p2pnet.net:- What’s happening today?” - emailed Mel from the UK. “I missed my morning fix. Another blizzard?”

“No Mel,” I would have emailed her back had I been able to. “A sudden huge wind-storm which blew up out of nowhere yesterday afternoon. It’s left a good part of British Columbia without power.”

I live on Vancouver Island, BC, and I’m writing crouched on the floor to access a Net connection in a city half-an-hour away. There, some power has been restored. But BC Hydro doesn’t expect our area to have electricity until tomorrow. It came on briefly, then cut out again. I’ve been hanging out at home, hoping the power would come back on, but it isn’t going to happen, and they’re expecting another blow within the next day or two.

Greenhouse effect? What Greenhouse effect?

It’s interesting that the giant energy conglomerates use many of the self-same “experts” Big Tobacco employs when it tries to tell us smoking isn’t a hard-core, deadly, addiction. It’s debatable whether or not all that poisonous junk emanating from the oil refineries, vehicle exhausts, chemical plants, and so on, and pouring ever upwards, is affecting the climate, say the bought-and-paid-for “experts,” glibly. There’s a question. A doubt. And if that’s so, the people who pay us can keep on doing what they do.

Anyway, as usual, Mel had emailed me a couple of urls for stories she thought might be good for p2pnet.

Thanks, Mel, as usual. Sorry I can haven’t been able to do anything with them : )

But this black-out has given me room,and time, to think

I can use some help.

My days are usually: get up; scan sites for news; choose topics; do stories; read emails; do stories; answer emails; pack it in; be a dad; go to bed; read; sleep; do it all over again.

And when the power goes out, nothing gets posted. But today I realised it’s gone beyond just finding a way to keep the stories online. Realistically, who cares? OK. I do my thing, but there are plenty of other sites and, thanks to rss, people can get the kind of items they want fed to them.

One of the things I’ve tried to do is: show the RIAA victims as people, not as faceless names. A handful of straight arrow lawyers (Yes, the do exist) are doing their lawyering, and they’re having a major and positive effect. They’re making the labels work for it.

But two things are being missed: the victims really are victims. It’s not just words. A huge groundswell is building: a critical mass of people who just aren’t going to take any more. And to do my small part to help it gather strength and momentum, I’d like to focus more on making it crystal clear Big Music victims really ARE victims.

But it takes time. So I’m asking for volunteer news editors and contributors - people who’ll each agree to produce one or two or three news items a day, anonymously or named. Their choice. And I’m also looking for victims not just in America, but anywhere in the world where the labels are using their co-called ‘trade’ organizations such as the RIAA, CRIA, ARIA, and so on, to haul people into court. I’d like them to get in touch so I, or someone else, can write their stories, anonymously or named. Or it’d be even better if they’d write their own stories. Their own words are certain to be best.

That way we can build up a Real People archive.

Big Four lawyers can get away with it in the closed environments of court rooms. But their clients, the members of the Big Four Organized Music cartel, Warner Music (US), EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), can’t hope to win in the courts of public opinion, which is where you and I come in.

Quantum scimus summus. We are what we know.

So let’s make sure we know who the victims - ordinary men, women and children all - are. In detail.

Lawyers don’t aim at truth. They aim at persuasion and in the process, the truth frequently gets left in the dust. And the truth is: these people aren’t criminals or crooks. They’re not thieves. They’re not out to destroy the music industry. They’re their the Big Four’s own customers, for God’s sake!

They’re ordinary people, just like us. In fact, they are us.

If you think you can help, or you want to tell your story, or have it told, please contact me here.

Cheers! And all the best. And thanks …

Jon Newton - p2pnet

---

If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 3447 times

« previous Big Music: death of the status quo

p2pnet: still storm-bound next »