Things That Just Piss Me Off

You know it never ceases to amaze me how people in large companies, supposedly very intelligent people, can shoot themselves in the foot so often. Do the record labels think they are winning when they sue people for downloading music?

They are so concerned that someone might hear a song for free, they forget how much money they make from it. It has been proven that cd sales went up at the same time the downloads increased. Yet the record labels and the RIAA claim it is costing them sales. A fact they have never been able to prove.

Sampling the music leads to buying the cds in most cases. The real reason the music industry is scared of downloads is that music artists are no longer chained to the record companies.

The music artists no longer need the approval of record company execs. Through myspace, imdb, and other social networking sites like youtube, new artists can emerge and become popular without the assistance of the record industry.

I really love the fact that the record labels claim they are protecting the artists by bringing the lawsuits when it is the record companies that have raped and pillaged music artists for years. By holding out contracts over musicians hungry for any type of deal and making the record deals benefit the record companies more than the artists they have left many musicians broke and alone while the record companioes are still making money off the artists work.

Labels Win Suit Against Song Sharer
By JEFF LEEDS
Published: October 5, 2007

In a crucial legal victory for record labels and other copyright owners, a federal jury yesterday found a Minnesota woman liable for copyright infringement for sharing music online and imposed a penalty of $222,000 in damages.

A totally ridiculous verdict the judge should have not just put aside, but should have thrown away altogether. Simple legal question. Can the RIAA prove that this one woman cost them $222,000 worth of record sales?

The jury verdict, which called for $9,250 in damages for each of the 24 songs involved in the trial, came after brief deliberations.

Better than $9,000 per song? Wow, the record companies make more per song in court than they do in record stores. No wonder they are suing as many as 30,000 people.

“Every lawsuit,” the posting said, “makes the recording industry look more and more like King Canute, vainly trying to hold back the tide.”

The lead plaintiff was Capitol Records, a label owned by the EMI Group. The three other major record companies — the Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and the Warner Music Group — also had songs involved in the suit against Ms. Thomas.

Personally, I will not buy any music from any of these labels in the future. It may not be much, but these lawsuits have definitely cost them one customer.

Next they will get bush to label people who do file sharing as terrorists.

This just goes on and on. How would you like to be able to get away with shooting someone? Just join blackwater.

State Dept. Plans Tighter Control of Security Firm
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: October 6, 2007

The State Department, seeking to retain its relationship with Blackwater USA while trying to bring the company’s armed guards under tighter control, said Friday that it would now send its own personnel as monitors on all Blackwater security convoys in and around Baghdad.

The department will also install video cameras in Blackwater armored vehicles to produce a record of all operations that could be used in investigations of the use of force by private security contractors. The State Department will also save recordings of all radio transmissions between Blackwater convoys and military and civilian agencies supervising them in Iraq.

Blackwater is one of three private companies providing security services to the State Department in Iraq, running heavily-armed escorts every time a prominent American civilian leaves the protected Green Zone. The requirement for ride-along monitors does not apply to the other two security contractors, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, the State Department said. Blackwater runs roughly 60 security convoys a week in central Iraq.

The State Department was facing new questions on Friday about its handling of another case, involving a former Blackwater guard who is suspected of shooting a bodyguard to an Iraqi vice president while drunk last Christmas Eve.

The former guard, Andrew J. Moonen, now lives in Seattle after being dismissed from Blackwater and sent home from Iraq 36 hours after the shooting, with the approval and help of the State Department.

But within weeks of losing his job at Blackwater, Mr. Moonen was hired by a Defense Department contractor and sent to Kuwait to work on logistics related to the Iraq war, a spokesman for the contractor, Combat Support Associates, said Friday. Mr. Moonen worked for the company from February until August of this year, said the spokesman, Paul Gennaro.

The company apparently did not know that Mr. Moonen had lost his job because of the December episode in Baghdad. Mr. Moonen’s lawyer said that his dismissal was based on reports that he had handled a weapon while drunk, not for shooting the guard, for which he has not been charged.

Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the Democratic chairman of a House committee investigating Blackwater, raised the matter in a letter to Ms. Rice on Friday. “I am writing to express concern that the State Department may have failed to report important facts about a private military contractor’s killing of a guard for the Iraqi vice president and thereby facilitated the hiring of that individual to work on another contract in support of the Iraq war only two months after the homicide.”

Mr. Waxman noted that Erik D. Prince, the founder of Blackwater, told the House committee on Tuesday that he would see to it that Mr. Moonen’s security clearance was revoked and that he would not be allowed to work in any further security or war-related capacity.

What? No one at the state department or at blackwater thought of revoking his security clearance and disallowing him to work on more contracts until now? The shooting someone while he was drunk thing wasn’t enough?

Let’s just bring the troops home and give blacwater a bigger contract. Let’s leave them in Iraq and bring everyone else home. We can even include a budget for more booze for the blackwater guards.