I linked a few days back to Andrew Dubber’s interview at Hometracked, and mentioned his downloadable free e-book, on the new industry, and ways to navigate such. Since then Andrew has found himself in the middle of quite some little Internet firestorm. It all started when he posted a link to a post on a site called Download Squad. The story had to do with a lawsuit a certain Ms. Del Cid of Florida is filing against the RIAA to counter an action the US industry body is taking against her.

The piece on Download Squad is worded as a perfectly straightforward news story with a few opinions thrown in there, the strongest being

The RIAA has been terrorizing many people who they knew didn’t have anything to do with alleged copyright violations, including dead people, young children, and the elderly.

Which, I guess from the RIAA’s POV, is strong stuff, but really no more so than what is more less generally publicly perceived. The RIAA has been roundly criticised across the spectrum for the way it’s pursued downloaders, often very insignificant, and the merciless persecution of people who’s lives would likely be ruined by the action.

Andrew’s blog’s primary focus is the way the new technology can be utilised to advantage by artists and labels, and a story like this is clearly highly relevant as the result of the suit could potentially be precedent setting. So he linked to the story.

However a certain Paul Birch, owner of an independent UK label, Revolver Records, took exception to the link and so began the astounding email discourse which can be found here. Mr Birch is also a board member of the IFPI…the international body representing the record industry.

The back and forth was gob smacking, Mr Birch, clearly a man of some standing in the UK’s industry was at times abusive, threatening, irrational and contradictory. But the upshot was that he gave the impression of an unpleasant bully threatening to shut Andrew down, and make a complaint to his employers simply because Andrew linked to a site making a comment, under the provisions, I guess, in the US, of the First Amendment. It was very ugly and unnecessary. And Andrew was never less than polite and completely professional in responses.

Mr Birch says, amongst other things:

I think that what is more desirable is to take down links from your site that promote this hatred of the recording Industry, because the assumption is that by linking to them that you support the extreme view heralded.

Really?

Andrew sent through, with Mr Birch’s permission, the conversation as a part of his regular blog email updates, and I received it on Saturday evening.

With 24 hours it had gone around the world, was highly placed on digg, had a thread on the US Industry forum, Velvet Rope, and had hit dozens of blogs.

Paul Birch was famous and for all the wrong reasons. He was, universally derided for both his stance and his nasty bullying; Andrew’s site crashed for 24 hours because of excess traffic and Mr Birch had given the original story brand new legs.

None of which seems surprising because looking at Revolver’s terribe website and their half baked My Space, they are truly luddites, dinosaurs…the world has passed them by. A major independent UK label which has virtually no web presence, and what there is includes a bunch of badly formatted links to various copyright issues. This guy doesn’t understand the modern world, but he seems to be aggressively obsessed by tilting at it.

And as if anything could be more indicative of the hole the record industry finds itself it, and is digging ever larger every day, our luddite bully boy is on the board of the world’s recording industry body (I must tell the story of the time a Blam Blam Blam member asked the president of said body if he had any drugs…but not now), which of course includes the RIAA as it’s largest member. The same body which is accused, on paper, screen, and now in the courts of threatening and bullying behaviour. Gosh…..

As an opinionated aside, looking at Revolver and its subsidiary, the imaginatively named “Heavy Metal Records” (a forthcoming album on the page due for release in Jan 2006!), it’s hard not to want to throw some of the blame for any pain Mr Birch might be feeling back in his A&R face. What an appalling catalogue of shabby dated acts, dodgy live recordings, fallen acts’ re-recordings of their hits and the like…and he’s on the board of the IFPI.

It speaks volumes, no?

Update:

A day later Andrew found himself explaining basic copyright parameters to Mr Birch

I don’t know why I don’t feel the urge to post here as often as I did. Certainly my mind is in a more languid state since I moved up to Indonesia…actually, on reflection, languid is the completely wrong word to use. Languid implies listlessness and I’m thinking more than I’ve thought for years, but the thought process here in the tropics, here in this wonderful crazy ordered but irrational archipelago, is more relaxed and less battered by the endless unnecessary imputation of stressful moments. Here, a day is not measured by how many small fires you manage to put out or minor victories but rather a sense of satisfaction that each day you can, all things willing, achieve one more substantial thing and the pleasure you get from that victory. Around that little victory you can happily surround yourself with things that give you even more joy…creating things, thinking, reading, listening, and watching, without the pressures and aggression that Auckland forces on you. Fucking hell, just driving the length of Queen Street is more stressful than a week here. In one day my CD-Rom in the laptop died (courtesy of the firmware update that HP suggested and then don’t support despite the countless posts on the net suggesting I’m not alone in having my Toshiba SD-R6252 drive killed by the update) then I lost internet connectivity because Telkom here had lost all record of my payment a week back – although dealing with Telkom here is a happy breath of fresh air after Telecom NZ’s luddite ways…perhaps TNZ could spent a little of its vast profits bringing it’s technology into the latter part of the last century, then its only a short jump into the 21^st …I’ve just been battling my way through their online billing services for small businesses…unbelievably unlike their peers in virtually every other nation on the planet they have none. So, where exactly does the annual $200 per head profit for every man woman and child in New Zealand go to? If you ask Telecom, it’s into new technology. Beep..wrong answer..Telecom simply adapts technology developed offshore by other companies and it certainly doesn’t go into things like online billing which is at best, in 2005, rudimentary by international standards. I have no problem with a return to shareholders…but since Telecom has a state maintained monopoly charging some of the highest rates for phone and internet use on planet earth a little re-investment is not an unreasonable ask….and in my own fiscally naïve way I would assume that New Zealand’s economy would benefit somewhat if all those hundreds of millions of dollars were not being funnelled offshore each year.

So, anyway, my cd / dvd player got fucked up (it still is…thanks HP) and my net connection got nixed (and fixed in 15 minutes…thanks Telkom) but what would’ve resulted in a minor blowout for me in enzed was a non event here. A little bit of perspective. These things don’t matter at all.

What I do find scary is the number of people warned me about Indonesia back in New Zealand…”Are you sure it’s a wise thing to do?”; “Aren’t you worried?” and other such garbage..

Shut up for gods sake.

None of the warning voices of course have ever been here and I have to admit bemusement as to why there are government travel advisories to Bali but none to London, New York or, the obvious next target, Sydney (lets face it John Howard would unquestioningly have troops on the high seas to Santiago before Condi finished the sentence requesting it, if Bush wanted him to invade Chile…what a thing it must be to have a completely subservient foreign policy…then again I guess NZ will find out if National gets in).

The Fox /CNN-isation of the media doesn’t help…jingoistic narrowly focused stories presented in the most simplistic and superficial way and repeated over and over again with the overriding assumption being that you, the viewer, is a moron. And so the world must have its ogres and I guess 200 million Muslims presents a large and easy target and helps keep the required Bush fear factor in good health….

Tracey Dahlby’s engrossing Allah’s Torch is a worthy reflection on this, a journey through Indonesia looking for the real and not so real ogres herein, and offers reasoned thoughts as to the root misunderstandings and misreadings that have given us both. I read the chapter on the targeting of the Hyatt in Yogjakarta the day after I’d checked out……….

Walking past a TV shop in Denpasar today and saw the video of 3 The Hard Way’s “Nothing’s Changed” on the big screen in the window today…MTV or Channel V I guess. The only other NZ act I’ve encountered in Indonesia is Bic Runga…”Sway” seems to get a bit of video and radio play