…and a Happy New Year

I usually shy away from making resolutions at the start of the year, largely due to the phenomenal fail rate of any long-term life changes it is customary for one to attempt.

However, this year is a little different. Somehow, I seem to have accidentally instigated a few changes around New Year’s, and I figure I’ll take common advice and document them here as a statement of intent and a reminder when old habits rear their heads later on.

As I said in my last post, I think I’ve become a much better musician since throwing myself into unfamiliar territory with more experienced players, so my first goal is to take as many of these chances as possible, and turn down less gigs. I figure if it goes a bit wrong I won’t be booked by those MDs again, but that’s surely preferable to never being booked at all due to my own lack of self-belief.

Secondly, I’ve bought a little pocket diary and aim to keep a bullet-point journal of the little (and big) things that happen each, both to help me remember all the brilliant stuff I get up to and forget about, and also to keep a bit of check on how often I drink out, go on shopping sprees, or waste days not achieving a great deal. With a bit of luck this’ll act as a bit of a reality check for me and help to curb my inherent laziness a little.

I have to admit at this point, I’ve fallen into the trap of clichés and plan to join a gym and sort out my lifestyle a bit. I’m already imposing limiting beliefs on this, but I reckon if I’ve paid good money for a membership it’ll inspire me to actually make use of it. I’m also packing the drink in for a while, to give my poor liver a little break.

Finally, I’ve decided on a project that I’m genuinely excited about. I often try to write my own songs, especially when inspired by a number of good friends who are brilliant at it, only to scrap them when I run out of steam or decide the material isn’t meeting my expectation. Therefore, I thought I’d do something about it, kind of in the spirit of NanoWrimo, and write & record an album. It will only be for me, I’ll probably put the tracks online for download should anybody else be remotely interest, but the focus will be on quantity of material, rather than its quality. That way the halting factor of my abilities not living up to the high level of my contemporaries will cease to exist, and hopefully I’ll be able to grow in confidence and ability.

So, those are my 4 ‘resolutions’, although I don’t like the idea of calling them that. I may blog more about them, I may not. One thing I do hope is that as I fill my time up with more interesting activities (and wrote them down for posterity), that this blog and my Twitter postings will become more populated with worthwhile content.

Sometimes 140 characters isn’t enough…

Earlier today I read an article on Mashable announcing the sale of The Pirate Bay to Global Gaming Factory X AB, who as far as I can tell specialise in Internet cafes and marketing within them. The fee is reportedly $7.8million, although 50% of this figure is tied into stocks in GGF – a very shrewd move, but I’ll come to that later.

As you can imagine, devoted users of the site aren’t particularly happy about this. For a start, the former owners of TPB have just fought a very public court battle on the basis that the entire entertainment industry can “go f**k itself”. They lost, but you just have to admire the bravado involved, don’t you? Of course they’ve immediately been branded as sell-outs for abandoning their previous business model, and selling up to a third party who are looking to legitimise the service.

The attitude taken by many Pirate Bay fans (and critics) is probably best summed up in this reaction from Twitter user @sethmeyers21, who makes a great comment on a company whose business model consists of “give away other people’s property for free*, and charge huge advertising fees to pay for the hosting charges and legal battles”.

*I’m aware that TPB never hosted Torrents; they’re just a tracking site – but my point still stands.

Personally I’m pretty damn sure I would do the same thing in their position; Landed with $3million+ to pay in damages after their court case, plus lawyer’s fees, the eyes of the world media upon them, and withstanding constant legal threats from the corporate giants of the entertainment industry (or MAFIAA, as one TPB user rather smartly put it). With this sale the four businessmen in question can retire comfortably, albeit after serving a year in jail, and continue to fund and support other organisations. Besides, suggestions within an official blog point to the possibility that the former TPB owners will still be involved behind the scenes, working to improve Torrent speeds and allegedly even developing an alternative medium for peer-2-peer sharing.

To me it all sounds very positive; The men behind an extremely successful and technically legal (although not entirely moral) business gain enough money to pay out what they owe, along with shares in a company who will no doubt receive a mind-numbing whirlwind of attention from global media. As I said before, I applaud this move from Global Gaming Factory; giving away nearly $4m worth of shares in their company ensures that their TPB predecessors will maintain a vested interest in the website and stick around to offer their advice on the technological and business decisions to be made in the future – at no physical cost to GGF. Of course, if they don’t play their cards right the world could soon be without PirateBay.org (remember how they’re a gaming company? Perhaps they simply think $3million is a price worth paying to rid an industry of a massive revenue gap…)

Although the official line from the Pirate Bay is that things will mostly stay the same, a press release from the new bosses states that they’re looking to introduce a new business model; one which rewards content providers and copyright holders, as well as increasing download speed and transparency for the consumer. To be perfectly honest, that sounds fantastic! The entertainment industry has been attacking the issue of piracy in every wrong way possible for 10 years, and only now are they starting to realise what can be done about it. If Global Gaming Factory have a workable system to provide consumers with easy access to every Album, Game, Film, and TV Show they could possibly want at the touch of a button – while simultaneously providing revenue to the very people who make it – they could be earning money in previously unimaginable quantities.

As it stands, the problem lies in the fact that iTunes, HMV.com, Amazon, and a myriad of other digital distributors are difficult to use, often require specific software, and charge much more than consumers are willing to pay without rewarding the content providers accordingly. For example, on a standard 79p music download from iTunes, the artist sees 3-4p of it, and that’s before publishers, managers, and all their other staff take a cut.

In contrast, you can sit at home and Google your favourite band’s name followed by the word “torrent” to download the entire discography almost instantly, for FREE. Because of this, any startup company who have the business model to monetise that (via advertising, subscription fees, or some other means), whilst being able to keep an accurate record of how many downloads each torrent achieves in order to pay the creator, will still fall at the first hurdle. However, if some bright spark DID have that idea, perhaps the first step towards making it reality would be to buy out the biggest competitor in the field – namely The Pirate Bay.

Since the advent of Spotify, you can listen to a huge catalogue of high-quality music for free, on an unlimited basis – as long as you can put up with a few ads. Alternatively you can pay a fee to upgrade. If you only listen to music at home when you’re near your PC, why bother downloading Torrents, clogging your HardDrive space, and potentially facing legal action? If GGF have a similar model in mind for the Pirate Bay, perhaps it will dissuade many ordinary people from illegally downloading copyrighted material for free.

On the other hand, TPB may go the way of Napster and DivX, both of which lost millions of users when they went legit. Where did these users go? To KazAa and Limewire; eventually to MiniNova and The Pirate Bay. Whatever the business model is (if they even have something specific in mind), The Pirate Bay needs to be cheap, fast, easy, and of equal benefit to Creators and Consumers if it is to succeed.

The BNP *may* be racist

WARNING: If your political leanings err on the side of BNP sympathy, 1) stop reading for fear of offence, and 2) please remove yourself to a location as far away from me and my blog as possible.

Now – this entry deals with a topic close to my heart, and I’ve been meaning to write about it since July 4th when the BNP gained two seats in the European parliament. That in itself is far from apocalyptic, since the Conservatives hold 26 seats, Labour 13, and Lib Dem 11. Incidentally, top runners from other countries include Italy’s People of Freedom (centre-right) and Germany’s Christian democratic party; so it’s not all bad.

The catalyst for my anger was an article in Reuters today – reporting that the EHRC has written a letter to the party leader “warning him that the party’s membership criteria, employment practices and provision of services may be unlawful.” Not surprisingly, the issue is with the United Kingdom’s race relations act 1973, which states that

“It is unlawful for a person, in relation to employment by him at an establishment in Great Britain, to discriminate against another—

(a)

in the arrangements he makes for the purpose of determining who should be offered that employment; or

(b)

in the terms on which he offers him that employment; or

(c)

by refusing or deliberately omitting to offer him that employment.”

The fact that the BNP has a policy of “all-white membership” is explained away on their website by listing organisations which, conversely, are made up entirely from Asian or Black members, inciting that these organisations should also be labelled as “racist” for representing a single ethnic group.

I do not believe the BNP to be racist on the grounds of their all-white membership. I believe them to be racist on the grounds of their policies. For example:

“…we call for an immediate halt to all further immigration, the immediate deportation of criminal and illegal immigrants, and 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[sic] financial incentives…”

Where are these “generous financial incentives” going to come from? Oh yes – all that money we’re wasting overseas helping those damned foreigners piece their lives back together.

“We reject the idea that Britain must forever be obliged to subsidise the incompetence and corruption of Third World states by supplying them with financial aid.”

Furthermore, the policies on that same website explicitly label all asylum seekers as “bogus”, announce the part’s plans to withdraw from both the European Union and NATO, and advocate building the strongest army possible – built on national service.

If you’re still unsure if the British National Party aren’t all that bad, take a look at their lesser-known policies.

“We support the re-introduction of corporal punishment for petty criminals and vandals, and the restoration of capital punishment for paedophiles, terrorists and murderers…”

“…the BNP calls for the selective exclusion of foreign-made goods from British markets and the reduction of foreign imports.”

I’m not making this up; it’s all verbatim from the official site. Contrary to what I said at the outset of this article, if these policies are things you agree with, then by all means vote BNP and I applaud you for it. What I heartily and fundamentally disagree with is people using their vote in this way with such a minimal knowledge of policies and knock-on effect of their decision.

As I discovered via a great blog entitled “curry and a bit of Motown“, the majority of voters don’t even know the name of the candidate they voted for, never mind their policies.

If there’s one thing I admire scumbag Nick Griffin and his fascist army for, it’s their superior marketing and publicity campaign – glossing over their less favourable policies, and emphasising their healthcare, employment, and democratic ideals. The BNP are capitalising on economic recession, political unrest, and public dissatisfaction to their own end.

That kind of propaganda was most famously (and disastrously) used by this bloke:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana