hiester.com

Good Morning Silicon Valley has been following the desperate efforts of various music recording industry groups to crack down on illegal music distribution. Groups such as the British Phonographic Industry are calling on Internet Service Providers to monitor their users online activities and punish or report those who share music illegally.

This week, the ISP’s shot back. MISPELL, the Multinational Internet Service Provider Education and Legislation League, issued the following press release:

Industry Groups around the world have been lobbying for legislation that will require ISPs to monitor our users’ activities and ban users who are found to share music files in violation of copyright laws. Our question is, why us? It would make just as much sense to require PC manufacturers to monitor their customers and punish those who steal music. Maybe they could make the violating computer melt into a useless smelly gray blob. That would be pretty good punishment, right?

Why not force hard disk manufacturers to detect suspicious music piracy-related disk activity and then send all the data to the authorities? What is music piracy if not the movement of data from one disk drive to another? Then again, disk drive companies would be correct in their assertion that data cannot be written to a disk without first being held in memory somewhere.

Memory chip vendors should add algorithms that sense illegal music distribution patterns in the silicon, then they should send the user’s biographical information directly to the BPI and the RIAA and display “Don’t copy that floppy” on the user’s screen.

Speaking of the screen, without a screen, it would be nearly impossible to pirate music. The bad guys have to be able to see what they’re doing in order to cripple the poor music recording industry by distributing music on P2P networks. Maybe display and peripheral device manufacturers need to speed up the artificial intelligence components in their devices so they can stop music piracy.

And how did the chip manufacturers come out of this smelling like a rose? Hello! You can’t be an Internet music thief without a computer and there is no computer without a processor. Intel and AMD really need to add some low-level music piracy detection machine code right into the chip. But wait! My Intel Core Duo is about as useful as an 8-track tape if I don’t have any electricity.

Utility companies must massage the power they distribute into a music piracy-detecting pattern in order to save the worldwide music recording industry from the crippling scourge of Internet crooks.

Not so fast there, young fella. Electricity doesn’t just get up and walk across the wires on its own. You’ve got to have some kind of fuel to burn to make heat to boil water to turn turbines to make electricity. What is the most common fuel used to make electricity? Coal. The coal industry has built itself on the theft of other people’s music. They should be ashamed of themselves! How can they sleep at night? We call on coal mining companies to start making “smart coal” that can burn in such a way as to make the electricity that it ultimately generates incapable of supporting intellectual theft. It would be nice, too, if they could alter its molecular structure so it doesn’t release carbon dioxide and speed up global warming, but that is a secondary concern to the music recording industry.

One of my new year’s resolutions was to avoid NPR, National Prozac Radio (and the Prozac part is that you need Prozac to keep listening). I turned on the radio this morning Weekend Edition Saturday has host Scott Simon interviewing a band called The Whigs. He explains that they’re from Georgia and they record on the label of “another Southern rocker, Dave Matthews.” I’ve never been a big Dave Matthews fan, but I do remember hearing that he is from South Africa. So, Scott, I suppose you’re right, Dave Matthews is a Southern Rocker technically. My favorite Southern Rockers are Ladysmith Black Mambazo. And nobody defines the West Coast sound like Youssou N’Dor.