BC Law IPTF Blog

OiNK’s new home page is now hawking waffles—and links to a Google search on”what to use instead of oink.” (The first result is brokep’s (of The Pirate Bay) blog post, appropriately titled, “What to use instead of Oink (waffleswaffleswaffles and jam).”)

This seems to be a message to the world to support the “hydra” model of seeding and leeching content: Use lots of little sites instead of gravitating to a couple of big ones. The beast should be a many-headed hydra, and when you cut off one head, two more grow to take its place.

brokep was the first to herald this idea:

“So public message to people - start up your own torrent sites, make the internet the hydra it is and needs to be. If there’s hundreds of sites, they can’t all be shut down. And well, if they shut down the few that are today, there will be hundreds of sites, I’m sure, but let’s start them before so we can spread the word of them easier.”

Here’s another write-up on the OiNK and brokep talking about the hydra concept.

What a fantastic, rich concept in such a fascinating application. Decentralize for stability. But also specialize to serve the market better. On top of it all—globalize to protect international civil rights.

So while in this current context, it’s just about sharing music, it points down to deeper core principles about how these types of movements need to operate.

Idolator has two enlightening exchanges with US attorneys about whether US-based OiNK users are at risk for copyright infringement. The take-home is “yes,” but the likelihood of prosecution, on the other hand, is low:

I think it depends on how quickly the RIAA gets its hands on any of the server logs. That’s partly facetious, but I don’t see the U.S. Department of Justice using its resources right now for criminal investigations of copyright infringement. The overseas raids were criminal matters–I don’t expect the same here. Plus, there’s an interesting issue of whether the UK and Dutch authorities would share the information with a private party.  There are long-running debates over data treatment and security between the US and EU.

But if RIAA does get the logs and data, then there will be hell to pay for anyone who used credit cards [to donate]; those who maintained membership via upload will be a little harder to trace because you’d have to follow the IP addresses, and ISPs are not always willing to hand over their customers without court orders

The conversants also note that most of the transaction were done by PayPal. While eBay has an interest in protecting its users’ privacy, a simple court order might do the trick in tracking down copyright violators—should the RIAA and the US government choose to do so.   

This reminds me of this great series of articles on Slate by Tim Wu about how politics prevents (or dissuades by inefficiency in reform and execution) the prosecution of certain crimes—crimes that society, for one reason or another (particularly because of class), has chosen to accept. It all comes down to how important that crime is for the people in charge.

In this case, US-based users might be isolated a bit because the US might not have the interest and time to pursue this claim with cross-border implications. But I don’t believe that the RIAA doesn’t have the time or interest. This just smells like something they’d like to nip in the bud. Though the problem is the “scene”—those involved in the music industry who do the initial leaking—cracking down on the outlets for their indie-cred egos might be an effective way of stemming these illegal pre-releases.

I think this is more of an important issue than people are making it out to be. While before I wondered why the RIAA isn’t going after the big guys—I now think that going after OiNK was the *smart* thing to do. It’s like going after the yuppie coke snorters in the 80s before cheap crack hit the streets. It’s going after the trend-setters (the OiNK scenesters) and not the trend-followers (the unwashed masses on The Pirate Bay).

As can be seen by the record sales from the Kanye West vs. 50 Cent faux brawl (or Lance Bass vs. 50 Cent all-out rumble), or for country music sales, the most popular music isn’t hurting. It’s the up-and-coming, the trend-setters, and the scene-busters where most of the damage is felt. People support illegal file-sharing to help out the Cold War Kids or the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! bands, but I’ve listened to Tegan and Sara and haven’t spent a penny on them yet. (Sorry for the name-dropping, I’m having a bad time thinking of good band examples.)

But Tegan and Sara (and now great bands like Rilo Kiley) are what’s playing on MTV and as background music on the CW, and that’s the market that’s being hurt by OiNK and the like. It’s this new, emerging market that the RIAA is protecting—for its benefit, but also arguably for the benefit of these really good bands that might be able to make the big break.

I can see the future just being this big, inconsistent mess, much like what Tim Wu discusses in his Slate articles. Big Music lets trend-setting friend-to-peer communities and bloggers build up the hype for up-and-coming bands, basically doing PR for the first album or two, and then when the bands are ready to break out, they shut down those communities and then lock down on the profits. It seems to make sense. Spend no money for the first few years, and then blow it out—getting legal fees and copyright judgments in the meantime. Not bad, puppet-masters, not bad.

Just one of those things: I’m reading about Bougainville Province and their fight for autonomy from Papua New Guinea. Then I took a break to look up some Iron & Wine lyrics, for the song “Passing Afternoon.” The song goes, “She chose a yard to burn / But the ground remembers her / Wooden spoons, her children stir her bougainvillea blooms.”

Both the province and the creeping flowers were named after a French explorer, Louis Antoine de Bougainville. Bougainville dreamt of utopian paradise, away from civilization, free like the noble savages of the islands he explored.

The Iron & Wine song hauntingly takes to ask the story of a woman remembering her past loves, when life was free. Perhaps there is some hearkening back to the innocent utopia of Bougainville, as her “children stir her bougainvillea blooms” and she loses her wedding ring “somewhere near her misplaced jar of bougainvillea seeds.”

Bougainville Province, on the other hand, has less of an idyllic memory—what with war and revolution watering its recent history. Though there is irony in a Wikipedia quote where the Americans, while attacking Japanese troops in the province during WWII, left the enemy entrenched, “to whither on the vine” through starvation and disease. Perhaps on bougainvillea vines (though not native to Bougainville), or just listening non-stop to Iron & Wine (which didn’t exist during WWII).

I was just thinking that if there was a wishing well where everyone had one shot to get what they wished, then inflation would go out of control. Everyone who asked for $1 M would drive prices up; then people would ask for $100 M, then $1 B, and so on. Global economies would collapse. And if everyone asked for true love, then would true love lose its meaning? World peace? Teddy bears?

Maybe less about the general depth of globalization in our society exampled through rap lyrics, and maybe more about just how complex Clipse’s lyrics are, here’s a bit from Malice in “Wamp Wamp (What it Do),” off of Hell Hath No Fury (2006):

…The Family’s close-knit
And deep like the Hutu—you cockroaches!
Just like the flow, the foe’s ferocious
I’ll tuck you in, homey, buenos noches.

So here, a reference to the Mafia (”the Family,” a common hip-hop reference to gang life), the Rwandan genocide (the Hutu referred to the Tutsi as cockroaches), and a little bit of Spanish at the end.

For those who read the Times (do I even have to specify which rag I mean?) or pursue graduate studies, the globalizing world is one of those basic les chose de la vie. (Please attempt your best authentic French accent.) But there are segments of our culture that are, for one reason or another, blind to this phenomenon. (See my post on casual drug use and the globally deleterious effects.)

What’s more interesting is when facts and ideas of globalization reach into areas where those players aren’t forced to read books about it from professors or peers flaunting their intellects. Worker protests against the WTO in South America. African farmers using the Internet to track global crop prices. And Southern rappers removing themselves from their otherwise provincial “ghetto mentalities” as a hierarchical claim to their alpha status above their peers.*

From “Momma I’m So Sorry” by Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury (2006):

But it’s a bigger picture, homes, trust I done seen it
From Frankfurt to Cologne, Oslo to Sweden,
From Italy’s Milan to the shores of Napoli.
Now I consider Ferrari and Salvador Dalis.
I’m no longer local, my thoughts are global.
That’s why I seem distant, son, expand ya vision.

* Though Clipse constantly profess the heights of their status apart from the hoi polloi of players, they still allow for others to join them in their ranks. In “Hello New World,” they sing: “Can’t wait for the next n*** from my hood to say, ‘Look out world, I’m on my way!’”

Here’s another post that has nothing to do with IP or technology…

When I was in college, I had the chance to talk with an assistant district attorney (Dan Rather’s son–unfortunately, I can’t remember his name, nor will Google give it up to me). During our conversation, he mentioned that one of his more compelling arguments against the use of marijuana is based upon fact that by using marijuana one supports a drug trade that kills people.

I, personally, have not found a compelling medical reason that marijuana deserves the level of censure that the law provides. Practically speaking, should a kid picked up with a dime bag of pot be thrown in jail? You can walk around most colleges and universities in the US on any day of the week and find otherwise-law-abiding citizens smoking dope.

Yet, it’s illegal. And, on a related note, it’s mostly those who aren’t in US colleges who are being prosecuted for possession of marijuana.

I would wager that a good percentage of kids out there don’t think that pot is that bad a drug. And they use it in the face of the law, just as the plethora of underage drinkers–I mean, watch MTV at any hour, and you’ll see underage drinking plastered across so many frames.

But the fact is that when you buy pot, you very likely at least fuel an industry, a drug trade, that ends up abusing and killing people in other countries. Perhaps if you buy organic pot, grown domestically, then you may feel less morally obligated. But I’m not sure if most pot is grown domestically. At some point, it comes from a Central or South American country where a vicious drug trade exists, where people are forced to grow, under a gun and the threat of starvation, drugs at an extorted price to fuel an industry that illegally traffics the drug across international borders. If not, then at least you fuel a demand, no matter how fictional, that drives producers and processors and traffickers to use their various methods to supply this plant.

The fact is that our globalized world allows pot grown by subsistence farmers in Mexico to end up in the hands of US college students. And by purchasing this substance you fuel a market that ends up in the prosecution of potentially otherwise-innocent folk in other countries, and in the process of extortion and murder that global organizations participate in to produce these black market goods.

So while there may be perfectly good apologetic arguments for the softening of punishments for marijuana, an otherwise-honest and innocent baseline middle-class kid in college may think that they’re just smoking up a good time, but in the end their $20 is putting $10 in the pocket of some person who’s holding a gun to the head of someone you’ll never meet.