Blog Ipsa Loquitur

The International New York Times’s Clemens Wergin takes a break from writing about foreign policy to write about something much more contentious; parenting.

Specifically, parents who safely shelter their children away from all possible danger:

Today’s parents enjoyed a completely different American childhood. Recently, researchers at the University of Virginia conducted interviews with 100 parents. “Nearly all respondents remember childhoods of nearly unlimited freedom, when they could ride bicycles and wander through woods, streets, parks, unmonitored by their parents,” writes Jeffrey Dill, one of the researchers.

But when it comes to their own children, the same respondents were terrified by the idea of giving them only a fraction of the freedom they once enjoyed. Many cited fear of abduction, even though crime rates have declined significantly. The most recent in-depth study found that, in 1999, only 115 children nationwide were victims of a “stereotypical kidnapping” by a stranger; the overwhelming majority were abducted by a family member.

That same year, 2,931 children under 15 died as passengers in car accidents. Driving children around is statistically more dangerous than letting them roam freely.

Just over a hundred kids snatched off the street. For comparison, in 2010, there were 156 kids killed by guns in their own homes. Check the math yourself in the almost unbearably grim National Violent Death Reporting System.

More kids are shot to death at home or killed in a car accident than are be kidnapped. Don’t be an innumerate parent.

Kashmir Hill, writing in Fusion:

Last night, Apple pushed out iOS 8.2 to my iPhone, an update to its operating system. The blurb for the update promised “improvements to the Health app.” Finally, I thought. When HealthKit was first introduced last year, it came under criticism for not taking women’s health needs into consideration.

The Apple app tracks an amazing assortment of possible health indicators: sleep, body mass index, number of times fallen, “electrodermal activity,” sleep, weight, sodium intake, copper intake, and even selenium intake. But it didn’t track the one thing most women want to track: their periods.

Spoiler alert: iOS 8.2 still doesn’t add support for tracking menstrual cycles. It’s apparently really difficult to find and/or talk to a woman at Apple, because this seems like a really basic thing to measure. If I can track selenium, half the people on the planet ought to be able to track their periods. It’s dumbfounding.

Straight from the horse wolf’s mouth, Vulf Records’s Jack Stratton on why Spotify is such a lousy deal for artists:

Take a single stream of “The Birdwatcher” in March 2014. Terry, the user, lives in the US and pays $9.99/month for Spotify. I, the artist, receive a total of $0.00786 over the next nine months:

1. Licensed Use of Master — $0.00668
2. Writer’s Performance Royalty — $0.00030
3. Publisher’s Performance Royalty — $0.00030
4. Streaming Mechanical Royalty — $0.00058

Total — $0.00786

Less than a cent. How did Spotify get this number? Spotify pools its revenue for March, gives 70% to artists and takes 30%. This is based on iTunes’ 70/30 split.

Stratton runs the math and explains how Spotify works now, as well as how it ought to work. It seems like a simple fix, but there’s a tremendous amount of inertia in the music industry. Specifically, there are a lot of middlemen, and they all want their cut. Stratton says his proposition is “simple and will never happen.”

The Pandorica Opens

It’s not just Spotify. In the span of just three months last year, Pandora played that Pharrell song “Happy” 43 million times. For that, Pharrell and his record company split $2,700. That’s absurd. It’s not like Pandora is getting rich, either. They lost $30 million last year, despite generating $920 million in revenue. How is that even possible? They paid less than three thousand dollars for one of the biggest songs of the year!

Well, shucks. Let’s have a look. Pandora’s a public company, which means they have to publicly report how they made/lost their money every quarter. The latest one is for the 4th quarter of 2014, and the costs are on page 48.

Pandora’s cost of revenue in 2014 was 55% of its gross revenue. This is “content acquisition costs,” which is the costs of licensing music, as well as “other” costs. Pandora spent roughly $442 million just on licensing content for use on its site. In exchange for that, they played roughly 20 billion hours of music for 81.5 million users. My personal iTunes library is 566 hours of music, and I have stuff in there I haven’t listened to since I was in college.

In Perspective

How long is 20 billion hours? That’s roughly 2.28 million years. To put it in perspective, 2.28 million years ago, one of the apex predators of North America was an eight foot tall, 300-pound bird named Titanis walleri. Pandora played enough music in 2014 to stretch all the way back to the heyday of the Titanis.

This assumes you have a time machine and Pandora One (because the ads would drive you crazy before you even got to the Crusades).

Today’s First Post from Personal Democracy Media has a remarkably concise rebuttal to critics of net neutrality:

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) writes in Politico that we shouldn’t allow government to “crash” the Internet party. It’s worth reading his op-ed if you want the full gist of the current disinformation campaign against net neutrality. Rubio claims the FCC is going to “play favorites” with Internet service providers, which is like saying SEC plays favorites with stock brokers by requiring them to play by the same rules.

He also claims the Internet “is a place…[not] unlike a city or town”—which it is not, it is a set of protocols. And finally, he argues that “it belongs in the hands of our people,” which is a welcome sentiment that completely elides the fact that most of it runs thru pipes owned by avaricious monopolists.

Read Senator Rubio’s actual misguided take on net neutrality here. As PDM notes, this is what opposing arguments are likely to take in the runup to the FCC’s rulemaking.

Today, Boston’s public radio station WBUR aired a segment on the recent $7.4 million lawsuit between the copyright owners of Blurred Lines and Got To Give It Up:

A lot of composers wondered if copyright is now being extended to cover not just lyrics and melody but a whole vibe. Rhythm. Timbre. This hour On Point: what’s theft now when it comes to music? To song?

It’s a good listen, but the real reason you want to visit WBUR’s web site is for the side-by-side comparison of songs and the other songs which allegedly ripped them off. Some of these I would have called shameless, before listening.

By way of Eve Ahearn, I just learned that the prestigious Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University produces a podcast about the internet. And there’s an episode about a particlarly titillating subject of intellectual property laws: pornography.

From the show notes:

While the web has created incredible new economic opportunities for adult entertainers […] few other industries on the web face the glut of competition from services that offer similar content for free or in violation of copyright. Simply put, there’s so much free porn on the net that honest pornographers can’t keep up.

Surprisingly though, the porn industry doesn’t seem that interested in pursuing copyright violators. Intellectual property scholar Kate Darling studied how the industry was responding to piracy, and it turned out that – by and large – adult entertainment creators ran the numbers and found that it simply cost more from them to fight copyright violators than it was worth.

I will say that while the pornography industry may have adopted this approach on a broader scale, various independent artists have employed the “hey, you’ll download it anyway, so it might as well be from me” legal strategy. For example, MC Frontalot, who for a good many years simply gave away his music for free.