Opinion
SHOHAM GEVA
EDITOR IN CHIEF
CLAIRE BRYAN
AND REGAN DETWILER
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS
LAURA SCHINAGLE
MANAGING EDITOR
420 Maynard St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
tothedaily@michigandaily.com
Edited and managed by students at
the University of Michigan since 1890.
Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board.
All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 — Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Caitlin Heenan,
Jeremy Kaplan, Ben Keller, Minsoo Kim, Payton Luokkala,
Kit Maher, Madeline Nowicki, Anna Polumbo-Levy,
Jason Rowland, Lauren Schandevel, Melissa Scholke,
Kevin Sweitzer, Rebecca Tarnopol, Ashley Tjhung,
Stephanie Trierweiler, Hunter Zhao
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
Shortly after the city of Flint’s
switch to the use of Flint River
water in April 2014, residents raised
concerns about rashes and hair loss.
In January 2015, protesters called
for higher-quality water. By March
2015, even the city council voted 7–1
to end the use of Flint River water,
but because of a Michigan law that
stripped local leaders of their power,
all of these factions were excluded
from the decision-making process.
A month ago, Gov. Rick Snyder
released e-mails from 2014 and 2015
related to the Flint water crisis. In
many of these, members of Snyder’s
administration dismiss and belittle
the concerns of poisoned residents.
Snyder’s former chief of staff,
Dennis Muchmore, accuses affected
residents of turning the situation
into a “political football” and calls
groups asking for investigations
“anti-everything.” Another Snyder
staffer refers to “data” in quotes
to undermine the credibility of
information provided by a local
physician indicating high levels of
lead in Flint water.
In his State of the State address
and recent interviews, Snyder has
tried to deflect blame by pointing
to the Flint City Council’s 2013 vote
in favor of a new water system. Yet
shortly after December 2012, the
governor
signed
an
emergency
manager
law
that
allows
the
state to intervene in financially
struggling municipalities — an idea
that Michigan voters rejected just
months before. Under that law, the
state’s treasury held the power to
make the water switch. Indeed,
Snyder’s hand-picked emergency
manager called the council’s vote
to end the use of Flint River water
“incomprehensible” and chose to
ignore it.
Snyder’s
administration
has
created a system in which public
leaders are neither responsive to nor
reflective of their constituents, and
this inevitably leads to outcomes
that do not benefit the community.
In this case, the result is a tragedy:
A generation of children will never
have the opportunity to reach their
full potential as a result of lead
poisoning.
One of the released e-mails, in
which a staffer writes to Snyder
about a Flint taxation debate,
shows just how removed Michigan
residents can be from the decisions
that greatly impact their lives:
“Governor, as you know Flint
would like to increase its city income
tax from 1.0% to 1.5% … Farrington,
Chair of House Taxation — said he
would take up this bill over his dead
body. Then he said he would take up
if you asked directly. You are having
lunch with him today — can you just
mention the importance of getting
this bill done before we adjourn.”
Flint,
an
urban
center
predominantly
made
up
of
residents of color, had its taxing
power decided over lunch by the
governor and Jeff Farrington, a
representative from a suburban
district that is 87-percent white and
nearly an hour away. And this was
business as usual.
Coming from Michigan’s middle-
class suburbs, I know it can be easy to
distance oneself from these political
problems until something like the
Flint crisis makes the news. In my
small hometown, Wixom, and in the
vast majority of Michigan cities and
towns, there is no fear of political
leaders taking away our way of life.
But democracy is not an exclusive
right of upper- and middle-class
white suburban communities. And
as Michiganders, we must realize
that situations like Flint will happen
again if we do nothing.
It matters who writes the rules,
and empowering Flint residents
could have shortened or prevented
the crisis. Participatory rulemaking
at the city level, for example, would
have ensured residents had a say in
their water regulations. Some form
of participatory budgeting process
would
have
allowed
residents
to make their own cost-saving
tradeoffs.
Our
democracy
only
works if all the voices in our state
have an opportunity to take part
in writing the rules of governance.
When we fail to create opportunities
for inclusive decision-making — or
even basic democratic access —
there is little to protect our state’s
most vulnerable residents from
catastrophes like this one.
— Dominic Russel is an LSA senior.
Enforce copyrights, protect music
A
s Taylor Swift has so famously
asserted, “Music is art, and art is
important
and
rare.
Important,
rare things are valuable.
Valuable things should
be paid for.” That may be
true, but unfortunately
for Swift — and the music
industry as a whole —
the right to determine
the
commercial
value
of music no longer rests
with creators, labels or
publishers.
It rests with the anony-
mous pirates of the World
Wide Web.
Though endemic for
decades, music piracy exploded when digital
and web-based technology rendered illegal
music replication and dissemination cost-
free, leaving the legal ramifications of copy-
right infringement the last remaining barrier
to large-scale piracy. But, save for a cluster of
lawsuits initiated by the Recording Industry
Association of America, music pirates have
faced few legal challenges to their thievery.
Absent more rigorous enforcement of copy-
right laws, the music industry has little hope
of recovering the profits lost from a decade
replete with intellectual property theft.
Absent uniform, large-scale copyright
enforcement, consumers can get pirated
songs for free on file-sharing sites, often
rendering them unwilling to pay for physi-
cal or digital copies of CDs in the future.
This dealt a catastrophic blow to the music
industry, which operated on a sales-driven
business model. As industry profits plum-
meted from $45 billion in the early 2000s
to roughly $7 billion today, entrepreneurs
scrambled to develop distribution models
that might entice listeners to actually pay
for the music they consume.
These efforts produced Spotify and other
streaming services, which allow listeners to
play music on demand for free in exchange
for listening to brief advertisements. Spo-
tify has provided an accessible, no-cost way
for 60 million consumers in 58 countries to
legally listen to music, while still compen-
sating songwriters and recording artists for
their work. By providing its services to con-
sumers for the price set by music pirates —
absolutely free — Spotify has played a role in
the industry’s anti-piracy fight. Upon initial
introduction in Sweden, the service reduced
music piracy by 80 percent.
But the streaming model returns notori-
ously low profits to artists, who rely on pub-
lishers, labels and performing rights societies
to quickly and accurately pay out royalties
on billions of individual song plays valued at
fractions of a penny each. High-profile art-
ists like Swift have pulled their catalogue
from the service in protest, despite the risk
that doing so might drive consumers back to
piracy sites.
Even if artists had vigorously supported
the service, Spotify could not have solved the
piracy problem. Allowing users to listen to
music free of charge merely enables the ser-
vice to compete with — but not defeat — the
pirates. Today, more than 20 million Ameri-
cans still consume pirated music, and it will
take much more than a creative distribution
model to reduce this number.
This is not a surprise. Intellectual prop-
erty laws exist precisely because ideas like
song lyrics and composition are infinitely
replicable once they become public. Until
the government enforces copyrights more
effectively, pirates will continue to replicate
and disseminate music unabated. Just as the
government has a responsibility for enforcing
traditional property rights through policing
and standard deterrence, it too should direct
resources to defending the rights it has guar-
anteed intellectual property owners.
Currently, copyright enforcement relies
on entities like the RIAA to sue individual
infringers. But in a digital era where pirates
are often anonymous and host sites across
international borders are outside of U.S.
jurisdiction, relying on lawsuits is wholly
inadequate. At the very least, it can only tack-
le the problem hosted in the United States,
leaving cross-border theft unenforced in the
vast majority of cases.
Music pirates exploit technology to carry
out their crimes, and government agencies
tasked with copyright enforcement should
employ digital resources to detect and pre-
vent infringement. The music industry itself
has invested substantial capital to develop
watermarking and fingerprinting technolo-
gies, both of which are designed to detect
piracy by tracking where songs appear
online. The technologies aren’t perfect.
But the government — staffed with trained
computer scientists — could conceivably
improve these technologies and employ
them to defend the rights that it has guaran-
teed to music creators.
Digital watermark and fingerprint codes
could be synced with the metadata already on
file for works registered with the U.S. Copy-
right Office, allowing enforcement teams to
match pirated copies of works with copyright
holders, empowering rights owners to pursue
damages in civil court. Additionally, armed
with more information about the nature and
scale of piracy activities hosted by individual
sites, the government could itself prosecute
the pirates, or in the case of foreign-hosted
websites, provide data to similar agencies in
foreign states.
Granting federal bureaucracy the legal
purview to police the Internet is not neces-
sarily an attractive option. But after a decade
of failed market solutions and piecemeal
enforcement through the occasional private
lawsuit, it’s certainly time to try something
new. Empowering the government to enforce
the laws it created is a good place to start.
— Victoria Noble can be reached
at vjnoble@umich.edu.
VICTORIA
NOBLE
Distracted living with the RE-vibe
I
t’s a Thursday afternoon and I’m
five minutes into reading about
Marco Rubio’s tax policies.
In
reality,
I
should be paying
attention to my
professor
who
is discussing the
different
types
of volcanoes on
Earth.
Given
that his class is
a
mini-course
that I am taking
pass/fail, I have
little motivation
to pay attention.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere,
the small plastic box velcroed to
my left wrist vibrates, reminding
me to redirect my focus toward my
professor.
That small, plastic, watch-esque
device is called the RE-vibe, and it
was created by FokusLabs, a small
tech company based in North Caro-
lina. Rich Brancaccio, the founder of
FokusLabs and a school psychologist
specializing in ADHD and autism,
created the device to help young
children stay focused in school.
“The RE-vibe is essentially a
virtual tap on the shoulder,” Bran-
caccio explained to me. “When it
vibrates, it poses the question, ‘Am
I doing what I’m supposed to be
doing?’ If you answer ‘yes,’ use that
as positive reinforcement. If you
answer ‘no,’ use that as a reminder
to get on task.”
This mechanism is decidedly
simple; there is no screen on the
RE-vibe and you can’t actually do
anything with the device. As Bran-
caccio explained to me, this was
intentional.
“We originally planned on put-
ting our algorithms on smart-
watches, but we found that the
smartwatches
themselves
were
distracting. People will get a text or
a Twitter notification and go, ‘Oh,
I should check that out.’ The very
thing that is supposed to keep you
from being distracted is the thing
that distracts you.”
While the device was originally
created for young kids, the mod-
ern college student is the key test
subject in analyzing the RE-vibe’s
functionality.
Tasked with maintaining stel-
lar grades, active social lives and
general social productivity, college
students are forcing their brains to
multitask beyond physical capabili-
ties more than ever before.
Such a society has seen a rise in
students turning to medication like
Adderall for help focusing, despite
not having prescriptions. In our
world context, singular focus is
not an option; multitasking is the
desired result that is worth risking
even one’s life over.
This ideology exists in stark
contrast to the RE-vibe. When dis-
cussing the simplistic nature of the
first-edition RE-vibe, Brancaccio
stated, “I think it’s important to
pick one thing and do it really well.”
Though he was speaking about the
design of his company’s first prod-
uct, his message permeates through
the device’s guiding ideology: Stop
messing around and focus on the
task at hand.
For the past month, I have been
trying to focus on the task at hand
with the help of the RE-vibe. In
many cases — like my mini-course
— I have found the device extreme-
ly helpful. When I found myself
wandering off, the RE-vibe would
often buzz me back into focus.
While reading a long, dull text-
book chapter, my wrist-worn “tap
on the shoulder” made sure I didn’t
fall asleep or check my Twitter. In
these instances, I felt empowered
to maintain focus for extended
periods of time.
However, the buzzes didn’t just
occur when I was distracted. Due
to a lack of sensor technology, the
RE-vibe can only approximate
when it thinks the wearer might
be distracted. What this meant
for me was a lot of buzzes while I
was walking to class, taking exams
and focusing intently on my task at
hand. Over time, these meaningless
buzzes encouraged me to ignore the
device in situations where buzzes
might actually help me.
Brancaccio said future versions
of the RE-vibe hope to tackle this
issue; his team already has an algo-
rithm that can sense when some-
body is truly distracted.
The real problem — the one
without an answer in the pipeline
— lies in determining when people
are focused. In their current state,
motion sensors, heart rate moni-
tors and related sensors aren’t
advanced enough to detect such
nuanced context.
Despite false vibrations, I found
myself appreciative of the instanc-
es in which the reminder served a
purpose for my brain. However, for
college students, I don’t know that
the RE-vibe, in its current state, is
the perfect answer I wanted it to
be. With future iterations — which
Brancaccio promised me are well in
the works — that could all change.
Maybe a smarter, more context-
aware RE-vibe could keep college
students from using Adderall as a
non-prescription focus drug.
Or maybe a future version will
just keep me from checking the tax
policies of Bernie Sanders later on
in my mini-course. My wrist hasn’t
vibrated in five minutes and I’m
already on the fourth page of pro-
posed policies.
— Elliott Rains can be reached
at erains@umich.edu.
ELLIOTT
RAINS
Flint: Rewrite the rules
DOMINIC RUSSEL | OP-ED
E-mail FranniE at FrmillEr@umich.Edu
FRANNIE MILLER
Elliott Rains wears the RE-vibe for a week. David Song/Daily
“A generation of children
will never have the
opportunity to reach
their full potential as a
result of lead poisoning.”