Post by NARAL Pro-Choice America.

I was Hall and Oates' Biggest Fan for a Decade.. then their biggest detractor for another

Never have I seen a case like theirs : have so much cool, great songs and great ideas in one decade, and then the next decade (the 80s), completely sell out, become a self-parody, and generally suck the life out of their own act.

I found out about them when the local progressive rock station spun the entire "War Babies" on a Sunday night in '74.  Never again did a track of War Babies grace the radio.  But I was entranced. 

"Sara Smile":  I would go to the Library to look at Billboard and to just "will" Sara Smile up the charts starting from #98.  I became a stalker of KSLQ, my local Top 40, by ringing their phone off the hook for a request that the song be added to rotation.  When they cost me all night sitting up listening when they said they were going to play it just to get me off the phone (I was 17 and didn’t know any better) I think I threatened to bomb the radio station!   

In the mid-late 70s, I would travel around the Midwest to see them (double billing with Shawn Phillips or my other hero, Eric Carmen, a lot of times). 

But by 1980, I couldn’t turn the radio off fast enough when one of those bubblegum "hits" came on.

Nonetheless, I am interested in what they're doing now, just in case they go back and get a flashback of some brilliance they had in the 1970s.  But I would never see them live because I couldn’t endure "Kiss on My List", etc.  But I wonder how much $$ many of us 70s die-hards, who started with them when they were on Atlantic, would pay now for a weekend at Daryl's house, if they had stayed a 70s cult duo?

~Emmett

So What's Been Happening?

Answer: both "a lot" and "nothing".

Apple and Amazon are frenetically busy in this area.  Google is worried about the DMCA.  Yet none of the three of them have called us up for help.  Because, of course, we're not 18-year old developers, how could we help them?  We're a solution, not an app.  But all in all, society is about ten years behind where it could be culturally because of a lack of understanding and embracing of the Exchange concept.  Those digital books that were supposed to be here by now?  They're still not here.  Total tragedy.

Oh. The Redigi case was decided since we last posted. We are happy that the Redigi  method was refused by the judge. Allowing people to resell their digital media without bothering to set up a registration system would have increased counterfeiting because it would've given the counterfeiter an extra incentive to counterfeit: remuneration from unsuspecting suckers. That being said, the judge's reasoning was faulty.

All this is going to do is encourage the forging of the atoms necessary to produce CDs or DVDs (or the pulp for books). Happy Earth Day everybody!

Because how does a judge stop me from ripping a DVD or CD or scanning a book that I own? He doesn't! He can't.

Even if the Redigi case is upheld on appeal, how does the Judge stop this scenario?:

1. I put my CD or DVD in a "warehouse".  
2. The warehouse rips it for me. 
3. I sell the CD to someone else.
4. The warehouse transfers the ownership to the new person.
5. The new person asks the warehouse to rip it for him.
6. Voila,  "digital reselling".