NPR Topics: Politics & Society

Letter About Palin Goes Viral
Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:05:00 -0400
This week in Wasilla, Alaska, a woman named Anne Kilkenny sent a letter to some college friends about her former mayor, Sarah Palin. By week's end, the letter was pinging around the country and Kilkenny's phone was ringing off the hook.
Teen Sex, Sex Education And Sarah Palin
Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:39:00 -0400
Gov. Sarah Palin has been a strong supporter of programs that advocate abstinence until marriage, and she also opposes explicit sex education. Alaska's law is silent on these issues, however, and it provides no specific funding for sex education in the schools.
Examining Palin's Pentecostal Background
Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:14:00 -0400
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has electrified religious conservatives who see her as one of their own. The Republican vice presidential candidate brings evangelical credentials to the ticket and has a Pentecostal background.

The Talk of the Town

Dorothy Wickenden: An old-style, Los Angeles feminist on Obama.
Dorothy Wickenden Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
Rosalind Wyman--seventy-seven years old; doughty feminist; political fund-raiser and philanthropist; hostess to J.F.K., Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, and Hollywood types too numerous to count; youngest elected member of the Los Angeles City Council (at the age of twenty-two); first woman to run a national political . . .
Lauren Collins: The Brooklyn painter Kehinde Wiley.
Lauren Collins Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
The painter Kehinde Wiley first travelled to Nigeria in 1997. He was trying to find his father, whom he had never met, or, more crucially for a portraitist, seen. (His mother didn’t have any photographs.) After several weeks in Lagos, he found his dad, who welcomed him. But--like any . . .
James Surowiecki: What drives market volatility?
James Surowiecki Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
American investors are frazzled. True, oil prices have fallen from their most vertiginous highs, the dollar is a bit stronger, and the stock market has actually risen over the past month. But none of those things have happened in a smooth and steady fashion. The stock market’s “ascent,” in particular . . .

 

Subscribe to Society RSS feed

Beyondthecommons - Featuring a dissertation by Anthony McCann focusing on Irish music, copyright, and performing rights.
Meta Description: [ Beyond The Commons: The Expansion of the Irish Music Rights Organisation, The Elimination of Uncertainty, and the Politics of Enclosure ]

404 Boycott CDs - Movement urging webmasters to protest the RIAA.

Boycott-Riaa.com - Organization rebutting arguments of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and writing critiques of the industry lobbyists' attempts to control music sharing and copying. With background information, news, essays, and links.
Meta Description: [ Boycott-RIAA, the center for the fight against the tyrant that is the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). ]

Business Week - Big Music's Worst Move Yet - The RIAA's newest aggressive tactics and legal assault on file swappers is pushing traders to encrypted networks, where file trading will mushroom as well as be untraceable.
Meta Description: [ The RIAA's newest legal assault on file swappers is pushing them to encrypted networks, where the damage could become catastrophic ]

Business Week - Did Big Music Really Sink the Pirates? - Surveys showing that lawsuits have greatly reduced file-sharing may be seriously flawed. By some measures, swaps are actually escalating.
Meta Description: [ Surveys showing that lawsuits have greatly reduced file-sharing may be seriously flawed. By some measures, swaps are actually escalating ]

Canada Plays Neutral in File-Sharing War - Article discussing Canada's stand on file-sharing and the industry watchdogs.

500 Downhill Battle - Non-profit organization promoting a fairer music industry. News, links, and action alerts.

File Sharing Doesn't Affect Films and Music Sales - Argues that P2P doesn't threaten music, musicmaking or musicians because sales are at all time highs.

Free Music - Supports the Free Music Philosophy, the idea that all people should have the freedom to copy, distribute, and modify music for personal, noncommercial purposes. FAQ, articles, suggested further reading, links to related sites.

Grey Tuesday - Free the Grey Album - Site organizing and then reporting on the results of the 24 February, 2004 protest against actions censoring the Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse.

Mass Mic - Fighting to provide freedom of expression in music. Offers a discussion forum, censorship news and contact information.
Meta Description: [ webhosting ]

404 Music File-Sharing Does Not Hurt CD Sales: Study - Despite hundreds of lawsuits on file sharers from the RIAA and loud cries that P2P networks are all to blame, research at Harvard Business School and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill concludes that downloads have zero effect on sales.

News.com - File sharing legal in Canada - Sharing copyrighted works on peer-to-peer networks is legal in Canada, a federal judge ruled.
Meta Description: [ Judge: File sharing legal in Canada | A judge rules that making copyrighted music available for sharing on a computer network is not illegal in Canada. | March 31, 2004, 11:33 AM PT | John Borland ]

NPR : DJ's 'Grey Album' Spurs Dispute - DJ Dangermouse (Brian Burton) took vocals from rapper Jay-Z's The Black Album, mixed them with instrumentals from The Beatles (known to all as The White Album), and came up with The Grey Album. It wasn't made for commercial release, but the mixes got Internet play. EMI - the label controlling Beatles music - took legal action, and Web sites recently mounted a protest. Joel Rose reports. [7:42 streaming audio broadcast]
Meta Description: [ DJ Dangermouse (Brian Burton) took vocals from rapper Jay-Z's The Black Album, mixed them with instrumentals from The Beatles (known to all as The White Album -- and came up with The Grey Album. It wasn't made for commercial release, but the mixes got Internet play. EMI -- the label controlling B... ]

PCWorld.com - P2P Companies Take Aim at the RIAA - A new group criticizes the recording industry for blaming consumers instead of its own failures.
Meta Description: [ New group accuses the recording industry of blaming consumers for its own failures. ]

Piracy is Your Friend - A manifesto for musicians who want to make money in the new economy. Asserts that piracy is a phony issue that record labels are hyping in order to rip off artists.

Policing Pirates in the Networked Age - A professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas lists reasons why record industry experts failed to prove their assertion that Napster was gutting industry revenues.
Meta Description: [ Promoting an American public policy based on individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peaceful international relations. Extensive library of studies, articles and monographs available ]

RIAA Radar - A tool that music consumers can use to distinguish whether an album was released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America.
Meta Description: [ The RIAA Radar is a tool that music consumers can use to easily and instantly distinguish whether an album was released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America. ]

Salon - File sharing: Innocent Until Proven Guilty - An economist says music piracy should be hurting the recording industry, but it isn't, and he doesn't know why.

Salon - Can Anyone Stop the Music Cops? - As Hollywood wins one court case after another, one Republican senator is suggesting that maybe it's time for some new laws -- that protect consumers instead of entertainment companies.

404 Supporters of the Real Underground - Underground music supporting community web site, featuring news, artists and music.
Meta Description: [ Supporters of the REAL Underground ]

The Droplift Project - Anti-copyright collective of musicians using samples from popular culture to create challenging and subversing audio collage. Information about fair use and copyright issues in music, along with free MP3 downloads.

The Globe and Mail - Copy This: Up With Downloading - Canadian article by an industry songwriter who examines both sides of the argument and sees file-trading as a consumer revolt and an explicit demand for change.
Meta Description: [ The most authoritative news in Canada featuring articles from The Globe and Mail, breaking news coverage, national news, international news, sports, weather, Report on Business. ]

The Problem With Music - Talks about how the monopoly grants (copyrights) have made the music industry so bloated and unproductive.

We Hate the RIAA - Updates and forum on RIAA actions.

500 Why Free Music? - A collection of essays on the issues surrounding intellectual property and copyright as they relate to music.