Slashdot Mirror
RIAA Quashed
FsG writes "According to an Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release, a Massachusetts district court has ordered that the RIAA subpoenas sent to MIT and Boston College be rejected. This ruling came in response to an RIAA request, filed earlier today, asking that MIT and Boston College be ordered to comply with subpoenas sent to them a month ago. 'We urge other colleges and Internet service providers to take similar steps to protect their users' privacy,' said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn." Following up on this story. Forcing the RIAA to have their subpoenas issued from the local court rather than Washington a) is legally correct and b) makes it harder (more expensive) for them to issue mass quantities.
I'm not arguing that the DMCA is a Good or Bad Thing, but it is law and it allows copyright holders to issue subpoenas without going through a court. Verizon was the test case and the RIAA won, hence there's a precedent ruling that their behaviour is "legally correct".
What's wrong with capitalism? If you don't like the price of popcorn, don't buy it. If you can't afford the cost of a CD, spend your money someplace else. Why shouldn't actor's be paid $25 million a money if they can get it?
-BrentWhat's wrong with capitalism? Well, plenty, but that doesn't mean it's a decently good system.
However, it is not a magic bullet. It has weaknesses. So we've come up with laws to cover most of them: fraud, theft, intellectual property, collusion, illegal monopolies. All these things are products of our capitalist economy.
In my humble opinion, the RIAA and MPAA seem to have discovered some loophole between 'collusion' and 'illegal monopoly' by alternately shifting blame between the member companies and the associations themselves.
Capitalism is a system, and like any system can be abused. Whenever we stop one type of abuse, someone will discover another. This is what 'trade group associations' are doing, in my opinion. Illegal monopolies and collusion are both harmful to the free market, so there are laws against both. I think it's pretty reasonable to suggest that the MPAA and RIAA's obscene lobbying power is also detrimental to the free market.
Unfortunately, they are quite capable of using their obscene lobbying power to protect themselves from such accusations (at least at a governmental level). And it'll take a hell of a lot more than a bunch of people pissing and moaning on Slashdot to get anything to happen about it. As usual, the EFF has the right idea, but they don't have even a tiny fraction of the power of the RIAA, MPAA, or any other major lobbying group (Liquor, Tobacco, Auto manufacturers, etc). Money is power in a capitalist country.
Just my random thoughts. And yes, I am a bleeding heart liberal, thanks.
Random and weird software I've written.
If the DMCA allows a subpoena to be send without a court order, then lets set up the filesharing software to track RIAA transactions so that we can issue a subpoena to them each time they sniff around on our shared directories. Turn it around and bury them in a legal morass.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
The radio is free for the listening, and online file trading is the new radio. As for the teenyboppers, they could easily be driven to the counterfeit disc vendors at flea markets and street corners if the the discs at the mall won't play in a computer, but the pirated ones will. The RIAA needs to decide which side of the digital revolution to be on. Right now, they are on the heads in the basket side.
How ya like dat?
We should be able to rent the latest cd's from video stores and anything ancient, out of print or 10 years or older should be available in the public library.
In 1984, the U.S. Congress banned the "rental, lease, or lending" of phonorecords without the express consent of both the recording artists' record labels and the songwriters' music publishers. Find the details in 17 USC 109(b).
Will I retire or break 10K?
I never believed the war on Iraq was for oil. After a bit of research, I have come to believe it was for the survival of the US as an economic superpower. Read on just a little bit more; there's a point to this.
The US is dependent on currency reserves. Other countries' currency reserves, to be precise. Most of the national deficit is financed by the US selling dollars. Dollars that go into other currency reserves, as the dollar is considered the most credible (and economically stable) currency in the world, and therefore the best currency to keep in a country's currency reserve.
Hence, the US as it stands today is economically dependent on the USD having the largest credibility of all world currencies.
The war on Iraq wasn't about oil; the world opinion would never allow the US to keep a conquered nation's resources.
It wasn't about the UN either. The US ended up not caring shit about what the UN thinks or doesn't think about attacking, which was a clear demonstration.
We know that the WMD evidence was faked already.
Nor was it about Saddam. Sure, he's a real bad guy whose ass deserves a hot date with my boot, and all the boots ever manufactured for that matter, but he's not alone about that. There are lots of warthugs leading countries really badly down there: Syria, Iraq, Tazhikstan, Kazhakstan, etc. Including Saudi Arabia's house Saudi, who are best buddies with the US. So why was Iraq singled out and an eye-popping amount of dollars spent on correcting that country's ways?
Because they threatened the dollar's credibility.
Iraq had switched to tying its oil prices to the euro. They were charging in euros per barrel, not dollars per barrel. Two days after this switch, the euro had grown 25% in value against the dollar.
Let me rephrase that: because of a decision taken in Iraq, American companies lost 25% of their market value against their European competitors in less than a week.
In addition, there is a potential for a snowball effect: more credibility to the euro means more countries switching to use the euro in its currency reserves, which means more credibility still, etc. Estimates have said that the dollar would lose about 40% of its value if this happens, in addition to the US being unable to fund its deficit by selling money. In short, it would be nothing less than a disaster for the American economy.
This is why spending lots and lots of millions of dollars on the war on Iraq made economic sense. The US is not prone to doing things that don't benefit the US in one way or another, and in this light, it makes perfect sense to intervene and make sure that the euro doesn't gain more momentum, even if it costs a little.
(For the conspiracy-inclined, do a search on "dollar euro iraq", or similar keywords.)
As a side note, up until recently, there were four countries using the euro in their currency reserves. Venezuela joined the club just recently. The other three are Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Rings a bell?
Oh, and Iraq is back on track now. One of the first actions of the interim government was to go back to selling oil for dollars per barrel.