I suspect that this sort of thing (cooperation between two sides of a lawsuit) is highly illegal.
This sort of thing is called a "friendly lawsuit" or a "collusive lawsuit". It's not always illegal. For example, suppose my brother and I are named as heirs in a will, and the terms of the will are ambiguous, and we need a court to issue a definitive ruling before either of us can collect. In such a case, I can sue my brother, and even if it's obvious that there's no animosity between us, the court will let the suit go forward.
However, usually, the US Federal courts don't like collusive lawsuits. One reason for the dislike is that the US Constitution only gives the courts the power to judge "cases and controversies", so if there's no real controversy between the two parties, it's not the court's business. Another reason is that US courts use an adversary system, and so they depend on each side being motivated to bring up all the evidence and argument that would prove its point.
One of the classic friendly-lawsuit cases is Chicago & Grand Trunk Railway Company vs. Wellman. Michigan passed a law regulating fares on railroads; the railroad had fares higher than the regulated rate; Wellman tried to buy a ticket at the regulated rate, was turned down, and sued. At trial, the railroad claimed that if it couldn't charge more than the regulated maximum, it would default on its loans, and Wellman said nothing to dispute this argument (there's the collusion). Then the railroad asked the court to declare that the fare-setting statute was unconstitutional. The trial court, the appeals court, and the US Supreme Court all refused to play along. --
Yee bought 667 ad impressions on Google for US$10 and got six click-throughs. In other words, his CPM (advertising cost per thousand audience members) was about $15 and his click-through rate was about 0.9%.
So if I worked for Google's advertising department, I'd be damn proud of Yee's figures. --
A better solution: eliminate TLDs entirely
on
IETF vs. ICANN
·
· Score: 5
Under the current (ICANN) set of TLDs, anyone who sets up a domain name must classify it as a ".com", ".net", ".org",... or as one of the country-specific TLDs. Most people recognize that this bureaucratic classification scheme doesn't correspond with our mental classification scheme; for example, as someone else in this thread points out, should a hospital be a ".com" or an ".org"?
Unfortunately, the commonly-proposed solution -- adding more gTLDs -- is not going to help. If health-care organizations get their ".med", then sooner or later, someone is bound to want separate gTLDs for doctors, dentists, and homeopaths. If a ".mp3" gTLD becomes widely used and another music format supplants MP3, then people distributing music in the new format will still set up ".mp3" sites for that purpose. And so on and so on, until users are confused by too many gTLDs, and companies afraid of cybersquatting register their names with 20 gTLDs, not just two or three.
When people learn vocabulary, they learn the words for genuses first, and learn other levels of classification later. That's why a child, seeing a wolf, says "that's a dog", and not "that's a member of the species Canis lupus in the order Carnivora." That's why so many people set up personal domains under the ".com" TLD, even if they have no intention of making these domains commercial ventures -- they recognize ".com" as the default TLD and don't care about its alleged purpose.
Back in the eighteenth century, a number of philosophers tried to construct languages to mirror (their views of) the natural order of things -- their dream was a language where a false statement would be ungrammatical and where related concepts would have similar-sounding words. The people who want to "improve" DNS by adding more gTLDs are falling into the same trap.
We need fewer gTLDs, not more. --
why the GPL is, strangely enough, not a contract
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 2
I don't see what makes you say that the GPL is "not a contract". It's not just a "waiver of rights" on
the part of the author, it's a list of rights and obligations for both the author and the user of the
GPL'ed software.
At least two things make the GPL not a contract (at least, not according to the US legal system's definition of "contract"):
A contract requires an explicit offer and acceptance. For example, if you go to a restaurant and see "Hamburger, $10.00", and you tell the waiter, "I'll have a hamburger", you and the restaurant have entered into a contract; they offered a hamburger for ten bucks, and you accepted the offer. You don't have to accept the terms of the GPL -- or even read them -- in order to receive a GPLed program. But if you violate the terms of the GPL and then try to claim, "I didn't know this was GPLed software, I never read the LICENSE file", the judge can say, "Even if you didn't know it was GPLed, you should have known it was copyrighted, and you should have known that if you didn't have some kind of permission from the copyright-holder, you weren't allowed to distribute copies or derivative works at all. Guilty!"
A contract requires an exchange. If I say, "I promise to give you $20 next week, on the condition that you spend $10 of it on a hamburger", and you say "OK", there is no contract between us, because you have not actually given me anything in exchange. The conditional waiver of rights in the GPL is like this. When the FSF says "if you write a work based on GCC, you must distribute it with a GPL-compatible license", it feels like you are giving something to the FSF by distributing your GCC derivative under the GPL instead of locking up the source and selling binaries for thousands of dollars a copy. However, from a legal point of view, it's the other way around: since the copyright holder has the right to control derivative works, the FSF is doing you a favor by letting you distribute your GCC derivative at all. Since you're not giving anything that the FSF doesn't have the legal right to take, there's no exchange and no contract.
Apple and Microsoft don't seem to be investing many developer resources in their desktops, either. Yes, they're adding chrome, but it seems like desktop usability and learnability haven't improved much in the past five years.
And why should it? The PC has become so firmly entrenched in corporate America that a large number of people have to learn the interface as it stands, and their feelings about the desktop do not drive OS sales. There are machines being marketed to people who find PCs too hard to learn, but as far as I can tell, those machines have a simplified version of the standard GUI, not a radically new interface.
So the stalwarts who are still working on KDE, GNOME, and GUI apps for Linux have one consolation: an almost stationary target. --
However, if you did not KNOW you were compromised, it might be nice to have the "white"
virus remove the holes before more malice comes to your box.
Furthermore, if you are worried about other people's badly-administered systems being used as launching points for attacks against your machine, it might be nice to have the "white" virus compensating in part for the other systems' lazy administration. --
.. I'm of the opinion that there should be a few less authorizations and a few more
limitations. For instance, "To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high
seas, and offenses against the law of nations;"... is kind of broad, and means that the
Federal Government gets to police the whole ocean, as well as "define and punish... offenses
against the law of nations".. i.e., be hte police of the world.
One application of this clause that was relevant in George Washington's day: According to a very old principle of international law (or, as they said back then, "the Law of Nations"), a pirate (the old-fashioned kind, that attacks ships on the high seas) is considered a hostis humanis genero (Latin for "an enemy of everyone," or some such). Therefore, if you're a pirate on the high seas, the first navy that catches you has the right to string you up. Under this clause, Congress has the right to pass laws defining and punishing piracy on the high seas.
Interestingly, this limitation: "No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any
state." would seem to put the damper on internet sales taxes, just as it has on catalog
mail-order sales; if you're not in the state it's being shipped from, then the good is being
exported and the state can levy no tax on it.
When you ship a book from one state to another within the USA, you're not exporting it. --
Every prominent open-source advocate has said that sometimes it makes sense to license software under something other than the GPL. Heck, even RMS admits this, which is why some GNU stuff is released under the LGPL.
So if Love has had the same brilliant insight, why is this news? --
What if someone developed a program that could shut off the
navigation system in commercial airplanes? What if someone developed a
program that could shut off smoke detectors in public buildings? Surely,
he said, the government could ban the publication of programs which were a
threat to people's lives.
The defense attorney needs to remind the appeals-court judges that software is not some sort of genie that can be instructed to do anything. If a public building does not have any control to its smoke detectors that is accessible over the Internet, then no piece of software will be able to shut them off over the Internet. If a manufacturer makes a system for controlling a building's smoke detectors over the internet, that manufacturer should be responsible for making it secure. --
How many copies of Microsoft Word are now circulating in Argentine government offices? How many of those copies were made with Microsoft's permission? If Microsoft found out these numbers and then demanded that the Argentine government pay for all its copies, how much would the government be forced to pay? (Remember that the standard Microsoft license says that all disputes must be resolved in a US court -- specifically, a Washington State court -- and if the Argentine government has any assets -- e.g., bank accounts -- in the US, then it is vulnerable to a US court judgement.)
And most importantly: How can you convince some mid-level bureaucrat to pay for every copy of Microsoft Word that his or her department uses, when it's so much easier to run off another copy (or share the CD, or find some way to defeat Microsoft's copy protection) than to pay for the extra copy? --
The GPL is a "contract" in the informal sense, where "contract" is often used as a fancy or solemn way to say "promise". However, the law has a more stringent definition of "contract". (Or, if you're more cynical, the law provides all sorts of ways for you to make an agreement that looks like a contract but can't actually be enforced in court.)
If someone violates the GPL, they can still be sued -- but they would be sued for copyright infringement, not contract violation. --
Not necessarily. A contract is an agreement where two parties make promises to provide benefits to one another: "If you give me $5, I will give you a hamburger."
By contrast, the GPL is a unilateral grant of permission. I don't have to give the FSF anything in exchange for my freedom to redistribute GNU Emacs -- I just have it.
If I modify Emacs and redistribute the modified version, the GPL places restrictions on how I can redistribute it. But even here, the restrictions are not in the form of a contract. The FSF has given me unilateral permission to publish any Emacs-derivative with a GPL-compatible license. It's like saying "I will give you this hamburger on the condition that you don't put cheese on it."
I don't have to give anything specifically to the FSF in exchange for the right to publish my Emacs derivative. For example, I could give copies to my 10 closest friends (none of whom work for the FSF), and they could all use the program for a month, decide they didn't care for it, and delete it. That would count as "publication" under copyright law, but it's hard to see how, in this circumstance, I am benefiting the FSF by adhering to the GPL. (Well, the FSF gets a benefit in the warm fuzzy ideological sense by having more people use GPLed software, even when those people have no connection to the FSF. But it's not like I'm giving them money.)
And if a 12-year-old girl produces a modified version of Emacs, and publishes it under terms that violate the GPL, the FSF could sue to prevent her from distributing it -- not because she violated a contract with the FSF (since she can't legally be bound by a contract), but because she is distributing the FSF's copyrighted material without permission.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, and there are enough odd nooks and crannies in contract law that I could imagine someone arguing the other way.) --
While waiting for the official complaint (96 pages, or a 4-MB PDF), I found the following summary on one of the aD bulletin boards. I haven't waded through the whole complaint yet, so I can't confirm the accuracy of the summary, but based on the first few pages, it looks about right.
You can read the complaint (the description of the lawsuit) at
Guan Yang's site. Since it's
a 4 MB PDF, mostly full of scans of things like the ArsDigita by-laws,
allow me to summarize. Note that I'm not a lawyer and might get things
wrong.
philg = Philip Greenspun
jsc = Jin Choi
eveander = Eve Andersson
teadams = Tracy Adams
allen = Allen Shaheen
ernb = Ernest Blackwelder
philg, jsc, and the VCs all signed a stockholders agreement in March,
2000, which stated that the ArsDigita by-laws cannot be changed without the consent of the VCs.
The by-laws at the time of the agreement stated that only the Board
of Directors (not the stockholders) can elect/remove company officers.
The stockholders agreement also says that everyone signing the agreement
must vote to elect the CEO and two other senior company officers to the
Board, and that the other two directors must be acceptable to the
VCs. There are five directors in total.
On April 5, 2001, philg and jsc (who in combination own a majority of
ArsDigita stock) signed an "action of stockholders by written consent", known in the complaint as the Contested Consent.
The Contested Consent amends the by-laws of ArsDigita, such that the
stockholders directly elect the company officers. It demotes allen
to President, appoints philg CEO, and appoints eveander and teadams as
Executive VPs. It removes allen and ernb from the Board and elects teadams and eveander to the Board.
So basically, in exchange for capital, the VCs made philg and jsc give
up control of the company. Now philg and jsc and trying to take back control, so the VCs are suing. Why are they suing philg, teadams,
and eveander, but not jsc? I don't know.
Students at MIT arn't required to have a computer?
Nope. There are clusters of workstations all over campus, and students get accounts, email, and disk space on MIT's servers. I brought my computer with me to MIT when I was a freshman, and I can't even remember turning it on while I was a student.
In addition MIT lacks a strong fundamental general education curriculum. CS students start doing CS from day
one. There is no strong arts or humanities program. In addition, the student population is too uniform to be of
interest. Students do not learn to effectively communicate with other kinds of people or across cultural boundaries
because everyone there is the same, and those that aren't don't speak English anyways.
At the time I attended MIT (about ten years ago), the HASS (humanities, arts, and social sciences) departments at MIT were in a weird political situation. The people in charge of undergraduate education were concerned that (in one dean's words) "too many MIT graduates work for too many Harvard and Princeton graduates", and they saw the HASS requirement as a tool for giving the geeks enough Culture that they could move into management. The heads of the science and engineering schools were annoyed by this, because tightening up the HASS requirement would give students less time for their science and engineering study, and because changing the admissions requirements to admit more "well-rounded" students meant that the average incoming freshman would not do as well as before in basic physics and calculus. Meanwhile, the HASS faculty were kind of peeved to be seen as mere service providers, rather than as professors of academic disciplines that were just as legitimate as math, physics, and computer science.
However, if you go to MIT and you want to have a good knowledge of the humanities, you can get it. I majored in political science and minored in women's studies, and I thought the classes I took in those programs were excellent (and, in case you're wondering, the instructors in the women's studies program were not pushing a militant feminist "party line"). A friend of mine graduated with a double-major in physics and computer science. Heck, one of my freshman-year suitemates graduated with a degree in creative writing. --
The number of people who use Linux is not tied to the success -- or failure -- of any single company or organization. Anybody who can afford a computer can become a Linux user, consultant, or provider of value-added services.
When deciding how to "compete against Linux", how does Microsoft's marketing strategy take this into account? --
Actually, one thing that annoys me about perl is the fact that it's almost impossible for an editor to syntactically highlight it perfectly. Although this is hardly ever a problem unless you're intentionally being obfuscated....
In my Copious Free Time, I'm writing a parser for MIF ([Adobe Frame]Maker Interchange Format) in Perl. An earlier version of the module included these lines:
#}}}}
#^^^^ this makes cperl-mode happy
...and I don't think I was intentionally being obfuscated.
These comments followed the string describing the grammar, which contained Perl code for the semantic actions, and which was fed to a method in a parser-generator module. (I tried including a few lines of the code in my post, but Slash gave me the error message: "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted. Reason: Junk character post." Harrumph.) --
Set up two Slashdot servers -- one like the current system, free for all and subsidized by ads, an ad-free server that only paid subscribers (say, $10/year) can access, both connecting to the same database on the back end. The paid-by-subscribers server could also be permitted more database connections per user than the paid-by-ads server, so that it would be more responsive, and thus people would have an incentive to pay for a subscription instead of simply running Junkbuster to block the ads. --
Introns actually provide good supporting evidence for evolution. Suppose you have three species, A, B, and C, with the following traits:
A, B, and C have a sequence of introns that are similar to each other, but A's sequence is more like B's than like C's.
A and B live on the same island, far away from C.
The habitat for A is more like C's than like B's.
A's anatomy is more like C's than like B's.
An evolutionary biologist can explain this constellation of facts very simply: A and B have a common ancestor-species that became geographically separated from C's ancestor-species, and "convergent evolution" led A and C to develop similar forms to solve similar problems in their respective habitats.
How would a "scientific creationist" explain why the arrangement of introns corresponds more closely with the species' geography than with their morphology? (Before you say that A and B have an ancestor-"kind" that walked out of Noah's Ark after the Flood, read the Problems With a Global Flood FAQ.) --
We have long known that we would share much in common with other creatures. I don't think any scientific creationist has ever denied this. Why should God use more complex tools to create life when so much of it is reusable? Perhaps as a software developer, I see the inherent need for reuse of code whenever possible that others might not. All this shows is that evolution would have had to do less work to get to the point that complex life has gotten to. It is in no way the smoking gun that proves the theory.
One way to prove the theory of evolution (or at least, demonstrate that it has a much higher probability of truth than any competing scientific theory out there) is to show examples of bad designs that can only be explained by evolutionary constraints:
In parthenogenetic lizards of the genus Cnenidophorus,
only females exist. Fertility in these lizards is increased when
another lizard engages in pseudomale behavior and attempts to
copulate with the first lizard. These lizards evolved from a sexual species so this behaviour makes some sense. The hormones
for reproduction were likely originally stimulated by sexual
behaviour. Now, although they are parthenogenetic, simulated
sexual behaviour increases fertility. Fake sex in a parthenogenetic species doesn't sound like good design to me.
In African locust, the nerve cells that connect to
the wings originate in the abdomen, even though the wings are
in the thorax. This strange "wiring" is the result of the
abdomen nerves being co-opted for use in flight. A good
designer would not have flight nerves travel down the ventral
nerve cord past their target, then backtrack through the
organism to where they are needed. Using more materials than
necessary is not good design.
In human males, the urethra passes right through the
prostate gland, a gland very prone to infection and subsequent
enlargement. This blocks the urethra and is a very common medical problem in males. Putting a collapsible tube through an
organ that is very likely to expand and block flow in this
tube is not good design. Any moron with half a brain (or less)
could design male "plumbing" better.
Perhaps one of the most famous examples of how evolution
does not produced designed, but "jury-rigged" traits is the
panda's thumb. If you count the digits on a panda's paw you will
count six. Five curl around and the "thumb" is an opposable digit.
The five fingers are made of the same bones our (humans and
most other vertebrates) fingers are made of. The thumb is constructed by
enlarging a few bones that form the wrist in other
species. The muscles that operate it are "rerouted" muscles
present in the hand of vertabrates (see S.J. Gould book "The Panda's Thumb" for an engaging discussion of this case). Again,
this is not good design.
Of course, you could argue that an Intelligent Designer created all these species in an apparently jury-rigged fashion for a different purpose, but what is that purpose?
--
I don't know anyone... who denies
microevolution--the alteration of an organism within its genetic bounds..... Macroevolution requires that different descendants of one organism become different species (i.e., can't breed). No documented cases of speciation have yet been found.
How would you protect such a network from a cuckoo's-egg attack? If any machine on the network can declare itself to be a server, then the RIAA can set up servers that poison the network with bogus data. If the client has a list of servers that can be trusted, then once the RIAA's lawyers get their hands on the same list, they know who to sue.
(If the people running the RIAA and MPAA had been clueful, they would have been pursuing this strategy against anonymous file sharing from the very beginning. If 99 out of 100 requests for insert-top-forty-song-here on Napster return William Shatner singing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", then most people would rather pay for the CD than sift through all the false results. But I digress.) --
Slashdot Mirror
However, usually, the US Federal courts don't like collusive lawsuits. One reason for the dislike is that the US Constitution only gives the courts the power to judge "cases and controversies", so if there's no real controversy between the two parties, it's not the court's business. Another reason is that US courts use an adversary system, and so they depend on each side being motivated to bring up all the evidence and argument that would prove its point.
One of the classic friendly-lawsuit cases is Chicago & Grand Trunk Railway Company vs. Wellman. Michigan passed a law regulating fares on railroads; the railroad had fares higher than the regulated rate; Wellman tried to buy a ticket at the regulated rate, was turned down, and sued. At trial, the railroad claimed that if it couldn't charge more than the regulated maximum, it would default on its loans, and Wellman said nothing to dispute this argument (there's the collusion). Then the railroad asked the court to declare that the fare-setting statute was unconstitutional. The trial court, the appeals court, and the US Supreme Court all refused to play along.
--
According to this Nielsen//NetRatings press release (PDF), the top 100 Web advertisers in "traditional" industries have a CPM of $20.10 and a click-through rate of 0.22%.
So if I worked for Google's advertising department, I'd be damn proud of Yee's figures.
--
Unfortunately, the commonly-proposed solution -- adding more gTLDs -- is not going to help. If health-care organizations get their ".med", then sooner or later, someone is bound to want separate gTLDs for doctors, dentists, and homeopaths. If a ".mp3" gTLD becomes widely used and another music format supplants MP3, then people distributing music in the new format will still set up ".mp3" sites for that purpose. And so on and so on, until users are confused by too many gTLDs, and companies afraid of cybersquatting register their names with 20 gTLDs, not just two or three.
When people learn vocabulary, they learn the words for genuses first, and learn other levels of classification later. That's why a child, seeing a wolf, says "that's a dog", and not "that's a member of the species Canis lupus in the order Carnivora." That's why so many people set up personal domains under the ".com" TLD, even if they have no intention of making these domains commercial ventures -- they recognize ".com" as the default TLD and don't care about its alleged purpose.
Back in the eighteenth century, a number of philosophers tried to construct languages to mirror (their views of) the natural order of things -- their dream was a language where a false statement would be ungrammatical and where related concepts would have similar-sounding words. The people who want to "improve" DNS by adding more gTLDs are falling into the same trap.
We need fewer gTLDs, not more.
--
--
And why should it? The PC has become so firmly entrenched in corporate America that a large number of people have to learn the interface as it stands, and their feelings about the desktop do not drive OS sales. There are machines being marketed to people who find PCs too hard to learn, but as far as I can tell, those machines have a simplified version of the standard GUI, not a radically new interface.
So the stalwarts who are still working on KDE, GNOME, and GUI apps for Linux have one consolation: an almost stationary target.
--
--
If you want to compare, here's the Microsoft Visual Studio license for your reading pleasure.
--
--
--
So if Love has had the same brilliant insight, why is this news?
--
--
And most importantly: How can you convince some mid-level bureaucrat to pay for every copy of Microsoft Word that his or her department uses, when it's so much easier to run off another copy (or share the CD, or find some way to defeat Microsoft's copy protection) than to pay for the extra copy?
--
If someone violates the GPL, they can still be sued -- but they would be sued for copyright infringement, not contract violation.
--
By contrast, the GPL is a unilateral grant of permission. I don't have to give the FSF anything in exchange for my freedom to redistribute GNU Emacs -- I just have it.
If I modify Emacs and redistribute the modified version, the GPL places restrictions on how I can redistribute it. But even here, the restrictions are not in the form of a contract. The FSF has given me unilateral permission to publish any Emacs-derivative with a GPL-compatible license. It's like saying "I will give you this hamburger on the condition that you don't put cheese on it."
I don't have to give anything specifically to the FSF in exchange for the right to publish my Emacs derivative. For example, I could give copies to my 10 closest friends (none of whom work for the FSF), and they could all use the program for a month, decide they didn't care for it, and delete it. That would count as "publication" under copyright law, but it's hard to see how, in this circumstance, I am benefiting the FSF by adhering to the GPL. (Well, the FSF gets a benefit in the warm fuzzy ideological sense by having more people use GPLed software, even when those people have no connection to the FSF. But it's not like I'm giving them money.)
And if a 12-year-old girl produces a modified version of Emacs, and publishes it under terms that violate the GPL, the FSF could sue to prevent her from distributing it -- not because she violated a contract with the FSF (since she can't legally be bound by a contract), but because she is distributing the FSF's copyrighted material without permission.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, and there are enough odd nooks and crannies in contract law that I could imagine someone arguing the other way.)
--
--
--
However, if you go to MIT and you want to have a good knowledge of the humanities, you can get it. I majored in political science and minored in women's studies, and I thought the classes I took in those programs were excellent (and, in case you're wondering, the instructors in the women's studies program were not pushing a militant feminist "party line"). A friend of mine graduated with a double-major in physics and computer science. Heck, one of my freshman-year suitemates graduated with a degree in creative writing.
--
--
When deciding how to "compete against Linux", how does Microsoft's marketing strategy take this into account?
--
These comments followed the string describing the grammar, which contained Perl code for the semantic actions, and which was fed to a method in a parser-generator module. (I tried including a few lines of the code in my post, but Slash gave me the error message: "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted. Reason: Junk character post." Harrumph.)
--
Set up two Slashdot servers -- one like the current system, free for all and subsidized by ads, an ad-free server that only paid subscribers (say, $10/year) can access, both connecting to the same database on the back end. The paid-by-subscribers server could also be permitted more database connections per user than the paid-by-ads server, so that it would be more responsive, and thus people would have an incentive to pay for a subscription instead of simply running Junkbuster to block the ads.
--
- A, B, and C have a sequence of introns that are similar to each other, but A's sequence is more like B's than like C's.
- A and B live on the same island, far away from C.
- The habitat for A is more like C's than like B's.
- A's anatomy is more like C's than like B's.
An evolutionary biologist can explain this constellation of facts very simply: A and B have a common ancestor-species that became geographically separated from C's ancestor-species, and "convergent evolution" led A and C to develop similar forms to solve similar problems in their respective habitats.How would a "scientific creationist" explain why the arrangement of introns corresponds more closely with the species' geography than with their morphology? (Before you say that A and B have an ancestor-"kind" that walked out of Noah's Ark after the Flood, read the Problems With a Global Flood FAQ.)
--
Of course, you could argue that an Intelligent Designer created all these species in an apparently jury-rigged fashion for a different purpose, but what is that purpose?
--
--
(If the people running the RIAA and MPAA had been clueful, they would have been pursuing this strategy against anonymous file sharing from the very beginning. If 99 out of 100 requests for insert-top-forty-song-here on Napster return William Shatner singing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", then most people would rather pay for the CD than sift through all the false results. But I digress.)
--