Comments on: Buying into corporate PR

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 12:20:31 +0000

RCS Interactive is pretty much of a joke too. that page is FLASH!? wtf. Flash for a **static text** page. these people are fricking geniuses. Why on earth would you do that? it makes resizing impossible, for those who can’t see the small font. they’ve even made the text unselectable!
in fact, their whole interface is Flash.

and i haven’t even commented on their lame-ass invented word: “e.Marketing”. i guess they put a period after the “e” for novelty. sad sad sad people.

/zi.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 09:17:48 +0000

http://rcsinteractive.com/about.cfm

This thing is a fucking joke. Download Legal aren’t students at all.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 07:28:44 +0000

eck.. always forgetting to sig..
I emailed them asking about their forum (read from bottom first) and got a response saying they’re “working on it”.. not from Brooklyn Burgess, but from “DownloadLegal staff”. I wrote back asking when they’ll have this ready. no reply. I think we should all email them and ask.

/zi.

From: zi
Mailed-By: gmail.com
To: Brooklyn Burgess
Date: Feb 14, 2006 4:25 AM
Subject: Re: question about the site

Ok great! I look forward to being able to participate in the discussions. There are many free blog software packages out there including Wordpress, which is used by a lot of people. Do you have an ETA on when the forums will be up?

On 2/13/06, Brooklyn Burgess wrote:

>Thanks for your interest.

>We are working on adding a blog to the website where people can post. We will notify you by email when we get it up and running.

>Download Legal Staff

>From: zi
>To: DownloadLegally@hotmail.com
>Subject: question about the site
>Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 01:59:03 -0500
>
>hi, I have a question about your site. In your press release, you said you: “TUSCALOOSA, Alabama â Download Legal, a new nonpartisan student advocacy group, was unveiled today with the goal of providing students with a forum to discuss impending developments in the realm of intellectual property.”

>I want to particiapte in the forum discussions. Where are they? I can’t find them anywhere on the site. There’s not even a chance to provide feedback for others to see.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 07:20:37 +0000

i posted this comment on the other DownloadLegal story, but i’ll post it again, since it got buried in the archives. I apologize if you’ve already read this:

It’s an open secret that I have no patience for liars and idiots, and it looks like we’re dealing with both here. Everything associated with DownloadLegal.org reeks of the RIAA’s stench. The site and these “students” are obvious paid RIAA sock puppets. These poor miserable bastards. They’re either truly believe in the RIAA’s, or more likely, they’re opinion-less, spineless muppets who will happily taking the money in exchange for being the RIAA’s tape recorder.

from their press release:

“TUSCALOOSA, Ala., Feb. 7 /U.S. Newswire/ — Download Legal, a new nonpartisan student advocacy group, was unveiled today with the goal of providing students with a forum to discuss impending developments in the realm of intellectual property. Download Legal also hopes to educate students about illegal file-sharing and the impact that it has on emerging artists.”

who the hell “unveils” a student group? in my entire 4 years of college, i never had 1 student group unveil itself. You unveil a new car at an autoshow, where people wait in eager anticipation with oohs and aahs. It’s like the movies when the waiter in a fancy restaurant brings you a tray with a huge metal lid, and he sets it down in front of you and removes the lid, saying “Bon appetit”, revealing some absurdly big and mouthwatering chunk of meat. A person does not unveil crap!

went to the site. The website is not only crap, it is mammoth crap. Nice little forum they have there. By “nice”, I mean “not nice” and by “forum” I mean “total lack of existence of vehicles for dialogue”. Discussion? Heh! Now for my Yakov Smirnoff bit: In Communist Russia.. you don’t discuss music, music discusses you!

Where’s the discussion board? from their press release: âStudents should be provided with an active voice in the intellectual property debate”. Ironic, ain’t it? No message boards, “reader’s voices” or anything. Have they got something to hide? Afraid people will flood the site with porn link, flames, and anti-RIAA anger? I’m going to write an email to them right now, and so should all of you, if you care about stopping the RIAA’s lies. yes, students need a voice, and that voice is “STFU RIAA” and “FOAD!”

It can’t be any more obvious that this site is just more RIAA propaganda. Real students wouldn’t make a site like this. We’ve all seen what student org websites look like. they’ve got that noob look. this site has a crap corporate look that’s a dead giveaway. as a professional web guy, i can tell you whoever the RIAA hired to do this isn’t a very good designer. i’ve seen templates on eBay that have more creative sense than this. if you need a reminder of what student group pages like (Alabama U):

http://bama.ua.edu/~isa/
http://www.bama.ua.edu/~tccf/

.. for more chuckles, see other groups
http://www.ua.edu/academic/international/services/intl_student_org.htm

If they’re in law school, they wouldn’t have the time. I have plenty of friends who are in/graduated from law school. Every single one of them say it is hell. They didn’t have time for anything except studying. Nothing on the site identifies the principles involved, except an “about us” page, which has a photo that looks like it came from Corbis. (I will die laughing if someone finds it!)

http://downloadlegal.org/Contact/

the page lists 4 males and 1 female. The photo has some lamer wearing an A&F sweatshirt and 4 females. hmm…. and the fake hotmail account is a really sad and transparent attempt to look noobish.

that’s not even getting into an analysis of the language of the site. there’s no persona and voice in anything that is written on the site, just brainless regurgitation of the RIAA party line. No “how we became involved”, “why we feel so passionate about this cause”, anecdotal accounts, or anything. any idiot who has taken English 101 in college out to be able to point this out. It is WORD FOR WORD the same garbage propaganda the RIAA uses.

.. I need to thank Turbogeek too for this excellent explanation about the RIAA manipulating language to support their lies. They’ve got millions of dollars for their publicity war, but we’ve got millions of people with brain cells. We have to make the RIAA suffer for their unjust actions. Eventually, the backlash is going to reach critical and the RIAA will run out of money. As Bob Dylan might sing:

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A p2p war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

[[ *** UPDATE *** ]]

i did a whois on them. the noobs at Rightclick Strategies even spelled their email address wrong! Washington DC registration address with “Brooklyn Burgess” is supposedly in Alabama. how interesting.

Registrant:
Rightclick Strategies

1140 Connecticut Ave
Suite 610
Washington, District of Columbia 20036
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: DOWNLOADLEGAL.ORG
Created on: 20-Jul-05
Expires on: 20-Jul-06
Last Updated on: 26-Jul-05

Administrative Contact:
Strategies, Rightclick suppoert@rcsinteractive.com
1140 Connecticut Ave
Suite 610
Washington, District of Columbia 20036
United States
(202) 333-4444

Technical Contact:
Strategies, Rightclick suppoert@rcsinteractive.com
1140 Connecticut Ave
Suite 610
Washington, District of Columbia 20036
United States
(202) 333-4444

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.INTERNET-DNS.NET
NS2.INTERNET-DNS.NET

Registry Status: CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
Registry Status: CLIENT RENEW PROHIBITED
Registry Status: CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registry Status: CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 05:48:51 +0000

“Threatens entry level jobs – Reducing software piracy by just 10 percentage points worldwide would generate 1.5 million jobs and add $400 billion to the world economy, according to a study released by the Business and Software Alliance and IDC.”

The assumption is that the money is either

-diverted to the monopopiles and the cartels for their good use (cerate jobs) throught the purchase of lousy overpriced products

- is thrown down the tube or burned and no jobs are created.

Actually the logic is inverted. Money sent to the monopolies and the cartels, located who knows where, create few far fewer jobs than money spent locally on food and clothes and education because salaries in the latter industries are lower, on average and the jobs are closer to home (icing on the cake).

The “job creation” argument is pure bullshit.

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:28:02 +0000

A website with no content, no clue, and no visitors i’d hope ;o)

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 06:33:53 +0000

Thanks Alex. Interesting piece.

Not sure if “download legal” is even worth that much consideration though…

If you debunk something that is pure bunk, what are you left with?

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 20:34:48 +0000

That site is so one sided I suspect it is a corporate front. You would think after visiting there that there are no artists who support p2p. Probably the most dubious claim he makes is that p2p hurts new artists. That is the first time I have ever seen that claim, from what I have read everywhere else most big artists don’t like file sharing while most unsigned people like it as they are trying as hard as they can to get publicity. He conveniently does not mention the Arctic Monkeys.