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WHEN THE MUSIC’S OVER (RANDOM LINKS FOR 4/17/12)
April 17th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

anti-riaa ad from the electronic frontier foundation; via university of texas

Two reasons why Hilary Rosen, Ann Romney’s recent verbal sparring partner, should not be considered a spokesperson for the Obama campaign or for any “progressive” thing:

(1) She became a PR shill for BP, post-gulf-spill.

(2) and most important: She infamously headed the Recording Industry Association of America during the start of that outfit’s notorious “anti-piracy” extremism.

Rosen didn’t just shut down Napster and Audiogalaxy. She fostered the music-industry lobby group’s policy of punitive aggression in the name of the Almighty Intellectual Property.

After she left the RIAA, the staff she’d hired served all those ridiculous suits for ridiculous sums against lowly individual file-sharers—and against some individuals who’d never shared a file in their lives.

Elsewhere in randomland:

  • Talk about going dangerously mainstream: The Stranger won a Pulitzer Prize. (It’s actually for a good piece, the one about the survivor of the South Park killer.) (Oh, the Seattle Times won one of those Pulitzer things too.)
  • Financial-software giant Intuit is celebrating Tax Day by closing part of Second Avenue downtown and (as per GeekWire) “inviting people to drive golf balls down the middle of the street.”
  • Neither gubernatorial candidate has so far dared to even mention this state’s #1 need: to reform our ultra-regressive revenue system.
  • There’s a new local news site in town. The nonprofit Seattle Globalist is all about the intersections between here at home and the whole wide world. The ethnic communities; the local impact of world events; world culture (film, food, anime, etc.). The site’s got a launch party on the 28th at Washington Hall.
  • A sports analyst says the Mariners are “ripe to be sold,” should the team’s current owners decide to sell (which they haven’t).
  • Here’s one more thing some folks are bitching at Amazon about: its membership (along with many other big corps) in ALEC, the notorious right-wing pressure group that supplies GOP state legislators with pre-written, megabuck-lobbyist-dictated bills. (It also files “friend of the court” briefs in U.S. Supreme Court cases.)
  • Just Plain Gross Dept.: The next stage in crash dieting is women who voluntarily live on feeding tubes for up to 10 days.
  • Margaret Atwood claims “our faith is fraying in the god of money.”
  • Alex Henderson at AlterNet believes America would be much better off, in several quantifiable ways, if the country could just shake off its “sexual prudery.” Some of these ways, he claims, would include lowered rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, and HIV infections.

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