Bassist rages at those opposed to anti-piracy legislation as online war hots up – while Reznor, Trivium support ‘no’ campaign
Anger: McKagan
Duff McKagan is furious over online action against proposed US anti-piracy legislation, calling the Stop SOPA campaign a “slap in the face.”
His outburst comes as hacker group Anonymous attacked a number of government and music industry websites in response to an FBI raid on filesharing site Megaupload in the aftermath of this week’s online blackout.
Over 7000 websites are thought to have voluntarily blocked themselves on January 18 in an attempt to demonstrate how the internet might be affected by the US’s SOPA and PIPA legislation, which critics say is too heavy-handed for simple anti-theft laws and would make it possible to censor almost any web community.
McKagan describes the blackout as a “dog pile” and says in his Seattle Weekly column: “When I turned to the Twitter and Facebook, I saw an overwhelming dog pile of support against the bills. Excuse me, but where were you all when piracy started to decimate the music industry? Why didn’t you take a stand against that? Those free records felt good, huh?
“It almost takes my breath away. Internet piracy has claimed half of the recorded music business, and made the prospect of making a living as a musician harder for artists of all rank and file.
“This is all boring, right? It’s typical that the ‘rich rock guy’ would be spouting from his golden pulpit. But let me tell you something: the working stiffs at recording studios and record stores that have had to close thanks to rampant internet piracy never were rich, but they are out of a job.
“Are people really actually pissed off because Wikipedia is ‘going black’ for a day? Because people feel that their First Amendment rights are really being threatened? Or is it because they’re afraid of losing free access to Deadwood and the Black Keys?
“As a practicing musician who has seen his industry turned upside down, and see how piracy has hurt every artist from chart-toppers to indie start-ups, this PIPA upheaval is a slap in the face.”
But other entertainers disagree. Nine Inch Nails mainman co-signed a letter on behalf of 20 artists which says: “We fear that the broad enforcement powers provided under SOPA and PIPA could be easily abused against legitimate services like those upon which we depend. These bills would allow entire websites to be blocked without due process, causing collateral damage to the legitimate users of the same services – artists and creators like us who would be censored as a result.”
“We are deeply concerned that PIPA and SOPA’s impact on piracy will be negligible compared to the potential damage that would be caused to legitimate Internet services.
“Online piracy is harmful and it needs to be addressed, but not at the expense of censoring creativity, stifling innovation or preventing the creation of new, lawful digital distribution methods.”
Trivium frontman Matt Heafy says: “SOPA is textbook overboard. Its stated aim is to curb online piracy and restore and protect the rights of content creators. That’s a noble goal. But it gives its wielders oh-so-much more power than that.
“It’s like giving a Tomahawk missile to an exterminator to take out a beehive from your front porch. Sure, the bees are dead – but so is everything else in a hundred yard radius.”
The extent to which online piracy affects the music industry remains unknown. Last year industry pressure group the BPI let slip that their position on filesharing is based on the assumption that, without pirates, sales would never drop – completely discounting the possibility that people are simply buying fewer albums. BPI boss Geoff Taylor said: “Legal downloads should offset the decline in CD sales.” Later in the year leading financial analysis body the London School of Economics said: “Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero.“
Piracy did not change the music industry — the music industry failing to adapt to technology is what changed it — and they only have themselves to blame.
Rather than embracing the internet (like most artists do nowadays), the entertainment industry as a whole backed away from it at first, and then later on went around suing 13 year old kids and grandparents for downloading 4 songs. Bad move. Suing your own customers and fans is not good PR at all, and it’s just wrong no matter how you try to spin it.
Even today, as we speak, there are startup companies (example: Spotify) who are trying to make music more available to people via the internet, and they’re hitting road blocks trying to make deals with record companies to offer their content.
The same thing is happening in the TV and film industry as well; even APPLE can’t get these people to negotiate reasonably to content deals. APPLE for fucks sake! One of the most popular consumer electronic brands on the fucking planet, can’t make deals with content providers to offer TV and movies via their hardware and software. Hulu and Netflix are also running into the same problems; if you’re a Netflix customer, you know what I’m talking about. That rate increase passed on to you, the consumer, is a direct result from Netflix having to deal with these insane and totally fucked up content management companies that Duff McKagan so adamantly defends.
Think about it — if there were LEGAL ways to download songs BEFORE Napster and Kazaa \ iMesh \ BitTorrent \ etc. were ever created, and it was a nice easy to use, friendly ecosystem created around great hardware and software (ie. iTunes, Spotify, Google Music, Slacker, Pandora, Etc.), people would have turned to THAT to get music instead of downloading it illegally.
And it’s not like there weren’t companies trying to do this even back in the late 90s and early 2000s. Companies like diamond multimedia, who created the first ever portable MP3 player (which I bought and still own, all 32MB of it!), got sued by the recording industry! The list of examples goes on and on.
This is coming from the same group of people who said before congress “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone”
And they want us to give them one shred of credibility? After time and time again fighting technology instead of embracing it to expand their businesses and make it easier for people to get more access to the content they like? Hey Duff McKagan; go fuck yourself.
There are plenty of bands who have used the internet successfully to boost their fanbase, give a larger amount of fans access to more (and sometimes exclusive) content (example: trivium has on their website a special members portal where you can post messages to the band, get update videos from them on tour and in the studio), and ultimately in the end, make more money because of it.
The problem with SOPA and PIPA is that they give the government too much power. Think about it; the RIAA and MPAA ALREADY have laws (example: DMCA) that they use sue people, take down websites, abuse the courts, and ultimately ruin peoples lives.
These are the same laws that the MPAA and RIAA have used to take baby videos down from youtube due to music playing in the background.
Why do they need MORE laws to accomplish what they’re already capable of doing?
When I think of SOPA and PIPA, all I picture is a group of friends in a restaurant; one guy is reciting a funny line from a movie he saw the previous night, and his friends are laughing…then all of a sudden lawyers from the MPAA and RIAA come in, and they ask the guy who recited the lines for all the money in his wallet. Seriously — that’s what this has come to.
Yet another idiot who thinks somehow its everyone else’s fault people download music illegally other than the people who actually do it.
Self serving idiots that hide from the one true fact: YOU are stealing someone elses work.
You didn’t make, you didn’t produce it, you didn’t promote it, you didn’t distribute it. …you just took it.
This ain’t the eighties and it aint your fiends distributing a lo fi mix tape of your favorite bands ( live or other wise ) that might in the end , only reach tens or a hundred folks———this is reaching thousands and hundreds of thousands, high quality , and with minima degradation…….all free.
do lie and give me a dog and pony show of excuses.
Said by yet another sanctimonious fool who has no clue that he’s being manipulated by some very rich and powerful people.
“duhhhh… steal bad!!”… Yes, Einstein. We get that.
Yes, people are hypocritical about theft, but fundamentally you’re not addressing the issue that SOPA is a special provision to benefit one industry, that not only confers too much power on a privileged group of very rich people… it also makes dangerous changes to your entire legal framework, all in the name of legal expediency for some very powerful corporations.
… and the rank and file musician will not benefit from this change.
[...] de Nine Inch Nails, es uno de los firmantes de un manifiesto contrario a las leyes, leemos en Rock Desk News.“Tememos que la ampliación de poder proporcionado por la SOPA y PIPA puede ser abusado contra [...]
Get Rich – Steal Bitch!
As The Music Industries Dun To The Musician, Thou Shall The People Do As Well…
For Without The People There Be No Industries – Period!
Its Like The Rise & The Fall….The End Is Nigh!
Get Rich Steal Bitch..Life Goes On….
Nah-Nah-War!!
From an insider..Working Musician!
~DRFILGOOD~
[...] to Rock News Desk for the full article. Regardless, I like the guy and respect his opinion. But change (and severe [...]