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EFF Ad Campaign On File Swapping
miladus writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is launching an ad campaign
to
counter the RIAA's lawsuits about file
swapping. There are more details available at the File Sharing: It's Music To Our Ears subsite." The press release kicking off this campaign says that "EFF's Let the Music Play campaign provides alternatives to the RIAA's litigation barrage, details EFF's efforts to defend peer-to-peer file sharing, and makes it easy for individuals to write members of Congress."
Our work newsgroups went into a panic when the RIAA announced that they were going to be sueing people.
Amusingly it took them about 30 seconds to get around to Freenet and how it might be worth investigating it.
Evil contains the seeds of it's own destruction as they say - being over zelous with a bunch of basically honest people who like to share some music yet still buy lots has foced them onto a more efficient, totally untraceable (or rather plausibly deniable) network. It's certainly not pushed them towards legal services.
Beep beep.
Hasn't worked for the millions of pot smokers being persecuted in the name of the children.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Copyright laws are fine. They make the GPL possible fer chrissakes.
If I write a song and don't want anyone to hear it, that should be my right. If I want to charge $100 per listen, fine. If I want to place it in the public domain, I can do so. I could even GPL it.
No. The problem is not with copyright law, it's with a bureaucratic elimination of competition. IMHO, it's insane that anyone should be demanding distribution methods that the free market can easily provide, as the argument goes, because it would be so damn popular.
But what I've recently realized is that the whole take on the issue is rather short sighted.
Ask yourself what the real problem is. Most will probably say 'I can't make copies of my music for my own use'. Or, 'I can't preview music for free'.
With regards to the former point, people in computer science must recognize that duplication of data (except for Backup/QOS purposes) is an evil thing. How much time, effort and storage media is wasted by storing a song in a gazillion places - by a gazillion people?
If any network administrator discovered that the file containing the company's phone directory was stored locally on 400 machines, he'd have a fit.
Much better is to have it stored in a central location where anyone can access it at any time. And, it can be backed up/mirrored to make sure it's always accessible.
So the solution is central storage. Streaming audio is very do-able over broadband today. Wireless shouldn't be too awfully far behind. Your current system with CD rack/jukeboxes and/or multi-gigabyte MP3 storage can devolve into a wired/wireless receiver that will be served whatever you wish.
You'll be able to create your own playlists in many different ways. In short, you'll be the programming director of your very own set of radio stations - each of which, you can select at will.
Yeah, it will cost something. In most cases it will mean (nicely targeted) commercials inserted by the servers. But it would be a trivial thing to allow/encourage commercial free programming for a monthly fee.
And the artists would get a micro-cent every time their song is selected. Seems fair. 'Course if the had a problem with this, the could release their songs (or just a demo song) as 'zero-credit'. In other words, no charge. And the end-user could select these exclusively.
I know that there are a lot of system administrators out there that actually like to manage data. I just want it to be there when I want it. All of it.