Listen here via Dickfork and Interscope:

A video for the track, done by the same guy who did the mental Born Free video, is due on Friday.

Update: Here’s that video…

Her new album is expected sometime this summer, and she’s heavily rumored to be joining Madonna at the Super Bowl Halftime show, in some strange dimension where that’s cool.

This NSFW video for Adanowski’s Don’t Try To Fool Me, featuring Teri Gender Bender was shot in Paris by Spock and Adanowski.

The mute button is only recommended for those who do not like Le Butcherettes’ sort of 2-3 chord garage rock. We personally had a lot of fun with it at our SXSW party last year. And if you’re new to Le Butcherettes, here’s our review of their debut album.

Thanks to reader Alex for the tip.

We wondered where such ridiculous and wildly fluctuating numbers could possibly be coming from, and as it turns out, we weren’t the first to do so. Researcher Julian Sanchez tracked them down:

The $200–250 billion number had originated in a 1991 sidebar in Forbes, but it was not a measurement of the cost of “piracy” to the US economy. It was an unsourced estimate of the total size of the global market in counterfeit goods.

The 750,000 jobs number had originated in a 1986 speech (yes, 1986) by the secretary of commerce estimating that counterfeiting could cost the United States “anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000″ jobs. Nobody in the Commerce Department was able to identify where those figures had come from.

These figures, produced from thin air as far as anyone can tell, persisted in talking points through 2008, and even through this year were occasionally cited by supporters of SOPA. This despite the fact that in 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report stating that the figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology.”

So the new number became $58 billion annually, and 19 million American jobs, according to Mark Elliot, an executive from the US Chamber of Commerce.

Sanchez tracked this new number down, to a paper released by the Institute for Policy Innovation, and authored by one Stephen Siwek, an MBA and principal of a consulting firm called Economists Incorporated that produces economic analysis for hire on behalf of (among others) businesses seeking to influence policy makers.

This only means that it was not an impartial academic study. This fact alone doesn’t invalidate the figure. What invalidates the figure is the method by which a much smaller, relatively less dubious estimate was multiplied; doubled and tripled, through troll logic. As Sanchez put it, Siwek used a method that’s useful for analyzing where in the economy we will likely see the effects of demand shifts, and pretending that it somehow reflects aggregate economic losses.

In other words, Siwek implied that the value of a stolen DVD is equal to the cumulative total of every dollar exchanged on its behalf, all along the way, from pressing plant to consumer. Sanchez’ colleague Tim Lee explains the fallacy in plain terms:

[I]n IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the DVD and $2 to the guy who shipped it to Canada, society has benefited by $10+$7+$2=$19. Yet some simple math shows that this is nonsense: The studio is $1 richer, the trucker is $2, and the manufacturer is $7. Shockingly enough, that adds up to $10. What each participant cares about is his profits, not his revenues.

So Siwek took an estimate of $6.1 billion in net losses to piracy for the movie industry, and by piling on the cumulative total of every single transaction in between manufacture and sale, came up with a more impressive sounding $20.5 billion in damages to the American economy. Further, Sanchez notes:

The original $6.1 billion figure, by the way, was produced by a study commissioned from LEK Consulting by the Motion Picture Association of America. Since even the GAO was unable to get at the underlying research or evaluate its methodology, it’s impossible to know how reliable that figure is, but given that MPAA has already had to admit significant errors in the numbers LEK generated, I’d take it with a grain of salt.

But we’re only scratching the surface. Even if that $6.1 billion estimate was accurate, it was an estimate of global movie piracy. In other words, it includes cases where, say, a Bollywood movie is pirated in China. Obviously, this has little to no impact on the American economy.

They took the impact of global piracy, exaggerated it by lumping in every associated transaction all along the way, and then that grand total was bandied about as damage to the United States economy. So at this point, Sanchez has dug through all of the layers of exaggeration to find a flat-out lie at the heart of the so-called “research.”

Despite having no access to the full text of the LEK study, Sanchez  managed to find a paper of Siwek’s that reproduced some of its PowerPoint slides, which break down the figures: Of the total $6.1 billion in annual losses estimated to MPAA studios, the amount attributable to online piracy by users in the United States was $446 million.

So now we’re down to $446 million in damages to the US economy from movie piracy. Remember, according to a report commissioned by the MPAA, the research for which has been kept secret, the proven inaccuracy of which the MPAA has already had to apologize for. Surely still a grossly exaggerated figure, which Sanchez devilishly points out is roughly equivalent to the global gross from the latest Alvin And The Chipmunks movie.

And yet even if the research behind the figure was sound, the context it’s put into is disingenuous at best. A common-sense economic principle called the “broken window” fallacy comes into play. To update the analogy for the 21st century, if your car window is broken, it may cost you $60 to fix. But that loss is not the economy’s. Had you not have to have fixed that window, would you have… eaten the $60? No, you would have spent it on a video game, or clothes, or groceries. Or maybe a night out at the movies.

An expert in the GAO report asserts this in saying that the “effects of piracy within the United States are mainly redistributions within the economy for other purposes and that they should not be considered as a loss to the overall economy.”

But are they even quantifiable losses for the movie industry? Sanchez dismisses all but a small fraction of these fantasy damages:

In many cases – I’ve seen research suggesting it’s about 80 percent for music – a US consumer would not have otherwise purchased an illicitly downloaded song or movie if piracy were not an option. Here, the result is actually pure consumer surplus: The downloader enjoys the benefit, and the producer loses nothing.

Sanchez doesn’t link to said research, and in fact it would be extremely difficult to accurately determine where illegal downloaders’ money would be going otherwise, but it was easy for us to find even more extreme (credible) estimates than Sanchez’ 80% spent elsewhere in the economy. Frances Moore of The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a non-profit advocacy group for the global recording industry, estimated that only one out of every ten downloads represents a lost sale. But even then, the “loss” is not physical merchandise disappearing from a truck or warehouse. It’s simply money that the industry would have gotten, in a perfectly honest world.

But at this point, the entertainment industry’s so-called “research” should indisputably prove that the world that we live in is anything but honest. This industry, determined to preserve the problems that it solves by criminalizing others’ solutions, will continue to lie to gullible and/or technologically ignorant lawmakers to get their way. But only for as long as we continue to allow it.

Thought you guys might be into that.

Bob Lefsetz emailed us a phenomenal TED talk Shirky very recently filmed discussing SOPA & PIPA, and summarized it as follows: “Just consume, don’t produce, don’t share.” That’s what the content industry wants from us.

You’ve got 15 minutes to watch this.

The whole business of actually suggesting that someone is breaking the law, and then gathering evidence, and proving that? That turns out to be really inconvenient. ‘We’d prefer not to do that,’ says the content industries. And what they want is not to have to do that. They don’t want legal distinctions between legal and illegal sharing. They just want the sharing to go away…

That’s the real message of SOPA. Time Warner has called. And they want us all back on the couch. Just consuming. Not producing. Not sharing. And we should say no.

Megaupload.com is currently unreachable. What’s troubling is that Megaupload has been able to successfully defend every charge of copyright infringement brought against it thus far, by respecting copyright law and aggressively curbing abuse of its system. Not only does Megaupload have a long history of swiftly responding to DMCA takedown notices, but it even gave the entertainment industry direct “back door” access that allowed it to completely bypass the DMCA process to remove illegal content itself, according to its FAQ (via Google cache).

Meanwhile, Megaupload’s file download counters showed that the vast majority of their users’ files, weighing in at a cumulative 100 petabytes, are accessed less than 10 times in their lifetime. Meaning the typical use case is one-to-one, or one-to-few exchanges of odd files, rather than the one-to-thousands illegal content distribution that the MPAA and RIAA allege. Megaupload is not “dedicated to infringement,” and in fact is used not only by many of the artists that its accusers claim to be protecting, but also by many of the world’s largest companies for legitimate purposes. Megaupload has preemptively defended these charges with the following assertion:

Mega has over 150 million registered users and over 50 million daily unique visitors. Employees of over 70% of the world’s Fortune 500 companies have accounts with us. We have become the de-facto standard for sending files that are too big to email. We are the most popular hard disk in the cloud. We host more backups than any other company. If Mega is a rogue operator as we have been unfairly labelled by the MPAA and RIAA, then what about Google? What about Yahoo? And every single ISP? At any given time, they all host pirated, illegal or even criminal content for which they are not liable nor legally obliged to prevent their users from posting. They are, like Megaupload, online service providers who are in no position to monitor or restrict their users’ activities. There are technical, practical and legal reasons why these entities as a whole enjoy safe harbor protection all over the world. Service providers like Megaupload are simply better off focusing on providing a better service to their customers than fending off lawsuits from third parties unhappy about content.

That said, all service providers have to deal with the challenge of online piracy, just like us. Google probably hosts the world’s largest index of pirated content and yet no one has characterized them as rogue. Why not sue the manufacturers of external USB hard drives or burnable DVDs? They can be used for illegal purposes, too. Microsoft’s Windows operating system is the world’s largest enabler of piracy. Windows is used to transfer and consume pirated content on a massive scale every day. And yet Microsoft is not rogue. This double standard should not be imposed on Megaupload since it finds no basis in either logic or the law. All we want is equal treatment.

Even by cynical estimates, despite Megaupload’s best (and surely better than required) efforts to contribute a legal, constructive service to the global tech industry, a minority of hubristic lawyers have managed to censor from the internet millions of innocent companies’ and users’ private and personal files, and shut down an entire business, merely by filing an accusation.

We don’t expect Mega to rest, let alone in peace. We don’t expect Anonymous to sit idly by as innocent technologists are hauled to the gallows. This will be a long, gruesome war of attrition that may result in the death of a defendant found innocent of all charges. We can only hope for the day that America finally grows tired of these lying liars’ lies, and collectively turns towards the real enemy: Those who abuse and corrupt our Government for financial gain, with no moral compass nor regard to the liberty and justice that is our right.

Wikipedia, Reddit, Google and others all “went black” in various ways, to raise awareness. And in that sense, they definitely succeeded. Far away from the blogosphere, throughout the day I heard many people talking about the bills, most of whom knew nothing of them yesterday.

Last month, we this covered these acts, commonly known as SOPA and PIPA, in detail. Here is the core of our beef; these bills were designed and pushed forward by corporations interested only in criminalizing any competitive activity they can’t control, who face no repercussions when they bribe legislators not only with exorbitant campaign contributions, but often with executive titles and massive salaries, all in exchange for their co-conspiracy:

Several of the country’s largest companies are fighting this; Politico reveals that Facebook, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, and Google have spent $29.3 million in lobbying between 2010 and 2011, all a part of the so-called NetCoalition that opposes the bills. Yet the entertainment industry’s lobbying budgets over the same time period dwarf that figure nearly ten-fold, with $279.5 million spent. Over the weekend, TechDirt broke the “shockingly unshocking” story that two of the congressional staffers that helped write SOPA & PIPA, Lauren Pastarnack and Allison Halataei, have been offered cushy, high paying jobs with the MPAA and NMPA, respectively. It may be legal, but it ain’t right. It reeks of 1999, when congressional staffer Mitch Glazier, who snuck a tweak into some legislation that stripped all recording artists of their copyrights, found himself the Senior Vice President of Government Relations and Legislative Counsel for the RIAA a few months later, with a $500,000 salary. You scratch my failing business model’s back, I’ll give you a shitload of money.

Several congressmen have withdrawn their support for these bills, yet they all echo the same parting word: “Something” needs to be done about piracy, maybe just not this. Even the lobbyists are hedging their bets as their bullshit cookie crumbles, daring the protesters to “stop the hyperbole and PR stunts,” and “engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy,” as MPAA CEO Chris Dodd put it. That’s Senator and MPAA CEO Chris Dodd. Senator and CEO.

They’re all saying, ‘well OK, you got us, but we do need to do something.’ And we agree. But the responsibility lies not among legislators. Piracy is not an enforcement issue. As TechDirt put it:

Multiple studies have shown that “piracy” is almost always a “service” issue – in that people resort to infringing options when no good options exist. A detailed four-year study on this issue around the globe found, consistently, that infringement was never an “enforcement” issue – but exclusively a business model issue.

With that said, not only will we protest SOPA and PIPA, but we will oppose any legislation that attempts to simply criminalize the natural behavior of consumers when officially sanctioned options fall far short of practical expectations. As The Oatmeal so eloquently put it in their protest message, attacking this problem with legislation like this is like dealing with some escaped lions by setting kittens on fire.

Put as simply as possible, this is the entertainment industry’s problem. It is a problem that they have created, and it is a problem that won’t go away if their best plan is throwing more lawyers and money at it. It will of course, inevitably be solved, but by innovators. And SOPA and PIPA are further proof that the industry still hasn’t figured out that time and time again, after all the histrionics and lobbying dollars burned, its enemy always comes to its rescue in the end. From radio, to movie theater de-monopolization, to cable TV, to VCRs, to DVRs, to MP3 players, to iTunes, to Spotify. Every new technology that was supposed to kill the industry only strengthened it. We’re out of sympathy.

Music won’t be free. Artists will get paid. Piracy is temporary. Innovation, not legislation, is the way out.

SOPA and PIPA aren’t dead. As Hollywood moguls like Rupert Murdoch threaten to boycott campaign contributions, we’re going uphill against powerful money. So we must continue to fight, and we must help our congressmen to understand that they’re being bought, used, and/or misled, that we know better, and that we don’t vote for sellouts.

Here is the entirety of the message that all traffic to Antiquiet was directed to for the duration of January 18th:

But Refused is on this lineup.

Refused.

My favorite band of all time. Who were never, ever, under any circumstances to ever reunite.

So this lineup is probably bullshit.

Right?

UPDATE: Here’s the full lineup, and Refused has confirmed. Goddamn.

Here is Refused’s official statement:

We had a band once, in Umeå. We would pile in a van, like every other punkband, and thunder off in pursuit of friends and glory in some basement in front of 20 people, 50 people, in towns 4-5 hours away. Sometimes there would be more than a hundred people and we would later in the week refer to that as a “big show.” We were ambitious, but we didn’t think of it as a career. We never made any fiscal sense whatsoever during 7 years of touring. Like most punkbands, it never occured to us to even try. We had a scene, we had some politics and we had just a hint of artistic ambition. True to our swedish roots we got very serious very fast. And then suddenly we got good. It’s a delicate path to tread for precocious twentysomethings anywhere on the planet, but this particular bunch didn’t make it. And that was fine. Most enterprises in life are unrelated to incredibly violent rock music.

It’s been a motley 14 years since our band came apart. We’ve all kept busy in our respective endeavors but we’ve all remained friends and kept in touch. There have been offers, and lots of jokes about these offers. We’ve sort of looked down from our high horses and made fun of people who’ve just wanted to share the psychopathic intensity that we would deliver on a nightly basis in our post-pubescent prime. A reunion has just seemed irrelevant to us. Too much other shit to do.

But then Kristofer got his degree from the Swedish opera academy, Jons medical studies began drawing to a close and Dennis and David started a new hardcore band together. Finally, after a decade and a half hiatus, Kristofer picked up the guitar again. Which made David want to play the drums again. Which in turn led to all four of us suddenly making new music in assorted constellations. As all this was brewing, Coachella got in touch. There were a couple of phone-calls, lots of skepticism, some hesitant enthusiasm before one of us basically said: “This is ridiculous. There are friends of ours who would murder close relatives just to go see bands there. Let’s just do it, one last time.” And with that, socialist fag-loving PC scumbags were on the road again.

We never did “The Shape Of Punk To Come” justice back when it came out, too tangled up in petty internal bickering to really focus on the job. And suddenly there’s this possibility to do it like it was intended. We wanna do it over, do it right. For the people who’ve kept the music alive through the years, but also for our own sakes.

We feel that you deserve it and we hope the feeling is mutual.

See you in the pit.

Reliable inside sources have led us to confidently believe that At The Drive-In will in fact be reuniting at Coachella 2012, with all Relationship Of Command-era members, including super famous martians Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López.

Oh, and Omar Rodríguez-López has now confirmed that ATDI will be playing “shows” (plural).

In summary, it’s all about control and preservation of an obsolete business model that would just cost too much to rebuild. You’d have to fire all of the technically-retarded people at the top and start fresh. No, it makes more sense to just buy some congressmen and rewrite American capitalism as a system where the “free” market can be bought, owned, and lorded over by the highest bidder.

But if you need more evidence to support this theory of ours that the labels, RIAA, and MPAA don’t really believe any of the bullshit their lobbyists are pushing, let’s consult You Have Downloaded, a site that tracks who downloads copyrighted content via BitTorrent. They have information for over 50 million users. That’s just a fraction of all public torrent downloads, but TorrentFreak has traced IPs to Sony, Universal, Fox, the office of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, and now, the Department of Homeland Security and the RIAA.

Now, some of the music RIAA torrented (Jay-Z and Kanye) could have been done for “research purposes” (though, you know, probably not). But how do you explain a download of the first five seasons of the TV show Dexter, an episode of Law And Order SVU, and some audio software? If we follow RIAA’s insistence that one pirated item should incur a penalty of up to $150,000, we’re looking of a theft of $9,000,000.

By the way, for the record, here’s what You Have Downloaded says when I go there:

Regardless, you can bet that I’ll be answering to a federal agent for blogging sooner than RIAA will be investigated for stealing $9 million dollars’ worth of Hollywood’s crops.