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.”