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.”

