Posts by Russell Brown
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Come on people - I can't believe that anyone didn't pick up on this line by Russell vis a via the Section 59 bruhaha...
Way ahead of you. I acknowledged my discomfort with symbolic or hard-to-enforce laws the first time I posted about the Bradford bill. But it met my relatively high threshold for approval, given that it related to the safety of vulnerable children, rather than the business model of an entertainment company.
And I actually would expect the Bradford bill to have an impact on social behaviour. I wouldn't expect Sky to suddenly recall all MySkys or people to report their neighbours for using a VCR.
But yep: let's not turn this into another Section 59 thread.
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Say for example that I like singing Metallica to my kids when I put them to bed at night. Or that my wife enjoys my rendition of Walk this Way by Aerosmith and Run DMC when I'm in the shower (Word Up - My rapping is dope).
Actually, precisely these qualms have been raised about the worse-than-the-DMCA copyright amendments Australia passed last year. From an IIA release:
“As an example,” said Mr Coroneos, “a family who holds a birthday picnic in a place of public entertainment (for example, the grounds of a zoo) and sings a song under copyright in a manner that can be heard by others, risks an infringement notice carrying a fine of up to $1320. If they make a video recording of the event, they risk a further fine for the possession of a device for the purpose of making an infringing copy of a song. And if they go home and upload the clip to the internet where it can be accessed by others, they risk a further fine of up to $1320 for illegal distribution. All in all, possible fines of up to $3960 for this series of acts – and the new offences do not require knowledge or improper intent. Just the doing of the acts is enough to ground a legal liability under the new ‘strict liability’ offences.”
The attorney general subsequently modified the bill to allow families to escape on-the-spot fines for singing in parks ...
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Given this is Maxim I have considerable doubts as to the identity of who actually completed the survey.
Given this is Maxim, I have considerable doubts about pretty much everything to do with it.
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But then those damn pirates come and force you to share their files?
Last time involved a song that I wanted now, that wasn't on iTunes NZ, but was on iTunes UK. I thought that was pretty dumb in the 21st century. So I availed myself of it.
What I object to a lot more than plain ol' file-sharing is allofmp3.
I try to explain to people that it's a simple artist rip-off, and their money is just pocketed by the Russians, but it looks legit and people assume that it is. Taking money for pirated music is a lot worse than simply sharing it.
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In this way, it's the bands and acts that put on a decent live show and generate an authentic following (as opposed to those with the biggest marketing to push their latest over-produced piece of puff-pop) that get the real rewards.
Actually, this principle works in another way, ie, when your fan is in the business of licensing.
There was someone at Grundy in Australia who really liked the songs of Andrew Brough, for Straitjacket Fits and Bike. And a lot of Broughie's songs got used in Aussie soaps that played all over the world. Other artists have benefited similarly; Broughie bought a house off it.
And if you're more in, say, the SJD mould, you're in luck if a fan is working in creative for an agency and flicks you a license deal that makes you more than your last 1000 sales.
One more: Chris Knox's 'Not Given Lightly' achieved a cultural status that far outstripped its very modest sales. A few years later, along comes Vogel's bread in search of the evocative Kiwi tune. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
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People have *always* copied music. When I was a kid I'd tape the John Peel show off the radio, tape friend's records, etc. Digital copying is no different - it just increases the scale of copying.
I was going to put this in the post, but I figured 200 words was enough:
There were a number of influences that led me to grow up as a heavy consumer of popular music, but the two most important ones were a direct consequence of the kind of copying RIANZ would ban.
1. When I was at primary school, my buddy John Holdsworth had an older brother called Gerard. Gerard had records. I would go around and tape them. I might not think much now of the stuff I taped - Uriah Heep, Deep Purple and bloody Supertramp (Alice Cooper was a bit more like it) - but that got me listening to albums.
2. Casey Kasem's Top 40. There was a lot of crap, but I would listen to it, tape-record songs and thrash them afterwards. I remember the first time I heard Patti Smith's 'Because the Night' and thought WTF is this?
I recently made up a CD of __Music A Young Man Should Know About __for one of Leo's friends. His mum doesn't have a lot of money and there's no other way he'd have heard that music. I think of it as making a music fan for the future.
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Weston said:
Unless Riddley can demonstrate to me that smacking is genuinely harmful to children, I don't accept that there is a liberal justification for this legislation.
This, from the Social Policy Journal of New Zealand last March, might be a start:
Research findings about the effects of physical punishment on outcomes for children provide a persuasive argument in favour of changing policies on the use of physical punishment within families. 2 A research team from the Children’s Issues Centre recently reviewed research on the guidance and discipline of children (Smith et al. 2005). This paper summarises and updates a section of that report. The research suggests that physical punishment is both ineffective and harmful as a method of disciplining children. This paper provides both an overview and specific examples of recent research on physical punishment relating to the following topics: social, cognitive and mental health; moral internalisation and family relationship outcomes; and the interactions with culture and ethnicity. It is firstly important to get some definitions clear, because much of the debate about the effects stems from the difficulty in agreeing on definitions.
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I was always patiently explaining to them that they were socialist sub-human parasites. I told my class-mates the same thing. I did not have a girlfriend.
I'm moved by your story. But at least you got over it.
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David Haywood's Public Address Science report - looking at thorium as a safer, cheaper and more plentiful nuclear fuel - is now available in the Public Address Radio podcast as a 4.76MB MP3 file.
You can also visit the websites for Whisky Galore and Dramfest, the malt whisky festival profiled in Saturday's programme on Radio Live. Public Address Radio airs at 2pm every Saturday.
You can find out more about Sashin Tendulkar's home ground Wankhede Stadium, on Wikipedia.
And there will be more content coming soon …
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This month, it's the magic of the printed page, and the moments it can make. Did you read a special book at a special time? A book that changed everything? A book on a journey? The right book at the right time? Or one that turned out wrong? Stories, please …
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