Dan has written an article giving us his take on the RIAA music piracy thing. It's pretty insightful as his writing is want to be, but it references these two articles. Obviously they conclude that the RIAA are being incredibly stupid - what clever person wouldn't. But these articles bring up some interesting historical precedents that I was unaware of.

This Henry Ford issue, for those who aren't link-clickers basically boils down to this: At the beginning of last century when Henry Ford was starting his mass-produced automobiles thing, there was an RIAA-esq organization which licenced all of the motor vehicle production in the US. They didn't like that Ford was going to make cars that were affordable for normal, everyday people, so they refused to licence him. He continued to produce cars and the organization sued not only him but the customers who were buying his cars. This turned out to be a Bad Idea.

There's also some actual almost-statistics on how much filesharing has been "hurting" the music industry. Here's the capsule review again for those who don't like links: Fuck all.

According to the record industry and their rich buddies the radio was going to kill record sales, photocopiers were going to stop people from buying books, VCRs were going to stop people from going to the movies, audio tapes were once again going to prevent people from buying records, now CD burners and MP3s are robbing artists of their hard earned. Of course none of this is true. Nobody can rob recording artists any more efficiently than the record companies do themselves. If you want to hear a little more about that (and a lot more about the studio/label/recording process) then get yourself a coke and check out the Mixerman Diaries.

Next? Well, market day was fantastical. I'm not sure of the exact statistic but it felt like more than 50% of the new EAS members I signed up were girls. This is mostly due to El Presidente Don's masterful plan of putting DJing workshops on free for EAS members on Thursday afternoons in the Red Room.

Last Thursday the EAS were usurped from our rightful place as Red Room stylers when some UQ Union hippy debate of some description took over for the earlier parts of the night.. Apparently music isn't conducive to debate or something. So we turned up at around 8ish and rocked the dregs of the night out. I made with the visuals for a while and realised that the table is a bit too low to comfortably operate a laptop while standing up. Have to sort that out next time.

So: Come to the Red Room on Thursday afternoon (from about 4), join the EAS - it's only $2 - drink beer and learn to DJ. Sounds like a plan to me.