RIAA PR Efforts Examined

The Importance of writes "Yale's LawMeme has an interesting article pointing out that the RIAA is having some PR success with their anti-file sharing lawsuits. People being sued are not just angry with the RIAA, they are angry with Kazaa. The LawMeme article thinks this is bad news for innovation since Congress might be likely to pass a law making innovative software providers more liable for the copyright infringements of their customers in order to stop the public outcry over the RIAA lawsuits." And in other news, a P2P group is planning to pay off the RIAA for that 12-year-old's settlement, and the BBC has an article about another victim.

Comments

Hmmmm...

[panxerox]

...using this logic means that congress should outlaw linux / pre drm microsoft os's as they are os's that allow people to play copyrighted mp3s ?! ...and is this the end of general purpose computers if the RIAA / microsoft can spin it right?

Re:Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies

[ratboy666]

Fascinating. Yet so wrong...

The "traditional" model of the Internet is "peer to peer". Your mailserver talks to my mailserver. Mine talks to yours.

POP came *after* sendmail. POP would be the "client server" approach. My computer says "hey, I am only on-line a little bit, so I need a bigger computer to do my mail for me". Mail used to be transferred over UUCP, and even there it was "peer to peer".

As larger companies got into the ISP business, they tried to impose a "client server" model. More like a "push content" model. The internet was NOT compuserve. In fact, compuserve (and their ilk) JOINED the internet. So the "peer to peer" model seemingly won...

But, many ISPs (like mine, rogers.com), have user agreements that read "you won't run servers at home". They would LOVE a push content model. As supported by my bandwidth (1.5mbps TO my computer 128kbps FROM my computer). If I can't run in a peer to peer way, how am I going to run my email domain, etc.? Right, buy that service from someone else -- even though I have purchased a sufficiently fast computer and a sufficiently large pipe.

The client server approach allows for a money grab. The traditional peer to peer approach gives more power to the users. Guess I'm going to be a traditionalist.

Ratboy.