Liberal Burblings

Archive for October, 2009

James Graham has written a very stimulating post on copyright law, which has led to some extensive comments and a further post from David Weber.

The simple answer to James’ titular question “Will Lembit have me arrested?” (for re-posting his Daily Sport articles on Prawn Free Lembit) is “No”. Lembit might be slightly off the wall, but he is not clinically insane. But I can see the logical extension in James’ mind. Lembit spoke up for Madelson’s plan to switch off illegal file sharers. It’s a logical next step for James to be clamped in irons for copying Lembit’s Sporty bon mots.

James makes some interesting points:

The death of the music industry – which is a real possibility – will not mean the death of music. Music existed before copyright laws and it will exist long after them as well. People won’t suddenly stop making music. What it will probably mean is the death of the superstar.

Well yes. The first caveman who came up with an interesting beat with his stick on a pig’s bladder didn’t get paid. He may have been given a couple of drops of a base intoxicating liquor by an appreciative fellow cave dweller. And did whoever come up with “Greensleeves” get paid? It’s been sung billions of times. I am surprised the PRS for Music aren’t onto this one.

I would have thought that we’ll see a very different music industry emerging the future. I very much doubt whether we’ll see its death.

Where I feel somewhat at a tangent from James is that his remarks tend to address the rich end of the music industry spectrum. Perhaps this is not surprising, since the recent examples of copyright dilemmas I’ve heard of in the media have been at the “top end”.

Cliff Richard brought out the violins to complain that he was losing the rights to records he made over 50 years ago. Presumably he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to afford another vineyard. Ironically, one of the first of his records to “cop it” and go out of copyright was “Move it”, recorded in February 1959 at Abbey Road studios. I say “ironically” because it is, IMHO, the only decent record he has ever made (although I have to give “The Day I met Marie” a bit of a passingly respectful nod). If he deserves the performing proceeds to any of his records it is “Move it”, which he doesn’t (have the rights to the proceeds anymore, that is).

Then we had the example of Pete Waterman. Not short of a penny, is our Pete, I would have thought (at least if he’s wisely invested the spondoolicks from his ‘Stock, Aitken and Waterman’ years). But he set off a campaign against YouTube on the basis that he had only, allegedly, received only £11 in 2008 for producing Never Gonna Give You up by Rick Astley, which received, he claimed, 100 million plays on YouTube.

On a slightly different note, there have also been unfortunate incidents about royalty payments, which have hit the headlines. Gary Glitter reportedly may have received substantial royalties after a computer company bungled and used a Joan Jett cover version of “Do you wanna touch me” in an ad. They pulled the advert when they realised that Glitter was entitled to royalties because he wrote the song.

And then we had the very unsavoury image of Jonathan King, fresh out of clink, crowing about getting megabucks for the use of “It’s Good News week” on a Channel Four series.

So the headlines have not been good on this subject. They’ve concentrated on the very rich and the dodgy musicians and performers.

So let me name a few names of people I think do deserve royalties and who don’t deserve to be ripped off due to internet piracy. Kevin Ayres. Neil Arthur. Sally Oldfield. Sandy Shaw. Gerry Rafferty. Sam Brown. Glenn Gregory. Dan le Sac. Martin Fry. Robert Wyatt. Some of them have been famous for a little while. But they are not stars now. They are certainly not “superstars”. Far from it. They are the type of people who rely on royalties, often for songs they wrote or recorded many years ago, to keep on performing, or just live from day to day. (Many of them have posted on this site – Fair Play for Creators).

So it is these sorts of people – and thousands of working musicians like them, that I feel we ought to focus on. Not the “superstars”.

So I think Lembit makes a fair point when he says:

Most musicians and and songwriters aren’t loaded, especially if they’re just starting out. If they don’t get paid they can’t make music, it’s as simple as that.

He is also pretty convincing when he says:

With over 20 LEGAL online services in theUK, like iTunes and Spotify, you can download legally without wrecking the industry.

Indeed. You can get most tunes free and legal on Spotify.

Coming back to James, he goes off on one here:

Will it be possible to make money as a musician in the future? It all depends on what your aspirations are. Any halfway successful musician will be able to make several multiples of what I’ll earn in my lifetime, but there’ll be a lot fewer multi-millionaires. You probably won’t ever get that private jet I’m afraid. The simple fact are only so many punters out there and talent is nothing like as hard to come by as Smash Hits and NME span> led us to believe. They lied.
But is rendering musician to the status of mere vocation such a terrible thing? Money has destroyed so many talents over the years that it is hard to shed a tear for the decline of the superstar. Is it really so wonderful that popular music has become so strongly associated with excess, mental illness, vanity, self-abasement and violence? More musicians earning less money is a scenario in which 99% of us win.

I really think James is seeing the music industry through the wrong end of a telescope. The overwhelming bulk of musicians are scraping a living, if that. This obsession with “multi-millionaires” is really misleading. And starting to bring “superstar” deaths into it is a distraction. Fine, we’ll see the decline of the superstar. But that’s not the issue. The issue are the thousands of unknowns scraping a living who rely on the proceeds from a few of their songs or records to get by. It’s those people who are, quite rightly, motivating the PRS for Music with their campaign against internet piracy.

I should mention that I don’t agree with the Mandelson “switch off” plan either. But sooner or later people who illegally share files on a grand scale should expect some form of reckoning.

I’m no fan of Prince Edward. I’m a raving Republican and Eddyboy strikes me as one of the less inspiring members of a very uninspiring and, importantly, unnecessary Royal Family.

But I’ve heard what he said in Australia about the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme:

The sense of adventure, the sense of excitement, that it gave you that sort of risk element, young people are like that still; that sense of adventure, that sense that (death) is possible…Obviously we don’t want that to happen, certainly it’s not our intention … It was just that psychology about what makes young people tick.

Well, it’s true. He could have phrased it better. It’s somewhat offensive to the family of a lad who died in the bush in 2006 while on an DofE award outing. But it’s hardly an earth-shattering statement.

If anything, he’s probably given much needed and deserved publicity to this fine award scheme of which I am a proud Bronze badge holder. Only the other night, I was recalling how our Chemistry teacher came out when we were on our expedition, some thirty five years ago, to check that we had put our tents up OK and wouldn’t get cold overnight. Hardly ‘living on the edge’.

Think about it. You have a very powerful job but it will end in eight months. Nothing you can do will change that end date; so, you have eight months to do what you want.

So, do you:

1. Follow the agenda of the Daily Mail ?

2. Follow evidence-based scientific advice ?

It’s a tricky one, isn’t it? …..Not.

Having said that, in fairness to Alan Johnson, he was getting conflicting advice from two professors.

In a marked departure with the George W. Bush years, Barack Obama has travelled at dawn to Dover, Delaware to witness the return of the bodies of 18 Americans killed this week in Afghanistan. With his big decision on Afghanistan due soon, this seems like a wise thing to do.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UA2UcpYPN4&hl=en&fs=1&]

I suppose you could say that it is a bit like that infinite number of monkeys and typewriters…

But let’s face it. With a Governor very much under siege against an antipathetic state assembly and his state in melt-down, how many rejections of bills would there need to be before, by sheer coincidence, the first letters of each line read “F*** YOU” ?

Not many it seems. Is Arnie cracking up under the strain, one wonders?

Ammiano Veto Message

Oh dear, I missed it. Slap Nick Griffin has now been taken down. But you can still savour something of the experience below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut4WCvzyRCo&hl=en&fs=1&]

…An excellent opportunity to wheel out the word “apocryphal” and the phrase “A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on” (attributed to Churchill and Twain – and in today’s world of the interweb thinget that should be updated to “ten times round the world..”).

Gordon Brown was never asked about his favourite biscuit.

And, while we’re at it, Samantha Cameron didn’t nonchalantly walk into M&S and pick up a £65 dress. Quite the opposite.

I must say I thoroughly enjoyed “Let’s kick the cr*p out of Nick Griffin” night on the BBC. Wonderful fun!

I was rather concerned that Griffin would be comfortably subsumed within the normal format of Question Time with blah-blah-blah about the Mail strike and bleat-bleat-bleat about Afghanistan. I also braced myself for him to be politely applauded by the audience for his reasonableness.

But we must never under-estimate the BBC.

The audience were without doubt the stars of the show. As soon as I heard their first reaction I thought “Crikey the BBC have really stacked that audience!”

Audience selection for these sorts of things is a fine art. They don’t just open the doors and let the first load of people in. They don’t just ask for interested people over the internet and give tickets on a first come, first served basis. They actually use proper researchers. People with degrees who phone you and ask you a series of questions about your political views and background. I think they normally ask for a photo also. Then they get back to you if you are selected. And they scrupulously select a balanced audience. If Nick Griffin does complain about the audience profile, he’ll get a dusty response. He’ll be given evidence that the audience numerically reflected how the nation votes. (You will have noticed a couple of BNP supporters shouting “rubbish” at Jack Straw at the end – well two people is about what they are entitled to if you look at how the nation votes overall).

But it was wonderful to see the ire aimed at, and the full-throated condemnation of, Griffin. Truly exhilerating and, I think, vindication (in the short term at least) of the policy of “giving him enough rope and he’ll hang himself”.

And of course, in the morning, all us Liberals gleefully enjoyed the headline in the Indie: The BBC gave Griffin the oxygen of publicity and he choked. Oh how we gloated!

But I am afraid that what actually happened in the programme will not matter much. The surrounding publicity will give Nick Griffin and the BNP sufficient name recognition to increase their vote anyway. On Friday GMTV was inundated with people saying Griffin had been treated unfairly. The BBC online Have Your Say section was flooded with support for Griffin. OK, some of those would be “put up” jobs, but not all – there was a veritable torrent of comment in that direction. And OK, the YouGov poll saying 25% of people would consider voting for the BNP may be a bit of a blip as is, perhaps, their poll increase from 2% to 3%.

However, like or not, I fear we will have to get used to debating with the BNP. Their vote is likely to increase somewhat.

So I look forward to the debate going a bit deeper. I would have liked to hear Griffin on normal policies, like the Mail strike. I would also like to have gone a stage beyond “Racist!” with the debate on the BNP’s policies. A young Asian gentleman asked Griffin where he would like him to go. Griffin said he was happy with him staying in this country. Next time, I’d like to hear discussion of the BNP policy on this matter:

…we call for…the introduction of a system of voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin assisted by a generous financial incentives both for individuals and for the countries in question.

So in the middle of a recession, with the NHS, schools and police crying out for money, the BNP wants to waste money on “generous financial incentives” to hand out one way tickets to people – turning the government into a sort of Thomas Cook on steroids.

It’s discussion of that sort of total madness that I’d like to see next, now we have initially lanced the boil of the BNP’s mystique.

Oh and by the way, this article in the The Times nicely puts paid to Griffin’s utter rubbish about Britain having an “indigenous race”:

A leading geneticist has accused Nick Griffin of misinterpreting his work to claim that Britain has an “indigenous” white population that dates back to the Ice Age.
The BNP leader claimed on BBC One’s Question Time last night that the white English, Welsh, Scots and Irish were “Britain’s Aborigines”, descended from the first people to inhabit the British Isles around 17,000 years ago.
His assertion appeared to be based on research by Professor Stephen Oppenheimer, a geneticist at the University of Oxford, who published his findings in 2006 in a book called The Origins of the British.
Professor Oppenheimer, however, told The Times that Mr Griffin had misinterpreted his science to support his political views.
“I assumed he was misinterpreting me,” Professor Oppenheimer said. “After the programme I went back to look at what I’d written. I wrote quite a bit about issues of racism. I feared some people like Griffin would probably hijack this — I assumed that fascists would cherry-pick different bits from my book to support their views.”

…Mr Griffin decried multiculturalism, which he said had been imposed on the British people. “We are the Aborigines here,” he told the audience. “It is racist to shut white people out of their own country. The majority of the British people are descended from people who have lived here since time immemorial who now feel shut out from their own country.”

Professor Oppenheimer backed an assertion by another panellist, Bonnie Greer, the American-born black writer, that the original Britons were Neanderthals.

The Professor added: “As [Ms Greer] pointed out, the original Britons were Neanderthals. They were exterminated, then the Ice Age left a clean sheet. The modern population is essentially of north Iberian origin. So what’s British?” “The purpose of looking at mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome in this way is not to identify the race of a person. They are just markers representing a tiny fraction of our genome. They do not tell you what someone’s like and pale European skin colour is largely the result of just one mutation, which protects them from getting rickets as infants. He’s using this information to bolster his political views, but genetics can’t do that.”

Here’s a very illuminating article in the London Review of Books. It’s been written by a postman of five years standing. He demolishes the constant refrain from Mail managers and Mandelson that “figures are down”:

Mail is delivered to the offices in grey boxes. These are a standard size, big enough to carry a few hundred letters. The mail is sorted from these boxes, put into pigeon-holes representing the separate walks, and from there carried over to the frames. This is what is called ‘internal sorting’ and it is the job of the full-timers, who come into work early to do it. In the past, the volume of mail was estimated by weighing the boxes. These days it is done by averages. There is an estimate for the number of letters that each box contains, decided on by national agreement between the management and the union. That number is 208. This is how the volume of mail passing through each office is worked out: 208 letters per box times the number of boxes. However, within the last year Royal Mail has arbitrarily, and without consultation, reduced the estimate for the number of letters in each box. It was 208: now they say it is 150. This arbitrary reduction more than accounts for the 10 per cent reduction that the Royal Mail claims is happening nationwide.
Doubting the accuracy of these numbers, the union ordered a random manual count to be undertaken over a two-week period in a number of offices across the region. Our office was one of them. On average, those boxes which the Royal Mail claims contain only 150 letters, actually carry 267 items of mail. This, then, explains how the Royal Mail can say that the figures are down, although every postman knows that volume is up. The figures are down all right, but only because they have been manipulated.

And he reports a disturbing shift in the raison d’etre of the Royal Mail:

Like many businesses, the Royal Mail has a pet name for its customers. The name is ‘Granny Smith’. It’s a deeply affectionate term. Granny Smith is everyone, but particularly every old lady who lives alone and for whom the mail service is a lifeline. When an old lady gives me a Christmas card with a fiver slipped in with it and writes, ‘Thank you for thinking of me every day,’ she means it. I might be the only person in the world who thinks about her every day, even if it’s only for long enough to read her name on an envelope and then put it through her letterbox. There is a tension between the Royal Mail as a profit-making business and the Royal Mail as a public service. For most of the Royal Mail management – who rarely, if ever, come across the public – it is the first. To the delivery officer – to me, and people like me, the postmen who bring the mail to your door – it is more than likely the second.
We had a meeting a while back at which all the proposed changes to the business were laid out. Changes in our hours and working practices. Changes to our priorities. Changes that have led to the current chaos. We were told that the emphasis these days should be on the corporate customer. It was what the corporations wanted that mattered. We were effectively being told that quality of service to the average customer was less important than satisfying the requirements of the big businesses.
Someone piped up in the middle of it. ‘What about Granny Smith?’ he said. He’s an old-fashioned sort of postman, the kind who cares about these things.
‘Granny Smith is not important,’ was the reply. ‘Granny Smith doesn’t matter any more.’
So now you know.

Most of the time with a strike, you can point to a specific “sticking point” between the employers and employees, which causes the strike and which, when resolved, leads to the end of the strike.

You know the sort of thing. Management propose a pay rise of 0.5%, the unions demand 8% and then they both sit down and agree on 3.73% tapered over 5 years backdated to last January 1st with productivity gains agreed.

Well, OK, what is the “sticking point” in the Royal Mail dispute?

Any thoughts?

I have just listened to Billy Hayes, leader of the Communication Workers Union, on Any Questions? He was asked this specific question. And answer came there none. He went on about job losses in the past and how awful the current management are. But we were left none the wiser as to what is the actual nub of the strike.

I’ve read an article by Billy Hayes in the Mirror and he presents a smorgasbord of vague grievances, the most specific of which is this:

Royal Mail will not agree to independent experts agreeing what constitutes a fair day’s work. At the moment postal workers are being bullied to carry unmanageable workloads and being disciplined when they fail.

The sooner this gets to Acas the better. But I think Acas will find that they need to attempt to knit fog in order to try to settle the dispute. Good luck to them. It is almost seems that the strike is about a very broad topic: “Who runs the Post Office?”

The unions and management need to be careful because the answer may be, in the end, “TNT or DHL“, as their business goes elsewhere. Already, Amazon have cancelled their £25million contract with the Royal Mail.