Congress to Ashcroft: Go After Song Swappers

saikou writes "Yahoo has published a news about proposal of 19 lawmakers to prosecute P2P systems' users. Allthough Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, said that FBI should not go for casual users but but instead to go after operators of "network "nodes", there is not enough info in the story to see if this "should" will change to "must in addition to", if or when trying to arrest major node operators fails to curtain song swapping online. Of course, questions of what to do about foreign users and foreign music are omitted. RIAA claps its hands. I guess we should expect network congestion because of users, downloading everything in their sight to beat this initiative."

Comments

Good.

[kabir]

This isn't intentionally a troll, but if it ends up that way, well, so be it.

Isn't this what we've wanted all along? Make the people stealing the music the ones who are culpable rather than outlawing the methodology... it seems like the right answer to me.

Of course there's the implicit requirment (in order for this to be a good thing) that legal activities not be persecuted under this initiative. For that I suppose I'll have to wait and see. Honestly though, I'm not upset in the least about this. When folks download songs they didn't pay for which weren't given away for free by the artist/copyright holder, whatever the downloader's philosophy about it that activity is still theft. And let's face it, that's probably the majority of what goes on with P2P music "sharing" networks... that's certainly all I've ever seen anyone doing with them!

This is new folks

[Henry V .009]

This is new, so pay attention to what's happening. A truly new crime has been invented--that isn't something that happens often.

Copyright infringement has never before been a crime committed by individuals procuring their own entertainment. Always before it has been a crime that could only be comitted by major distributors. After all, those were the only people copyright law applied to 50 years ago.

Stealing a song is not like stealing a car. One involves the deprivation of a personal property, and the other involves breaking a social contract.

This is new, and I wonder how long this new crime will be with us.

Re:This will help the REAL artists...

[kcbrown]

2. The big P2P sharers leave the networks. Usage drops drastically. However, the P2P software makers are still in business, as they are now left alone. Music is still being shared, only now its stuff that explicitly has been allowed by the Artists to be shared.

Huh? How naive can you get?

You think the RIAA will just be nice and leave P2P software makers alone once trading of RIAA 0wn3d music on P2P networks drops through the floor? You think the RIAA will just ignore all those independent artists that they don't have any control over but who would now have more relative exposure on P2P networks?

You've gotta be kidding me. What world did you grow up in?

The RIAA will not stop until all music distribution methods are completely under their control. Total domination is what they're after and they're not going to settle for anything less. And because they 0wn Congress, they have a reasonable chance of succeeding. Oh, yeah, they might destroy the Internet in the process, but everyone knows that the only people who use the internet as anything other than a glorified TV set are 3v1l h4x0rz and terrorists, right?

Sigh...