“What next?  Car companies demanding that you pay them to watch their ads?”

Boy, it would sure be shocking if an American car company did something so stupid.

*sigh*
A lot of people really have trouble with this concept.
In this world, the *real* (money, products) economy is inextricable from the political economy.

What that means is that much of the time, it’s all about social control, and not about getting richer.  The music companies don’t care about selling records precisely…They care about mindshare—and the proximal benefits of shaping a community’s idea of what is good and what is bad are considerable.  Considerably more than just the cold lucre of cash for cds.

People own media companies because they function as party organs.  For instance, the NYTimes is *still* going on about the CRA being a cause of the mortgage problem even though it’s debunked a thousand times.  They do it because it shapes public discourse in a way that’s favorable to their owners, who freakin’ *need* that scapegoat for the crisis.

It’s the same thing with usury.  Sure, many people have gotten rich doing it, and most people are in it for the money.  However, the real value of usury is that it functions as a cheap call or put on people’s property.  It also can assist in making mutual alliances more stable.

Bernie Madoff wanted to be at the pile of big dough.  Do you know why?  It’s not because of the money—50 billion is way more than he could spend or even store.  It’s because that moneybin is something he can sell access and convert to favors of various non-financial aspects.  There are all too many things money can’t buy, as the filthy rich already knows.

Amanda, that sort of answer pretty much determines that they (shah) won’t understand what you’re saying.  Someone who doesn’t understand the difference in tone just won’t understand why you’re upset, either.

So just saying, ‘It’s the tone!’ is like telling someone who’s color-blind, ‘It’s the color!’

I don’t think you’re stupid.  I think you’re stubborn.  I don’t even think that it’s necessarily a bad trait, except as something to avoid or work around.  Thus, I’m rather spectacularly not going to pick a fight.

I don’t think I’m an amazing genius.  If I were, then I’d be out there making beaucoup money and slinging the booze (or kava as that may be).

As far as *this* thread goes, my first post was not directed at you.  I don’t think you have trouble making connections or lacking the will to make them.  The beginning of the post is more or less a sentiment held by Mencken all the time, and is reflective of how hard it is to get people to make connections and *see* things. 

It’s hard to show the average guy on the street how Republicans use a set of cultural strategies, including anti-abortion ideology to pull the wool over people, because that involves using perception and a bit of empathy.  I just gave an idea about why record company do the things they do and a set of examples of similar left-hand, right-hand business.

Now, I *do* look down on willful idiocy, and yes, I *am* a snob about information and how one gets it.  I’m one of those guys that’s accurately depicted on the xkcd’s classic strip about people being wrong on the internet.  I certainly *don’t* have social graces, and I never meant to be condescending in my post (to you, if not the Average Joe).  I’m really sorry if I made you feel that way.

know what?  I did it again.  I’m going to refrain from further comment if I can’t get my foot out of my mouth.

I’m far from a market fundamentalism, but this seems more like the kind of straight stupidity that’s been all over the music business over the last decade than an active desire to screw anyone. Long story short, Warner is looking for the quick easy, short term, and smaller revenue they could get from royalty checks on a small amount of content than the larger profits they’d likely get over the long term from exposing their stable to a larger audience. It’s pretty obviously dumb, but I don’t get how they’re really “screwing” anyone. My life isn’t going to be particularly affected if I can’t watch music videos from Warner Music artists on YouTube, I’ll either find another way to fill in the white noise in my head, or I’ll listen to some other company’s artists. It’s their loss, not mine.

I wonder if they want a bigger cut because of what YouTube is making on ads on top of the videos.  Also, a surprising number of people rip songs from YouTube.

Finally, labels that are offering these songs in the form of 99 cent or whatever downloads probably have some impetus to drive consumers to those forms if they are actually available.  The difference here is that pulling videos made no sense before because there was no easy place to shop around or hear a lot of this music.

What, no Prussian Blue videos?  Hatin’ on us Aryans again, eh?

I don’t know. On the one hand, it’s kind of hard to look at this example because it’s the recording industry specifically, and they’re basically going to disappear because of the internet. The days of putting out 3-5 songs off an album on the radio or as music videos is essentially over, because you’re not limited to the whims of the radio in regards to how often you can listen to your favorite song if you don’t go buy the album anymore. The problem with YouTube as opposed to MTV is that I can access the song on YouTube for free whenever I want. And obviously I don’t ave a right to access someone else’s product anytime I want without paying for it. I don’t really know what the answer to that vis-a-vis the recording industry is, and it would certainly be better if they could just come up with a way to make money off the internet, but on the other hand I’m just not sure they *can*, and that the industry isn’t just doomed to die a slow inevitable death.

I tend to assume that most managers are just morons, and that definitely includes the guys running the record companies. You would have to show them pie charts, illustrated in bright primary colors and pictures of happy barnyard animals before they’d even begin to catch on. And then they’d forget the entire lesson the next time they had a strong bowel movement.

The other day, Amanda mentioned the use of The Decemberists’ “The Infanta” in Mad Men. I can guarantee you that, had it not been on YouTube where I could “try before I buy,” several high-quality Decemberist tracks would not now be in my computer’s music library. So the question, asked yet again about the music industry, is why would they kill a goose that lays golden eggs?

Here’s the answer:

1. Most American bigcorps are hobbled in their creativity and ability to innovate by the fact that their executives are risk-averse control-freak attorneys and short-sighted greedhead MBAs.

2. An American media bigcorp is further hobbled in reaching its full potential by the fact that senior management is more often than not made up of time-serving deadwood and flavour-of-the-month golden boys, all of whom know zero about business and a lot about office politics and CYA.

3. The music division of an American media bigcorp is additionally hobbled in its ability to make common-sense decisions in that, as an industry vertical, it has historically drawn its management at all levels from hack producers, degenerate druggies, and outright criminal thugs.

Once one understands that toxic witch’s brew of a corporate culture at a place like Warner Music, it’s not baffling at all that they’d try to kill a free advertising platform (just like they already tried to kill what amounts to a free distribution system). Not to mention that music company managers, in a sort of mass projection syndrome, have a history of treating everyone else as either confidence game marks (esp. artists), blackmail targets (esp. other media platforms), or criminals (esp. customers).

Amanda, you may be correct that there’s a class warfare element at work in all this, but I seriously doubt that most of the players named above could articulate it in private conversation, assuming they wanted to do so.

A handful of corporations pay decent wages out of the goodness of their hearts

Actually not.  There is a well established literature (which seems to have conveniently disappeared down the memory hole over the past 30 years) which shows significant gains to the employer for paying better wages.  This produces greater employee loyalty, more motivation, higher productivity, and more innovation.  It was far more common among major corporations in the 1950s-1970s.

This produces greater employee loyalty, more motivation, higher productivity, and more innovation.

Again, it would seem to make sense. However, you’re not thinking like a typical bigcorp MBA enabled by the Human Resources Culture. They don’t want loyal and experienced employees, because loyal = long-term = expensive. The only motivation they care about is the fear-driven kind that squeezes out various forms of unpaid overtime. And innovation? Please. If it doesn’t show up in the quarterly numbers, it doesn’t exist.

Gracchus -

I know, I know.  This is why the UAW was able to get such good contracts over the years and the US auto industry benefited and prospered.  Then The MBAs took over in the 70s.  Previously most CEOs were promoted from within in all corporations and had a strong background in the industry, often on the technical side.  Companies invested for the long term.

Someone up thread said something to the affect that music industry has had its head up its ass for the last decade or so.  I would disagree.

You can go back to the beginning, to lacquer and wax cylinders and before that to sheet music to see that the music industry has always been about petty and utterly vicious about control even when it worked against their own long term best interest.

If you have any interest at all in the machinations of the music industry and you don’t know someone inside one of the very best places to get a glimpse is to read Fred Dannon’s “Hit Men”.  It’s absolutely factual and in no way distorts the business on a micro and macro level.  Yes, it’s an older book discussing radio but extrapolate everything there forward and you get a good picture of what’s going on.

I’m not so sure it about control of the customer, per se, as it is control over what products they sell, you use and how you use them.  Obviously that’s exercising some control over you but it really all comes back to the industry being maniacal about “owning” music.  Gracchus really said it correctly, perhaps better than I did.  All I’ll add is, I know this to be the case, I was there.

I do want to say that when I was there it wasn’t as much a case of the MBAssholes calling the tunes but the simple, old-fashioned, music biz thugs that were making the same mistakes their parents did in the business and they applies equally to the few women who were in the business as well as the men.  At one time my generation thought itself the new guard that would bring a street fueled honesty to the business.  Sadly, the peers of mine who further themselves either self-destructed or fell into the same old, thuggish line as their bosses.

A mere century ago no less than J.P. Sousa denounced player pianos because they were going to doom the (sheet) music industry and had to be stopped.  Now it’s YouTube and P2P.  Same old song and dance, just a slightly different dance floor.

I don’t get how they’re really “screwing” anyone. My life isn’t going to be particularly affected if I can’t watch music videos from Warner Music artists on YouTube, I’ll either find another way to fill in the white noise in my head, or I’ll listen to some other company’s artists. It’s their loss, not mine.

Yep, that’s the thing they never see—>they don’t understand that they really aren’t as important as they think they are. 

The internet has opened up information in such an amazing way.  Any question I have can be answered by googling.  If I miss a TV show, I can YouTube it, and if it’s been taken down, I just have to wait a day or two and someone else will put it up. 

Warner pulling its products from YouTube only makes sense if you believe the customers are limited to their payola radios.  It only works if you believe that the monopolization of radio has produced customers who are controlled and want to buy the payola product.

The fact that people can find and listen to other artists that have no relationship with any Big Music Corp freaks them out.  They are still in denial, and by refusing to embrace the new media, they are killing themselves.

I don’t care who’s on Warner’s label.  I care about listening to music I like.  There are more than enough indie acts to fill anyone’s desires, and the internet makes it possible for any of them to reach an audience.

Pulling videos from YouTube is no different from pulling songs from radio, from a marketing position.

The fact that Youtube let things get this far makes it pretty clear that Warner actually doesn’t have a lot of leverage. Otherwise they just would have renegotiated. But the thing about social control is (imo) crucial—unless Youtube starts putting in mechanisms so that the big labels can pay to have their stuff come up higher in search results, or to degrade the quality of clips with indie music, or whatever else (like the payola deals) lets them pay to subvert the actual decisions of consumers, they won’t be happy.

I’m not so sure it about control of the customer, per se, as it is control over what products they sell, you use and how you use them.  Obviously that’s exercising some control over you but it really all comes back to the industry being maniacal about “owning” music

Well, that’s what “accepted wisdom” tells them, whether it’s old school music biz or MBAs.

Really stupid thing is that there’s real world evidence that, at least in some cases, that being less tight ass about “control” will make you LOTS more money. See Baen Publishing and John Scalzi…..

What next?  Car companies demanding that you pay them to watch their ads?

There isn’t enough money in the world for that.

I just wish Warner wouldn’t keep forcing YouTube to pull those great Bugs Bunny cartoons. (Although I have to admit that there, they have more of a case.)

Really stupid thing is that there’s real world evidence that, at least in some cases, that being less tight ass about “control” will make you LOTS more money. See Baen Publishing and John Scalzi…..

Exactly the example I was thinking. 

For those who don’t know (or avoid Baen), a few years Eric Flint started the Free Library at Baen by convincing a few authors to put some of their older works online, DRM free.  The authors who agreed to it weren’t really losing anything since sales on mass-market books that have been out a few years, especially genre fiction, usually doesn’t amount to much so the amount of lost royalty to the authors and sales for Baen were pretty minimal.

Then the authors started noticing that after the books were online they started receiving some royalty checks on those books again.  And they tended toward larger sales on the new books.

The reason, of course, was that it was free advertising and people, reading the older work, were then buying a hardcopy of it.  Baen then started putting a CD of a selection of the Library in some of their hardcover releases, still DRM free.  Pick up an Honor Harrington hardcover and you’ve basically got the most of the entire series with it.

More authors started getting in on it, and by all accounts it’s been a goldmine for Baen and its authors (relatively speaking).  Readers were getting exposed to authors they might not have otherwise heard of, both new like Ryk Spoor and old-timers like Keith Laumer, and if they liked what they could get for free they’d be willing to pay for other stuff that wasn’t in the Library.

Despite the demonstrated success of this, there are still a lot of authors and publishing companies who think that anything away for free is going to be the death knell of the industry.

For those who don’t know (or avoid Baen), a few years Eric Flint started the Free Library at Baen by convincing a few authors to put some of their older works online, DRM free.  The authors who agreed to it weren’t really losing anything since sales on mass-market books that have been out a few years, especially genre fiction, usually doesn’t amount to much so the amount of lost royalty to the authors and sales for Baen were pretty minimal.

Eric Flint is a socialist.  This must make the collaborations with David Drake and David Weber interesting.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall of any Baen party with both him and John Ringo in attendance…

The market isn’t supposed to produce more “correct” (profitable) business decisions (in your opinion, a longterm focus in this case). It’s supposed to punish those that fail to make them and reward those that do (or relatively so, if no one makes the “best” decision(s)).

If big media close themselves off to new distribution methods and cede marketshare to smaller labels as a result, I’d say that’s a positive and things are working perfectly in this instance.

Metric is one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen.

That’s all.

Music industry execs? These are the same idiots that stood around with their dicks in their hands and let Steve Jobs move in from a completely different sector and became the preeminent online distributor of their music. I’m not sure there’s a need to posit coherent evil intent here, blithering incompetence will probably do. Suing people for tens of thousands if their kids download a few tunes though, that is freakin evil.

Mixtapes are destroying music!

I’m not going to disagree that it’s partly about social control, but I think it’s also just basic ‘myth of scarcity.’ The assumption is that there are no win-win situations, that the only way to make money is at someone else’s expense.

Fuck you, Malthus and Ricardo.

Malthus and Ricardo have been dead a long time, and Solow isn’t.  It’s not about old economic philosophy; it’s about the oldest—“the love of money is the root of all evil.”

Al:

The market isn’t supposed to produce more “correct” (profitable) business decisions (in your opinion, a longterm focus in this case). It’s supposed to punish those that fail to make them and reward those that do (or relatively so, if no one makes the “best” decision(s)).

If big media close themselves off to new distribution methods and cede marketshare to smaller labels as a result, I’d say that’s a positive and things are working perfectly in this instance.

It’s so cute how free-market fantasists always seem to think that we can’t see the hidden implications of their “let the market take care of it” arguments: that 1) it’s A-OK if the market never gets around to punishing companies for systematically fucking over both their customers and their employees (or contractual subjects, as the case may be), and 2) the only valid way to punish bad corporate behaviour is to sit around and wait for the vagaries of the market to make it unprofitable.

In short, the problem with the music industry isn’t that the open, unapologetic exploitation of both consumers and musicians isn’t profitable anymore. It’s that this exploitation was allowed to continue unchecked for so long, even though no one ever bothered to conceal it.

The worst part of this, IMHO, isn’t the music videos.  It’s the fanvids that are going to get pulled, and the fanvidder accounts that will then get suspended.  Creative work by people, some whom no longer have copies on their own computer(last week I know one vidder whose account was suspended and had to ask around to see if anyone else had downloaded and had a copy of older vids), which the bigger companies certainly don’t approve of.  They tolerate it because it’s impossible to suppress all together-if Universal pulled this kind of stunt my three monetized skating montages would be declared in violation and my account would be suspended, but I keep copies of everything and have other places to distribute, but they can make individual vids lost and individual vidders suffer.

Following up on Dan @7:55AM…

Also, Al, “free marketeers” (in the name of property rights) seem to be just peachy keen with the big labels using the courts to pursue nuisance lawsuits against end-users and fair-use samplers, and using bought-and-paid-for legislators to continually extending copyright terms far past their intended length.

Oh, and the record labels also have a history of using their outsized weight in the “free” market to shut out smaller labels as much as possible from full participation in any distribution or marketing channel they make their deals with.

In short, Al (and I hate to make you cry during the holiday season), the free market where your perfect punishment/reward scenario plays out doesn’t exist and never will—government or no government. We know this here because we take into account the those exotic economic factors known as “human behaviour” and “reality.”

In conditions where a market isn’t close to being “free” (i.e. in the real world), incompetent business managers often look for ways to game the system to ensure that they don’t fail, and that they’re rewarded on the basis of factors other than providing the best product or service in the market.

Although there are plenty of scummy people (and crooks) in the music business (as everywhere else), I think what’s mostly been going on for the last 10-15 years is just the recording companies flailing around trying to find a way to protect their dying part of the industry.  Technologies have come along that make their part of the music business largly unnecessary (maybe not completely).  They’re just trying to find some way to stay in business.  It’s just like the old example of buggy whip manufacturers (or buggy makers) trying to hold on as long as they could in the face of the automobile.  It’s a losing proposition.

I doubt if (in most cases) it has anything to do with oppression or control, other than trying to control what they view as their product from being used by free riders.  The whole control meme and “screwing the little guy” is just part of your schtick.  Mostly they’re just trying to figure out how not to be cut out of the pie.

I’m torn on this. I belong to that breed that will buy an album if there’s a single I really like, so not being able to have a listen to a single that I like will make me less likely to buy the album. As someone who suffered some sort of mental block resulting in the embarrassing purchase of a Spacehog album, I’m very careful to not buy an album unless I’ve had multiple listens to the song in question to make sure that I wasn’t high or something when I thought “oh, hey, this is good.”

That said, the song itself is the product that makes the album worth owning, and the music video contains the full product. If it were a 30-second clip like they have on iTunes or Amazon, that’s a different matter. And being able to call up the entire product on-demand by going to YouTube reduces the incentive to go out and buy the album if you want to listen to the song whenever you want. Now, obviously, unless you’ve got a good connection, reliable buffer recording software, and don’t mind low-quality streaming sound, you can’t take YouTube in your car or out running. When you watch a car ad, you aren’t actually driving the car—they’re telling you about the product, not giving it to you for free.

But for people who like music casually, and don’t have hundreds of albums in their collection, YouTube makes owning albums completely moot. They listen to whatever song happens to grab their attention for the moment until they’re sick of it, then they move on to the next song.

I disagree with the decision, but I understand the sentiment behind it, and I do feel like they’re shooting themselves in the foot by lowering visibility of their product because of it.

Libby:

Although there are plenty of scummy people (and crooks) in the music business (as everywhere else), I think what’s mostly been going on for the last 10-15 years is just the recording companies flailing around trying to find a way to protect their dying part of the industry.  Technologies have come along that make their part of the music business largly unnecessary (maybe not completely).  They’re just trying to find some way to stay in business.  It’s just like the old example of buggy whip manufacturers (or buggy makers) trying to hold on as long as they could in the face of the automobile.  It’s a losing proposition.

Meanwhile, out here in the real world, this is exactly how the music industry has been operating since its inception, not just in the last 10-15 years. The endless, often unethical, and in some cases just plain old illegal efforts to exercise extremely restrictive control over artists and to limit the market for consumers, distributors and non-labeled prospective artists (as well as artists on other labels) have always been a central part of the music industry’s business model. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone at all that they remain so, and yet I still find plenty of folks who are shocked that they would stoop to such a thing.

It cannot be repeated often enough: this is not just a desperate effort by a record label to hold on to a dying market, this is business as usual.

In short, this is another one of those times when having even the slightest clue what the fuck you were talking about really would have come in handy.

Dan, sorry you’re too stupid for words.

I don’t even disagree about how many, many record companies treated artists in particular over the years. 

My point was I don’t think it has much to do with what this post was about.  They are getting squeezed out and are trying to find a a way to stay in the game.  Under current law, they own a product and don’t want others to use it for free.  There’s nothing evil or wrong with that.

But it’s likely their approach is wrong.  I look at the B & N model.  Who knew that letting your customers use your bookstore as a library would work?  It does.

Apropos of nothing, thanks for introducing the Vivian Girls to me.  I had never seen them before, but they’re kind of like an emo version of the B-52s with a little Bjork mixed in.  I like it.

This screw-or-be-screwed mentality is all over the blogosphere.

I doubt if (in most cases) it has anything to do with oppression or control, other than trying to control what they view as their product from being used by free riders.  The whole control meme and “screwing the little guy” is just part of your schtick.  Mostly they’re just trying to figure out how not to be cut out of the pie.

First, Dan is correct: “screwing the little guy,” whether it’s inventors, artists, and even customers is pretty much the definition of how the music industry incumbents have worked since the days of Edison. And that leads directly to their choosing the wrong model and resisting change, time and time again.

Second, the extremely narrow view of “controlling one’s property” is what gets extreme free marketeers into intellectual binds and business disasters. Like Star Trek’s Ferengi, they’re so focused on protecting their gold, latinum, currency, jewellery, and other valuables against “free riders” that they ally themselves with (e.g.) Xtian fantasists who believe that one’s own body doesn’t count as personal property. They also tend to think the open-source software is an evil that promotes “free riding,” ignoring the fact that there are multi-billion dollar industries that rely on OSS and the services required to maintain and upgrade such software. And—most relevant to this post—they usually have a profound misunderstanding of the purpose and intent of copyright law (hint: it was designed to promote that domain of eeevil “free riders,” the public domain).

The point is, if the record company executives could get beyond the attitude that their customers are “free riders” (which they falsely equate with the term “thieves”) they might have a chance at not only retaining existing customers, but gaining new ones. To expand on PonyGirl’s post…

But for people who like music casually, and don’t have hundreds of albums in their collection, YouTube makes owning albums completely moot.

It does, but from a business point of view “people who like music casually” wouldn’t be buying albums anyhow. They are more likely to buy individual tracks, however, but that’s another money-making trend the music industry has fought against tooth and nail until Steve Jobs forced it down their throats.

Why were they so resistant? Due to the fact that, despite changes in production technology, the lazy buggers are still married to the highly inefficient hit-based model. Albums provide a way of mitigating that inefficiency and sloppiness by forcing consumers to buy the crap tracks along with the hit ones (i.e. screwing them over). In the end, that’s why they curse Steve Jobs (and constantly try to screw Apple out of their cut), even though iTunes has brought them new customers and more revenue.

Gracchus—not anymore, no. The music industry is relying on an outdated model, but if you cruise by a used CD store you’ll see plenty of copies of shitty pop albums in the cheap bin because the owners were forced to buy the whole 98° album because of one or two songs they liked on it, then got bored of it and unloaded it. No one’s going to turn around and pick that album up because 98° is no longer what’s on the radio, so it just sits mouldering away in the cheap bin.

I don’t know what the future of music is going to be. I’m actually annoyed that one of my favorite bands is releasing tracks onesie-twosie on their myspace page, instead of releasing an album that I can buy as a complete item. But I’m also not terribly upset that record labels no longer have the easy means of just throwing together some shitty group to put out one popular single and then stuff the rest of the album with a bunch of unlistenable filler and charging you $16 for effectively one song.

“or to degrade the quality of clips with indie music”
The mechanism to degrade the quality of Youtube clips already exists: it’s called being on Youtube.

And then through payola they found you can screw people and make money by turning the radio into a wasteland.  It’s fascinating how screwing people is a more common denominator than making money.

It’s fascinating how defining to allow people to use your product for free is ‘screwing people.’  How can declining to give somebody something they have no right to ‘screwing people’?  It would be rather nice if a bookstore would let me borrow a book and return it when it was done without me paying anything.  It’s hardly ‘screwing’ me if they decline to do so.

Libby:

Dan, sorry you’re too stupid for words.

I don’t even disagree about how many, many record companies treated artists in particular over the years.

My point was I don’t think it has much to do with what this post was about. They are getting squeezed out and are trying to find a a way to stay in the game. Under current law, they own a product and don’t want others to use it for free. There’s nothing evil or wrong with that.

But it’s likely their approach is wrong.  I look at the B & N model.  Who knew that letting your customers use your bookstore as a library would work?  It does.

Thank you for once again demonstrating that not only do you not have the slightest fucking clue what you’re talking about, you don’t even want one.

The reason nobody around here likes you isn’t ideological, as much as you might like to pretend that’s the case. It’s because you’ve repeatedly and willfully demonstrated that you are utterly incapable of listening to anyone other than yourself, even when it’s crystal clear that they they are more informed than you are.

Al:

It’s fascinating how defining to allow people to use your product for free is ‘screwing people.’ How can declining to give somebody something they have no right to ‘screwing people’? It would be rather nice if a bookstore would let me borrow a book and return it when it was done without me paying anything.  It’s hardly ‘screwing’ me if they decline to do so.

It’s far more fascinating how free-market libertarians are almost without exception either A) utterly incapable of arguing in good faith, or B) utterly incapable of arguing at all.

To be blunt, the argument you’ve made here ought to be used in every introductory logic textbook as an example of how not to construct an analogy. It’s not even close.

I long ago lost hope that the Entertainment Industrial Complex was capable of acting in their own long-term self-interest. The question isn’t a matter of “THAT’S OURS, YOU DON’T HAVE ANY RIGHT TO POST ITBLAHBLAHLBLAHBLAH”. Nobody’s arguing that. One of the simultaneously best and worst things about our society is the (generally) unmitigated right to be a dick about everything. Being a complete and utter raging asshole industry is a perfectly legal business strategy.  But see where that gets you in practice. I mean, I’m not the most socially clueful person in the world, but even I can figure this out.
I don’t know why this kind of behavior continues to boggle me, but it does.