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The RIAA's Rocky Road Ahead
The RIAA's new plan to enlist ISPs in its war on file sharing, once it announced it was calling a halt to new consumer lawsuits, is running into rough sledding. Wired reports on the continuing legal murkiness of the RIAA's interpretation of copyright law. And one small ISP in Louisiana asks the recording organization, "You want me to police your intellectual property? What's your billing address?"
What is the legality of this? RIAA tells them that they represent Metallica and I have a rar file called metalica. This would mean that the provider opens my rar file and looks into it. They should not be allowed to do so. Privacy and such, you know.
In Belgium what happens is that a letter is send to the provider that user X with IP Y at time Z was downloading a file that they believe to contain copyrighted material. The provider then could do several things. Basicaly 1) forward the letter or 2) ignore it.
No information could go to the local RIAA. This is called privacy. So the only thing they could do was try to sue. However the courts said that they would not follow up unless people where making money out of it.
So copying songs and selling them: burn in hell.
Downloading them and sharing with friends or strangers: nothing happens.
The fact that I have 60 petabyte of songs downloaded does not mean they lost money. I stopped buying long before the internet made it possible to download. I shared music with friends on casette. Hey, that is a good casette, can you make me a copy? How did you get it?
Well, I got copies from friends and using my dual-cassette player copied the different numbers so I had my own music, minus the crap.
When I think since when this has been going on, I am getting old.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I can't believe sueing people like the RIAA does is a viable business model. The costs must outweigh the benefits by far. Even if the RIAA manages to win a case against a poor grandmother who has never heard of P2P and the like, she won't be able to pay the fine because the costs of defending herself have bankrupted her for good. I have a very hard time understanding the people who work for the RIAA and sue people for a living.
-- Cheers!
Hey! This screams for a car analogy ;)
1. Part of the value that the car manufacturers provide to customers is the ability to use the road. So car manufacturers should be paying for roadbuilding :)
2. Part of the value that light bulb manufacturers provide to customers is the ability to travel at night with your car, so the light bulb manufacturers should be paying for car building.
3. Part of the value that roadbuilding provides to the road users is the ability to get away from a crime scene very fast, so road builders should sponsor the local police.
Any more ideas? :)
You can forge IP packets so that the reciever of the packet is given a fake sender IP. Im not entirely sure how the packets of most P2P programs work, but it could be possible they will accept a packet with a spoofed IP under the correct circumstances. In this way you could possibly make it look like 76.74.24.143 was distributing music (riaa.com).
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
Here is a similar quote: "The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it."
Some other interesting ones on the same page: "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Let's look at these by themselves:
*limited experience
True, from what I hear, Obama's not very experienced. On the other hand, having seen what experience did in the hands of George W. Bush I'm not sure experience is a good way to judge someone's competence. And while I'm not an expert on that subject, I don't think someone like Martin Luther King, Jr. had a lot of political experience before his rise to fame. After all - what we look for in a leader is not always that they're experienced, it's that they inspire us.
*extreme liberal positions
Which ones are they? Granted, I'm European, so a lot of the ideas that we have over here are quite radical in the US. Like the right to abortion (least up here in the civilized countries in Northern Europe), socialized medicine (personally I'd skip socialized road works over medicine), free educations for everyone (up to and including university). They don't say what these dangerous and "extreme liberal positions are" so we're left to guess. Maybe it's his idea that you should be able to vote when you're 18?
*radical political alliances
And again - which ones are they? Joe Biden as VP? That's hardly any worse than Sarah Palin for VP. And if experience is a requisite for being president, then how the hell can you elect Sarah Palin as the VP candidate? She had less experience than Obama to begin with. And being a mayor of a city with 8,000 people is hardly indicative of ones ability to lead a nation. I'm not judging, just curious about why "these people" don't settle for one standard instead of two
But, in the end I think Obama was elected because he presented himself of much more of a change away from Bush' policies than McCain. The Daily Show (the horrorible embodiment of liberal media bias) had a nice segment where they contrasted McCain's campain comments with Bush' from 2000, and it certainly sounded like they had the same speech writer. Of course the nice clip where they contrast Karl Rove's ridicule of a potential VP candidate for Obama for only having been the mayor of a city with 200,000 people followed by the same Rove's grandstanding and overstating Palin's work as mayor for Wasilla, a city with less than 6,000 people (according to the 2000 survey).
Maybe the public in general figured "New guy or the guy who wasn't as good a candidate as Bush was in 2000? Fuck it, I'm not going for the guy that'll be even worse than Bush!"