A Little Activism

I did indeed get around to sending some letters out about being screwed over by the Oakland Athletics back in March. My letter to the San Francisco Chronicle was actually printed:

I also sent letters to the Athletics and to the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, but haven't heard anything back from them, and I doubt I ever will.

But it made me feel better.

On another subject, many of you may be aware that the Internet radio industry is on the brink of extinction. The heinous Digital Millennium Copyright Act is an evil law which was forced through Congress by the media corporations; it's the one that made it illegal to even talk about methods of breaking copy protection. (If there is a hell, the people who devised and passed this law deserve to burn in it.) It also provides for record companies to be paid for every song played on an Internet radio station. However, the prices eventually set are astronomically high compared to the actual revenue of Internet radio stations, and are also retroactive. Basically, the DMCA is going to drive all but big, corporate-run Internet radio off the air.

Which means, for instance, that later this month, my favorite progressive rock radio station, Aural Moon, might end up disappearing. Which would suck, not just because I enjoy listening to it, but because I've discovered several new groups whose music I enjoy and whose records I've bought and plan to buy. And if the station goes away, then it will be that much harder for me to discover other new artists I want to buy.

Which is, of course, just the way corporate America wants it. They don't want me discovering good new artists that I like; they want me to spend my money on the cookie-cutter pap like Britney Spears.

It's a law that doesn't benefit the consumer, and doesn't benefit the artists. All it benefits are large corporations and their deep pockets.

SaveInternetRadio.org says all of this better than I can, and they also suggest writing to your Senators and Representatives to object to the licensing rules, which could be overturned by the Copyright Office later this month.

I'm going to send some out this week. Because this just sucks. If you listen to Internet radio - or if you just object to being raped by the media conglomerates - then I suggest you do the same.

On another note...

A few weeks ago I wrote about a comic book from the 80s that I enjoyed, called Open Season, by cartoonist Jim Bricker. It was a short-lived affair, and I'd never heard anything about Bricker since then.

I was surprised, then, to receive an e-mail from the man himself yesterday afternoon. He'd done a Google search on his name and the comic, and turned up my page (indeed, my entry was at the top of Google's list for the keywords). It seems he did some assorted work for a variety of companies (including Disney) in the late 80s and early 90s, but since then has mainly been focusing on his job and his family.

He seems like a nice guy. He still lives in the area. Maybe we'll bump into each other sometime.

The Internet is neat, sometimes.

When the government and the corporations aren't trying to wreck it, that is.