add more blogposts

archetypes/blog.md

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+---
+title: ""
+summary: ""
+author: "Abdullah Tarawneh"
+date: ""
+tags: []
+category: "Blog"
+cover: ""
+---
+
+<p class="has-pullquote after" data-pullquote=""></p>

archetypes/code.md

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+---
+title: ""
+summary: ""
+author: "Abdullah Tarawneh"
+date: ""
+tags: []
+category: "Code"
+cover: ""
+---

archetypes/default.md

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archetypes/work.md

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+---
+title: ""
+summary: ""
+author: "Abdullah Tarawneh"
+date: ""
+tags: []
+category: "Work"
+cover: ""
+---

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content/blog/no-right-to-profit/index.md

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+---
+title: "You don't have a right to profit."
+summary: "People will go to ridiculous lengths in the name of protecting the “right” to profit. Let’s be real here. No one has a “right” to profit."
+author: "Abdullah Tarawneh"
+date: "2015-07-08"
+tags: ["grooveshark", "music", "music industry", "culture", "user generated content", "capitalism", "copyright"]
+category: "Blog"
+cover: ""
+---
+
+<p>These days, you see a lot of ridiculous things like <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/the-worlds-most-idiotic-copyright-complaint-150222/">copyright claims on the download pages of free software</a>, because they contain the word “download”. A lot of these stupid actions are done in the name of “protecting the artists”. People will go to ridiculous lengths in the name of protecting the “right” to profit.</p>
+
+<figure>
+<img src="download.png">
+<figcaption>Pages for Skype, Java, CCleaner, OpenOffice, Eclipse, Ubuntu, Python, and more were claimed to be infringing copyright, simply because the URL contained the word "download".</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Let’s be real here. No one has a “right” to profit. No one is guaranteed to make money just because they make something. If you are offering something, then you are an entrepreneur. You have to make people WANT to give you money. If you can’t do that, you find a better business plan, or you quit.</p>
+
+<p>I’m really tired of these “protect the artists” sentiments that are only used to prop up an archaic business model. Do we have problems? Sure, but egregious litigation is definitely not the answer. Smart competition is. Wanna reduce piracy? Be more convenient. It should be pretty well-established by now that people are willing to pay for something if it’s available in an easy-to-access way.<p>
+
+<p class="has-pullquote after" data-pullquote="No one is guaranteed to make money just because they make something. If you are offering something, then you are an entrepreneur. You have to make people WANT to give you money."></p>
+
+Ask yourself: why do people even pirate? Reasons people pirate:
+
+1) no legal alternative
+2) drm failed after purchase
+3) it’s easier
+4) no money
+5) too greedy to pay
+
+<p>You’re never getting money from #5, and chances are you’ll never be able to stop them. #4 has no money to begin with, so they’re not worth considering when analyzing piracy, either. But #1, #2, and #3 are access issues. <strong>Make your stuff available in all countries, with no DRM, in an easily accessible way, and piracy is no longer a compelling alternative to most people.</strong> (Personally, I’m 3+4. I have no money, but when I do have money, I’ll pay if something is easier and worth paying for.)</p>
+
+To date, I have bought exactly one album: Circa Survive’s Violent Waves. Why?
+
+1) It was $5 self-produced.
+2) It was available for purchase directly.
+3) I WANTED to give them my money.
+
+<p class="has-pullquote after" data-pullquote="Make your stuff available in all countries, with no DRM, in an easily accessible way, and piracy is no longer a compelling alternative to most people."></p>
+
+What converts me from a pirate in that situation to a paying customer is that the purchase was accessible. $5 is a low price, that I am perfectly capable of paying without too much thought. All I had to do was give them my money directly, no intermediaries, no DRM, no BS, just one payment, immediate delivery of MP3 + FLAC files, and a CD shipped out soon after. For $25, I could get the exclusive pre-order t-shirt, too. And Circa Survive is my favorite band, so I wanted to support them and their indie efforts.
+
+For any other artist? For the rest of my music collection? There are excellently tagged discographies, in high quality or ripped straight from a CD. Even the legal copy isn’t that good. [edit July 2015] Since writing this post, I’ve also purchased Anberlin’s Never Take Friendship Personal: Live in NYC. There were spelling mistakes and other incorrect things in the tags. This was the OFFICIAL RELEASE, and it wasn’t tagged properly. Not to mention it came in MP3 only. Not a pleasant shopping experience. [edit February 2018] And furthermore, the download link to that album has expired due to Tooth & Nail abandoning SendOwl for digital deliveries. The link claims to allow 3 download attempts, but as of now, it will allow 0. The only thing you’ll get is a 404 error.
+
+Basically, I’ll only ever buy CDs or high quality FLAC files, because buying anything else cannot match the alternative of just downloading the pirated copy. My copy of Violent Waves is right here, and I got the FLAC digital download immediately after purchase. Much of the pirating scene is dedicated to quality releases, so when a legal alternative can’t match up, it needs to offer something else. It needs to offer a compelling reason to give up your money.
+
+If you can match the quality of pirated CD-rips, then you can differentiate your legal option with convenience. Why do you think streaming services are gaining popularity? Because it’s easier to pay one fee and listen to anything you want, ever. At the touch of a button, you can play millions of songs spanning decades of creativity and culture. But even at its core, streaming is just plain convenient. No dealing with physical CDs, which take up space and need to be stored carefully. No giving up your storage space to MP3s. You don’t even have to bother with the payment processing. No downloads to make. Just play songs immediately. That kind of convenience is unmatched, and is a big reason why Spotify can compete seriously with piracy. Pure convenience, and there’s a free tier that’s ad-supported, so they can generate slightly more revenue than $0.00.
+
+<p class="has-pullquote after" data-pullquote="Much of the pirating scene is dedicated to quality releases, so when a legal alternative can’t match up, it needs to offer [...] a compelling reason to give up your money."></p>
+
+My ideal purchasing situation: when you buy an album, not only can you get a CD, but you also get streaming rights, with an option to download. No DRM, no BS. You bought it. A smart label would partner up and get something like that done. Amazon does this to some extent with their AutoRip service, and Google Play Music gives you streaming + download when you purchase music. Since originally writing this, Apple Music has been introduced, which means you should get streaming rights to your iTunes purchases as well (to a limited extent). I just wish that this was more standardized somehow. Perhaps if labels started their own streaming service (and again updated, with the seizure of Grooveshark and its intellectual property, this is an opportunity for labels if they wish to increase their revenues…), or gave streaming rights on particular services (or all services) if you have a purchase code of some sort that could be included with each CD physical. This could even be accomplished with a more innocuous form of DRM like linking each code to one account only, so that only you can get streaming rights.
+
+<p class="has-pullquote before" data-pullquote="Much of the pirating scene is dedicated to quality releases, so when a legal alternative can’t match up, it needs to offer [...] a compelling reason to give up your money."></p>
+
+I realize a lot of people don’t buy albums anymore, but that’s the music industry’s fault for commoditizing the individual tracks. Labels like to complain that various things are ruining the music industry, but the truth is that the music industry is ruining the music industry. Rather than innovating, they litigated. Then they devalued albums with the era of the digital single. Then they focused on mega-stardom and manufactured celebrity, pouring a lot of money into already-established artists and causing the music industry to contract and shrink. If the music industry had capitalized on the growth of the internet, if they had competed with Napster instead of shutting it down, if they hadn’t relied on iTunes for so long, if they had been quicker to adopt streaming and worked with Grooveshark and Spotify, if the labels reorganized their business plan from owning artists to doing publicity and media management and distribution… maybe things would be going better for them right about now, huh?

content/blog/rip-grooveshark/index.md

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+---
+title: "RIP Grooveshark."
+summary: "I last used Grooveshark earlier today. I refreshed the page and found that it was dead. [...] I find myself feeling about Grooveshark similarly as when I found out that Megaupload had been shut down, and that many of my files were lost forever."
+author: "Abdullah Tarawneh"
+date: "2015-05-01"
+tags: ["grooveshark", "music", "music industry", "culture", "user generated content", "capitalism", "copyright"]
+category: "Blog"
+cover: ""
+---
+
+I last used Grooveshark earlier today. I refreshed the page and found that it was dead. Grooveshark has finally shut down. UMG et al have won. Effective immediately, the Grooveshark service no longer works, all music has been wiped entirely from the site, user data has been lost, curated playlists are inaccessible, VIP users are unable to get refunds, all social media accounts have been deleted, and the grooveshark.com website shows only an apology that admits wrongdoing and directs users to whymusicmatters.org, the RIAA’s website.
+
+<figure>
+<img src="rip.png">
+<figcaption>This message almost reads like it was written by someone with a mafia gun pointed to their head.</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p class="has-pullquote after" data-pullquote="I find it amazing that the music labels found absolutely nothing of value in the remains of Grooveshark.">I find it amazing that the music labels found absolutely nothing of value in the remains of Grooveshark. They seized the intellectual property and the resources, and simply shuttered the rest. You couldn’t have done anything with the massive social media userbase? Grooveshark had 142,000 followers. You couldn’t have come up with a tweet to send to all of them? The Grooveshark service itself could have been legitimized, or could have had its infringing content deleted. Why wipe ALL of it? <strong>Why abandon a userbase of 35 million users?</strong> Surely you could do something more profitable or useful with Grooveshark than just shutting it down.</p>
+
+<p>There are things that Grooveshark was legitimately good at. Things that weren’t illegal. Things that could be used to improve other services. Things like being able to share a song with a URL and have someone be able to listen to it without logging in. Being able to do the same with an entire playlist. Only YouTube does this, and YouTube of course includes additional overhead from having to load videos with the songs. (As an app, Atraci is built around loading audio-only YouTube, but sharing a URL does not allow for this functionality.) Spotify forces me to create an account and login. Could Spotify not monetize anonymous users by simply playing an ad before allowing users to listen to shared music? Spotify could even allow logged-in users to skip the pre-roll ad and start listening to the playlist immediately. As it currently stands, it’s not at all friendly to share music from Spotify to the public. Nor is it like that for any other music service besides YouTube.</p>
+
+<p class="has-pullquote after" data-pullquote="[…] it’s the obscure stuff that Grooveshark excelled at. Nowhere else could you find that one-of-a-kind glitch song, or that video-game remix that someone made and decided to upload it to Grooveshark, because Grooveshark had an ecosystem built around user uploads.">As a personal user of Grooveshark VIP (renewed just a week ago on April 23, ironically), my losses don’t include the ability to access licensed content. I never cared for the licensed content, but it’s the obscure stuff that Grooveshark excelled at. Nowhere else could you find that one-of-a-kind glitch song, or that video-game remix that someone made and decided to upload it to Grooveshark, because Grooveshark had an ecosystem built around user uploads. No surprise that users chose to upload infringing songs at first, but I find myself feeling about Grooveshark similarly as when I found out that Megaupload had been shut down, and that many of my files were lost forever. The feeling I had walking into 11th-grade precalculus class on my phone, in disbelief and shock, realizing I would never be able to access the wealth of papercraft that was no longer accessible. The OSTs that people had meticulously created, the indie games that people had made, all of it was gone and I would never be able to download it again. And now, the feeling of sitting down at my computer, refreshing my Grooveshark tab, seeing that message, and realizing that my carefully-built playlists were gone, that I could never again easily discover new ambient and glitch and video-game music, that I could never again simply look for something that I wanted to try and figure out if it was worth downloading it and supporting that artist directly. Where are the broadcasts of people choosing tracks that are much better curated than anything you could ever find on Pandora?</p>
+
+<p>UMG et al didn’t have to shut down Grooveshark, and it would have been wiser not to do so. There would have been much to gain from spinning Grooveshark into a licensed service, or allowing it to continue without infringing material, or even perhaps turning Grooveshark into a streaming service wholly owned by the major labels, [a concept I’ve been thinking about and might write about later.] Any of those options would have been much more beneficial to the music labels than to have simply wiped every record that Grooveshark had ever existed. And of course, the eternal debate about music piracy rages on. What possible effects did this closure have? What repercussions will be felt in the music piracy scene? Knowing how things always play out, absolutely nothing will happen. Music piracy will continue unabated, just as it has outside of Grooveshark all this time. Will people start to buy more music now that Grooveshark is dead? Probably not. Will any of this matter to anyone outside of the Grooveshark community? Nope, not a chance.</p>
+
+<p>I will say this: I enjoyed all that Grooveshark offered while it lasted. I have bought more music due to Grooveshark and supported more artists than I ever would have without it. But absolutely none of that money would have ever gone to UMG, anyway.</p>

content/blog/twitter-not-social/index.md

@@ -6,7 +6,6 @@ date: "2018-04-27"
 tags: ["twitter", "social", "network", "media", "analysis", "capitalism"]
 category: "Blog"
 cover: ""
-draft: false
 ---
 
 <blockquote>"We are not a social network. We do not benefit from social graphs," Dorsey said. "People come to us when they're interested in events happening in the world or with a niche interest. We've been biasing a lot more of the service towards interest and topics."</blockquote>

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