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RIAA Seeks Summary Judgement Against P2P Services
kanad writes: "RIAA seeks summary judgement against Musiccity , Kazaa and Grokster. In other words they want the above to be banned even before the trial. RIAA accuses them as Napster clones.
Read the
official statement here BTW does anybody knows of 'Leonard Kleinrock' described as "one of the original founders of the Internet" in the article and an expert witness ?" I wonder whether the mimeograph machine would survive if it was invented today.
Leonard Kleinrock.
/.'ed. Great way to use that Berman-Coble DOS self-help!
Unfortunately the RIAA page is
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
It's a great way to short-circuit an expensive long trial .... if you win ...
IANAL etc
For the 10,000th time...
This is just a summary judgement request. I've never been involved in a case (thankfully few) where both sides didn't file requests for summary judgement. Its just lawyer chest thumping. The lawyers says "My case is so strong there is no possible defense." Then the judge whips out his denied stamp, whacks both summary judegment requests and the case proceeds.
Now, if the judge grants this, then that would be newsworthy.
If a lawyer filing a summary judgement request is news, then you probably ought to cover every time they take a leak too.
If P2P networks is the method that 90% of the music traded (illegaly) uses, than shutting them down would effectivly wipe out sharing for non-motivated individuals. BTW, shutting down KaZaA and grokster would not be difficult, they would just sue the $hit out of them, like they did with napster.
/., information wants to be free.
Of course, where there is a will there is a way, and many motivated individuals could find alternate means to distribute music and such. As they say on
I'm not a big fan of Gore by any stretch, but these kind comments are beyond stale.
From http://internet-history.org/memories/0055.html:
Al Gore has been one of my heroes for the last decade. I became aware of him around 1990 when he started being quoted a lot by the engineering types working on internetworking issues: He was the first legislator who actually appreciated what the internet was all about, and he helped guide the 'net through a very tricky transition.
When the 'net got started in the 1970's, every computer scientist who heard about it was jazzed, but only a very select clique could get to touch it: The hardware for the internet was these special computers called IMPs (I think that was short for Intelligent Message Processors) built by Honeywell, and outfitted with software and some minor hardware modifications by Bolt Beranek and Newman, and engineering company in Cambridge, Massachussetts. In order to get one of those, you had to be a research institution with contract funded research for the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense. I think the rental for an IMP was something like $100,000 per year, which had to be paid out of the overhead on the research contracts, so small colleges need not apply!
Around 1980-82, the ARPAnet had grown to include major military posts, defense contracting companies and most universities that had any defense research contracts at all. It was now carrying several different classes of traffic:
- administrative traffic for the military
- administrative traffic between the military and its contractors
- and acting as a testbed for research experiments in protocol
development.
During this period, TCP was developed, and the network switched from the original NCP protocol to TCP/IP. Shortly after that, the network had grown so large that it had run out of numbers for the IMPs (the hardware allowed 8 bits for the IMP number) and it was split into two separate networks connected by some routers called "mail bridges":
- network number 10 - ARPAnet
- network number 26 - MILnet
This split also helped calm the fears of some military people who were worried about sharing a network with potentially subversive students. This fear is why the connection between the networks was called "mail bridges" implying that only the relatively safe e-mail could get across. Despite the name, however, those were really full-fledged routers, providing a completely seamless connection.
With IP installed, and the newly invented ethernet allowing for affordable campus networks, the major universities started attaching campus networks to the ARPAnet backbone, using VAX-11/780 mini-computers with the network-aware version of UNIX that ARPA had paid University of California at Berkeley to develop.
Many of the smaller universities wanted to participate, but did not have any military reaserch contracts to qualify them, so they banded together to build a compatible network running TCP/IP over X.25 (Telenet, Tymnet). This was known as CS-NET (for Computer Science network).
By 1989, the university-to-university traffic had dwarfed the military traffic, and the DoD wanted to divest itself of the overheads of running the network, so they asked the National Science Foundation to take over. Around this time, the NSF had started a program to build - I think it was 9 - national supercomputer centers, and needed to link them with the potential users at universities. They rented a bunch of 56 kbps lines - of the same kind that ARPAnet ran on - and installed a bunch of routers built out of inexpensive PDP-11/23 minicomputers, using a software package called FUZZBALL, developed by professor Dave Mills of University of Delaware. This created a second backbone, parallel to the DoD-sponsored ARPA backbone. Since NSFnet had no military funding, there was no longer a requirement for military contracts to be connected, but since it was paid for by tax dolllars earmarked for reasearch in the national interest, it was not available to businesses, except in support of government paid research.
It was at this point that Senator Gore stepped in, and basically brokered a deal where NSF stopped paying for the network, and instead gave the universities money to buy network services. This made it possible to start network companies to compete with NSFnet and its regional affiliates. Several of the NSF-funded affiliates re-invented tehmselves overnight into for-profit ventures. NYSERnet became PSI, for example.
Without this visionary plan, there would not have been a commercial Internet.
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He has NEVER CLAIMED to have single-handedly created the internet. And it sounds to me like we could do much worse than to have him take the stand on the RIAA issue.
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
What he said was factually correct. Read my comment above. And I'm not apologizing for anyone, merely pointing out that you are wrong.
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999