Fish Fear Me

Why I'm Skeptical of What I Read in the MSM, Example #4,327

Ugh. This may just be a poorly written article, or it may be just another cleverly written agenda item planted by a willing reporter:

Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use

Excerpt:

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

A number of bloggers have read that as saying that the RIAA is suing Jeffrey Howell for having personal copies of CDs he had bought stored on his computer. At first blush that's what I thought also. The headline, with its "goes after personal use" language, and just the way the article is written seems to say that. The obvious question bugged me though: If the music files were on his PC for personal use, how did the RIAA find out about them?

A little digging quickly shows that the RIAA is not suing Howell because he had "unauthorized copies" of music on his PC, they are suing because he used Kazaa to share those files over the Internet, clearly violating copyright law. You can see a couple of the court docs in pdf here and here. Somehow the WaPo reporter left out that little detail. To be fair to the writer, he doesn't actually say that Howell was being sued for copying music to his PC. The entire article seems to be constructed to imply that though, and I can see how many people would get that impression. Look at the very next quote:

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."

Well, Jeffrey Howell in fact did distribute copies over the Internet, once again something the reporter left out. I find it hard to believe he didn't know that.

As far as the RIAA referring to personal copies being "unauthorized copies", I call bullshit on it even being a serious issue. Ever. When the RIAA uses that term it sounds like simple legal CYA to cover their rights to me. In fact, they know they have no way of even policing something like that and their own website says:

It’s okay to copy music onto an analog cassette, but not for commercial purposes.

It’s also okay to copy music onto special Audio CD-R’s, mini-discs, and digital tapes (because royalties have been paid on them) – but, again, not for commercial purposes.

Beyond that, there’s no legal "right" to copy the copyrighted music on a CD onto a CD-R. However, burning a copy of CD onto a CD-R, or transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive or your portable music player, won’t usually raise concerns so long as:

The copy is made from an authorized original CD that you legitimately own

The copy is just for your personal use. It’s not a personal use – in fact, it’s illegal – to give away the copy or lend it to others for copying.

The RIAA is not going to go after people for ripping a CD that they purchased and putting the files on their own ipod. If they ever did go that crazy I doubt they would win against a jury. They're not even likely to go after you for making that mix CD for that special someone. How are they even going to find out? No, they are going after dumbasses that choose to illegally share music over the Internet, in effect, high-tech pirates.

Look, I have no great love for the record companies. Over many years they have given many people very good reasons to despise them. The bottom line here though, is that they are not going after personal use. That's just hysterical ranting meant to further demonize the RIAA and it appears quite a few folks are falling for it. And let's face it, distributing unauthorized copies of copyright work is stealing. People can rationalize it all they want by demonizing the record company or the publisher or whomever. It's still stealing though. God forbid any of those people create something of value and then get it ripped off. They might learn firsthand the old line about a pie in the face: It stops being funny when it starts being you.

Merry Christmas

I hope this Christmas Day finds you well. It's a bit gray here, but a little over an inch of snow frosted the trees overnight and it's a pleasant day to take a walk through the woods:

Or at least down the driveway and the back road. Sammy is still game enough to dive through the foot to foot and a half deep snow a little ways, but at 10 1/2 she doesn't have the gumption anymore to go very far into that kind of snow. There's at least one deer hanging around these woods. We saw some tracks behind the sauna house and Sammy picked up on some kind of scent as we were walking along. I couldn't catch sight of any critters through the trees though. Meanwhile, down on shore the lake is rocking a bit more today:

Dude, Where's My Blizzard?

It figures. If you plan for the worst, it doesn't happen. We were supposed to get up to a foot of new snow yesterday and last night. Though the wind howled pretty good all night, the total amount of snow was maybe an inch. I'm a little disappointed, but it was surely a blessing for people who had to travel this area yesterday. Today was a positively balmy 27° with hardly a cloud in the sky. Tanning weather for this part of the country and this time of year. No politics for a couple of days, just pics:

And finally, one for Bingley so he doesn't slander me as on the wagon:

Merry Christmas!

A Horse is a Horse, of Course, of Course

From the Cook County News-Herald Sheriff's report, Dec. 6, 2007:

12:42 p.m., Grand Marais: Complaint of a horse running loose on County Road 7. A neighbor captured the animal after it stopped to talk with some other horses at the intersection with Fall River Road, and put the horse in with his for safekeeping until the owner could be contacted.

That's always how they get caught up here. They stop to talk about fishing, or chat up a filly or two, and the next thing they know they have a rope around their neck and are being led away.  It's been a while, but been there done that.

A couple more

Losing the light here, but some bigger waves are coming in now:

I accidently captured some Lake Superior wraiths:

Do you see the ghost wolf?

Greetings from the North Shore

Merry Christmas from Grand Marais, MN. If you are traveling this holiday weekend, then safe journeys. We managed to time the trek up from Minneapolis well and squeaked between a couple different bands of precipitation to get up here with good roads. Today would not be a good day for travel though, as the snow has moved in again and we are supposed to get anywhere from 6" to 12" total by late tonight. As I write this, I'm watching big rollers on Lake Superior coming from the east meeting a stiff wind coming from the north. The lake is confused today(The lake was confused that day my friends, like an old man trying to take soup back at a deli...wait, that's not right).

A couple of pics as we prepare to hunker down for the day. To say that Sammy loves it up here is an understatement:

It's hard to tell here, but we're starting to see whitecaps further out in the lake:

Food? check. Booze? check. Dare I say it?

Bring it on.

I'm sorry, but...

Don't tase me, Breaux!

...somebody had to do it.

McCaffrey on Iraq

Retired General Barry McCaffrey has returned from a recent visit to Iraq and Michael Yon has posted a memo that McCaffrey has sent to his department head at West Point. The memo gives McCaffrey's assessment on the current status in Iraq in a number of areas. It's an interesting read and not that long so I encourage you to read the whole thing.

I don't entirely agree with McCaffrey's perspective though, and there are a couple of things to note here before you buy into his assessment entirely. First of all, I'm not comfortable with his flat assertions of "civil war". I think that term tends to minimize the number of factions and particularly the tribal and criminal violence. It's a debatable point. Second, I'm a little puzzled at this flat out assertion he makes:

The Iraqi justice system…courts, prosecutors, defense attorneys, police investigators, jails for pre-trial confinement, prisons for sentences, integrity of public institutions—does not yet exist. Vengeance is the only operative law of the land. The situation is starting to change. The Iraqi Police will be in charge of most neighborhoods by the end of next year.

I think it's fair to say that the Iraqi justice system has a long way to go, but to say that it "does not exist" and that "Vengeance is the only operative law of the land" is a bit puzzling. I read a briefing transcript about a month ago from MNF-Iraq that claimed otherwise. Here's a summary paragraph from the "Key Themes" of that transcript:

• The Iraqi courts are able to make decisions regardless of political impact.  There are 1,160 judges in Iraq, and many more employees in the judicial system itself.  There have been numerous detainees as a result of OFaQ. The investigations committees in Karkh and Rusafa are capable of doing investigations with detainees in the 5 detention centers in Baghdad, which resolves detainee’s cases.  4,000 detainee’s cases have been brought to trial for judgment. Attorneys from the Iraqi judiciary monitor conditions of the detainees and have formed a committee to receive grievances by citizens in Karkh.  The High Judicial Council confirms that there is no sectarian or political interference in this process.  Many detainees have been released for not convicting crimes as reviewed by the Higher Judicial Council.  We do not allow footage of detainees since it is a violation of their human rights.

A healthy skepticism towards any source is appropriate, including what Iraqi judges or ministers say at MNF-Iraq briefings. In this case it wouldn't surprise me if the Iraqis were being, um, a bit positive overall, but they threw out some pretty specific numbers and I haven't seen anyone challenge them. Yes, the Iraqi justice system is far from where it needs to be. To say it doesn't exist seems like bullshit to me though. That doesn't mean that McCaffrey is wrong in other assessments, I just suggest using caution in buying into them wholesale.

Recommended Reading

One good thing about battling the flu for the last couple of days is that I did get caught up on some reading. Three essays that I found via The Belmont Club are particularly well worth your time I think.

The first is by Arthur Herman and is titled "Who Owns the Vietnam War?". I was not quite 14 when Saigon fell and Herman notes the Vietnam narrative that I grew up with:

1. America’s cold-war obsession with Communist totalitarianism led it to intervene in an internal struggle in which no conceivable vital interest was at stake. “We deluded ourselves into thinking that we were defending freedom,” wrote the military analyst Andrew Bacevich (himself no leftist) after Bush’s speech, when in fact “we had blundered into a civil war,” a war in which our side, the Republic of South Vietnam, “proved to be a fiction.”

2. On account of that initial mistake, we found ourselves confronting a powerful native insurgency in the form of the Vietcong (VC), an indigenous guerrilla force. In this unconventional conflict, for which the U.S. military was woefully unprepared, we soon resorted to drastic, even barbaric methods and then lied to the American public about them. As Jonathan Schell wrote in a famous 1967 essay in the New Yorker: “we are destroying, seemingly by inadvertence, the very country we are supposedly protecting.” Or as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it: “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is] my own government.”

3. The frustrations of fighting this losing battle wrecked the morale of American troops, leading to excessive drug use, assaults on unpopular officers with fragmentation grenades, atrocities against Vietnamese civilians as in the village of My Lai in 1968, and, in the aftermath, a generation of veterans physically and emotionally scarred for life. For the American soldier in Vietnam, Marilyn B. Young wrote in The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (1991), “the announced goals of the war—to repel an outside invader, to give the people of South Vietnam a chance to choose their own government—were daily contradicted by the soldier’s sense that he was himself the invader.” According to the writer Peter Marin, what made Vietnam different from other wars was the American soldiers’ “direct confrontation . . . with their own culpability, their sense of their own capacity for error and excess” in an unjust and immoral conflict.

4. Despite intensive bombing, and despite Richard Nixon’s 1970 invasion of Cambodia in an effort to wipe out enemy sanctuaries there, the American intervention was destined to fail. The final collapse, which put an end to the government of South Vietnam in 1975, led at last to the unification of the country and other beneficial effects. Rather than triggering a bloodbath or the fall of other Asian regimes to Communism, as Presidents Johnson and Nixon and other war supporters had predicted, “the strategic effect,” in Bacevich’s words, “proved to be limited.” Once the Americans left, “the Vietnamese began getting their act together” and today enjoy peace and relative prosperity. In the judgment of Robert Dallek and others, whatever violence occurred in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge after we abandoned Vietnam was triggered by our earlier meddling in that country with Nixon’s “secret” bombing and incursion.

That seems generally correct to me as the conventional wisdom then, with maybe a couple of minor quibbles. It wasn't until I was in my twenties and started serving with some men who had served in Vietnam that I started to think there was something off with the accepted narrative of what happened in Southeast Asia in the 60s and 70s. Bit by bit that narrative fell apart as I read more and talked to veterans and I've found that much of what I thought I knew about Vietnam was really just myth. Herman's essay is a great recap of what I've learned over the years that has demolished that old narrative and it's also a primer on many of the anti-war tactics and myth-making that we see today regarding Iraq.

The second essay is by Reuel Marc Gerecht and is titled "Why the Worst Is Probably Over in Iraq". It has been fairly common to look at Iraq in simple terms of Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd, but the reality is far more complex. I don't necessarily agree with everything Gerecht writes here, but it's an interesting look into that complexity. There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about Iraq and Gerecht makes some good points along with raising some caveats to keep in mind. Good footnotes too.

Finally, an essay by Robert D. Kaplan titled "On Forgetting the Obvious". Kaplan writes:

Some truths are so obvious that to mention them in polite company seems either pointless or rude. What is left unstated, however, can with time be forgotten. Both of these observations apply today to the American way of war. It is obvious that a military can only fight well on behalf of a society in which it believes, and that a society which believes little is worth fighting for cannot, in the end, field an effective military. Obvious as this is, we seem to have forgotten it.

Remembering will help us in several ways. First, it will show us that the greatest asymmetry in our struggle with radical Islam is not one of arms or organization or even of ideology in any simple sense, but one of morale in the deepest sense. Second, it will provide an insight into the state of civil-military relations in our own country, which is a growing problem many of us refuse to acknowledge. And third, it will show us why some kinds of wars—“in-between” wars, I call them—have become inherently difficult for the United States to fight and win.

There's much to ponder there as Kaplan elaborates on those points. His take on belief and faith, not from a religious perspective, but in our nation, is particularly valid I think. Well worth reading the whole thing.

Monday Miscellanea

Okay, if this video doesn't give at least a little tug on your heartstrings then I'm pretty sure you have no soul: Best Christmas gift ever.

The Vikes take on the Bears tonight at the Metrodome in a big game as far as the playoffs go. If they win tonight and also win their last two games they're in for sure. That's possible, and I'm rooting for that, but that's a pretty tall order for this team. If they don't, it could be a pretty wild set of tiebreaker calculations between the Vikes, New Orleans, and Washington. It sure makes the last few weeks of the season interesting.

In related news, I ended up in the lower division of the playoffs in my FFL league and managed a first round win to avoid the dreaded Toilet Bowl. This weekend was the first of a two weeks total points round with the winner getting $25 to partly offset the entry fee for the year. It gives us losers in the lower division something to play for. So far I'm up by 15 with the MN-Defense going for me tonight and the Vikes kicker for my opponent. It would be nice to win, but I'm not going to get bent out of shape if I don't. I'm just glad I'm not in the Toilet Bowl.

I've changed my mind about what I want for Christmas(video, safe for work and kids big or small).

Despite not getting above freezing this month, ice conditions in the Minneapolis area are still very dicey. I heard a report today of only 4" of ice under the snow on one our metro area lakes. You've heard of the Maginot Line and the Siegfried Line I'm sure. Well, this is the Idiot/Pussy Line when it comes to ice fishing. One camp considers people who won't go out on 4" of ice to be pussies. The other considers people who will to be idiots. I'm firmly in the latter. Which reminds me that I need to dust off and finish an essay on ice fishing that I started a couple of years ago for Sheila O'Malley's "expert" series. Personal events overtook me at the time and I kind of let it go. Now if I can just find it.

It looks like a certain dumbass is not going to get the beatdown that he so richly deserves. At least not from that source and not at this time. It's a good call, I guess, and it's probably better to try to ignore him than do anything else. Still, given old Chuckles track record I'm sure we'll be hearing about his next dance with his inner dumbass from somewhere in the next month or two. I'll start the over-under at 45 days.