No Future Now

This internet has really changed things for artists. I owe my fame and all the miseries that have come with it to the internet. Now it is possible for a talented artist to be more popular than TV stars and rock stars before he can even set foot on a stage. This demands a change in our laws to protect such talent. Why are corporate broadcasters allowed to promote malicious lies about their fraud victims? My first feelings about NBC were positive. If you want to know exactly what I said about them, track down that Simpsons episode that ends with the family talking about NBC's 'quality programming,' which was plagiarized from one of my erased posts. I guess the broadcasters thought my pure heart was amusing. Many years have passed since I first shared those naive words and I have only been able to document their offenses against me in all that time. Their lazy hosts, uninspired writers, and burnt out cartoons have plundered my blogs so much over the years that I can barely write anything without looking like a hack. And this morning I had to hear about someone who was interviewed on Dateline where he told the world that I stole Careful from him. Besides the fact that the lyrics to that song are still online in my name with my copyright, why would I want a song like Careful when I am interested in performing rock? For that matter, why would I want a song like Under My Umbrella? Are we going to let this dirty network punish me for authoring the odd song outside my normal genre? Of course, I wouldn't be capable of driving inferior network talent to such outrageous measures if it weren't for the internet. Therefore, if we want to keep the internet, we need to pass tougher laws controlling corporate broadcasts. They should not be allowed to so easily and transparently smear their victims. As for music labels, I concede that they own almost every avenue of advancement for an up and coming artist, but I think that they should be held more responsible for who they sign in the face of the internet. I don't think it's fair to a victim to let the label that made commercial fraud out of his work and sold it in units of millions to his fans to be able to escape punishment and do it again. The first time might even be excusable, but the second time is plainly malicious. After my songs played all over the radio in the names of other bands, the labels should know my music well enough to avoid any further breaches of my copyrights. Given the convenience of the internet for easily tracking down copyright information, such as that which I have posted in the last three years regarding my ownership of my work, I think it is time that we closed the legal loophole that would let a large corporation sign a musical fraud with the full knowledge of the harm it would do to the holder of the copyright. If our laws change along these lines, it will be a boon to the artists who follow me. The way things are going in the present, it looks like I will have to sacrifice all or most of my own success for their sake. [4:35pm:] The protective measures I suggest must come from authority, since the crowd shows little or no sympathy for the plight of artists like myself. I understand this and do not hold it against them. We human beings tend to find it impossible to sympathize with others whose experience is alien to our own. No one in the crowd who celebrated my music or my comedy knows what it feels like to have such personal property ripped from their hearts. Their imaginations fail them in assessing the pain inflicted by such crimes and they end up envying the victim for his talent rather than taking any notice of the thousands of deep psychological wounds from which he bleeds right in front of them. Furthermore, as an artist who has proven himself capable of pleasing crowds with his work, I face adversity from even within my own minority group of authors and poets. Isn't Leonard Cohen also an artist and a songwriter and a poet? Look what he did to me in 2007 when he appeared on TV with my poem Buck Henry turned into a ballad. That just leaves responsible authority to protect people like myself and special members of the crowd like my parents and relatives from the vicious abuse I have received from corporate broadcasters since the outset of my independent authoring debut in the late 1990's. Broadcasting corporations, used to having exclusive control over the public mindset through their giant transmitters, would be inclined to resist any change that reduces their power. Perhaps they don't deserve their power. When I consider their flagrant abuses of my copyrights over the last ten or twenty years, I gather that they see the internet as existing strictly for their sake, as some kind of exclusive resource to help them shore up any gaps in their content without any consideration whatsoever for copyright laws. Whenever they discuss the internet, they always point to stories about mediocre people with ordinary problems as though the only impressive people work for them. In my case, it appears that they took a person with outstanding talent and tried to reduce him to a mediocre fool by getting old friends and relatives to talk about him behind his back and by getting his fans to say that there was nothing 'special' about him. But I can think of at least one thing that separates me from all the people Dateline interviewed on their program: I'm the only one whose content was stolen by NBC by the volume. That also separates me from almost everyone else on the internet, doesn't it? So while the internet may largely be a source of music or comedy that we'd rather not have, this should not turn into a barrier for the rare talent that outmatches the quality of content offered by corporations on the TV and radio. I wouldn't have had any cause to write and share so much work if it weren't for the internet. I probably would have found some normal job and had some kind of a life in the last ten years if it weren't for the internet. Unless the internet is really just a fatal trap for rare talent, I expect our laws to adapt to its presence so that future artists like myself may be spared from suffering any further horrors.
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