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Internet Cafe Fined for Letting Users Burn Downloaded Music
prostoalex writes: "EasyInternetCafe, an international operation with cafes in major Western European cities, is fighting the attempts of British Phonographic Industry to fine it for letting customers burn the downloaded music to CD's. It managed to lower the original fine of 1M British pounds to GBP 100,000 so far."
The CD burners in easy everything were not self service.
You saved your files to a network drive then took your ticket to the front desk. The orange sweat-top clad wage slave on the till would have a look at how much data you had and offer to delete some to make it fit on one CD. It would be equivalent to going to kinko's and asking the staff to photocopy a book for you.
When they charged UKP1 (E1.5) to burn a CD the 4 writers per store were often all in use. I stopped going when they put the price up to E7.5 including a supplied blank.
Their system was fairly crap, on several ocassions I descided to leave when the trains started around 6am sunday morning having been there
for a couple of days (no toilets!) and would still be there at noon after ftping my files to a different computer because the till computer could not see the network share of the original one.
I'm told the security is improved now but an aquantance of mine figured out how to install linux on the machines, the staff had no computer knowlege and never noticed us using bash on the console and the lack of the annoying banner ad bar. The firewall meant giving shells to people on IRC meant using cron and netcat to make an outgoing connection with a shell attached. They reboot all the machines every few days which copys a fresh image over the entire harddrive.