The Media, Slavery, and Rascism ?

 General, History, Media, Politics  No Responses »
Mar 242007
 

I have written on slavery before in a more general sense, but this time it is more about how media represents slavery at a time when slavery is in the news because Sunday is the 200th anniversary of the British attempting to abolish the slave trade as the first step in abolishing slavery which is something that is still not finished.

Well, actually the campaign for the abolition of slavery in Britain/England is actually quite a bit older than that act in 1807; the first step was allegedly the abolition of serfdom in 1102. There were many steps forward and many shameful steps backwards (such as the start of the transatlantic slave trade). But I’ll stop there before I get carried away and just point you to the Wikipedia article on the history of slavery … [w:History of Slavery]

What this little rant is about, is how the media portray slavery as an institution where only blacks were slaves and only whites were slave owners and traders. Wrong!

Even ignoring the earlier history of slavery, it is clear from various statistics that slaves could be white or black :-

Group Number
Africans in the transatlantic slave trade 11.6 million
Africans in the Eastern slave trade 11-16 million
Europeans in the Eastern slave trade 1-1.5 million

These figures are hardly likely to be accurate … slave traders do not appear to be good record keepers for some reason, but it would appear that from these figures approximately 6% of the slaves in early modern history were European. That seems like a relatively small quantity in comparison to the number of African slaves taken from their homes, but each individual forced into slavery is a crime against humanity, and a tragedy for the individual whether the individual was black, white or any other colour.

These figures probably vastly underestimate the number of slaves throughout history even if we exclude serfs (a serf is a slave owned by the land and not a person … a distinction likely to make a difference to a lawyer but not the serf). The colour of a slave is irrelevant; it is the fact that he is a slave that is important (and important to free him). The colour of a slave owner is irrelevant; it is the fact that she owns slaves and abuses them that is important (no matter how kind a slavemaster is, she is still abusing other humans).

It is easy to overlook the African involvement in the slave trade … we are given the impression that it was solely white Europeans who threw black Africans into chains. There was certainly plenty of that going on, but in the early days at least many black Africans were involved in the slave trade.

The media needs to stop getting carried away with the easy job of portraying the transatlantic slave trade where images are relatively easy to come by, and make it plain that all slavery is wrong and that it was not just black Africans abused in this way. Given how widespread slavery has been in the past, it is almost certain that everyone alive today is descended from someone who was a slave and probable that they are descended from slave owner.

There are those who say we should compensate the descendants of slaves for the crime against their ancestors. If everyone is a descendent of a slave, this could be somewhat expensive to do! However there is some that we must do and that is to do everything we can to stop present day slavery … yes it still goes on. I am sure that many if not all of history’s dead slaves would cry out that any money that could be put into compensation should be first spent on stopping anyone else being subject to slavery in any form … that is the first priority.

Digital Rights Management Is Just Software Protection With A New Name

 Film, General, Media, Politics  No Responses »
Mar 172007
 

In the dim and distant past when iPods were something in SciFi films that hatched some nasty alien, and the only people who thought we might be using our computers for music were dangerously unstable visionaries there used to be a big issue called ‘software protection’. The software publishers had noticed that their software was being copied rather than paid for.

Being under the impression that every single illegal copy represented a lost sale (it isn’t, but that’s another story), they hired geeks to make copying software difficult. All of a sudden all the floppy disks (yes that long ago) that software came on were written with all sorts of funky tricks to make copying them difficult.

What happened ? Well the pirates came up with tricky ways of copying the disks and even removing the protection completely. Essentially the software protection schemes did not exist for them … in fact the more geeky ones enjoyed the challenge!

As for legitimate consumers, they started having problems. Those few who had hard disks suddenly had a collection of software packages that they could not copy onto the hard disk. Those who failed to treat their disks delicately found themselves unable to run software that often cost hundreds of pounds. It even grew to a point where the disk protection was so extreme that you found even a new disk did not work reliably.

A personal story from the 1980s … when the game Elite was launched for the BBC Microcomputer, I took some of my very limited money at the time and bought a copy. The game was brilliant but the disk protection was so extreme that I could not be sure of loading the game at any time. This experience ruined the game for me and I took it back. A few months later I ‘obtained’ an illegal copy and carried on playing it.

Do I feel guilty about breaking copyright law in this case ? No. I tried to do the right thing, but the software protection was so obnoxious to me as a legitimate consumer that I was encouraged to seek out an illegal copy.

Eventually after a long campaign, most of the larger software companies gave up software protection as a bad joke and everybody (probably including the software companies) breathed a sigh of relief.

Roll on a few years to now and look to digital music … a whole alphabet soup of different file formats … MP3, OGG, AAC, WMA, FLAC, MIDI … and that is just a few from the software that I run on my iPod. Some of these digital music formats have digital rights management and some do not … and the ones that do have it do not have the same one.

So I ‘buy’ a track from an online store for my smartphone which works quite well providing I keep the music there. Move it to my iPod and the iPod does not know it is music. Move it to a Windows machine, and it says that you’re not allowed to play it here. Some of these digital music formats have digital rights management and some do not … and the ones that do have it do not have the same one.

Notice something similar ? Again those who want to steal something will come up with a way to do it, and those legitimate consumers have to put up with restrictions that the pirates do not. Some of these digital music formats have digital rights management and some do not … and the ones that do have it do not have the same one.

We move onto films, where the same thing is happening. Ever notice whilst watching a DVD that you have to sit through 5-10 minutes of some stupid video telling you not to be naughty and steal the DVD ? Very irritating to be told off for something that you are not doing … especially when you realise those who steal movies usually have hacked hardware so they can fast forward through those bits. And of course movie download sites are using DRM in much the same way as music … you can download the movie and play it once, or play it as many times as you like for a month, or it only works on your PlayStation3 (or something like that). All sorts of restrictions for the legitimate consumer.

And what about those who download films from the file sharing networks ? Well no restrictions of course. In fact you can sometimes even download films before they are in the cinema especially if you are in a strange place like the UK where apparently shipping a film suitable for showing in the cinema can take many months.

Most media companies have yet to learn something that most software companies learnt a long time ago … pirates will steal your content whatever you do, and punishing legitimate consumers for doing the right thing will encourage some to become pirates and is pretty daft anyway. If I were a large media company I would do the following :-

  • Get rid of DRM. It costs money, probably has a negligable effect on the problem and punishes legitimate consumers.
  • Make all the old content available for download in a high-quality media format that can play everywhere for an almost nominal sum … perhaps a £1 a movie. Put the address of the download site at the beginning of the film prominently for a minute or two. This becomes your advertisement to those who get a copy illegally … and some of them will spend a pound to get an obscure
    film they’ve heard is good and then become more likely to purchase downloads.
  • Stop making cinema releases in stages. If you really want to see an over-hyped film that you know is in the cinema in the US but you have to wait months to see it in your country, you are far more likely to download an illegal copy than otherwise. If you have seen that illegal copy (sometimes a low-quality recording from a camcorder in a cinema) you are less likely to spend money on the film again. Especially if it is really over-hyped.
  • Same thing for DVD releases. Release them simultaneously world-wide and make them region free (whatever the excuse, region encoding comes across to consumers as a way of ripping them off).
  • Normalise DVD prices as much as possible. Seeing the same product at different prices in different countries makes the consumer feel they’re being ripped off. And don’t make the sales tax excuse … some consumers are capable of calculating the difference that makes.
  • Make DVD prices as cheap as possible. When consumers get DVDs for free with our newspaper, they feel like they are getting ripped off when they pay £20 for one.

If consumers feel like they are getting ripped off by media companies, they are more likely to try ripping off the media companies.

It all comes down to one simple statement. Rather than trying to stop people stealing using methods that don’t really work (and punish the legitimate consumer), look into why consumers steal films and other media and come up with consumer-friendly methods to alleviate that problem.

Educating People About Taxes

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 182007
 

Everyone hates paying taxes. To be honest nothing is going to change that at all, but there are a few things that could be done to improve the situation. At present people want to pay as little tax as possible, whilst having well funded public services. Which is kind of foolish and impossible to achieve; of course there are ways in which to make public services more efficient but that is a whole other rant.

I should point out at this point, that I’m somewhat partial here as my own salary comes indirectly from taxation (and pretty stingy the tax-payers are too), but that is also a whole other rant.

The funny thing is that when you start working, you get a nasty shock when you get your first payslip about how much disappears in the direction of the government and nobody is there to explain what you get for your money. Why not include classes in school about what taxation gets us ?

All that taxation does provide us with useful services which include :-

  • A public health service that anyone can use at no cost or vastly reduced cost.
  • A police service intended to protect us from criminals.
  • Armed forced to defend us from external threats.
  • A social security system to provide us with a safety net in case we cannot earn an income.
  • An education system that educates everyone.

And I dare say I’ve left loads out … I nearly forgot education where I work! But we don’t get told about what we get for our money, we are expected to “just know”. Of course it some ways it is obvious, but why not make it clearer ?

In fact why not make the yearly pay slip (the P60) larger and include rough figures for how much we paid for each service ? If you get something that says you paid £10,000 in tax, of which £1,500 went to pay for Health, etc., we are more likely to be less critical of taxation.

Honours For Cash ? Why Not ?

 Politics  No Responses »
Dec 142006
 

We have a long running issue in the UK with honours allegedly being exchanged for cash contributions to certain political parties. This is hardly a new thing, and has been regularly repeated throughout history. And the original “Lords” certainly needed plenty of cash to maintain their position … it is rarely mentioned, but honours have been removed when a Lord lost too much money.

Personally I suspect that it has always been the case that if you were careful and ‘helpful’ to the party in power, it has always been possible to exchange your surplus cash for an honour.

So why not make it official ? Making honours something you can buy will stop all the backdoor deals that probably go on in exchange for honours.

Make someone who wants to sit in the House of Lords, pay up £5 million. Of that, £3 million goes either to the political party of their choice, or into the general tax funds; £1 million goes towards the cost of maintaining the Lords.

The final £1 million goes to a random person selected from the electoral register, gets a title, and must sit in the House of Lords. They could probably do with a salary as well (which is where the ‘maintenance’ comes in).

This kills two birds with one stone … takes the sleaze out of the honours system, and helps counter-balance the tendency of the Lords to be weighed down with establishment cronies. It tastes better to me than the idea of making the House of Lords just another house full of politicians … whilst the old Lords packed full of establishment cronies is a pretty bad thing, one thing that is good about it, is the relative freedom from party politics. And adding some good old common sense from the common people to keep the excesses of the politicians in check is worth trying.

Slavery

 History, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 272006
 

The UK prime minister has just released a ‘statement of regret’ for Britain’s participation in the slave trade which is fair enough … after all slavery was and continues to be a crime against humanity. Some are calling for him to go further and issue a full apology and hand out reparations, which is where things get a little tricky.

The history of slavery is a little more complicated than just excessively greedy British merchants sailing to Africa, seizing millions of Africans and dragging them across the Atlantic to live and die in atrocious conditions. For a start, many of those merchants bought their slaves from native slave traders who had been in business for many years already.

In Africa it was common for African tribes or nations to enslave prisoners of war (a common practice in many other parts of the world) and sell those slaves on to slave traders who would them take them East or later West for resale. As many if not more slaves were sold East to Arab slave traders as were sold West to European slave traders.

In addition, the pirates of North Africa had their own slave trade by seizing Europeans from sea or land and selling them into slavery in their own markets. Whilst not of the same scale as the outgoing trade from Africa, it still counts as a crime against humanity for each of the estimated 1.5 million victims. Including a number of US citizens … the Barbary Pirate attacks on US ships was the chief reason why the US Navy was started.

In fact slavery or similar states (serfdom, enforced contractual slavery, etc) has been so widespread that there are very few parts of the world that did not have slavery at some point in the past, and probably very few of us who do not have slaves as ancestors.

So when we talk of reparations for the crime of slavery, who should pay ? And who should be paid ? It is not an easy question to answer. Of course Britain is included amongst the group of debtors, but do we get credit for the amount of efforts Britain made to abolish the slave trade ? And what about the other slave traders … other Europeans, Arabs, and Africans ?

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