John Pilger - Obama and Empire

Or why Obama cannot legitimately be described as any sort of 'socialist'.

Author, journalist, film maker John Pilger speaks at Socialism 2009 www.socialistworker.org; www.haymarketbooks.org. Filmed by Paul Hubbard at the Womens Building in San Francisco 7-4-09.

David Harvey Interviewed on New York Public Radio

Presented here is a great interview with Professor David Harvey, as aired on New York Public Radio, in which he talks about the state of various aspects of the world including the immense and almost unmentioned consolidation of class power that is occurring in the world of States, banking and finance. It is worth noting that while there are some efforts being made to consolidate working class power, these efforts would appear to be somewhat less concerted and considerably less well organised at the transnational level than those of the banking, financial and ruling classes. However, there is still time and we have all the tools for doing so already to hand.

The interview with Harvey includes some discussion of the way in which solutions to the permanent crisis of capitalism lie not in falling back on previous historical models for running things, but rather in novel, realistic, legitimate and achievable new models that can create a more fair, just and equal society in which the needs -- rather than the selfish wants, and desires -- of everyone, not just the rich, ruling classes, can be realised.

So, for example, at least as far as digital content goes, we already have in existence the New Economy of Community, established and operating without let or hindrance. This is despite the continued evil machinations of global media oligopolies whose existences are entirely dependent on the wholesale robbery of both their customers and the artists on whose backs their media empires have been built. Of course, such machinations by corporations would not be possible were it not for the almost total compliance of the Corporatist state lackeys responsible for passing regressive and repressive legislation (usually referred to as 'governments').

Anyway, back to the original reason for this post, the interview with Professor David Harvey. The full interview is 24 minutes long and you can listen to it below, or download an MP3 copy for off-line listening:

While you're listening, you may also wish to contemplate the following words, recently added to the Antagonista Manifesto in the sidebar:

Throw away your ambitions for membership to the socially acceptable position of wage slave.

Class struggle back on student agenda

Tying together a few political loose ends from now and various other points in recent history:

Amidst the decomposition of the old world, false consciousness -- which still reigns but no longer governs -- has the nerve to take to task a whole generation of young proletarians, who have re-launched the offensive against the society of the spectacle, for not being able to resolve all the questions at the origin of both their revolt and the crisis in which all the appointed powers are floundering. The real situation is very different: what the young proletarians are in fact being taken to task for is posing questions that power cannot resolve, for it is power itself that is being questioned.

-- Gianfranco Sanguinetti, Milan, March 1979
On Terrorism and the State

A recent article from the Independent:

The Independent
Students are revolting: The spirit of '68 is reawakening
Sunday, 8 February 2009

They are the iPod generation of students: politically apathetic, absorbed by selfish consumerism, dedicated to a few years of hedonism before they land a lucrative job in the City. Not any more. A seismic change is taking place in British universities.

Around the UK, thousands of students have occupied lecture theatres, offices and other buildings at more than 20 universities in sit-down protests. It seems that the spirit of 1968 has returned to the campus.

While it was the situation in Gaza that triggered this mass protest, the beginnings of political enthusiasm have already spread to other issues.

Oh yes. Below are some student occupation web sites triggered by the recent dramatic murderous increase in the plight of human beings in Palestine:

• ManUni Occupation - Solidarity with Gaza
• Cambridge Gaza Solidarity Campaign
• King's College Occupation in Solidarity with Gaza
• Leeds Uni Occupation
• LSE Solidarity with Gaza!
• Occupation Nottingham
• Oxford Occupation in Solidarity with Gaza!
• Queen Mary Occupation
• Sheffield Hallam Free Gaza Movement
• Strathclydeunioccupation’s Blog
• SUSSEX OCCUPATION
• The Warwick Solidarity Sit-In
• Plymouth occupation
• UAL occupation
• Cardiff University Occupation
• St Andrews occupation
• UEL occupation
• UWE occupation
• NY University occupation
• University of East Anglia (UEA) Occupation
• Goldsmiths Occupation
• Edinburgh Occupation
• Glasgow occupation
• Rochester NY occupation
• Dundee campaign
• Bradford occupation
• Free MAN MET! occupation
• SOAS occupation
• Essex occupation
• Birmingham occupation
• Plymouth occupation

Any others?

As the Independent article noted, political enthusiasm spreads to other issues, with the spirit of Mario Savio running through them:

http://www.anothereducationispossible.org.uk/

No wonder senior police officers are concerned about a "summer of rage" and less wonder still that such concerns were pre-empted by the Minstry of Defence, which wrote:

The Middle Class Proletariat

The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoples’ attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the world’s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.

Source: The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Progamme 2007-2036 [PDF]
Published by the Ministry of Defence

Viva la people's revolution!

Steal This Film - Pirate Bay #spectrial Edition (updating)

If anyone reading this uses a computing device of any sort, a viewing of Steal This Film Trial Edition is heartily recommended, even if you haven't heard of the current spectacle trial [Twitter: #spectrial] brought by the media industry against some Swedish kids who enjoy technical challenges and travel the Internet under the moniker of The Pirate Bay. More later on the spectrial in which half the charges were dropped within the first two days.

Keep an eye out for appearances by Sebastian Lütgert and his endorsement of peer-to-peer as the new economy of community. He positively buzzes on the vibe of what he describes as:

"a force like this, a power like this, zillions of people, connected. Sharing data, sharing their work, sharing the work of others. The situation is unprecedented in human history and it is a force that will not be stopped."
....
"The files have been shared. There's no way back. It's not about shutting down BitTorrent. It would be about confiscating everyone's hard drives. The files are out there. They have been downloaded. They're down. There's no up anymore. They're all down."

All the creativity of each and every connected individual shared in one big collective of information, ideas, sights and sounds.The only people upset about it are those moneyed enough not to have to worry about it. Therefore, the root of the issue isn't the one stated by the media mafia and their 'legal' representation -- which includes Monique Wadstedt who also acts on behalf of the Church of Scientology -- of money and profits but the control of information and sensory experience, sensory experiences that the dominator capitalist culture has always sought to imprison within various commoditised Pandora's boxes. But Pandora's Box was opened a long time ago. Steal This Film!

STEAL THIS FILM
DOWNLOAD THE TRIAL EDITION

IN 2006, A GROUP OF FRIENDS DECIDED TO MAKE A FILM ABOUT FILESHARING... AND THROUGH THE PIRATE BAY, WE WERE COPIED AND MULTIPLIED BEYOND OUR IMAGINATIONS. TODAY THE PIRATE BAY ARE ON TRIAL, AND WE ARE PROUD TO SUPPORT THEM WITH THIS TRIAL EDITION OF STEAL THIS FILM. STF 'TRIAL EDITION' CONTAINS UNSEEN FOOTAGE, INCLUDING BROKEP AND TIAMO PREPARING FOR THE TRIAL, AND RE-ENACTMENTS OF THEIR POLICE INTERVIEWS. IT REPRESENTS 'STEAL THIS FILM 2.5', HALF WAY BETWEEN PART 2 AND THE 'FINAL CUT' WE ARE SHOOTING RIGHT NOW IN STOCKHOLM @ THE TRIAL. AFTER THIS RELEASE, WE WILL BE OFFERING IRREGULAR REPORTS ON THE TRIAL, WHICH WE'LL DISTRIBUTE IN CONJUNCTION WITH OUR FRIENDS @ TORRENTFREAK. AS ALWAYS SHARE, REDISTRIBUTE AND REJOICE, DONATE IF YOU LIKE. WE ARE ALL ON TRIAL TODAY - BUT THE TIRED OLD MASTERS WILL NEVER WIN.LEAGUE OF NOBLE PEERS, FEBRUARY 2009. - À NOUS LA LIBERTÉ!

There are a good few writings on Reason.... in relation to the human inclination to participate in the sharing of resources via the Internet and peer to peer technologies. Many of the ideas expressed in these articles feature in Steal This Film because, no matter what the issue and despite what the post-modernists and liars might have everyone believe, truth is objective. A good place to start is the P2P label. Personal favourites include:

• Filesharing - The New Economy of Community
• Global Free Trade Under Threat From Corporate Greed
• P2P Vs the 0.01 Percent-ers
• The music industry is shit-scared of the Internet

Oh, and if you happen to believe there is any justification for the years of legal actions instigated by various cabals of media conglomerates against various individuals and groups outside of their profiteering cabal, perhaps you should learn a little more of how and why the Internet was designed.

Computer Networks - The Heralds of Resource Sharing

A documentary film about the history of the ARPANET and birth of the Internet.

Thus is exposed the inherent injustice, wrongness and intrinsic flaws in the actions of global media conglomerates as they endeavour to persecute and profit from people who are only using the Internet for the purpose it was intended, sharing.

---===[ STEAL THIS ARTICLE! ]===---
Link it, copy it, email it,
PDF it, print it, Digg it,
Mixx it, Reddit, Stumble it,
Tweet it.
---===[ STEAL THIS ARTICLE! ]===---

--
Extras:

- This filesharer.org business is probably worth steering clear of:

This is what a criminal looks like | filesharer.org
Let the music and movie industry know who the file-sharers are. Upload a picture of yourself and show them what a criminal looks like!

Oh yes, good idea. Probably best to also send them your home and work addresses along with the bank details of any accounts held in your name. [Edit: For balance see Thomas' comment]

- Day 5 of #spectrial and questions are raised by the defence about whether the prosecution was a political action rather than a criminal one. Given the approximate association of the Pirate Bay with the Pirate Party and their copyright and patent objectives, and the fact that half the criminal charges against the Pirate Bay were dropped in the first two days of the trial, it's difficult to see the debacle as anything other than a political prosecution.

The Pirate Bay is loosely affiliated with the Pirate Party. The Pirate Party's sole aims appear to be the reform of copyright law, the abolition of patents, and guaranteeing the right to privacy, none of which are bad things for greater mass of the humanity:

The Pirate Party

Introduction to Politics and Principles

The Pirate Party wants to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected. With this agenda, and only this, we are making a bid for representation in the European and Swedish parliaments.

Not only do we think these are worthwhile goals. We also believe they are realistically achievable on a European basis. The sentiments that led to the formation of the Pirate Party in Sweden are present throughout Europe. There are already similar political initiatives under way in several other member states. Together, we will be able to set a new course for a Europe that is currently heading in a very dangerous direction.

The Pirate Party only has three issues on its agenda:

Reform of copyright law

The official aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance in order to promote culture being created and spread. Today that balance has been completely lost, to a point where the copyright laws severely restrict the very thing they are supposed to promote. The Pirate Party wants to restore the balance in the copyright legislation.

All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.

The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. Today's copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money seventy years after he is dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today's world. If you haven't made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.

We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract clauses that aim to restrict the consumers' legal rights in this area. There is no point in restoring balance and reason to the legislation, if at the same time we continue to allow the big media companies to both write and enforce their own arbitrary laws.

An abolished patent system

Pharmaceutical patents kill people in third world countries every day. They hamper possibly life saving research by forcing scientists to lock up their findings pending patent application, instead of sharing them with the rest of the scientific community. The latest example of this is the bird flu virus, where not even the threat of a global pandemic can make research institutions forgo their chance to make a killing on patents.

The Pirate Party has a constructive and reasoned proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. It would not only solve these problems, but also give more money to pharmaceutical research, while still cutting public spending on medicines in half. This is something we would like to discuss on a European level.

Patents in other areas range from the morally repulsive (like patents on living organisms) through the seriously harmful (patents on software and business methods) to the merely pointless (patents in the mature manufacturing industries).

Europe has all to gain and nothing to lose by abolishing patents outright. If we lead, the rest of the world will eventually follow.

Respect for the right to privacy

Following the 9/11 event in the US, Europe has allowed itself to be swept along in a panic reaction to try to end all evil by increasing the level of surveillance and control over the entire population. We Europeans should know better. It is not twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there are plenty of other horrific examples of surveillance-gone-wrong in Europe's modern history.

The arguments for each step on the road to the surveillance state may sound ever so convincing. But we Europeans know from experience where that road leads, and it is not somewhere we want to go.

We must pull the emergency brake on the runaway train towards a society we do not want. Terrorists may attack the open society, but only governments can abolish it. The Pirate Party wants to prevent that from happening.

The Pirate Party ideology appears to be spreading. The cocky forthrightness of the Pirate Bay and their defence team, along with the links into the Pirate Party lend further credibility to the idea that this is indeed a political prosecution by the Media Corporations Inc. of those espousing and bringing to life an opposing ideology that threatens the concept of private ownership of everything, from physical objects to ideas.

Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images, summed it up when he said:

"Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century."

---

Update 25/02/09
Free is as Free Does

One of the many invalid arguments of the transnational global media conglomerates to deflect, detract and distract from the main motivating factor for their actions, the profit motive, is that artists won't do anything for free. This argument, they believe, is sufficient justification for extending their historical racketeering ways without let or hindrance across international boundaries and borders.

According to the media industry: Artists won't create art, musicians won't make music, film makers won't make films, and writers won't write.

What those who seek global full spectrum dominance over humanity's shared culture have failed to notice as the Internet and the world has grown up around them, leaving the former culture controlling giants as cowering, anti-human midgets in the process, is that the whole of Internet-connected humanity is perfectly prepared to do pretty much everything for free. Such is the nature of the new economy of community where we consciously recognise our shared humanity in open defiance of those who would seek to keep us all in separate, convenient, individualist, nuclear-familied consumer units.

The truth of the matter is that artists WILL create art, musicians WILL make music, and writers WILL write. They have been doing it throughout history and the history of the Internet. In turn, the Internet has developed to facilitate ever more novel ways and means to make it so.

This article was conceived of, written, and published for free. Below is some art created for free by Eisner Award-winner Dylan Horrocks' that is specifically NOT copyrighted, originally drawn up in support of New Zealand's #blackout, which appeared on The Pirate Bay. Elsewhere, the Internet is awash with articles that people have written and published for free, music that people have made and published for free, and films like Steal This Film which have been created and published for free.

Today it is announced that the typist for the whole of the world's culture, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, "is aiming to have the framework of an international strategy to combat illegal internet downloads agreed with the US and European partners by the autumn." Yesterday, Irish ISP Eircom wasn't going to comply with requests to block access to sites like the Pirate Bay. Today, apparently, that decision is reversed.

It is reputed that the godfather of Fascism, Benito Mussolini, claimed that fascism could be thought of as the seamless merging of state and corporate power. The actions of the international media conglomerates, in tandem with various governments, are quite simply the modern manifestation of Mussolini's political ambitions.

The fight back against those that seek to suppress the innate human creativity and the innate human need to share their creativity is now the imperative duty of everyone.

The legendary Terence McKenna on how corporate/State controlled Culture is not Your Friend:

---

Ho ho ho! IFPI and their legal team appear to be clutching at straws somewhat: Pirate Bay Day 8 - Prosecutors change charges | Technology | guardian.co.uk

I hate to say I told you so, but.....

From this very blog some three and a half years ago:

25 June 2005
Filesharing - The New Economy of Community

All this time later and those lovely people historically responsible for holding vibrations of air hostage are still trying to figure a way to keep their profitable racketeering going by 'monetising" Peer-to-Peer (P2P) filesharing while simultaneously co-opting The Antagonist's very own "new economy" tag:

30th October 2008 18:21 GMT
The Register
A new economics of P2P file sharing

The difference between the two? In the new economy of community sharing, a trait taught to toddlers, isn't a crime.

Better yet, El Reg does the Antagonista-told-you-so-doble, complete with a beautifully ironic twist.

The following quote about your humble blogger -- note the name of the person who penned it -- is taken from the Feelers' right-hand sidebar entry over that-a-way ->:

"I’m glad to be able to announce that the UK now has it’s very own mindless twit. || Either that or he’s a damn good satirist."

- Tim Worstall

Three posts of a kind, all about the popularly propagated myth that cannabis consumption is responsible for increased levels of psychosis, all published right here on Reason.... just weeks before the 2005 coup d'etat "power surge" changed everything:

22 June 2005 The Cannabis Psychosis Myth Exploded 24 June 2005 Cannabis Psychosis Myth Explosion #2 26 June 2005 Cannabis, Mushrooms, Psychoactives & Evolution

Three and half years on from the three of a kind and El Reg publishes this little gem by, er, the same author as the Feelers quote:

6th November 2008 13:19 GMT
The Register
Study clears cannabis of schizophrenia rap
No greater risk than general non-tokers
By Tim Worstall

Well, well. Who'd have thunk it? More amusing yet is the fact that Worstall uses a few points about the myth of cannabis psychosis, made by yours truly in the articles posted over three years ago, and then claims that nobody has ever posited such notions before.

Apparently, the truth of any matter is of no consequence until it is coopted, prounounced by, and charged for by scientists.

Ho ho ho! "Mindless twit" it is then, as confirmed by scientists after  three years of intensive research.

Sachsgate: Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross, Andrew Sachs, Georgina Baillie, Satanic Sluts & Max Clifford

Fake outrage, real resignations, real sackings, real suspensions and real suspenders, Sachsgate has got the lot, including a whiff of conspiracy. It is difficult to comprehend the way in which the non-story of a few offhand comments from raucous lothario comedian, Russell Brand, and the veteran if slightly unruly light entertainer, Jonathan Ross, became the media and -- more amusingly and worryingly in equal measure -- political frenzy that it has. Still more difficult to believe that the spectacle involving Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter, Georgina Baillie, happens to be running in parallel with the collapse of the carefully engineered but inherently wired-to-implode global banking racket. Yet these things are only difficult to comprehend if you thought the point of the 'news' media was to keep you informed about things of some consequence, and that anything and everything that happens just happens by accident. Luckily, there isn't much of humanity that still labours under those illusions any more.

Once upon a time there was a phone call broadcast on BBC Radio 2 that resulted in a slightly burlesque message being left on Andrew Sachs' answerphone....

Keen listeners will have noted that it was Jonathan Ross who shouted, "He fucked your granddaughter!" into Andrew Sachs' answer machine, and also that Brand's instant reaction was one of shock and horror having already asked Ross not to mention his liaison with Georgina Baillie.

The complaints that followed the live broadcast were, well, negligible, insignificant and inconsequential. "A BBC spokeswoman said the programme had received two complaints". Further, the "two complaints related to Ross's swearing - rather than the content of the phone calls." So, the issue that inspired all of two complaints was that Ross had said the word, "Fuck", not that Brand had carnal knowledge of Sach's granddaughter, nor the manner in which this information was conveyed. It soon emerged via Andrew Sachs’s agent that Sachs had been ‘terribly hurt’ by the incident and Georgina Baillie's mother, Kate, said: ‘It’s awful.’ That's the "two complaints" right there! Except that's not quite the full picture.

There it would have ended, until an anonymously penned editorial incitement of incendiary proportions was published in the Mail on Sunday, Ross, Brand and the BBC's gutter culture. Ignoring the fact that the Mail, aside from its historical support for fascism, is a doyen of the "gutter culture" it professes to despise, the outraged sentiment soon spread almost as if there were nothing much else going on in the world worth talking about.

As is usual when issues of alleged personal moral turpitude become opportunistic point-scoring political playgrounds, it wasn't long before the voices of "conservative" "decency" entered the fray. This time, possibly because he has nothing at all else of substance to say, it was in the form of David "Related to royalty, just like Boris" Cameron. Worth remembering also that Cameron and Ross have previously locked horns after Ross used his Friday night chat show on BBC1 to ask Cameron if he had ever masturbated while imagining Margaret Thatcher in stockings. Coincidentally, it was the Mail on Sunday that led the indignant outraged backlash against Ross that time around too. They say revenge is a dish best served cold and Cameron has kept his offering in the freezer for a couple of years before it was finally dished up.

Not to be outdone by the Tories, the boy's club currently in government joined the whipped-up witch hunt quick-style. First up was the despicable-as-any-Tory, Jack Straw, closely followed by no lesser mortal than the prime minister himself, Gordon BrNWO. So serious is the business of someone saying "Fuck" on the radio that BrNWO even interrupted an economic summit to pass judgement.

That this provocation occurred at the same time as details of yet another report appeared warning of "Teen yobs" and their antics is, perhaps, a "conspiracy theory" too far. (As everyone knows, the cause of all the ills of society are kids, not adult ruling classes whose interests and actions deliberately and wilfully conspire to create poverty, social deprivation and despair.) Pretty soon, in true Pavlovian mass media fashion, the likes of which Goebbels would have been most proud, the public reaction began. It is now claimed that the BBC has received over 40,000 complaints about Ross and Brand in relation to a broadcast that most of the complainants probably hadn't heard for themselves, at least not until they actively sought out transcripts and audio copies of the answerphone messages.

New Puritanism

"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance."

-- Leonard Schapiro

If the pen is mightier than the sword, then it logically follows that words are mightier than deeds. Ergo, it is acceptable to do certain things but not to use words and language to talk about them in any meaningful way. It is acceptable for Russell Brand to have slept with Georgina Baillie, but it is not acceptable to talk about it, especially not if the word "Fuck" is used in the process. This is the nonsense logic underlying the 'scandal' and so the bone of contention becomes Ross's use of the word "Fuck", even though the statement in which it was used happened to be the truth. So, truth becomes a crime of verbal immorality, pre-judged by those with the most dubious morals of all. Lenny Bruce turns in his grave and a witch hunt similar to the witch hunts and persecution endured by Bruce after a decade of McCarthyism, becomes its own self-justification after a decade of New Labour.

Some are calling the backlash against the BBC and its Radio 2 presenters the new puritanism, but in a world where the current paradigm requires the commodification, objectification and fetishisation of everything, sex is always good for business. Even within such confines it is certainly an odd form of puritanism where the supposed moral high ground is alleged to be held by an ex-pre-marital-bedmate of Brand that also happens to be known for her role as a burlesque dancer, the Satanic Slut, Voluptua. Imagining that such an alter-ego might secretly conceal a lady filled with particularly virginal and conservative tastes, decency and overt prudishness is quite some challenge indeed, but let's not let that get in the way of a hysterical witch hunt.

As is usual with mass media frenzies whose main thrust is something of no consequence, somewhere among hyperbole and hysteria is at least one other story that the facade conceals. In the case of the Brand and Ross radio show and prank call, aside from its stochastic coinciding with the yob report, it's highly unlikely that many will be aware of any subtexts, unless they happen to have listened to the original radio show in its entirety, or unless they are already aware of Brand's politics.

A little more of the truth behind the persecution and witch hunt of Brand can be found through a better understanding of the nature of Russell Brand and his place in geopolitical space and time. Aside from being a popular stand-up comedian with a large and loyal following among the yobs youth of today who, lest we forget, are the future whether anyone likes it or not, Brand's politics are what the ruling and media classes would term "radical" and "extreme", terms now almost exclusively reserved for use in stories about "terrorism", particularly "Islamic" terrorism. In the early stages of the same Russell Brand radio show in which messages were left on Andrew Sach's answerphone, Brand described himself as a "post structuralist". In short, that means radical left wing politics of the sort a Socialist or Marxist might espouse. Brand briefly expanded his position during the show, saying:

"I was trying to open up a bit of debate about socialism, during the credit crunch, mate. I was thinking perhaps there could be a socialist alternative to capitalism, but if you can't take a bit of talk about economics and revolution, Jonathan, because you're up in your ivory tower on your high horse...."

Before adding:

"The universe is using me as a conduit for revolution."

It is these few words, and many other examples of Brand conveying similarly revolutionary intent and ideals, that provide a more coherent and legitimate explanation of the hugely disproportionate response to a few gags of dubious comedic artistry and integrity. After all, the initial "two complaints" were hardly sufficient to warrant the media and political maelstrom and witch hunt of Russell Brand that has followed. Whatever way other aspects of the story are spun, it is free publicity for all involved and there is, apparently, no such thing as bad publicity. As with all such things, one will find the media darling of the media darlings, Max Clifford, operating on behalf of both the 'victim' and the torch and pitchfork mob of outraged complainants that seek to silence those whose words to which they object, whether they heard the original broadcast or not.

When the entire capitalist racketeering operation that is enduring the deepest and most international crisis in the whole of its brief and nearly ended history, you can't very well have the BBC facilitating the promotion by popular, young, working class upstarts of revolutionary Socialist ideals as an alternative to Capitalist barbarism. Such things cannot be on the agenda of the broadcasting company of a state that is inexorably wedded to the Capitalist paradigm, especially when the show is pre-recorded and its contents have been approved by those higher-ups in the editorial process whose job it is to censor what is and isn't acceptable for broadcast.

What matters to the controlling political interests is that other messages of political opposition and significance that Brand has to offer -- particularly relating to the opening up of discussions about socialist revolution as the only sensible and final reaction to the unfolding Capitalist Armageddon, and particularly opening up this debate among his large audience of young people who have little or no faith in the existing system of Capitalist 'democracy' run at the behest of inbred Oxbridge graduates and their international counterparts -- remains buried and without a public forum.

After a time Russell Brand filmed a video apology, in addition to issuing verbal apologies, specifically addressed to Andrew Sachs rather than the outraged minorities, for an explosive issue that never should have been. In the video, Brand -- the creative, ingenious demagogue that he is -- made another far more subtle political statement. His apology was issued as he stood in front of a black and white background, by all accounts a pretty bland background. Until, that is, you notice the black part of the backdrop is a telescreen and the white background is mostly created from a large picture frame, in the centre of which is a small photo of the Russian totalitarian dictator, moral arbiter and censor in chief, Joseph Stalin. In a bitter-sweet twist and the cruellest of ironies, and almost as if to prove that Brand's symbolic socio-political commentary about the totalitarian nature of life on prison ship Britain was correct, the video apology featuring Stalin was itself censored when broadcast by the BBC and Stalin was nowhere to be seen.

A whiff of conspiracy - a final word on Woss

Given Ross's long held position as the staple of all light entertainment fare, and that it was his saying "Fuck" that prompted the uproar, one might well be tempted to wonder whether his part in initiating the persecution of Russell Brand was an accidental oversight as he got caught up in the mood of the moment, trying to outdo his younger, funnier and more entertaining host, or whether it was by a somewhat more sinister design. Factor in the following:

• the involvement of the sensationalist publicist, Max Clifford as Baillie's publicist, whose life and infamy is based on the sort of devious cunning that can manufacture stories out of thin air, make a gay man straight and turn liars into paragons of virtue;
• that the incitement to national hatred was provided by an anonymous editorial in the Nazi supporting Mail on Sunday;
• that Andrew Sachs, being the consummate gentleman and professional that he is, although a little disappointed and nonplussed at the first interview effort in which the answerphone messages were left, had in fact graciously offered to participate in the Brand's show the following week so the intended interview could be properly recorded (see Andrew Sachs interview video);
• Russell Brand's post structuralist, revolutionary, socialist, radical rhetoric and politics and his rising popularity among large, youthful audiences to which he brings that message in a time of global financial crisis in which the State can only offer greater servitude and subjugation;
  
• the on-message cross-party political class unity in its universal condemnation of the non-event;
  
• that Satanic Slut Georgina Baillie was so incensed by the invasion of her privacy that she felt moved to flog the remainder of her privacy to the Dirty Digger's Sun tabloid, among others to exploit this "awesome opportunity";
• that Ross had been specifically asked by Brand to err on the side of discretion during the call;
• that the show was pre-recorded and approved by BBC editorial controls before being aired;
  
• that the original live broadcast on Radio 2 prompted only two complaints;
• that Russell Brand has been forced to resign from his BBC position;
• that the Radio 2 station controller, Lesley Douglas, has been forced to resign from her position;
• that the BBC itself is once again in the sights of a State apparatus that cannot tolerate anyone or anything straying too far off message, just as it was around the time of the mysterious death of Dr David Kelly / Andrew Gilligan affair,
  
• and that Ross, the sole public instigator of the uproar, has merely been suspended for three months and remains in the overpaid employ of the BBC at a time when his cryptically titled book is published: Why do I say these things?
  

As is often the case when a few clearly established facts provide a more comprehensive context and understanding for a series of inter-connected events, it is the facts themselves that offer up a plausible conspiracy theory which practically writes itself.

Two thousand years ago, legend has it that Jesus was crucified for the sins of others. In modern times it is Russell Brand and his messianic and revolutionary aspirations that are being crucified. As with the tale of Jesus, Brand too is being crucified for the sins of others.

Antagonista TV #911: Capitalism Hits the Fan

It's probably time for a few words on the global financial meltdown cutely named the "credit crunch" but, in the interim, have some words on the same crafted by a bona fide professor.

The sound and video quality on the video below is average -- actually, it's of a better standard than the BBC's recent high-technology, high-quality foreign news reports that look like they were recorded on early incarnations of mobile phone cameras -- but if it's a little rational commentary, a quick oversight of recent history and a few crumbs for compiling into morsels of food for thought you're after, then it's worth persevering with.

Capitalism Hits the Fan A Marxian View
Oct 7, 2008 - 39 minutes

Richard Wolff a professor of economics at UMass Amherst talks on the current "financial" crisis and capitalism in general. A form of socialism is presented as a possible alternative. This talk was presented by the Association for Economic and Social Analysis and the journal Rethinking Marxism.

That videos such as the one above appear from out of nowhere, for all to see, and that such things are free to watch, listen to and learn from is yet another manifestation of the new economy of community outlined here some time ago. This is the same new economy of community for which plans exist, among small groupings of paranoiacs with access to the “paraphernalia of paranoia”, to bring it all to a crashing end.

July 4th : Independence Through Decentralisation

Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead

Hollywood movie studios launched new legal action against operators of sites that help connect people ... In the United States and the United Kingdom, the Motion Picture Association of America, the main lobbying arm of U.S. film studios, filed civil lawsuits against more than 100 operators of BitTorrent "tracker" servers.

MPAA anti-piracy chief John Malcolm said the trade organization's actions were not aimed at criminalizing P2P technology itself, citing "legal torrent" services that specialize in public-domain material as examples of the technology's non-infringing potential.

Source: Wired News, 14 December, 2004.

Then came this, and this, and this, and this, and all of these which sort of indicated that the above statement was a little misleading.

Then came this development a few weeks ago. From the BitTorrent Trackerless information page:

As part of our ongoing efforts to make publishing files on the Web painless and disruptively cheap, BitTorrent has released a 'trackerless' version of BitTorrent in a new release.

Suppose you bought a television station, you could broadcast your progamming to everyone in a 50 mile radius. Now suppose the population of your town tripled. How much more does it cost you to broadcast to 3 times as many people? Nothing. The same is not true of the Web. If you own a website and you publish your latest video on it, as popularity increases, so does your bandwidth bill! Sometimes by a lot!

Now it's new, improved BitTorrent Trackerless - with added Trackerless Support - which turns the 100 IP addresses targeted in December's round of the global media's "Which impoverished individual can we sue to keep ourselves rich" into a multiplicity of anywhere up to 4,294,967,296 IP addresses. And this isn't even up and running properly yet with its 3,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible moving-target-trackers.

The Antagonist hates to say, "I told you so", but in light of this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, what next?

BitTorrent - Liberation of the Pepsi Generation

The Senate/Grokster-ruling fallout continues with most of the world hung up on the concepts of victory, loss, and how to defend copy 'rights' which depend on being able to strictly control and regulate the distribution of the goods and services to which those 'rights' apply.

In the age of the Internet, digital media and peer-to-peer, this paradigm of control of distribution to create artificial product scarcity, and therefore value, at the discretion of suppliers is no longer an option.

As everyone wonders against whom the next legal action should be issued while trying to understand how to reinstate 'rights' which depend on a market environment that does not exist any more, news hits the streets of a meme penned by the creator of the BitTorrent protocol Bram Cohen which outlines the fundamental ethos that underlies the cooperative nature of the Internet and the peer-to-peer networks which have grown on it, both of which have rapidly become the anathema of content owners, big business and government.

Cohen's words are reproduced here in full to avoid any hysteria that may arise from quoting selective sections. Comments are given below:

A technological activist's agenda:

"I am a technological activist. I have a political agenda. I am in favor of basic human rights: to free speech, to use any information and technology, to purchase and use recreational drugs, to enjoy and purchase so-called 'vices', to be free of intruders, and to privacy.

I further my goals with technology. I build systems to disseminate information, commit digital piracy, synthesize drugs, maintain untrusted contacts, purchase anonymously, and secure machines and homes. I release my code and writings freely, and publish all of my ideas early to make them unpatentable.

Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'.

Despite my emphasis on technology, I do not view laws as inherently evil. My goals are political ones, even if my techniques are not. The only way to fundamentally succeed is by changing existing laws. If I rejected all help from the political arena I would inevitably fail."

-Bram Cohen

Before getting upset and losing sight of the fundamental tenets on which this statement was based, ask yourself if the basic concepts of human rights, free speech, privacy, freedom of choice, or the right to use information and technology are fundamentally wrong?

If these basic beliefs are not wrong then no technology that evolves from them or which facilitates them can be fundamentally 'wrong' either. In fact, technology is always neutral and BitTorrent serves as a timely example of how this is the case, flying in the face of the Senate decision that the technology makers can be held liable for the uses of their technology.

On one hand are the stated intentions of a lone-programmer who seeks freedom of speech, information and privacy for all, and on the other are the corporate giants like Microsoft and the international media companies who recognise, finally, that they are missing out on something and are scrambling to adopt the protocol as the basis for their own attempts to catch up with the peer-to-peer revolution that they have, for the most part, missed.

As big business adopts the BitTorrent protocol which grew from the tenets of human rights, freedom and liberty, the question necessarily becomes, "What is the difference between the version of the BitTorrent protocol offered by Cohen and the one offered by Microsoft?"

The answer is, "Nothing." In both cases the technology is the same and can be used for either 'good' or 'evil' so the value judgement which then needs to be made is whether the private interests of a few corporate entities are greater than those of the interests of the public that includes every single one of us.

In the case of Bram Cohen, the BitTorrent protocol, and the fundamental essences of the Internet and peer-to-peer networks, the driving forces behind development are those of human rights, freedom of speech, privacy, freedom of choice, and the right to use and share information and technology for all.

In the case of Microsoft and their implentation of the BitTorrent protocol, the driving forces behind development are those of private profit and growth, and neither private profit nor private growth results from facilitating free speech, privacy, freedom of choice, or cultivating any rights to use and share information and technology. Instead, private profit and growth result from the restriction of free speech, choice, privacy and any freedoms to use technology and information without the application and enforcement of significant costs and a long list of conditions and caveats that require submission of almost all rights to anything.

Bram Cohen had the right idea.

Morpheus/Grokster Senate Ruling Explained

According to the BBC, file-sharing has suffered a major defeat as a result of a US Supreme Court ruling that file-sharing companies are to blame for what users do with their software.

This, of course, is utter nonsense and The Antagonist will explain forthwith but first needs to get this little lot out of the system and into the ether... following the logic of this judgement, how about suing Microsoft for making the operating system on which the file-sharing software runs? Or maybe Cisco and other communications companies for helping build the networks across which all this data travels? What about Charles Babbage? Nobody's sued him yet, the bastard, and he started all this back in the 18th century. He might be dead but that hasn't stopped them before. Then we could sue the gun and weapons manufacturers for what individuals and governments who purchase their products then go on to do with them.

Obviously, holding governments to account for anything - even killing thousands of people on the basis of no evidence at all - will never happen and so is completely non-sensical, just like the notions of suing Microsoft, Cisco and dear old Mr Babbage. By virtue of something known as the logical extension, the senate ruling also renders itself immediately null and void and disappears in a puff of logic.

Anyway, back to the point... The headline is entirely misleading and filesharing has not suffered any form of setback at all. What has suffered, however, are perfectly legal file-sharing services that aren't approved by the international media conglomerates, i.e. other businesses who had the foresight to get in on making money from P2P first.

The story relates to the legal case of big business versus Streamcast Networks - the makers of the Grokster and Morpheus filesharing software. Streamcast happened to achieve what the media industry had consistently failed to achieve and managed to generate revenue streams from file-sharing networks. That Streamcast beat the international media companies to the job of so doing is the bugbear of big business and the reasoning behind the legal action.

Initially media companies started victimising a handful of individuals who were, are, and will never be anything more than an insignificant statistic in an ever-growing network of half-a-billion peers. When that tactic failed miserably in the only way it ever could and numbers of peer-to-peer users continued to increase dramatically, the media companies set their sites on other targets. One of these targets is any company that had the foresight of trying to generate media revenue streams from the Internet, a medium and problem that Sony executives themselves admitted they were 'shit scared' of back in 1998 and still failed to address.

So what we have is a worldwide media industry that is watching its artificially maintained empire collapse and crumble as it lashes out at anyone and everyone in a desperate attempt to save something that doesn't exist in the form that it once did.

The Antagonist hates to be the one to open anyone's eyes to anything but the fundamental essence of business in the free markets that man created so many rules to keep 'free', is one of cut-throat competition. Business across all industries has consistently shown that where profits are concerned anything goes and staying one step ahead of the competition is all that matters.

So when the same multi-national industries who preach the virtues of free-markets have to resort to suing competitors who have been more competitive than themselves, the practice can only be seen for what it is, entirely anti-competitive and against the nature of anything that vaguely resembles a free-market at all. You can't have it both ways. That the Senate appears to support this anti-competitive and restrictive practice should tell us all we need to know about them too.

And, on that note, The Antagonist would like to recommend that the media industries dedicate at least a small portion of their seemingly limitless legal funds to the purchase of a copy of Dale Carnegie's excellent book, 'How To Win Friends and Influence People'. If, however, the coffers are running a little low owing to the free-market economy that keeps the coffers of everyone else in the world a little low, they could always try the peer-to-peer networks they spend so long scouring and scratching their increasingly more furrowed brows at.

Filesharing - The New Economy of Community

The BPI has growled and snarled again and is victimising and showing its teeth to another small handful of people in the UK who form a tiny fraction of users in an Internet population of over 400,000,000 file sharers around the world.

The Antagonist has written several times about the fundamental truths that underlie the p2p debate, and the futility of the issuance of legal threats (here, here, here and here) and is once again duty bound to authoring the following article in another attempt to introduce whatever tiny degree of logic possible into the arena of file-sharing discussion.

Conceptually, the issue is not that file-sharing occurs, rather the inevitable consequences of that file-sharing.

Confused? You won't be...

The Inevitable Transformation of Copy Rights

Since its inception, the Internet has resulted in the emergence of the ultimate fantasy of free-market-fetishists everywhere, an entirely cooperative and entirely free-market that dissolves international boundaries, regulates itself without rules, and in which anyone with an Internet connection can participate.

This Internet community has built itself almost from nothing to the crescendo of now in the space of just 20 years and it is only just starting to be recognised, or perhaps openly acknowledged by those that have denied it for so long, as the force of evolution and escalating consciousness that is its very essence.

This community, for it is a community in the true sense of the word, has created all manner of things from open-source operating systems and applications that compete with the expensive corporate alternatives, right through to music, films and words - not for profit - but for everyone to use as they choose, and at their discretion. The price for this service? So negligible as to be as close to free as anyone might hope to achieve.

The world is unquestionably a better place for the novelty of these developments. Unless, of course, you happen to be entirely reliant on the captive market that results from the monopolistic or oligopolistic control of markets and distribution channels.

The international network of peer-to-peer users, Internet Relay Chatters and Instant Messengers consists of ordinary people who share freely and globally their local and individual forms of culture, music and ideas. The morality of doing so cannot be legislated, nor can any such legislation be realistically enforced, especially when the captive market on which that legislation depends no longer exists.

The P2P community is the embodiment of a global mass-rejection of the hard-copy, solid-state, media channels of yore that dictated, "Here, watch this, at this time, but only if you can afford it!" The old, inflexible, paradigm of controlled media distribution through specific channels has necessarily given way to worldwide networks of media consumers who listen to and watch what they want, when they want. This is the 'On demand' media utopia that multimedia always promised but that the media industries failed to deliver, instead choosing to rely on their captive audience remaining captive, despite technological revolutions greater than that of the industrial revolution which reversed that captivity forever.

Recently the media industries finally evolved enough to enter the digital media race, embarking on a game of catch-up in a competition that ended some time ago. That this is a fact, cannot be denied. Nor can it be denied that the media companies, even in their international collective cabals with all their legal might, have little hope of closing the file-sharing floodgates now, or at any point in the future, for this would be similar in nature to the Sissyphean task of trying to persuade everyone that the Earth is flat.

And, while the likes of RIAA/MPAA, and their international cohorts around the world, pursue their ill thought out, self-defeating campaigns of issuing legal threats against their customers - the very same people who fund the media's existence and who include children, grandmothers and dead people - for the abominable charges of watching films and listening to music, a whole other world emerges outside of the boundaries of currently acceptable peer-to-peer debate. Until now.

The very collectivisation and faux-dedication of the multi-national media companies to their hopeless cause tells us far more about what has not entered the copyright discussion thus far than what has. Aside from nearly every song and every film ever made, peer-to-peer networks also contain nearly every operating system, software application, research paper, radio show, TV show, lecture, interview, talk, speech, script, document, thesis, legal document and just about every book of every kind in every language ever published.

Are we to presume that those who claim ownership of anything else that can be digitised, and which therefore cannot be owned or controlled as before, follow the same path as the media industries? With the benefit of logic, rationality, and the hindsight of evidence demonstrating the extreme inefficacy of this tactic, I think not.

If the Stick Doesn't Work, Try the Carrot

The multinational media companies openly state that the only reason legal threats are issued against anyone is to serve as a 'deterrent' to the peer-to-peer community that, in private at least, the media companies know they cannot dream of stopping. Naturally, the deterrent function of a handful of legal proceedings has failed and all manner of peer-to-peer, Internet and network statistics exist to support this position.

File-sharing traffic now constitutes almost 90% of all Internet traffic, and as more of the world comes online, the number of users that comprise that 90% of Internet traffic will increase exponentially. This in turn this renders the idea of continuing to issue legal proceedings against individual peer-to-peer users even more redundant than it would already appear to any right-minded business person unfamiliar with the bizarre practice of suing their customers.

As the efforts of media companies to herd customers who have escaped via a variety of alternative sources back into CD and vinyl pens with a big stick, ever greater numbers of people around the world are actively demonstrating their reluctance to be shepherded, either through extortion, victimisation, or otherwise, into paying artificially-inflated, cartel-inspired prices for things which they have become accustomed to accessing for considerably less.

Of course, the media industries will make big noises about each individual case of victimisation because the reality of the matter is that one user, 1,000 users, or even 1 million users is still less than one percent of the overall user base and will never approach being anything other than an insignificant statistic.

What if 50 million peer-to-peer users decided to join forces and issue legal proceedings against the media cartels for price-fixing and other easily provable predatory 'free-market' tactics used to hold media buyers hostage since the advent of the gramophone? There isn't a lawyer in the world that wouldn't leap at the chance to lead that prosecution.

The Economy of Community

A world of sensory experience that previously required considerable disposable income is now accessible to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Those that stand to lose their self-appointed rights to that over which they had no legitimate claim originally will necessarily endeavour to hold back the unstoppable march of the progress which instantly dissolves their illegitimate and transparent claims to the right of eternal private profit at the public expense of everyone.

As file-sharing is vilified by those that wish to maintain the anachronistic status quo of a century of media control, it would be wise for the rest of us to remember that peer-to-peer networking and file-sharing liberates the media, information and knowledge for one and all, and that this liberation results in rapidly escalating levels of awareness and consciousness that serve the benefit of all humanity, albeit at the expense of those that desire otherwise. This, in part, is the menace of peer-to-peer networking.

The real menace of peer-to-peer networking and file-sharing as perceived by multi-national industries and governments alike, however, is not that files are being freely traded, but instead the direct and inevitable consequences of those files being traded.

The consequence of the digital revolution that has liberated information, knowledge and people, is that it challenges traditional profit-based market models. New, uncharted economic territory is being explored and the emerging economic models of this territory are so diverse from those we have known that they challenge the long-held positions of power and influence that multi-national corporations and governments have fought so long and hard against the people to preserve.

Everything wants to be free. If this wasn't the case, governments and corporations wouldn't have to go to such extreme lengths to make it not so. The new, emerging economic model of the Internet and file-sharing paradigm is now substantiating this claim as never before.

This is the power of sharing, co-operation and community, and it comes almost entirely free of artificially inflated charges.

There. It has been said. The cat is out of the bag. The horse has bolted. The banks have burst.

"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind", as Neil Armstrong once said.

'Evil' P2P - The One Microsoft Way

P2P is evil and the scourge of the Internet. Or so those that seek to part everyone from their hard earned cash at every available opportunity keep telling us.

Now, Microsoft enters the world of evil P2P with its own file-sharing software, codenamed 'Avalanche', which is based on Bram Cohen's well established and respected BitTorrent protocol.

Microsoft researchers said 'Avalanche' could be used to help distribute software and security patches, which The Antagonist finds rather odd because Microsoft recently invoked the nonsense DMCA against P2P group Downhill Battle for doing just that.

With regard to 'Avalanche' the software - Stable doors, horses and bolts.

In reality, it promises nothing that some bright kid somewhere won't improve upon immediately, if not before, 'Avalanche' starts rolling down the Microsoft mountain. Such is the fluid, dynamic and fast-paced nature of the Internet. So fast and fluid, in fact, that the traditional, behemothic industries of yore are finding it increasingly more difficult to compete and stay afloat.

The Internet paradigm has, since its inception, forged new, diverse, cooperative communities of inter-connected people that traditional supply/demand economic market models cannot entertain and simultaneously survive.

This new international community of peer-to-peer users, Internet Relay Chatters and Instant Messengers, where users of these services share globally their local and invidual forms of culture, music and ideas in a mass-rejection of the hard-copy, solid-state, media channels of yesterday, is now a living, breathing entity outside of anyone's direct control and it has high-speed access to the world's single biggest information resource.

This Internet community has built itself, almost from nothing, in the space of just 20 years and is only now starting to be recognised, or perhaps just openly acknowledged, by those that have denied it for so long, for the force (read: threat) of prominence and escalating conscience that is its very essence.

Those that stand to lose that over which they had no legitimate claim originally, will necessarily endeavour to hold back the unstoppable march of progress, or continue to jump on the bandwagon a short while after it's already too late.

Microsoft's 'Avalanche' is a shining example of the latter.

Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Elvis & P2P

Word is that Michael Jackson might have to sell his ownership of rights to the back catalogue of Beatles and Elvis tracks to bail himself out of financial difficulties. Jackson owns half of Sony/ATV Music which owns the rights to 200,000 songs, which includes the Jackson-owned Beatles and Elvis catalogues. Sony's publishing business is worth in the region of $1 billion, 50 percent of which is attributable to Michael Jackson, himself reported to be worth somewhere around $150 million.

Apparently.

It beggars The Antagonist's belief that this continued assumption of ownership of vibrations in the airwaves, and the huge sums of money associated with so doing, can continue when anyone with a TV, radio, or PC and Internet connection can readily avail themselves of those very same vibrations.

Sure, a centralised bunch of media companies can wave around lots of bits of paper containing all sorts of legal jargon which implies ownership of everything ever recorded, but they can't really argue with a world-wide, decentralised, fully-redundant world of half-a-billion Internet users, who account for up to 85% of all Internet traffic, and who are all actively asserting a rather different paradigm.

Evidence shows they still haven't quite got it yet.

High Speed Multimedia Terrorism

Hey media industries, has The Antagonist got some news for you!

Reports of Internet transfer rates of "billion bits a second" and how "consumers could download an entire HD movie in about five minutes vs. today's 22 minutes."

Whatever evil spins the media corporates try and put on p2p or filesharing, even a click and a whopping 22 minutes to download a film wins hands down when compared to paying to sit on hold to a call centre for 22 minutes to pre-order tickets to a film - complete with additional booking fee for the privilege, of course - for which you still have to queue, possibly for another 22 minutes, to pick up when you've braved the elements and travelled, perhaps 22 or so more minutes, to get to wherever it is the film is showing. Then, after about 22 more minutes of adverts and general fluff that most of us could happily live without, along comes your film.

Which one would you choose?

In their infinite wisdom, the global media mafiaa are sticking to their clever strategy designed to see them through this passing Internet fad and have sued a few more multimedia terrorists... er... I mean a few more of the "upwards of 400 million peer to peer users worldwide".

The Antagonist will return soon with some clever statistics involving the numbers 9,000 (total law suits to date) and 400,000,000 (number of peer to peer users worldwide) just as soon as the abacus has been exponentially upgraded.

Bad Peer Days

It's been an interesting few days in the battle of big business versus the Internet-using population of the World.

First, in the run up to the MGM Vs Grokster case, owner of a number of content companies and the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, takes a financial stand against the really big content companies and pitches in monies to employ the legal services of Richard Taranto in arguing the EFF case for Grokster.

Next up, members of the U.S. Supreme Court express their concerns that allowing legal action to proceed against technology companies will stifle future technological progress. Intel agreed, and filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court to be used on behalf of Grokster and the other defendants. The Intel brief explains:

"Imposing on innovators, such as Intel an obligation to anticipate potential uses of their innovations, to correctly guess which uses will predominate, and then to design their technologies to prevent infringing uses (even if it were technically and practically feasible to do so) would stifle innovation and dramatically increase the cost of such technologies and of the consumer and enterprise products based on those technologies."

Then, on the day EFF defends StreamCast Networks in front of the Supreme Court, Cuban writes another article questioning the logic behind the RIAA's claim that file-sharing causes a decline in sales.

Cuban goes one step further and says that all other forms of digital media - DVDs, Digital Photographs, Video Games, Software, and Ringtones - have all seen huge increases in sales, either in terms of monetary value, or actual units since the advent of P2P technology, and that any alleged decline in music sales is simply due to lost market share. When you consider the global media mafia's steadfast commitment to their die-not-adapt logic and the sales of non-RIAA-cartel releases popularised by the very peer to peer networks the media mafia are looking to destroy, this all makes perfect sense.

The media companies are fighting just about everyone they can, from members of the general public, to technology companies, to even other media companies who happen to demonstrate a greater understanding of the inherent nature of digital media and Internet technologies. And in this they've taken on the impossible task of stopping the unstoppable.

The world knew it back in the days of Napster. Mark Cuban knew it in the early days of broadcast.com. Maybe, soon, the global media mafia will realise it too.