about that thing
Ok, so I am a recording artist. I hold copyrights. I also work for the government. I think I do a pretty good job trying to help people out in my government job. I disseminate information. I find ways for people to do things or get to things they might not have been able to in the past. It is no big deal. There are a lot of people doing this.
Recently I got a DCMA takedown notice from some corporate body -IFPI or some $&*#. Basically they crawled a public web folder and saw I had a song called “Imagine That.”
It is a song I wrote, recorded and performed with my wife/partner/bassist Maria in 2006 or so. We worked really hard on it. I’ve even made a couple different videos of it. We put it out on our first album, the local weekly newspaper also released another version on a local music compilation. Again, no huge deal. But apparently my efforts to promote my meager project ran afoul of their efforts to shove the same boring crap down your earholes. So much so that because Apparently either LL Cool J and/or some wankers called “Diamond Rio” both have a song with a similar title.
Did they listen to this song and feel like it was a cover, or intrinsically ripped off something from their chart-busting epic tunes? No, I’m pretty sure a deaf person could spot there was no similarity in the songs. So they are just bullying everyone their bots return as a possible hit. Is that enough? No apparently they want to buy enough government employees (congress) to ensure that nobody gets any film, music or similar entertainment without going through them.
As a government employee and someone who puts out original art that is copyrighted, I am against that. Government employees should be helping people, enforcing laws that actually keep people safe, and protecting people like me from assholes like the MPAA, RIAA, and the IFPI.
I think just killing SOPA and PIPA aren’t enough. You want letters? What these efforts represent is a criminal conspiracy to keep things boring. Don’t just urge your representatives to vote against it. Have them investigate these mafias under RICO.
