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Lawsuit Against RIAA Tries To Stop Them All
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Tanya Anderson has filed an amended complaint against the RIAA. One of the more interesting provisions in it is in the 18th claim, which seeks to stop the RIAA from 'continuing to engage in criminal investigation of private American citizens', no doubt referring to the unlicensed MediaSentry investigations. If granted, that could shut down the RIAA lawsuits entirely. Naturally, the RIAA doesn't like this at all. First, they got the judge to agree that the original complaint was too light on the details, so it was amended. Now the RIAA complains that it's too long, because it's 108 pages filled with the RIAA's dirty laundry. You may remember this as the countersuit to the lawsuit where RIAA lawyers tried to grill a 10-year-old girl, only later to drop their case for lack of evidence and have the mother sue them for malicious prosecution."
What they should do is reinvest the 'funds' and get some acceptable talent going so music would be worth buying again. The crap they try to pawn off as music nowadays...
Apparently she has to file a 3rd revision now.
There is.
It's called Vexatious Litigation
Thing is, some of the cases the RIAA has filed do have legal basis (these are the ones you don't hear about in the media and are settled out of court quickly), and while some of the most egregious examples might approach might approach vexatious litigation, I doubt you'll find a judge to agree that all of them do.
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God damn it somebody please mod that as TROLL. The link goes to the NIMP thing. For that matter why can't anything pointing to a known trojan be filtered out??
THIS comment is offtopic. The above comment is dangerous to your computer. I have to hand it to the asshat who posted it, he managed to make the status bar report that the link was to yahoo, and somehow overcame the slashcode that reports a link's domain at the end of the link.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The other story was about ways to DoS the Great Firewall of China from outside. You can, in theory, overload the content filter parts. If they're too busy to forge RST packets (or they don't forge them in time), that part of the Great Firewall won't work. You can also create false positives. So you can send packets containing banned content into China to create false positives (and tell that it's working by watching for forged RSTs). And you can reflect it by using OS bugs that sometimes reply with parts of the original packet (e.g. pings), which could allow you to create millions of false positives for them to investigate. Unlike most things, those allow outsiders to interfere, who have no worry about being arrested by the Chinese government. Of course, they would adapt things to filter them out, but hopefully that would accidentally create more openings in it by filtering out too much, creating new opportunities.
Those might even work, so I hope someone follows up on them :) Note that I wrote them all as I Believe in Irrational Property instead of I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property. Here they are:
RIAA Yacht Copied in Daring Act of Piracy
In a what the Coast Guard is calling a 'daring act of nautical infringement,' pirates have copied RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol's personal yacht. After attacking with high speed inner tubes, they quickly made off with the data necessary to exactly duplicate the ship and vanished, but not before leaving behind an NFO with a pirate flag and a threat to 'rip' former RIAA chief Hillary Rosen's ship next. The RIAA is now demanding that the US Government issue Letters of Marquee and Reprisal so that they can prosecute these pirates under a little-known provision of copyright law governing ship designs as well as Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution.
Microsoft Seeks Partnership With IKEA
After being spurned by Yahoo, Microsoft is seeking to acquire the furniture maker IKEA. Microsoft's Ballmer was quoted as saying, 'They have many assets I can use for leverage in pursuit of future acquisitions.' The deal appeared to get off to a bit of a rough start when Ballmer's tour of one of their factories was cut short after what authorities are describing as a 'bizarre furniture-related mishap,' in which three VPs who opposed to the deal were hospitalized. Authorities are not releasing many details, but one officer made the cryptic comment that, 'I didn't think even Bob Goatse could do that with a chair.' Even so, inside reports indicate that the remaining company officers are now 'very eager' to finalize the deal.
SCO Lawsuit Was Really "Performance Art"
SCO's D
Not the OP, however: I understand the incredulity, but here's one study I was given in a telecommunications economics class. (The link from my school's website appears to be gone, but based on filename this is the same PDF I saw):
http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf
A quick excerpt from the abstract:
The basic conclusion, if I remember correctly, was: The top 1% of artists in terms of popularity lose sales due to pirated songs, and the rest actually see their sales increase with piracy. Obviously you can fact-check this yourself to see if my recollection is correct.