Slashdot Mirror
RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's Mistakes?
An anonymous reader writes "George Ziemann has written the latest installment in his 'history repeats itself' series of articles regarding the record industry and the tactics utilized by their lobby, the RIAA. This time Ziemann focuses on the recent RIAA lawsuits against individuals who file-trade, and the search-and-seize missions against independent music stores. Slashdot posted his first two articles back in June."
RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's Mistakes
This might not count for much in this day of digital audio but anyone who still listens to vinyl records have the RIAA to thank for something: The RIAA Equalization Curve
The RIAA Equalization Curve is used to describe the property of a specially tuned audio amplifier that boosts low frequencies and then slowly tapers to unity gain as it approaches the higher frequencies. In effect, an audio amplifier with a "permanent" graphic equalizer feature.
Without this curve, the sound coming from a record player would be tinny and totally lacking in bottom-end. Those little record player pre-amps they sell at Radio Shack are low-voltage amplifiers that implement this curve so you can connect your record player to your modern AV unit that lacks a Phono input but has a Aux input.
The EFF has taken on defense of another alleged filesharer. Here is a snippet:
Los Angeles, California - EFF today announced that it will defend Ross Plank of Playa Del Rey, California, against a wrongly filed complaint, among the 261 copyright infringement lawsuits the recording industry has filed against individuals.
The federal lawsuit filed against Plank in Los Angeles accuses him of making hundreds of Latin songs available using KaZaA filesharing software earlier this summer. Plank does not speak Spanish and does not listen to Latin music. More importantly, his computer did not even have KaZaA installed during the period when the investigation occurred.
More articles on Ross Plank and his 'wrongful accusal' at Wired, The Reg, The Inq, DSP Reports, and p2pnet.net.
The public and the government will actually tolerate a benevolent monopoly for quite some time if no one complains about it. Major league baseball is a perfect example
Not. Major league baseball is an example of an entity that is exempt from the antitrust laws because it has an exemption. A trilogy of Supreme Court cases, beginning with Oliver Wendell Holmes in the twenties have sealed the deal.