The Internet Giveth And The Internet Taketh Away

Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

I trust the boys and girls over at Daily Kos and the other "Netroots" sites are paying some attention to today's NY Times. According to the Times, an explosion of resentment about that part of the grand immigration deal that opponents call "amnesty" for the undocumented already in the country was fired up by the internet and talk radio. The result was a deluge of calls, emails and letters to Senators that scared the be'jesus out of many Republicans.

The truth is that the medium is irrelevant to a large extent. Yes, it is now very easy to email a long list of people at one keystroke, but their rate of response is still determined by the oldest political motivator in the book, anger.

The Kosacks have mistaken their recent successes (we won't bring up the Lamont failure) to some quality of truth in their views. In fact, they failed to note the widespread atmosphere of fury throughout the society directed at Bush. They have just been picking the low hanging fruit of that fury.

The immigration deal provided some fuel that fired up the right. They may appear older and less hip, but they can still get just as angry. Maybe more so. Doesn't the word crotchety sort of belong to those of a certain age?

The Death Of Internet Radio Is Imminent

One of the great features of the internet has been the capacity to listen to an extraordinary array of sources of music, information and talk from around the world via audio streaming.

An arcane entity called the Copyright Royalty Board, a creation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996. That piece of legislation is a wholly bought and paid for creation of the major labels of the record industry, the major movie studios and other related business giants. It is pure K Street product, filtered through the Congress for the sake of appearances.

What the Copyright Royalty Board is proposing to do is significantly raise the royalty rates to be paid to the owners of recordings, the large record companies, presumably with some share of the total going to the actual creators of the music, the artists who wrote and performed it. No one objects to paying the creators for their work, but anyone who has ever paid attention to the music business is familiar with the extraordinary accounting creativity of the music and movie businesses that make it a regular occurence that big selling songs or movies produce pennies or often nothing, to their creators.

The large expansion in these royalties, retroactive to 2006, is a particular hardship on public radio stations and other nonprofit or small independent sources of programming. Most of these will be forced to stop their webcasting.

David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, has a lengthy explanation of the problem. (Thanks for the heads up from Andrew Sullivan.)

If you have ever enjoyed the discovery of musical joy found in a station from abroad or across the country, please consider signing this petition set up by Save the Streams.org in an attempt to influence Congress to intervene.

The internet will be a poorer place if this goes through.