"Jumping the Shark" refers to a late-season episode of Happy Days (I believe) in which the Fonz ends up on water skis and jumps over a shark. The phrase itself typically indicates that X (where X is the entity jumping said shark) has passed it's point of usefulness and is now trying too hard to justify its own existence.
See, the thing is, the RIAA doesn't *have* have to catch the actual pirates. All they need to do is spread enough FUD that people will think twice before installing that file sharing software. If you're Joe Average, you probably don't know how to mask your IP on a public network; but you probably do know that the RIAA has been suing people for downloading music. This campaign isn't about prosecuting music pirates - it's about scaring people away from this new (and thus, not yet under their control) technology.
That actually happened at a medium sized web host I did tech support for! A network admin had been at the NOC all night installing patches on our servers and on his way out tripped over the cords for the main routing system. As a result, every one of our websites (serving some 20,000 customers worldwide) were offline for about two hours before someone discovered what he'd done.
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"Jumping the Shark" refers to a late-season episode of Happy Days (I believe) in which the Fonz ends up on water skis and jumps over a shark. The phrase itself typically indicates that X (where X is the entity jumping said shark) has passed it's point of usefulness and is now trying too hard to justify its own existence.
See, the thing is, the RIAA doesn't *have* have to catch the actual pirates. All they need to do is spread enough FUD that people will think twice before installing that file sharing software. If you're Joe Average, you probably don't know how to mask your IP on a public network; but you probably do know that the RIAA has been suing people for downloading music. This campaign isn't about prosecuting music pirates - it's about scaring people away from this new (and thus, not yet under their control) technology.
That actually happened at a medium sized web host I did tech support for! A network admin had been at the NOC all night installing patches on our servers and on his way out tripped over the cords for the main routing system. As a result, every one of our websites (serving some 20,000 customers worldwide) were offline for about two hours before someone discovered what he'd done.