It’s my birthday, and as I officially become a middle-aged crank, I wish to marvel at the incredible Dorian Gray act of someone older than me (if it’s even possible to be older than me).
Ted Rogers, namesake and honcho over at Rogers Media, has kicked off the shackles of time and age and joined with the cool kids. He’s not only selling our youth MP3 phones — um, so they can be even more annoying on the streetcar? (that’s the crankiness starting) — he’s actively encouraging them to engage in the sharing of digital music files, without compensation to record companies or musical artists. One of Rogers’ holiday TV commercials has a young woman gleefully describing how she bought a phone for her boyfriend and then had all her friends load it with their music. You see actual file-sharing going on — sensitive artist-types avert your eyes.
Yes, old Ted has become an activist for peer to peer file sharing and free-as-in-beer culture. Why? Presumably because if a whole bunch of kids-these-days buy one of his inexpensive combination music player telephonic communications devices, he will make even more money than he already has. No, that can’t be it. He’s sticking it to the man — to all those corporate capitalists who are trying to imprison our culture.
How much money does corporate capitalist Ted Rogers currently have? How far away is Mars, in centimeters? Mr. Rogers just recently offered a man $126 million dollars to play baseball for the next 7 years. That’s how much money he has.
So, the question for my birthday is — how do we young kids feel about denying musicians fair compensation for their work, while simultaneously buying Ted Rogers another small country?
The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray