Savage Popcorn

Something that often irritates me is the way in which people use cuddly phrases to talk about activities which are a long, long way from being cuddly, nice or even human.

There is nothing “honourable” about murdering your daughter and there is nothing “pro-life” about trying to control who can and cannot have access to fertility treatment.

The only comment you need comes from Beau Bo D’Or.

This could be the new Battlefield Earth!

- Devin Faraci on the possibility that the insane idea of filming Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged might actually go ahead.

Last week several Swedish MPs - from the Moderate Party - have called for (via) the decriminalisation of online file sharing. The article is worth reading but the crux of their argument is this:

Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet. Politicians who play for the antipiracy team should be aware that they have allied themselves with a special interest that is never satisfied and that will always demand that we take additional steps toward the ultimate control state. Today they want to transform the Internet Service Providers into an online police force, and the Antipiracy Bureau wants the authority for themselves to extract the identities of file sharers. Then they can drag the 15-year-old girl who downloaded a Britney Spears song to civil court and sue her.

I’m not about to start condoning media piracy and I do think that artists should be compensated for their work. But it also strikes me that the media industry - the distributors, the promoters and the rest - are less concerned with protecting artist revenues and more interested in shielding themselves from the changing realities of their chosen market.

Read The Register’s reaction to the music industry’s special pleading over ticket sales.

So, ticket touts are in the news again with an all-party committee of MPs calling for profits from resold tickets to be shared with artists and organisers.

This does strike me as a remarkably impractical approach, not least because of the inevitable difficulties that will gather around identifying resold tickets, determining whether they were touted or just passed on to a friend by someone no longer able to go to a concert, and then collecting revenue from someone with whom you have no commercial relationship. I’m also instictively skeptical of centralised or legislative attempts to determine how a market should operate - especially, as in this case, the promoters are so far out of step with their customers.

As has been noted elsewhere, the music industry often takes a rather bizarre delight in how quickly tickets gfor major concerts sell out. But really, if you manage to sell a full set of tickets in under two hours, that’s about as clear an indication you can have that your ticket price is two low. It’s not surprising then that touts will move in, snap up the underpriced tickets, and sell them on at a price closer to the one people are willing to pay.

And if the promoters really wanted to be nice to their fans, they could use the adiditional revenue to bring down the prices of food, beer, tshirts and everything else that gets marked up at these events.

You can’t be a rational person six days a week…and on one day of the week, go to a building, and think you’re drinking the blood of a two thousand year old space god.

- Bill Maher (via)

Of course, things WERE different back then – in those days we had the I.R.A. armed not with sugar and fertiliser but with semtex and aiming to explode large London landmarks backed by the oil billions of Libya (and a lot of dollars from America too). Oh, and they were QUITE GOOD at their EVIL job, and very rarely set themselves on fire instead of their targets.

- Millennium Dome on the UK Government’s plans, yet again, to extend the limit that people can be held without charge.