Posts by Damian Christie
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Having been to the lock-up yesterday and read the report pretty much right through, I agree that the report seemed largely positive, and the Government certainly jumped on the rest by saying it agreed with, and would implement as quickly as possible, all 60 of DMB's recommendations.
However I don't agree that providing complainants with anonymity had a dampening effect on the media. I saw both print and TV examples along the lines of "Look, the report says this terrible thing happened in 1983, and another terrible thing here in 1985, and yet another in 1986..."
Of course when you aggregate all the complaints it's going to look bad - systemic even - and I guess it's far from surprising some media would choose to focus on the prurient historical stuff rather than the current state of the police force.
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Augie was never the head of MetService, and it's years since he was a spokesperson. All that he speaks for now is the ragtag collection of wingers, fossil-fuel corporates and random nutters that is the CSC.
Right. My bad. I thought that sounded odd but misread his shots across NIWA's bow as being directly linked to NIWA's scuffle with Metservice... I shouldn't really comment on anything if I don't have time to read it properly, and with a 300 page Police Commission report in front of me to digest, I don't see that being anytime soon... :)
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METSERVCE I think the greater issue here is having a climate change denier heading up the Metservice. [EDIT: Of course, he's not - Thanks Tom]
Maybe not an entirely accurate analogy, but isn't that like Pope being head of NZ Aids Foundation?
Robust debate yes, but there's got to be a point where deniers are made to sit in the Flat Earth corner of the room and think about what they've done.
Media are equally to blame, and its an argument I have often with colleagues in various fields of journalism - objectivity doesn't equal giving nutter airtime.
DUBBER I don't know much about the Interweb 'n' stuff, but when you said having files with twice the bitrate doesn't cost the provider any more, or take up any more shelf space, isn't that exactly what it does? I'm pretty sure that twice the bitrate takes up twice the storage space, and twice the bandwith to flick to people... but feel free to show me where I'm wrong :)
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Jon L:
With a taste in music history - tell me Einsteins - where do I go to buy a copy of Thomas Edison reciting "Mary had a little Lamb", pre 1914 - hell - pre 1900 recordings of all sorts...
You don't need to, Einstein. They're out of copyright...
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Robyn: I don't think everyone fits into one of your three categories, nosiree, not by a long shot. I think there are an absolute shitload of people -in fact I'd say a majority- who illegally download music they want, because they'd rather have it for free than pay for it. Simple.
The fact that its so removed from theft in some people's minds was nicely illustrated by Dave from Elemeno P, who told me about all the young kids coming up asking for him to sign their burnt CDs! Of course they could all just be format shifters...
Everyone has their own justification for doing it - from Russell's "it was available for purchase in the UK but not here" (so are many things, dare you to steal them too) to your "preview system" - if you discover you like it, do you really go out and buy the CD so you can retrospectively legitimise the copy on your iPod? Most people I know don't, even if saying they like to makes them feel better.
My personal justification is that as most of my music is to play on my radio show, I'm really doing the band a favour by downloading it, and saving the record company (and the artist) from shelling out to send me a promo CD, as they generally do if I ask - see, I'm doing them a favour by stealing...
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It's not extortion. It's a reasonable exercise of performance rights granted under the law.
Exactly, no-one's forcing you to play someone else's music in your shop.
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Troy - no, that's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying - the music industry has already worked out how to ensure artists get their slice of covers bands, and has been doing so for years.
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Actually Troy, I think you'll find that cover bands playing in licensed venues are theoretically required to submit their songlists or something (so are DJs, which is even more ludicrous in a dance music environment, with white labels and so forth), and then because the establishment owner pays fees to APRA, it all gets worked out that way. Supposedly.
I had a friend at APRA for a while who was responsible for getting business owners to pay fees. If you have a shop and you play CDs in it, you're supposed to pay a licence fee for public broadcasting. I assume this also applies if you just have the radio going quietly in the back of the dairy.
Speaking of radio, the music industry really needs to get onto their backs - don't they realise those bastards are giving away music FREE, over the airwaves, to anyone who wants to listen to it? And they've been getting away with it for years! Surely that's something to be sorted with the new legislation...
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Do you think the Freddy's relative immunity to file sharing might have less to do with a connection through their live shows, and more to do with the fact that even with broadband and a 128kbps sample rate, it's a lot slower/harder to share a 20-minute dubbed-out jam than 3 minute pop song? :)
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Generally speaking, I don't approve of illicit copying and downloading of music: which isn't to say I've never done it, but I try not to...
But then those damn pirates come and force you to share their files?
The idea of automated content-identifying stream ripping sounds awfully complicated compared with simply typing the name of a song into the 'search' box of your favourite P2P program and hitting Enter.
I remember the whole Illegal Downloads Are Hurting Our Artists thing being raised when the second Stellar album came out a few years back. The sales were compared with the first album and the difference was blamed on pirating, as if it's a legitimate expectation that the second (and presumably third, fourth, fifth) album must sell the same amount as the debut.
It's a very long bow to draw, especially when the first album has a bunch of hits, a strong record company push and as with Nesian Mystik, just seemed to fit the zeiteist better than the second.
Illegal downloads are bad (m'kay), and I'm a little dubious about some of the studies showing they're not having any negative impact on the industry, but at the same time I can't remember a time when as many people were listening to music.
By being the consumer item to have, more people must own and use ipods each day than ever carried walkmans to work before. And rather than passively listening to whatever crap the radio station feeds at you, it's up to the individual to make a choice what music they want to listen to. People are therefore more engaged with their music, and whether it's through illegal downloads or legitimate purchases, in the long run that's gotta be a good thing.