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RIAA Failed To Disclose Expert's Lobbying History To "Six-Strikes" Partners
concealment writes "A month before the controversial 'six strikes' anti-piracy plan goes live in the U.S., the responsible Center of Copyright Information (CCI) is dealing with a small crisis. As it turns out the RIAA failed to mention to its partners that the 'impartial and independent' technology expert they retained previously lobbied for the music industry group. In a response to the controversy, CCI is now considering whether it should hire another expert to evaluate the anti-piracy monitoring technology."
So... what gives them the right to punish the alleged infringers?
The Terms of Service of course. The problem you'll face here is that they're completely within their rights to run a regime like this provided it's in the contract. Just like they can terminate your account for all sorts of shit.
And consider yourself fortunate. In my country, it's three strikes, and it's enshrined in law thanks to your fucking government.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Sorry, half of you are mssing what the original Anonymous Coward said: "Trade only in games / movies / music / books / etc that you can legally share with others." (emphasis mine). So the works he advocates sharing are, like open-source software, explicitly allowed by their creators for such purposes. Among other things, this includes the growing body of music released under the Creative Commons licenses.
Nadaka went apeshit because he was responding to a comment that seemed to suggest that even sharing music whose creator wants it to be shared is somehow wrong, which is a primary FUD tactic used by the MAFIAA to shut down ALL file sharing, not just illegal file sharing. That's basically the whole discussion encapsulated into three posts.