Public Address - Hard News (Home)

British style | Apr 05, 2007 10:54

It's good news that the captured British sailors are to be released - and a vindication of the British government's diplomatic approach. Raising the temperature would have been indulging the banality of the Iran leadership's rhetoric.

Of course, the Americans didn't help, with Bush referring unhelpfully to "hostages" after promising not to even mention the issue, and the jobless John Bolton trying to pick fights with everyone. Bolton declared the British approach "pathetic".

IMHO, it was quite a lot better than, say, doing a secret and illegal deal to sell arms to the Iranian government in exchange for hostage release and using the money to illegally fund South American terrorists, then trying to destroy the evidence. But that's just me.

So when will the US release the Iranian officials it captured while they were on an official visit to Iraq, on what The Independent claims was a botched attempt to kidnap two Iranian generals who had been meeting with the Iraqi Prime Minister? You can imagine Tehran still feels a bit sour about that.

Meanwhile, Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi visits Syria and gets a result. And while the White House and its cheerleaders all but accuse her of treason for making the trip, it emerges that the Republican congressmen who visited Syria, like, last week, went with "the co-operation of the administration." You couldn't make this stuff up.

The usual exaggerated outrage on Kiwiblog over Steve Maharey swearing in the House (actually, I think Whaleoil's video is very good, except for the silly whiny bits). As I've noted in the thread, the same people would have been beside themselves with fury if Sean Plunket had concluded an interview with a National Party MP by musing on whether he was a "racist", without scope for a response. Maharey had every right to be outraged. What he didn't have the right to do was get on the hotline and start shouting about going to the Radio New Zealand board. Make a BSA complaint, take a ticket and stand in line with the rest of us, Steve.

I'm rather less exercised by the actual cussing that some people are having conniptions about. And so, it turns out, is Peter Cresswell, who observes: "At least when Little Steve says 'Fuck you' he means it. What has John Key ever said that he would stand behind?"

Taking his cue from the re-launch of the Coalition for Open Government, which is lobbying for election funding reform, No Right Turn rounds up blog comment and outlines his own views on what should be done. Very well worth reading.

And on a completely different tip, Randominanity at Blogging It Real finds a nifty little app that lets you make a map of countries you've visited. It's quite salient to see how many places one hasn't been. Here's mine.

Feel free to post links to yours, but unfortunately, you won't be able to use the embed code in our forums. You'll just have to cut and paste the URL, which ends with a string of capital letters.

And with that, happy Easter everyone. Have a rest (I know I will be) and have a listen to Public Address Radio, 2pm Saturday on Radio Live. This week, we visit a NOS bar and ask why they're so crazy about party pills in Christchurch, David Haywood does body-mod science and we are pleased to present the debut of 180 Seconds With Craig Ranapia. And yes, we'll be a bit smarter about getting the MP3s online afterwards.

(73 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Things we needed to hear | Apr 04, 2007 09:24

It has been fashionable in the past few weeks to say that Dame Margaret Bazley's Commission of Inquiry into Police Conduct, because it would not name names or venture on cases under investigation and had been conducted under tight terms of reference, would be a blancmange. It isn't.

You only need to read parts of the report to be impressed by its canny, consistent tone. And the not-naming-names has had a beneficial effect in this way: it leaves nothing for the news media to focus on but the issues. They can find their perps and victims under their own steam.

The report, happily, describes an improvement and in police conduct of procedures since the 1980s and, less happily, finds a Police Complaints Authority that can't be bothered communicating with complainants and really doesn't meet the standards expected of a modern public agency. I guess I'm not the only one perplexed and surprised by the lack of a code of conduct.

I've never quite been able to decide how much of my more courteous dealings with police officers in the public road come down to the fact that I'm just older and how much is culture change, but I do think that the police are in a much better state now than in the 1980s.

It still makes me angry to recall how, more than once, I silently fumed while bad cops picked on and abused my gay friend Rupert for no other reason than they could. And I can hardly believe now the way they'd show up at the Windsor Castle spoiling for a fight. I remember stories about the notorious police private bar in Timaru.

I wonder if there wasn't a turning point after the Aotea Square riot in 1985. That Christmas, I was down at my folks' place and a senior Maori policeman, who would become a good friend of the family, was around for a barbecue.

"So Russell tells me you guys blew it at Aotea Square," said my Dad with his usual tact.

I cringed. I'd only just met the guy and Dad had dropped me right in it.

"Yes," said the officer. "Yes we did."

My subjective impression is that the police were never as bullying or confrontational after that. Although in the mid-90s I did spend a couple of social evenings in the company of some older policemen who were plain racist, sexist bastards. One evening I had to leave and go around to my lawyer friend's place to splutter indignantly.

Police officers have a hell of a job. They do things most of us could, or are glad not to. It's not hard to understand the culture of loyalty such conditions produce. But the cases listed in the report of sexual harassment in the workplace and conduct towards members of the public are disturbing, and often not well handled - and not all distant history either. Things have to be better than this.

Meanwhile, down at misogyny corner, the commentary of one former officer unwittingly tends to bear out unflattering stereotypes of the police in the 1980s, while someone else declares that "this has been orchestrated to take PC control of the police". Whatever.

At any rate, Dame Margaret deserves great praise for this report. It's thorough, intellectually rigorous and frank. And it says things we needed to hear.

(92 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

You've gotta hand it to Steve | Apr 03, 2007 10:38

You've gotta hand it to Steve. Yesterday's announcement that EMI will make almost its entire catalogue available via Apple's iTunes Music Store in high-quality non-DRM format from next month. What happened was an elegant solution to at least six different issues, which are, in no particular order:

1. A small but vocal minority of iTunes users has been calling for higher-bitrate files.

2. The major record labels have been trying to shift Apple off its one-size-fits-all pricing.

3. The same labels are battling a shift away from album purchases online.

4. Steve Jobs was under some pressure to take some concrete action to back up his open letter about how music sales would be better with no DRM.

5. For all the iPod's market-conquering success, the fact that iTunes downloads were incompatible with other portable players was only going to become more of a problem.

6. EMI's music business needed a circuit-breaker to arrest its alarming financial decline.

The new 256kbit/s DRM-free AAC files will cost slightly more for single purchases, but album prices will remain the same, increasing the incentive for consumers to purchase whole albums. You'll be able to pony up the cash difference to upgrade your whole EMI catalogue, meaning a nice little welcome-in windfall for EMI.

Will the new downloads wind up on the file-sharing services? Of course. But Apple has nothing to lose from the AAC format starting to crowd out MP3 in the wider (that is, including pirated) market, especially when Microsoft is trying to lock in its own proprietary WMA as the format of choice. And neither do we: MP3 is an outdated technology stuck in a patent mess. There are already quite a few mobile players that support AAC and, significantly, they include most 3G mobile phones.

The signal appears to be that this deal will extend beyond iTunes. And I daresay the people at this country's biggest digital music store - Vodafone's one - will be studying the news with interest. Their fare is currently DRM-infested WMA files. Is there any reason they would not want to sell EMI's music in a format that's not only compatible with their phones, but plays on an iPod and (when it comes) and iPhone too?

It puts EMI Music New Zealand in an ironic position of course, given that the company was party last week to RIANZ's select committee testament to the holy status of DRM. I can't see how the local artists EMI distributes - including Goldenhorse, the Black Seeds, the Datsuns, Salmonella Dub and Blindspott - would not be party to the deal.

British-based PA reader David Lucas notes a smaller, but still significant shift. A radio group convinces the British PPL (which licenses the use of music recordings) that the sky won't fall if 30-sec chunks of music are included in radio podcasts. Huzzah!

Fun corner: an even bigger music industry announcement yesterday turned out to be an April Fool's Day joke. Shame, really …

Elsewhere: Augie Auer just gets more, um, interesting. Latest public utterance: demanding that NIWA be closed down because he doesn't like its findings on climate change. The backdrop to this, although I'm not sure how directly relevant it is here, is the dispute between NIWA and MetService over who gets to make weather forecasts. NIWA believes it has better models (it certainly has a bigger computer) and that forecasting is implicit in its task of predicting longer-term weather trends. MetService doesn't think so.

And, finally, reader Matt queries the police recruiting banner that appears across the top of these pages:

I'm interested to know if there was any pressure put on Public Address to accept the police as an advertiser subsequent to your accurate observations surrounding the Clint Rickards / Bob Schollum case(s), or whether they simply paid too well that Public Address couldn't refuse.

That would be funny, but no. I didn't even know the ad had been sold until I saw it. It was booked via our arrangement with Scoop, and I presume an agency and the Internet Bureau were involved too. It's part of a wider campaign embracing billboards and adshell advertising.

It just seems that as far as target audiences go, Public Address readers don't really seem to fit into the likely group of potential police recruits.

Possibly not, but they're welcome to try.

I am genuinely interested if there were any 2nd thoughts or hesitations about advertising for the police recruitment drive, given the recent Louise Nicholas and other cases which have illuminated some rather nasty aspects of the culture within our police force.

Of course not. I don't blame every policeman for the actions of a few.

So, I while I understand that some bad apples don't spoil the barrel, it just seems unusual to me that Public Address which has a great niche audience and no doubt employs selective marketing, would actively go out and seek this kind of advertising - and so I am genuinely interested in the real politik that surrounds these issues.

Er, there isn't any …

And just for the hell of it, Bill Maher's 'New Rules' is always funny. He also riffs on one of his favourites, drug policy.

(87 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

The Public Good | Apr 02, 2007 09:09

Is the Campbell Smith who told a select committee last week that illicit downloading was killing his artists' careers and forcing them into day jobs the same Campbell Smith who told a room full of people several years ago that he didn't have much of a problem with file-sharing, which was "the only marketing we've got in most territories"?

Yup. I don't particularly hold it against Campbell. He's a good guy. And back then, he was solely an artist manager. Now he's an artist manager and the CEO of the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand, and there are different expectations of him.

It is probably true that illicit copying is costing some local artists some sales, but it is certainly not true that it accounts for the career fortunes of Campbell's whole roster. If Scribe's scratching a bit, that'll be because he hasn't had a new album in nearly four years and has barely played locally for the past two.

And Bic Runga's third album, Birds, has sold only 50,000 copies (compared to 100,000 and 160,000 respectively for the first two) because it doesn't have any pop hits on it. That's not a criticism, but it's sombre and introspective even by her standards. But it still entered the New Zealand charts at number one and sold double platinum in a fortnight. That 50,000 sales represents triple platinum status.

And I'm not sure if Campbell's artist will thank him for the mention, which won her some unwarranted hostility from readers in the Herald's Your Views section.

Update: This just in from Bic herself in her MySpace blog:

Got home to some fuss in the media about how most New Zealand musicians have to have day jobs. Now that's never been news! But you know, I haven't flipped burgers since i was 15 (actually, I was very good at it, I once made up an order of 21 burgers in one go.) Thanks for your concern, but most musicians are just happy to be musicians.

The more modest recent sales figures for some well-known artists need to be set against the fact that the late 90s and early 2000s were a period of unprecedented sales success. There were more multi-platinum New Zealand releases than there have ever been. New Zealand music sales grew in a declining overall market, and a handful of artists had a simply phenomenal impact.

But previous results are no guarantee of future performance. Nesian Mystik's sophomore album captured few hearts the way their first one did. And it's not like no one's selling records. In the past two years, Fat Freddy's Drop's Based on a True Story has set a new record for weeks at number one total and weeks on chart. It has sold 105,000 copies so far. If downloading is killing music, someone forgot to tell the Freddies.

It wasn't business as usual: Based on a True Story was the first independently-distributed album to top the local chart, and it did so with almost no conventional marketing expenditure. The band played live and toured a lot, and ran itself as a self-contained business. Its arrangement with its distributor, Rhythm Method, was based on trust, rather than a formal contract.

IF RIANZ members - that is, the major music companies - want to use the artists to plead their case, they also need to be called on the way they treat those artists, especially in the small but growing realm of legitimate download sales. As I've explained here before, a local artist signed with a major label will typically get about half as much from a sale on the iTunes Store as an independent artist. I know of one or two artists tied to major labels who are quite frankly being screwed on downloads.

But sales are but one income stream for today's artists, and not always the key one either. A single licence for a track to be used in a TV ad makes a direct copyright return to the creator that's worth thousands of sales. Other forms of rights income are nearly as important. None of these are under threat from file-sharing, and none will be facilitated by the kind of draconian laws the industry is demanding for its benefit.

RIANZ spent a lot of money on its select committee submission, so much so that Independent Music New Zealand chose to join in rather than make its own. I've seen the submission, and it would be fair to say I'm very disappointed by parts of it.

The highly conditional format-shifting exception and qualms about the exalted status of TPMs via Section 226 have been dealt with fairly extensively. So - pausing to note that the music companies' submission calls for the bill to be strengthened to make it an offence for anyone to personally circumvent a technological protection measure - let's start here:

Secondly, the subscription model, which typically allows unlimited rental-style access to a catalogue of songs in return for a fixed monthly fee. These services offer access to catalogues of up to one million separate recordings. Subscription services are a growth area for the music industry. Music subscription services such as Rhapsody, Napster and e-Music now reach 3.5 million consumers worldwide, growing by 25% in the last year.

Although subscription services are not yet available in New Zealand, we are hopeful that the developing market will soon support such services. We discuss this further with regard to TPMs below.

I would have thought that $35,000 worth of lawyering would have procured a little more accuracy. Emusic, the second-biggest music download service in the world, does require a monthly subscription, but it assuredly is not a subscription service in the way the RIANZ submission implies. You download a track from eMusic, you keep it.

And insofar as it relates to TPMs (technological protection measures), it's an argument against them. Emusic sells high-bitrate MP3 files with no DRM. It is available to New Zealanders. And the major labels' expression of "hope" for emusic is a little ironic, given that they all refuse to license music to it because of its no-DRM policy.

One of the more draconian provisions in the draft Copyright Amendment Bill is 84 (c) - the one that would withdraw the exception for "time-shifting" of programmes - that is, recording for later consumption - in circumstances where there was an on-demand version of the programme available, even at an additional cost.

TVNZ has told the select committee it doesn't even want this provision (which would ban the use of a PVR or VCR to record Shortland Street, TV news and a very wide range of other TV and radio programmes made available either free or for purchase via the internet) - that it's simply unrealistic in terms of consumer behaviour. RIANZ, as you might expect, thinks it doesn't go far enough:

A further development to be taken account of is the newly-created market for podcasts of work. Copyright owners or licensed providers now make podcasts available for purchase and obtain a return. The wide time shifting provision in the Bill will interfere with the normal exploitation of copyright owners and thus be in conflict with both the Berne Convention and TRIPs Agreement.

This is nonsense. I'm not aware of a single New Zealand podcast made available on a paid basis, and few that are produced in New Zealand contain musical elements - because RIANZ almost always denies permission.

But the submission's depiction of copyright crisis is relentless. Take the section on stream-ripping - the online equivalent of taping stuff off the radio:

Stream ripping; what is it? 129. Many radio stations now make their broadcasts available by streaming (simulcasting) or webcasting their programmes over the Internet. In addition digital radio is appearing in other jurisdictions and will likely operate in New Zealand within a year. Broadband Internet access enables such radio programmes to be widely available to Internet users. As a result, many radio stations around the world are instantly accessible via the Internet. For example, it has been widely reported that the New Zealand radio station, George FM, is listened to in Germany. In addition, digital radio is operating in several countries and it seems likely that it will be introduced in New Zealand within a year.

130. When content is transmitted digitally in these ways, it is accompanied by metadata. Metadata is information that is embedded in the broadcast, and is capable of being detected and processed by digital reception devices. So, for example, the metadata associated with a digital radio broadcast would typically include data identifying the track name for particular sound recordings within the broadcast. Metadata means that listeners are easily able to, through the use of automated tools, identify specified broadcast or streamed content, and then record and manipulate it. This is called "stream ripping".

131. Stream ripping devices and tools now allow users to take music from simulcast radio and webcasts and digital radio (which are intended to be transient and non- interactive) and make permanent copies of sound recordings. These are then available on demand on the user's equipment. The Windows Media Player program on most computers has a button you click for recording to hard-drive (or burning to CD Rom). Some tools that are now available enable metadata searches so that a user can set up an automated request for a song e.g. Fat Freddy's Drop Wandering Eye. The automated programme then finds the song on a webcast, anywhere in the world and records it. If a number of songs are chosen, then the user can create a library that is in clear substitution for legitimately purchased downloads. In practical terms, this presents a far greater threat than consumers waiting by their radio and pressing the "record" button when a favoured song is played.

You might assume from the above that George FM's stream contains this sort of metadata. It doesn't. Neither does bFM's stream, or Radio New Zealand's (indeed, RNZ's web guy Richard Hulse didn't even know it was possible until I asked him about it). I'm not aware of any local station that does. When you start narrowing all this down to the few internet radio stations that embed metadata; the consumers who know what it is; the consumers who'd purchase a dodgy stream-ripping app; and the consumers quite quite frankly can even be arsed with all that, you're not talking about a really big issue.

To address the stream ripping threat, we submit that there should be an exclusion from the time shifting provision if a person uses metadata or an automated process to identify and selectively record certain sound recordings from a communication work.

Oh, whatever …

The music companies want to further restrict the right to time-shift to someone who:

(b) makes the recording solely for the purposes of viewing or listening to the recording once only at a more convenient time.

In sum, this all proposes an unenforceable law that no one will pay the blindest bit of attention to, although I am sure that those involved in this submission will stand out by virtue of their religious adherence to it, and they will all cease using their video recorders in all but the most restricted circumstances. Or not.

But if that part's silly, the parts which seek to tightly restrict the ability of libraries and archives to digitise collections, and even to make works available for viewing on-site border on the offensive.

Short version: libraries should not be able to format shift sound recordings for archival purposes. And, further, "it is submitted that libraries and archives should not be permitted to make sound recordings or films available both in terminals on-site or terminals off-site and that such rights are not necessary for their proper functioning and operation."

But this is actually the basis on which organisations such as the New Zealand Film Archive operate. No one goes to the Film Archive and sits at a terminal to view a work for the sheer entertainment value of it. But people ought to be able to see those works (most of which are not available any other way) for study or information purposes. There is a clear public good in them being able to do so.

I understand that the music companies are obliged to defend their copyrights, which are the basis of their business. They are going to have particular views on copy-protection and format-shifting. Generally speaking, I don't approve of illicit copying and downloading of music: which isn't to say I've never done it, but I try not to, and I spend money every week on legitimate music downloads. But parts of this submission go beyond the purview of copyright law, and, indeed, beyond the legitimate interests of music companies.

Here's the thing: the public good has been invoked frequently in the past decade as a compelling rationale for support of the arts. Taxpayers' pockets have been tapped to the tune of millions, radio stations have amended their programming and a lot of people have preached the good word. Music companies and their artists have gained from all that. In that light, those involved might want to reconsider the contempt for the public good shown in parts of this submission.

(124 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!