free to be: audio outlaws

I was reading the Cleveland FREETIMES newsprint NEO-wish-fulfillment edition (the one featuring the Mafia plot to kill Dennis Kucinich) and happened to notice an ad on the back for "Audio Outlaws." The advertisement for auto-audio featured cleavage offset by two huge speakers and a subwoofer and mentioned a 600-watt amp. I think that's a lot, but I'm not really expert in that market.

The point I wanted to make is that, obviously, these merchants know that they are selling product to make people "outlaws," that is, people who break the law when they use the product. They flaunt this in their very name. They also know that enforcement of the noise ordinances is weak. They also know that if enforcement picks up, because of the "outlaws"'replacements of the confiscated boomboxes, they'll sell more product, for a while.

Is it possible to levy a nuisance tax on this kind of business, first of all?

This summer has been sort of noisy. It adds to the stress; you get no real peace, even at 3 in the morning. For those of us in town, it creates a siege mentality, or the incipient stages of PTSD. Businesses like Audio Outlaws know they're parasites, and they revel in it.

Second, is it possible to make them a party in some sort of lawsuit? Ill-gotten gain should not stay put; it should be recovered and redistributed. We need to take our neighborhoods back, and that includes recapturing some of the equity stolen in the past. If they rob us of our peace and quiet at our homes, they also reduce the value of those homes across an enforcement area, and we need to take our money back.

here's another reason for the SB117 full frontal assault

DirecTV May Test Broadband over Powerline - News and Analysis by PC Magazine -- It seems that AT&T may be outflanked here, by just about everybody--the cable companies, the VoIP providers, the cellphone companies, the satellite providers, and now, to add insult to injury, our friend the electric company, and that more than likely accounts for AT&T's haste and desperation in ramming through the bad-for-everybody-but-them legislation known here in Ohio as SB117, sponsored by Lance Mason and Bob Spada.

If we can get broadband over our electrical power lines or through the air or over cable, and we can get VoIP over broadband, we don't really need all that legacy POTS that AT&T has held onto for years without improving, all the while charging premium prices for it. It seems that this is reckoning day for AT&T, and they're trying to dodge their demise by cozying up to our state legislators and trying to put their signature tin boxes on every treelawn between here and Cincinnati.

In the process, they're making us a technological laughingstock and pointing up our technological illiteracy and innumeracy as a community.

Remember, we don't owe AT&T anything. Let the market forces prevail. Let them fail. Do not let AT&T prove the sad old theorem we last heard from the open-source man, Bruce Perens: "If you can't innovate, legislate."

Verizon patent litigation extorts Vonage for 5.5% royalty

Vonage Wins Permanent Stay in Verizon Patent Litigation --Bruce Perrens, whom we met recently in an MTB session, gave us the catchphrase, "If you can't innovate, litigate," and that's what Verizon's been doing with Vonage lately. Today, Vonage obtained a permanent stay, so it can go about it's business almost as usual, with the modification of paying a 5.5% royalty to Verizon and posting a $66 million bond. This is similar to the AT&T situation with the Ohio SB117, where an uncompetitive and hidebound older company tries to gain market share of a market in which they aren't in the least competitive, using their pawns in the state legislature to extort the companies that created the market. There's honest and forthright competition, and then there's the cheater's game played by AT&T, which might be rephrased as, "If you can't innovate, legislate," especially if you have cooperative "operatives" like Bob Spada and Lance Mason. Am I being too harsh, too unfair?

Bill Callahan's been giving this SB177 thorough and balanced coverage for the past month, and I guess Matt Zone testified today down in Columbus.