-day wedding and a golden gun

The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics

Cartoon by Macleod

The bacteria in your gut can store more data than your hard drive

You probably have about a hundred trillion different microorganisms living in your gut right now, which is ten times the number of cells in your body. These microorganisms help keep you alive, but researchers have figured out how to get them to store your porn collection at the same time.

Bacteria have the potential to store a lot of data. One single gram of e.coli could theoretically hold something like a million gigabytes of information, while one gram of the stuff that your computer's hard drive is made of can store about four gigs, if you're lucky. The way that the data gets stored is basically the same, though: your hard drive stores data magnetically by converting them into zeros and ones, while bacteria store data chemically by converting them into nucleotides and making DNA.

The problem with storing DNA data in bacteria is that there's a physical limit to the amount of data that each DNA strand (and each bacterium) can hold. The solution, of course, is to chop your data up into lots of little pieces of DNA, and give each piece to a different individual bacterium. When you do this, you also have to give each piece an address of sorts, so that you'll know how to put all the random pieces back together the right way. This sounds like a pain to have to do, and it is, but it has the side effect of encrypting your data pretty well, since without the address key, there's no way to put all the DNA snippets back in the right order.

Once you've got your DNA-encoded data inside your bacteria, it doesn't bother them in the least. They'll just go about their happy little bacteria lives, oblivious to the fact that they're being hijacked as hard drives. And when they reproduce, they'll duplicate your data at the same time, providing a massive amount of redundancy.

So now that you've got a couple million bacteria wandering around with all of your data in their tummies, how do you actually get it back out again? It's not so hard, as long as you have a fancy next-generation high-throughput DNA sequencer. The poor e.coli who have been loyally storing your data for you get all squished up and run through a machine that can read their DNA, and it spits out a big long list of all of those individually addressed pieces. Put them back together, and there you go, it's your data.

Now, the important question: what, exactly, are the chances of this random DNA causing the e.coli to mutate into some superbacteria that will destroy all life as we know it? Apparently, pretty low. Not nonexistent, mind you, but it most likely won't happen.

Most likely.

Evan Ackerman @'Dvice'

WikiLeaks: Secrets shared with millions are not secret

Before WikiLeaks: Vietnam veterans' memorial wall, Washington. The Pentagon papers tracked the path to the ‘unwinnable war'. Photograph: James P Blair/ James P Blair/CORBIS Take it from a Pentagon papers hawk: it's OK to regret the WikiLeaks dump, and to deplore the dumpsters even as you defend, indeed admire, our democratic press and its freedom. It's been 40 years since the New York Times had to defend itself against government censors and threats of prosecution under the espionage acts for publishing a top-secret cache of Pentagon documents tracking the duplicitous path to an unwinnable war in Vietnam.
But that was another century. The leaker then, Daniel Ellsberg, was not breaching secrecy for its own sake, unlike the WikiLeakers of today; he was looking to defeat a specific government policy. Moreover, he was acutely conscious of the risks of disclosure and did not distribute documents betraying live diplomatic efforts to negotiate an end to the fighting. And it took him years to find a credible medium of distribution, which is now available at the push of a button. The government cried damage and suffered almost none; Ellsberg wanted to hasten peace and failed.
This week's dump of documents seems more likely to complicate America's diplomacy and may more surely damage some national interests. But damage is a two-sided coin. Secrecy can also hurt mightily and information is a volatile commodity: its effects are simply unpredictable. Disclosure may defeat a worthy policy but a secret may protect unworthy ends. Government should not be gratuitously hampered but its discomfort should never shield it from accountability.
The right standard for managing this uneasy balance was asserted in the Pentagon papers case by the late Justice Potter Stewart, when he wrote for the decisive centre of the US supreme court. He was sure the Pentagon papers' publication was not in the national interest, he said, but he could not find that it would "surely result in direct, immediate and irreparable harm to our Nation or its people". So despite repeated demands that we emulate Britain and criminalise the publication of official secrets, Stewart's tough test still governs the tense collaboration and competition between the American government and press.
Whatever any leaker's official culpability, the New York Times has prevailed in America's courts by proving that sophisticated reportage of foreign affairs routinely requires officials and reporters to traffic in classified secrets. The sad fact is that these technical breaches of security are essential to public understanding of current events and also to government's achievement of public support. So government has acquired the habit of classifying everything it does, thinks, plans or contemplates in the realm of foreign policy and must then break its vows and help to unravel those secrets to advance its purposes.
As Justice Stewart shrewdly observed, the checks and balances governing domestic politics are sadly absent in the realm of foreign affairs. Congress is easily browbeaten into patriotic silence when the war drums roll. Even our courts are thoughtlessly deferential to presidential prerogative when the national interest is invoked. That is why Stewart held that "the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry – in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government".
A wise government would therefore decide – for moral, political and practical reasons – to insist on avoiding secrecy for its own sake. "For when everything is classified, then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless, and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion ... Secrecy can best be preserved only when credibility is truly maintained."
And here we are at his predicted destination. Lead us secretly into one war too many, and see how we wallow in one or another disclosure too many.
Of course it will sting if some foreign leaders hesitate for a time before exchanging confidences with US officials. Diplomats may lose face, or even careers, for having written indiscreetly about their hosts. But there are few facts or observations in these leaks that a US official would not confide, without attribution, to a respected journalist.
As Dean Rusk, a former secretary of state, once told me, there was really little in his cables that he had not already read in the Times. It is hardly news that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are not securely held; or that Sunni Arabs dread a nuclear-armed Shiite regime and would gladly hold our coats while we fight Iran; or that China covets Iran's oil more than it fears North Korea's military sales. It is mainly the direct quotation or loose formulation of those confidential messages that risks some damage.
Mindful of such possible damage to foreign informants or intelligence methods, the papers given the WikiLeaks files censored certain passages and heeded some concerns of the US government. But facing a flood of documents on the internet, the papers had an obligation to publish well-digested accounts of the material. Information once lost to a government cannot be returned like stolen goods; by definition it informs those who receive it.
So the theft of secrets may be deplorable, and their massive concerted distribution may appear irresponsible. While the journalist in me recognises a clear duty to publish and be damned, the citizen in me also recognises a mess too far. I well know that no family, business or government can function without some genuine secrets. The trick is to focus on the genuine and to treat truly essential secrets accordingly.
Governments must finally acknowledge that secrets shared with millions of "cleared" officials, including lowly army clerks, are not secret. They must decide that the random rubber-stamping of millions of papers and computer files each year does not a security system make. What common sense has so far failed to teach, technology will surely now command. Chase away the WikiLeaks enterprise and another web-savvy crowd will reopen for business within hours. The threat of massive leaks will persist so long as there are massive secrets. An ambassador needing to protect a confidence needs to limit his audience to a few superiors. A diplomat looking to educate the government at large needs to hide his authorship of widely circulated reportage.
It is up to government, not the press, to guard its secrets as long as it can, and to adjust to a new reality when it fails. It is the duty of the press to publish what it learns, and to find news where it can when it is denied.
Max Frankel @'The Guardian'

WikiLeaks cables condemn Russia as 'mafia state'