http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2008/08/chinese_democra.html August 28, 2008 | Comments: (27) 33 votes Chinese democracy meets US justice The feds have arrested a 27-year-old blogger for posting unreleased Guns N' Roses songs to his site, and Cringely is steamed. Read on to find out what's making him so mad. TAGS: Political pandering, The DMCA Blues, There's an RIAA riot goin' on Yesterday, FBI agents raided the Los Angeles home of 27-year-old blogger Kevin Cogill and arrested him. Cogill's crime? He uploaded nine unreleased tracks from the upcoming Guns N' Roses album to his blog. The album is titled “Chinese Democracy.” Now there's an oxymoron for you. Cogill admits to posting the files last June so GnR nuts could stream them off his music blog. He took them down when he received a cease and desist letter, and cooperated with the FBI in its investigation. According to Wikipedia (admittedly not the most reliable source) six of the songs had been made available in some other form and three were new. Now Cogill's looking at three years in the pokey and fines of $250,000, plus whatever damages the band might choose to pursue. The legal argument here is that posting files for free kills legitimate sales of the music. (And Lord knows GnR must need the money – they've only sold 90 million records during their career.) But Cogill didn't make the files available for downloading. He streamed them to a player on his blog. If someone can explain to me how streaming music cuts out legitimate sales, I'd like to hear it. Don't we have an invention that does something very similar called ... radio? Hasn't that been the prime marketing vehicle for the recording industry for the past 50 years? There's only one rational explanation for a deed so trivial to get this kind of attention. Someone with some serious juice is leaning on the Feds. Now I mean no disrepect to the hardworking guys and gals in blue suits and buzz cuts. They have a tough job and they seem to do it pretty well. In fact, the FBI has more on their plates than they can possibly handle. So to send five agents to arrest a scruffy blogger for streaming a handful of MP3s almost certainly means somebody pulled some strings. Let me posit this hypothetical scenario. Recording industry mogul hears about the scruffy blogger, goes postal, calls his highly paid lobbying firm on K Street. Lobbyist contacts Senator on the Judiciary Committee – say, someone with a history of pushing RIAA-friendly legislation in return for major campaign donations (Orrin Hatch, your Blackberry is buzzing). Senator calls the FBI director, who calls the director of the LA office. PR firm for recording mogul selectively leaks story of arrest to a handful of news outlets. Next thing you know Cogill is in cuffs and everybody has a nice juicy story to run on how the Internet is destroying the recording industry. (News flash: The recording industry is destroying the recording industry. Can't happen too soon, in my opinion.) This truly is Chinese Democracy in action. The ruling party makes the rules and breaks them when they feel like it. They selectively prosecute those they perceive as enemies, while failing to act on far more serious breaches of the public trust by their allies. I don't think I need to list the many examples we've seen over the last eight years. There are lots of ways this situation could have played out short of bringing in the Feds. Guns N' Roses management could have accepted Cogill's decision to take down the files and been done. They could have asked him for a royalty fee equivalent to what radio stations pay and continued to stream the music to fans hungry for more GnR. Or maybe they should have just thanked Cogill for putting the band back in the spotlight, 13 years after they last staggered out of a recording studio. What do you think? Is three years in prison for nine songs a fair penalty? Who else deserves some time in the pokey? Post your responses below or email me: cringe (at) infoworld (dot) com. Posted by Robert X. Cringely on August 28, 2008 11:52 AM ------------ 'What we've got here is failure to communicate Some men you just can't reach So you get what we had here last week Which is the way he wants it! Well, he gets it! No, I don't like it any more than you men Look at your young men fighting Look at your women crying Look at your young men dying The way they've always done before Look at the hate we're breeding Look at the fear we're feeding Look at the lives we're leading The way we've always done before My hands are tied The billions shift from side to side And the wars go on with brainwashed pride For the love of God and our human rights And all these things are swept aside By bloody hands time can't deny And are washed away by your genocide And history hides the lies of our civil wars D'you wear a black armband When they shot the man Who said "Peace could last forever" And in my first memories They shot Kennedy I went numb when I learned to see So I never fell for Vietnam We got the wall of D.C. to remind us all That you can't trust freedom When it's not in your hands When everybody's fightin' for their promised land
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