Atomictumor

Because copyright laws are continously being changed to provide copyright owners with ever broadening and restricting definitions of what exactly you can do with the movies, music, and electronics that you plunked your money down, today we all celebrate Fair Use Day!

Its easy to sit back and say that these laws are helping artists, engineers, and creators be safe from the evil pirates (arr), but the truth is that you should be able to exercise the same priviledges with modern technology that you did with your old Betamax, which means that if a damn good episode of Golden Girls is coming on, man, you should be able to fire up that DVR recorder and save it without restrictions.  You should be able to pop that episode into any TV set (even at your friend Lenny’s house), and watch it.

Can’t do that with Tivo.  Can’t do that with your cable DVR.  But the thing is, they fool you into thinking that because its digital, or because its the latest and greatest, that giving up these things is the price of having the cutting edge.

Bollocks.

So, the options are suck it up and let Big Media have their way with you, put on your eyepatch and risk getting a call from Blondie at the lawyer’s office, or to make some noise and let those losers you elected know that you’re tired of taking it from Big Media.

Theres all this big mighty talk about getting big mighty businesses into Oak Ridge, like Target, and Aldi (for what its worth).

They throw incentives at these big businesses, like tax abatements or funky financing, they use city resources to get these things off the ground, and they bend over backwards. None of that is necessarilly a bad thing, because big businesses are, well, big, and tend to make money and taxes and good stuff like that.

However, this town apparently doesn’t do anything in the way of fostering small businesses. I’m thinking of some of my favorite places in town, like the Time-Out in Grove Center, or J & M’s butcher shop, or Jefferson Drug Store, or Razzleberry’s Ice Cream Lab. These places lend flavor in town, as well as providing a bit of retail tax and bringing shoppers into locales like that.

In talking with some of the folks who run these joints, I hear the city is at best indifferent, and at worse downright belligerent towards the needs of small businesses. Insanely high deposits for utilities, poorly slow response times for the same utilities, including the police dept (the fire dept in town I’ve never heard anything bad about, to the credit of fire chief Mack Bailey, despite his, uh, dropping the ball with the fireworks everywhere but Scarboro).

The town does have a chamber of commerce, but for small retail that really doesn’t do anything but suck up a $200 fee and provide a plaque (or a sticker on the window). Its for networking, but networking with other business owners isn’t what these people need. It might work well for doctors and lawyers, but for a dude running a deli, or a butcher shop, it ain’t much.

And doctors and lawyers can take care of themselves, thanks. Its the people working 12 hour days to keep their business open and in their name that I respect, and these are the people that Oak Ridge needs to take to heart, because people with that kind of dedication and drive are valuable.

So, what to do?

I’d love to see Oak Ridge really get serious about small business. It’d be bitchin to maybe have a group of officials tasked with fostering and assisting small businesses. It’d be even super bitchin’r to see the city set aside some of that mighty IDB money to trickle down on places opening up in Jackson Square, or Grove Center, or anywhere in town to help set up, and get a business through that first year.

We can get a Target anywhere. Where else can we get a Tank burger, or eat ice cream next to a life sized anatomically correct (trust me, Pigpen’s checked) pig next to the Playhouse?