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RIAA To Stop Prosecuting Individual File Sharers

debatem1 writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, the RIAA has decided to abandon its current tactic of suing individuals for sharing copyrighted music. Ongoing lawsuits will be pursued to completion, but no new ones will be filed. The RIAA is going to try working with the ISPs to limit file-sharing services and cut off repeated users. This very surprising development apparently comes as a result of public distaste for the campaign." An RIAA spokesman is quoted as saying that the litigation campaign has been "successful in raising the public's awareness that file-sharing is illegal."

5 of 619 comments (clear)

  1. Re:File sharing isn't illegal. by morgan_greywolf · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    A bread knife CAN be used to kill someone but that's not what it was designed for.

    That's a bad analogy. Knives were most definitely first created for killing -- well, hunting anyway. Early man needed to kill and slaughter beasts for food, so they sharpened stones. Eventually they refined the sharpened stones -- well, you get the idea.

  2. Appropriate timing by boyfaceddog · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Christmas is the best time to release this piece of news, considering we are now in a season where we are asked to believe that the child of the sky god was born in a stable to a mother who never had sex. The alternative belief seems to be that a fat saint (who isn't even a saint) slides down every chimney in the world in one night delivering present to boys and girls, traveling in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer.

    After believing those two things, believing the RIAA won't be a problem.

    --
    Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
  3. Re:File sharing isn't illegal. by dave420 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    What about if 99.9% of all butter knives are used to kill someone... does that slightly change things?

  4. Re:Film and TV producers also call for action by Thiez · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    > Oh, and my reaction is the reaction you could expect from a large part of the Europeans.

    Maybe, but the Dutch hate their language. I for one would not mind if everything on TV were English (exception: the news). English is such a beautiful language compared to Dutch, you can say the exact same thing three times without ever using the same word.

    Not that I would completely abandon Dutch, but I don't need my series in Dutch.

  5. Re:Film and TV producers also call for action by MBGMorden · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Dutch and English are part of the same family of languages which makes learning one if you know the other somewhat easier (akin to switching from Spanish to French). IIRC, German, Norweigan, and Swedish are all part of the same family too.

    It's a shame though. Aside from OCCASIONALLY German, it seems that no one living outside of most of those countries ever learns those languages. In general, at MOST schools I've seen at the high school level, if you take a foreign language you generally have to choose between French or Spanish, neither of which is as easy a transition from English, as say, German. At the college level the options open up a bit. At that level I had French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, Chinese, and Japanese to choose from.

    --
    "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain