Like a coked-out rock star being led around by the nose by his manager, the RIAA members are being led around the nose by greedy asswipe lawyers.
Think of it, the lawyers are probably pressing the hardest for these measures, because without a hard-edge stance, there isn't much for them to do. They are trying to justify their own existence.
Does that mean that RIAA members are innocents? Hell no!
What would be cool is if there was a "competing" record company(s) that weren't members of the RIAA that sold CD's at a decent price ($8-$10), didn't do jackass stunts like copy-protection, and actually did something to promote smaller bands instead of the megastars.
I am so surprised that the U.S. government hasn't disbanded the RIAA on the grounds that it's a monopolistic cartel. Get with it, dammit!
I'll apologize ahead of time if I re-iterate what others might have already said. I haven't had time to read all the posts...this is a big topic. With the genie out of the bottle, who can possibly put the cork back in? Pirated digital information is too easily passed around, quickly and with little effort. If Napster is stopped, there is still Gnutella. And FTP. And IRC. If the.MP3 extension becomes blacklisted somehow, it'll just be renamed. I've been to tons of sites where files are renamed with different extensions to hide from prying administrators and persecutors. I think that Metallica and Dr. Dre would be best served in finding council with advisors that understand technology. They would soon drop this case, because the only people that are going to be hurt by attacking their own fanbases are they and they alone. Do you think that any significant prosecutions will come from this list of 3xx,xxx Napster users? Maybe a few token ones. Economically, it's impossible to go after that many people. It's a scare tactic, pure and simple. What it will do is polarize so many people against them that they will become worse than washed up, they will be vilified by a large segment of the population that previously adored them. No government in the history of this planet has been able to completely crush an underground movement. And that's exactly what we are talking about here. There are millions of MP3 transactions happening every day on the internet--anyone who thinks that from a half-baked threat such as this, that all these transactions will get exterminated, to them I say stop smoking the reefer because you are completely deluded. What the government should consider doing is attacking the music companies for price fixing. CD's cost significantly less than cassette tapes to produce, yet cost a lot more to purchase. Huh? We were promised that as production of CD's ramped up, they would pass the costs on to the consumer. Obviously this never happened, the prices have even gone up slightly over the past year. Maybe if the record companies were regulated, CD's would only cost $5-$6 each and the average person would be less motivated to try the illegal alternatives. As far as music distribution goes, I'm silently laughing at the lack of significant progress in this field. Could it be that the music companies realized that it would only be a matter of weeks before someone cracked the encryption methods they outlined? Of course, I view this all as short-term thinking. What I envision is most of people using a hosting service for storage (and collection) of music files, video files, movies, whatever. The future of computers is portability, and I think that most people will just store their files on an off-site server. The files stored on these servers would be analyzed by software agents for copyright information. To the user, they would see advertisements on their computer screens, goggles, whatever, and that advertising would pay the copyright owners for usage when those files are accessed. There will still be a dark underworld though. These are people that will have utilities to store files on their own storage devices, bypassing detection and disabling copy protection. I have no doubt that this will still exist. By acting soon, however, I believe that the majority of people will choose to be honest. If they wait too long, searching for MP3's will be known by everybody, and not just the upper crust of computer users. Then the battle will be truly lost for the music companies-no one will ever pay them another dime. Gee, I hope my rant made sense. I don't normally do this.
One of the things that I loved about the IIgs was that it could have different OS compatibility layers under System 6. Using software patches, it was compatible with DOS 3.3, ProDos, Mac HFS, and MS-DOS volumes. It seemed for a while that the IIgs was Apple's technology testbed. They used ADB before the Mac, they had a colour OS before the Mac, better sound than the Mac, etc. It had dialog boxes that I wish the Mac had to this day (ie. Copy Dialog) that were way more advanced. Truly a machine that was advanced, but destined to historical obscurity.
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Like a coked-out rock star being led around by the nose by his manager, the RIAA members are being led around the nose by greedy asswipe lawyers.
Think of it, the lawyers are probably pressing the hardest for these measures, because without a hard-edge stance, there isn't much for them to do. They are trying to justify their own existence.
Does that mean that RIAA members are innocents? Hell no!
What would be cool is if there was a "competing" record company(s) that weren't members of the RIAA that sold CD's at a decent price ($8-$10), didn't do jackass stunts like copy-protection, and actually did something to promote smaller bands instead of the megastars.
I am so surprised that the U.S. government hasn't disbanded the RIAA on the grounds that it's a monopolistic cartel. Get with it, dammit!
I'll apologize ahead of time if I re-iterate what others might have already said. I haven't had time to read all the posts...this is a big topic. With the genie out of the bottle, who can possibly put the cork back in? Pirated digital information is too easily passed around, quickly and with little effort. If Napster is stopped, there is still Gnutella. And FTP. And IRC. If the .MP3 extension becomes blacklisted somehow, it'll just be renamed. I've been to tons of sites where files are renamed with different extensions to hide from prying administrators and persecutors. I think that Metallica and Dr. Dre would be best served in finding council with advisors that understand technology. They would soon drop this case, because the only people that are going to be hurt by attacking their own fanbases are they and they alone. Do you think that any significant prosecutions will come from this list of 3xx,xxx Napster users? Maybe a few token ones. Economically, it's impossible to go after that many people. It's a scare tactic, pure and simple. What it will do is polarize so many people against them that they will become worse than washed up, they will be vilified by a large segment of the population that previously adored them. No government in the history of this planet has been able to completely crush an underground movement. And that's exactly what we are talking about here. There are millions of MP3 transactions happening every day on the internet--anyone who thinks that from a half-baked threat such as this, that all these transactions will get exterminated, to them I say stop smoking the reefer because you are completely deluded. What the government should consider doing is attacking the music companies for price fixing. CD's cost significantly less than cassette tapes to produce, yet cost a lot more to purchase. Huh? We were promised that as production of CD's ramped up, they would pass the costs on to the consumer. Obviously this never happened, the prices have even gone up slightly over the past year. Maybe if the record companies were regulated, CD's would only cost $5-$6 each and the average person would be less motivated to try the illegal alternatives. As far as music distribution goes, I'm silently laughing at the lack of significant progress in this field. Could it be that the music companies realized that it would only be a matter of weeks before someone cracked the encryption methods they outlined? Of course, I view this all as short-term thinking. What I envision is most of people using a hosting service for storage (and collection) of music files, video files, movies, whatever. The future of computers is portability, and I think that most people will just store their files on an off-site server. The files stored on these servers would be analyzed by software agents for copyright information. To the user, they would see advertisements on their computer screens, goggles, whatever, and that advertising would pay the copyright owners for usage when those files are accessed. There will still be a dark underworld though. These are people that will have utilities to store files on their own storage devices, bypassing detection and disabling copy protection. I have no doubt that this will still exist. By acting soon, however, I believe that the majority of people will choose to be honest. If they wait too long, searching for MP3's will be known by everybody, and not just the upper crust of computer users. Then the battle will be truly lost for the music companies-no one will ever pay them another dime. Gee, I hope my rant made sense. I don't normally do this.
One of the things that I loved about the IIgs was that it could have different OS compatibility layers under System 6. Using software patches, it was compatible with DOS 3.3, ProDos, Mac HFS, and MS-DOS volumes. It seemed for a while that the IIgs was Apple's technology testbed. They used ADB before the Mac, they had a colour OS before the Mac, better sound than the Mac, etc. It had dialog boxes that I wish the Mac had to this day (ie. Copy Dialog) that were way more advanced. Truly a machine that was advanced, but destined to historical obscurity.