SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION

posted by James Reel

    Leftists love to quote John Stuart Mill’s remark that "Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative." I have a musical corollary to that: Claims for the “Mozart Effect” aside, classical music doesn’t make you less stupid, but stupid people are ignorant of classical music.
    Here’s the latest evidence that complete idiots and asses are in charge. The victim of the stupidity: composer, music journalist and blogger Kyle Gann. He operates a little online music service he calls Postclassic Radio. At that site, you can hear a wide variety of contemporary art music, hardly any of it available commercially or easily. Gann is providing exposure for composers whose music otherwise might not be heard beyond Downtown Manhattan, and absolutely nobody is losing money because people would rather listen free to Postclassic Radio than buy the CDs it plays—again, you can’t buy much of this stuff, and those discs that you can buy are things you probably would pass up because you’d have no idea what the music sounds like. Everybody benefits from what Gann is doing, and nobody loses.
    But Gann has been found in violation of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because he dares to play more than two consecutive tracks from the same CD. The law is intended to keep people from downloading or making available huge chunks of commercially available discs, thus cutting into the legitimate profits of record companies. But the morons in charge of protecting the rights of the record companies don’t understand that classical music is dominated by multi-movement works. If you don’t play more than two tracks of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or any number of other compositions new and old, you’re not playing the whole thing. Gann tried to explain this to the Powers That Be, but they remain recalcitrant in their ignorance.
    You can’t expect all people to know all things; that’s why this so-called information society developed, so we could become better informed. But the willful ignorance exhibited by the people cracking down on Gann is intolerable. Why do we give power to people who defend their right to stupidity? I suppose it’s called democracy.
    Meanwhile, Gann has figured out a work-around. The “permalink” option isn’t working, so to read the update go to his blog and find the entry called “Take the Blue Pill.”