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Digital Music's 2001 Winners and Losers
An Anonymous Coward writes: "MP3 Newswire is running two articles that contain their top 8 MP3 winners for 2001 as well as those who top the loser category. So who is this year's #1 winner? The legal industry for all the billable hours they got to roll up thanks to RIAA and MPAA lawsuits. It's a pretty interesting read and the two articles solicit reader opinions on other potential contenders. I can think of Dmitri Sklyarov right off the bat, but I admit I'm not sure if he won for getting the charges dropped or lost for getting arrested in the first place. Rolling Stone has also run their own digital music winners and losers list for 2001."
This is simply untrue - FUD. You can compile closed/proprietary stuff with GPL'ed tools. It's the code that's protected, not the use of the tools.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
You can still find Xolox out there, you need a small "patch" to allow it to continue working. Being that it uses the gnutella-net, it's steady as she goes, Cap'n! :)
Trolling is a art,
Please don't compare someone who has killed members of his own species to someone who is trying to run a profitable business (no matter what you think of that business.)
I agree that you cannot really compare Rosen, Valenti & Co. to the likes of Bin Laden, certainly the urgency of stopping the latter is much greater do to the immediate threat his evil poses to peoples lives - but we still need to be aware that they to represent a deep evil, and a long term threat to the our freedom as a people that is in many ways more scary then that of religious fundamentalists for the simple reason that is is not as certain to fail.
It is easy to paint these people as simply being the ugly side of capitalism - after all it is at the nature of our system that people, and corporations, act in their own best interest, even when they are everything but utilitarian - but it is not that simple. They are not just ruthless capitalists trying to squeeze some money out of us - and what they are attacking is not just our wallets, but our fundamental freedom and self determination in the digital age.
The future that the corporate overlords from whoom our friends Rosen, Valenti and Co. are lackeys have dreamed up a is one where all the information that people access and process is completely controlled by machines loyal not to their users - but to those very corporations. They are working toward establishing a world where the machines which will continue to grow more and more intimately integrated into our very identity and existance are not tools for freedom but chains of bondage - where the promise of unlimited communication becomes instead a reality where our lives have been invaded by machines that control every word we say and hear. And in the name of "security" and "anti-piracy" they are hijacking the governments that are supposed to guard our freedom to force this world down our throats whether we want it or not.
The threat of an information age where the machines we use to access information are not controlled by ourselves, but rather control us, is a distopia beyond the imaginations of the most paranoid technophobes. The road they are trying to lead us down, and for which the resistance is small, is one of the most profoundly dangerous threats to the very meaning of being human that we have every faced - in very real terms, these are people who are selling out humanity to an unholy union of corporations and machines.
Let us not forget that evil wears many faces.
If the law is...then isn't something wrong?
Please remember that the "legal system" (as opposed to individual pieces of legislation) isn't entirely at fault here. The lawyers acting for the RIAA, MPAA, etc are only able to do what they do because a certain supposedly democratic institution that sits in the Capitol building in Washington DC has passed suitably bletcherous legislation that allows them to do it. Like it or not, courts follow Congress, and that's the way it's supposed to be.
I see a lot of posts on /. when a 'bad' decision comes down to the effect that the judge was evil. Well, the judge (who is usually unelected) is constrained to follow the law (which is usually formulated by democratically elected representatives), even if it's a bad law. Reform will only start in the legislature, not in the courtroom. Some people here may wish to abandon their democracy in favour of the benevolent dictatorship of the judiciary, but (barring violation of constitutional provisions) I don't. Not yet.
As I read this message, I'm listening to Jennifer Terran's most excellent The Musician. I'm one of those millions tcc refers to when it comes to telling the RIAA to kiss my ass...I've started my own little boycott by buying from artists who bypass the RIAA and publish their own music. Someone here turned me on to CD Baby (unsolicited plug). They have an enormous catalog of artists who have chosen to thumb their noses at the big recording studios.
The point of this isn't to push CD Baby on anyone, but to point out there is a lot of excellent music out there if one simply takes the time to look beyond the drivel that passes for "popular music" on the radio.