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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.
sue if you're not happy with something, and everybody's guilty until proven innocent. well, nobody's innocent anymore, are they?
:|
it is rather unfortunate that the RIAA's product is less talented than it's lawyers
I don't know what it does, so I'll claim it's a napster clone...
It can be used to cut into our profits, stop it...
With this logic, PC's should be banned, as they can copy music, MSN and AOL should be shut down, since they provide access to the internet, which has illegal copies of music, and hell, XM radio should be shutdown as well, since it is hackable and can have music ripped off of it...
BLAH! Put the RIAA out of their missery, and MINE!
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
In other words they want the above to be banned even before the trial
RIAA is slashdotted... but... from Alice...
"Sentence First. Verdict After!"
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I wonder if the mass distribution of music for a profit would survive if Napster, Kazaa and Grokster would have been around during the 1920s.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Here's his home page where he does claim to have invented the Internet.
Going further, what's to stop IRC and a number of FTP servers? I still host a ton of content on my FTP server, and it is NOT anonymous (yeah-yeah, insecure blahblah). Or, I could burn info to a CD and send it wherever to whomever, or even just email a MP3 if its small enough...
ineffective at best, i say.
----rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
I believe he was one of the engineers at BBN that helped on the development of the Net through a grant from DARPA. If you want more data, try Nerds 2.0.1 or Where Wizards Stay Up Late, both available from your favorite bookseller.
His home page:
http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/
The RIAA has seen what the people want, and refuse to offer them that service. Because of this, people are going to take an alternate method of getting what they want.
:)
All of this litigation is, frankly, nonsense.
If the goverment is for the people, (i know it really isnt) and the people want to be able to download mp3s. Then this should be reflected in the law of the land.
Maybe we could vote on it?
no
... and thier, um stuff, get's traded more heavily than the copywritten music on KaZaA.
Now what about all the porn being traded online. We're talking 200 MB files of people gettin it on. Has Vivid been suing?
I wonder whether the mimeograph machine would survive if it was invented today.
Idunno, but the fresh pages sure smelled good!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
The RIAA just doesn't have a clue what reality is.
TheftThe act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief.
In order for something to be stolen, it must be taken AWAY from the possession of the owner. You can argue copyrights and such, but it isn't theft.
Copying is not theft. you havent removed anything. It may not be ethical to copy, but it isn't theft.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
It seems that the majority of creators aren't getting the chance to make that decision. The RIAA with its arrogant presumption is making the decision for everyone by pursuing these services.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
It's a great way to short-circuit an expensive long trial .... if you win ...
IANAL etc
The RIAA accusses a shadowy hacker's organization, known only as "slashdot", of a massive distributed Denial of Service attack on its web site...
I'm waiting for publishing companies to seek an immediately injunction against Xerox and the rest of the copy machine companies pending trial. Copy machines and scanners definitely allow people to STEAL their property.
Next will come Kodak...how DARE you reproduce images without expressed written consent of all parties involved?!?!?
</sarcasm>
From the article:
:(
RIAA® members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States.
That might be FUD, but damn. I knew it was bad, but I had no idea it was THAT bad.
Triv
I wonder whether the mimeograph machine would survive if it was invented today.
No, but not for the reason you're thinking. It would be immediately banned as thousands upon thousands of school kids catch a buzz from sniffing the freshly printed sheets.
Karma: Professionally Doomed (mostly affected by inability to keep opinions to self)
An interesting quote from the man himself:
...Kleinrock built the crystal radio and was totally hooked when 'free' music came through the earphones...
illegitimii non ingravare
Do Kazaa, or the other people making the clients have *anything* to do with the actual network anymore? If say all of these companies were shut down, would the Kazaa/Morpheus/Kazaalite/whatever clients still talk to each other? Is it really as decentralized as it's touted to be?
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.
"With this logic, PC's should be banned as they can copy music"
They're already trying to do something like that, but instead of banning PCs and services, they want to turn them into devices that they can control. For example, check out Palladium. Last time I checked, both AMD and Intel had bought in to this.Putting aside the technical difficulty of shutting down a P2P network, some of this software may stand a chance in court. They are very much geared to 'file'-sharing rather than music sharing. That improves the chances that some court might see them as substantially non-infringing. Moreover, they are software programs, rather than centralized server, making the case for "the users are responsible for their own actions" stronger.
None of it matters in the end, though. There are three types of people out there: 1) There are those people who don't understand computer technology. 2) There are those people who understand it a little because they've used it. But they don't really understand it. They think that the icon is the program. They think of electronic mail as 'mail, but electronic.' And they have a fuzzy perception of information ownership. They think of people who alter the information on their computers in ways that were not intended as 'hackers' and slightly nefarious. 3) There are people who understand how computers work, and have a good idea what is happening with the 1's and 0's at any given time. Sure, they couldn't build their own OS, but they understand how it works to some degree. (Like someone who couldn't fix his car, but understands the basic concept of an internal combustion engine.)
Unfortunately, it is highly probable that the judge will belong to category 1 or 2.
It wasn't much of a problem before. Most pirates wouldn't have paid the money for it anyway. But now they've drug the rest of us into it and now we are all criminals!
:-)
:-) and it sure isn't $20!
I've gotten so fed up with this crap. I really quit buying CDs now. I download the songs I wanna hear. Not because I want to steal them but because I don't want to give the RIAA any more money they can use to get me, or the rest of us, up our respective a$$es. I support my favorite artists by going to concerts (yeah I know the RIAA gets a cut but what can you do?) and buying merchandise like the concert T's. God, I can't wait to see Disturbed and Korn next month!
Really, this wouldn't be such an issue if they were not a$$ raping us $20 for a CD. We all know now, how much it really cost to burn one!
If they'd charge a reasonable price and quit a$$ raping their customers and a$$ raping the bands they are pretending to protect (what is it, most bands get $.50 - $1 per CD sold? more? less?), they wouldn't have this problem in the first place!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
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.
-------------------
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
the birth of the Internet which occurred when his Host computer at UCLA became the first node of the Internet
Out of curiosity, what was the point of having the first host, as opposed to the first pair of hosts? "Hey, look at me! I'm networking with myself!"
In about thirty years I'll tell you how I was the first host on Internet 3. :)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You create an arbitrarily sized table of randomly placed 1's and 0's... Then what you trade is files that reference where in the table the bytes for your file located in sequence... Would this still be considered piracy or intellectual property?
What the people want is easy access to music, and the ability to sample.
P.Diddy has the ability to sample, and look where it got him.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The reason that Napster was extremely successful and these P2P apps have been somewhat successful is because they lowered the transaction costs for successfully downloading, i.e., for every CHOSEN file they made it quicker (searching), easier (less work to download), faster (downloading...more servers...higher probability of finding a fast server), and require far less technical ability (the users skill). If you force the users back to IRC, FTP, and such you're going to:
A) Cut out 95% of the users because they won't have the necessary skills to complete most of the downloads they desire.
B) Cut out most of the people that have (or acquire) the skills because finding the files, the sites, and acquiring the trust or the ratios (maybe not necessary in this system, but that is the status quo and human nature). The few that are willing to put up the effort likely are not RIAA's better customers anyways.
C) Reduce the # of downloads of said users, by virtue of the fact that each one simply takes them longer.
Very effective.
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
I _could_ download the Sopranos off the internet. I could have my friends tape it for me, or Replay it over to a VCD, but I don't, because HBO is easily available to me at a reasonable price.
Charge me $40-$60/month (which is more than i'm paying for CD every month these days), give me access to every song I want, and you'll make a killing.
Its a new era, you need a new billing scheme. Look at cable companies. Does anyone think that stealing cable is justified? They don't charge by the show, and conversely, nobody says "I'm not really stealing cable, because there's no way i'd watch 200 channels anyway." or "Yeah, i'll watch Showtime because I can, but if I couldn't get it for free, I wouldn't watch it."
It'll never happen though. They'll charge $18.99 for a highly restrictive format download of a shitty CD, then moan that nobody is buying it because of piracy.
Morpheus also asked for summary judgement, but they wanted all of the charges dismissed. Their argument is that there are too many uses for the service for it to be shut down because of the illegal users. This was reported on Monday on news.com.
You left out the second part of the definition from Webster's definition, Sparky:
b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
Embezzlement is a *lot* closer to copyright infringement than the other definition suggests.
However, note that this is from a dictionary from 1913, where there is still a noun 'theft' that means a stolen property. Note that the m-w.com site labels it obsolete. And there is also a definition as of stealing a base (in baseball).
This should show you that language is not static, it is fluid. The fact that you don't think it should be called theft is your problem. 'Theft' is now used to indicate copyright infringement. Cope.
He's known as "the Father of Modern Data Networking." Says so right here on his site.
Interesting point. The historical answer is quite revealing. The invention in question is not the memeograph, but the printing press. The printing press so threatened those in control of information at the time (the Catholic church), that the entire reformation resulted. Let's just hope this go-round is not as bloody.
Here is what I want:
The ability to download a low quality version of a song to see if I like it. If i like it, i am given the option to buy that track at a reasonable cost (I'd pay ~$1 USD, but demand a bulk discount for a whole CD): I want this track that I buy to be available NOW, in many popular formats including a lossless format suitable for burning. I want the right to copy this track to kingdom come, from my car to my home and portable.
The record companies will say that then users will take this files and exchange them all over with their friends but think about this: I have money and my time is worth money -- it it technically "cheaper" for me to pay $1 for a high-quality song and have it NOW than to spend 5 hours finding a low-quality and corrupted copy off some P2P service. As an extension of this, those who can't afford to pay for digital music cannot afford to buy the CD anyway, so no one is loosing a sale anyway.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Dr. Leonard Kleinrock is known as the Inventor of the Internet Technology, having created the basic principles of packet switching, the technology underpinning the Internet, while a graduate student at MIT. This was a decade before the birth of the Internet which occurred when his Host computer at UCLA became the first node of the Internet in September 1969. He wrote the first paper and published the first book on the subject; he also directed the transmission of the first message ever to pass over the Internet.
http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
By the same token, do music copyright holders have the copyright to any technique that could produce air vibrations similar to the air vibrations that happened when the artist performed the song? And another thing, do they actually own the original vibrations, by which I mean, I'm not allowed to measure those vibrations and report to anyone else the results of my measurements, even if I make the measurements from a distance? They actually own the rights to what the air is doing?
What if I had a method to describe the complete pattern space of waveforms that the original music was not? That is, I have some sort of mathematical description of every possible wave form except the original music, I can't tell anyone what that is either, I suppose because that would allow you to derive the original. Even though I'm explicitly and rigourously not giving you the original.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Here are a couple of interesting thoughts.... 1) In one example in the dedacted version from the RIAA website, the document actually mentionsWindows Media Player. So, since that is so obviously being used to infringe upon copyrights, why are they not named in the suit? 2) According to the press release on the RIAA site, it sounds like I would be infringing copyrights if I rented/bought a movie and thn invited all my friends over to watch it, or worse yet, loaned it out to them, or geve them the movie after I watched it... Whew!! Time for a reality break..... At the rate things are going, the RIAA apparently won't be happy until you have to pay them each and every time you listen to a song (I am refering to one you purchased).
I gave $1000 to the EFF last month.
What have you done?
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
If Al Gore were president, Tipper Gore would be First Lady, and the RIAA would have to answer to her all over again, only this time, she would be a lot more powerful. I wish Tipper Gore was First Lady. The recording industry deserves her. She would get Al to veto any Pro RIAA crap coming out of Congress. It is a shame we let Bush enter the White House when he did not win the election.
How ya like dat?
Interesting...seems a substantial part of RIAA's propaganda against the peer to peer companies is predicated on the fact that they're making a profit.
I wonder if this means their case would be weaker against giFT.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Correct, he did take the intiative in creating the internet.
If it wasn't for him, woul would have ARPAnet, MILnet, and CSnet, none of which would be available to the public.
This is like saying the founders of the Big Mac should take claim because there was hamburgers before there was Big Macs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Interesting... nice to finally know the details of what so many have scoffed at.
On a related note:
My father was working for U of Md and NSF at the time, and I remember him talking about the transfer of the backbone from NSF. He was convinced it was going to destroy the universities' ability to use the internet, because (IIRC) the backbone providers were:
a)going to price universities out of the market
b) not be able to coordinate to enough an extent to actually keep the thing running.
I'd love to represent my dad (who is very farsighted) as prescient on this, but when it comes to the backbone, he seems to have been wrong. But he was quite foresighted in seeing the Internet as a commons that could easily be render much less useful.
But then again, all we could listen too would be Pat Boone and Patsy Cline records.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
The mimeograph and later xerograph did eventually prompt changes in copyright law (1976 Copyright Act)--the additional restrictions were balanced by the codifying of Fair Use. The critical differences today are that people have the ability to distribute (virtually) unlimited copies. And there is essentially no thought given to consumers' rights in new copyright legislation.
This copyright timeline highlights some of the big events. Unfortunately, it stops in 1996, pre-DMCA.
When you say "MusicCity", I'm guessing your talking about Morpheus?
Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but Morpheus is on the Gnutella Network. The Gntuella Network is decentralized (no central server, *NOT* a Napster clone) (well, if you count GWebCache/Bootstraps as being decentralized). I doubt they could stop users on Morpheus. They could stop the vendor from distributing it's client, but not the network. Since Shareaza, Bearshare, Limewire, Gnucleus, Ares, and many many others use the Gnutella network as their network of choice for their P2P Clients.
Actually, it may be good for Morpheus to be dropped from the Gnutella circle. Morpheus is hurting the network by soaking up all the leaf nodes, and not supplying the network with any Ultrapeers (in v1.0). Before, Morpheus would allow ANY of it's nodes to become Ultrapeers, now it doesn't allow ANY of them to become Ultrapeers. Errr. There is now a major Ultrapeer shortage on Gnutella (takes a long time to connect, hard to retain a stable connection).
Before, they [Morpheus] wouldn't allow any of teir nodes to become ultrapeers, flooding the network with bad Ultrapeers (you have to be "elected" as an Ultrapeer with good details: Good OS (not Win 98/95), Good Connection (T1 and higher probably), and have a good uptime history. Morpheus ignored that, and just let anyone of their nodes become an Ultrapeer. Hurting the network.
Morpheus has proven unable to keep up with the times. They have yet to implament major Gnutella fundamentals into their system. Ultrapeers, Partial File Sharing, Upload Queue, Download Mesh... I've seen none of that.
So long Morpheus. Lets hope MusicCity doesn't bring down the rest of the network circle along with it...
Ok, we all know about the issue of royalties for internet radio:
0 2- 07-21-radio_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/20
Basically, the royalty owed is seven hundredths of a cent, per song, per listener.
When the RIAA argues losses on P2P, they calculate it based on the sales of CDs. Which is probably about 2 bucks per song transferred.
What is the distinction? They both use the same underlying technology. You can save an mp3 stream from a 'net radio' to a file without losing quality.
Why cant a *ster service just track and charge users seven hudredths of a cent per song? For a buck a week, you could get 14.3 tunes. 30 bucks a month would equate to an album a day.
Let publishers waive royalties if they wish.
Rather than a network of 'servers', classify it as a network of 'internet radio stations'. Or is it not one already?
I don't see this as a loophole, but a perfectly acceptable system. Probably 90% or higher of P2P users use it as an alternative to conventional radio.
If the copyright appeals board set a royalty of seven hundredths of a cent, how can the RIAA claim any more than that?
IANAL, someone who is please clarify the difference (between an MP3 only service and internet radio) for me.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
(Note the press release's misuse the word "said." Public relations people are so arrogant they make up language as they go along.)
Balderdash. He did no such thing. Internet research was years old by the time this Johnny-Come-Lately appeared on the scene in a Congressman disguise.
What Gore said was indefensible and manifestly false. It's hilarious that anyone ever tries to defend it, or to explain it away. The much better tactic would be to admit that it was a stupid thing to say. The fact that Gore and many of his cultists cannot or will not do so says more about them than it does about the facts of the case.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
"At the age of 6, Leonard Kleinrock was reading a Superman comic at *HIS* apartment in Manhattan" (emphasis added)
I really doubt he had his own apartment at 6.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Not only does it have a Centralized server used as a Bootstrap (To find Supernodes), but it also has NETWORK SUPERNODES. Meaning, they are dedicated Supernodes on a server. They are always up, always fast, always avaliable. In addition, the Network has a central server for bootstrap porposes and so that they can regulate which clients connect to the network (they have a gateway system, that's how they turned off Morpheus). Network Peers and regular Supernodes (computer users) are involved as well.
The developers of FastTrack (names) have opened a new website called Joltid which has a model similar to what the RIAA said it was like. I'm guessing the website is for companies to purchase the technology, but the developers will no longer release clients for free to the public. This is obviously saying "Kazaa is gone, time to start up a new company."
Oh well. If FastTrack goes down (which it will), there are many, many, many alternatives.
Slashdot story: Leonard Kleinrock On The Origins of Packet Switching
The Web page that story links to has since moved here.
Isn't it ironic? The RIAA was fighting against the PMRC's censorship in the 1980s, and championing freedom of expression. Now, they are for censorship, asking the courts for prior restraint against file trading. This stifles freedom of expression by taking away one of the only forums unsigned artists have. They also will not sign anything but Britney Spears style teenybop crap to recording contracts. They are now stifling music more that Tipper and her bunch ever could have. Maybe the almighty dollar was all they ever cared about, and they never gave a damn about freedom of expression. Does the DMCA still allow us to express what we think of them? Boycott the recording industry.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Can someone help me locate the testimony in which Kleinrock describes how they could easily control and prevent massive copyright infringement?
I mean, I'm dying of curiosity. Every solution I can think of is either trivial to circumvent, or non-trivial to implement. Nothing falls in the classification of "easy".
Then again, I'm not Dr. Internet with a PhD from MIT.
that would force you to buy the crap that they churn out, you have nothing to worry about.
So why, when I rent a tape or a DVD at the local major-national-chain video store, does it contain the standard warning that this tape or disc is licensed solely for private home viewing, and that rental is prohibited?
Maybe it's different in America, but in Canada, all the tapes seem to be this way.
--
Twoflower
Nope, no sig
Hey, I was just answering the submitter's question.
To be honest, most articles I have read tend to give credit to both Kleinrock and Davies.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
More importantly, I did not say (nor did I imply) that "taking the initiative in creating" while in Congress is tantamount to saying "I invented it".
My assertion is that what he actually said is absurd: he cannot have taken "the initiative in creating" something that was already some years old by the time that he even got elected to Congress!
If algore had said something to the effect that he was a supporter of the Internet from its infancy, that would have been a far more plausible assertion. But that's not what he said.
What Gore said may have been a deliberate lie, to puff up the ol' resume on national TV. But even if it wasn't, the very best that can be said is that it was a laughably poor choice of words. And like I said, he and his cultists would be a lot better off just admitting that he misspoke. The fact that they defend this nonsense - as you are! - is just hilarious. Pathetically hilarious.
Please find something to defend that is more worthy of your energies than algore's verbal gaffes. You won't find me defending Dan Quayle's spelling of 'potato', and I should think that you would have better things to do with your time than defend algore's nonsensical claims about his role in the Internet's creation.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
I admire you both for boldly making false claims about Al Gore's innocence, and for the fact that you are apparently a powerful enough person on slashdot that no one will disagree with you unless they're posting as an AC. But I'm capped, so I'll repeat what the ACs have said with a +1 score. Maybe more people will see it:
What Al Gore actually said was: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." And that claim is patently false. There is no way to misconstrue it as "factually correct" unless you want to paint yourself as an Al Gore fanboi. Al Gore helped make beneficial infrastructure changes to the Internet, I'll grant him that. And he's a geek -- we're lucky to have him. But don't put him on a pedestal and start inflating his credentials. His credentials are fine as-is.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
The RIAA apparently has used p2p company emails, message board correspondences, and executive interviews to show that KaZaA and the rest of the FastTrack Network clients (ok, Morpheus isn't FastTrack anymore but that's beside the point) worked to 'embrace and extend' (*ack*) the Napster program, which has been shown to be illegal in court.
There is no mention of Gnutella or any of the Gnutella developers in this suit... while Gnutella has had great difficulty advancing the protocol specification to the efficiency of other P2P networks, they are making progress. Advances in query by hash, query routing, network traversing searches, bandwidth shaping, and many more are being developed or incorporated now into newer clients.
With one of the only completely decentralized networks around a totally open specification, I am interested to see if the RIAA behemoth will ever attempt to 'take on' the task of legalizing Gnutella into oblivion.
When all the lawyers are finished, will Gnutella be the last left standing?
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
It is completely unconstitutional for a defendant to lose without being allowed to have a trial.
See the 7th Amendment
Summary judgement FOR the defendant does not pose a constitutional problem.
Of course, the civil court system ignores the Constitution and other laws of the land (such as the DMCA exemptions listed RIGHT IN the DMCA itself in the DeCSS case) on a daily basis. So if you are a defendant and lose via summary judgement, you're going down.
Even if you have good lawyers if you "threaten the system", you are very likely to lose and even be ordered to pay for your own persecution. Again, look at the DeCSS 2600 case.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Yes, when your brother and his cronies fix the election for you in the one disputed state, you get more electoral votes. America sat idly by and allowed a coup. No wonder Bush, and "that general guy," Pervez Musharraf get along so well. They are both dictators.
How ya like dat?
Like this?
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Do you even know what those words mean young man?
There's a new channel where I live (Iowa) called "More Music", it plays a decent crosscut from hiphop to heavy alternative (haven't seen heavy metal yet).
It appears to be trying to be what mtv once was, I'm not sure who owns/operates it yet, but I watch it a few minuites a day.
I live in a giant bucket.
If by "IP" you mean "Intelectual Property", then no. If you mean "Internet Protocol"...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Why is it that people who want business to operate in a state of anarchy call anyone who doesn't a communist or socialist? If the rule of law is a good thing everywhere else, it is good in business, too. It is high time people who "get it" that business needs to be regulated called the Enron conservatives what they are. Anarchists. Deregulation makes "might is right" the only law.
How ya like dat?
P2P is a search engine. They have no control over what people trade person to person. If they are actually serious about this, then they had better shut down every real search engine that finds sites with warez, mp3 archives, serials, etc... Which is every single one of them. There is no difference and it just makes it all the more obvious that the people behind the RIAA are hypocritical dumbasses. Thank you.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
You can record shows off cable TV with your VCR, and the tapes still work if/when you stop paying for cable, or move house, or buy a new TV/VCR. This doesn't happen with most Pressplay "downloads", and there are limits on how many "portable downloads" (i.e. uncrippled downloads) you can buy per month.
I have an unfortunate feeling that you may be altogether too close to the mark. After all, wasn't there already a suit against Kinko's, using the presumption that the ONLY thing a photocopier was good for was copyright infringement?
I don't recall the details (maybe someone who does can jump in) but the practical upshot was that their clerks weren't allowed to photocopy any material that bears a copyright notice. (Consequently I once had to argue with a Kinko's clerk to get a copy made of my OWN manuscript.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
It was the first host to connect to the first switch on what would become ARPANET
Joe Consumer can rent his movies, You can't make copies and trade, rent or sell them. My rights are the same as anybody elses. Before the Betamax court case the studios said that you couldn't rent videotapes. I even have a few Disney tapes that have "Not For Rental" printed on them because they were made before the case was decided. I also have some forigen tapes that say "Not for Hire". The FBI warining isn't all BS but it dosen't apply unless you copy the tape for non-fair use reasons. I hope that made it a little clearer.
In other words they want the above to be banned even before the trial.
NO - summary judgement simply means that the RIAA believes those other entities have violated existing statutory law by merit of the facts of the case and that no trial is necessary.
Now, whether or not that is true is another story.
I'm a 2000 man.
Prohibition (18th Amendment) was repealed 1933 by the 20th Amendment, so you could say that.
The parent post is a stock troll, cribbed from a story on Kuro5hin, and sprinkled with inflammatory allusions to, "bearded Linux hippies [living] in their parents' basement." It is also signed with the moniker HYBTT, which stands for, "Have You Been Trolled Today?"
It is also a dangerously deceptive re-casting of Jefferson's words into an entirely misleading light. Jefferson strenuously opposed copyrights, as they are a form of monopoly. Jefferson opposed monopolies in all forms, as they inevitably lead to abuses. An example of an abusive monopoly contemporary to Jefferson was the East India Company, whose record of abuse was well-documented.
What Jefferson was really saying in the famous quote cited above was, "Look, information leaks no matter what you do to contain it. No natural law sustains the notion of copyright. So save yourself the ulcer and don't bother trying."
Jefferson eventually agreed to establishment of copyright, but it was not in the form he wanted, and he still feared the abuses it might bring -- fears which, 200 years later, appear to have been borne out.
A more complete, balanced, troll-free discussion of Jefferson's and Madison's thoughts concerning copyright may be found here, also on Kuro5hin.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions