Number one, people with short hours are part of a demographic, and often demographics are known to have certain tastes. If we limit music creation to just them, that's another skew on the music-creation spectrum. Music is an interesting example, because it's fabricated and altered so much by the industry already. Lots of music sounds identical, these days. The labels take an artist who has a bit of talent and they transform them into something that's proven (by years of focus groups and seeing what sells) to make money from the masses. If an artist is lucky and gets big enough, they might be able to branch out and get more creative control. Otherwise, you're going to get lots of rehashed stuff from popular labels.
Again, another skew. Expect more electronic music, expect less physical CDs, expect people who don't have internet connections to be left in the cold. Absolutely, and if I indicated that I thought copyright should just go away right now, I didn't mean that. But the trend is definitely going to the Internet as deliverable media. Certainly artists can burn CDs and sell (for a premium!) for people who want that hard copy.
BTW, copyrights also serve the important function of allowing an artist to keep his art's integrity. Some people might be turned off distributing their music if they see cheap bastardisations of their original recording, or seeing their work being attributed constantly to other people. Absolutely, however I wonder how many artists would choose not to create because of this issue. Copyright is a delicate balance between incentives for art and allowing ideas to be "free." Taking old ideas and reimagining them, reusing them, etc. is an integral part to the the arts. Disney is the perfect example of this--almost all of their stories are just implementations of fairy tales.
Ultimately, I'm basically ok with copyright, just not with the length or power of them. I should be able to make copies for personal use. Copyright should expire within about 20 years. I'm not sure that they should be transferrable. The basically unlimited copyright that we have right now is simply not acceptable (and it's really another justification for civil disobedience-style infringement--the cartels lobby for longer and longer copyrights, eventually obtaining virtually unlimited copyrights, and destroying the basis for the entire copyright system--if they're going to treat it like their own personal plaything, maybe there's something to be said for treating their works like our own personal playthings.)
Piracy (or the facilitation thereof) is not the solution. You're right, of course. Like most issues, it's fighting extremism with extremism. The truth is, I'm not sure what is worse, though. Ideas and the expressions thereof are meant to be free--copyright is supposed to be an exception to this, and it is supposed to be limited. The cartels have mutated this into the concept of intellectual property. They own it now, and basically forever. But in the end, the art is supposed to belong to the people, and with new works, this will basically never be. So who is the real pirate? The person stealing the content now, or the people stealing the content from the people for all eternity?
sudo, at least, needs to be suid. A trojan would have to act as a wrapper, which could certainly work, but it would probably be more suspicious than/home/bin/happyfungame, which would just start a background process and wait for the user to run sudo.
Then again, we're talking about the more ignorant userbase, so a wrapper in their home directory might go unnoticed.
I'm not trying to be rude here, you probably shouldn't make a statement of fact based upon your own assumptions.
I've mostly used Debian-based Linux distributions, though I've also used Gentoo. I've installed Red Hat's enterprise solution, though I've never used it on the desktop. None of these have any special firewall beyond Netfilter (commonly called iptables.) Some are configured to block inbound packets that aren't part of an established connection, some don't have any rules by default (and use implicit pass in/out), but of the three, none have had implicit outbound-blocking. I've also never seen a Linux firewall that worked like ZoneAlarm (blocking by default, but alerting you and offering to let you allow the connection.)
No better than Windows on this front? Well, only as far as the defaults go. You're quite capable of blocking egress (outbound) traffic in Linux, you just have to turn it on yourself. In XP, you aren't even capable of blocking outbound traffic without third-party software--the Windows firewall only blocks incoming connections (as far as I can tell--since I don't run Windows myself, my experiences are limited to times when I've had to learn enough to support a user.) So Linux is a little better--at least the capability exists.
Are you suggesting that the user not be able to run things at startup? That would certainly work. You could also restrict what can be run to only things which have been approved by the vendor (in any particular OS), but it doesn't mean that it's a good solution.
Keep in mind that Windows could re-image itself every time that the computer is restarted, or every X hours. The registry startup entries could be cleared, each boot. The problem is that you lose functionality with any of these solutions. They're great for corporate environments, but they don't work so well for individual users at home.
It's not hard to stop malware from running on computers. It's just hard to do it while maintaining the freedoms that current users enjoy.
With Windows, almost everyone runs as Administrator, so the software doesn't have to do anything special to hook into the OS while beings stealthy. On Linux, being stealthy (against most non-knowledgeable users) would just mean adding a line to.xinitrc or.bashrc. If you set your parents up with Ubuntu, would they know to look there? Would most people who aren't deep into the Unix culture?
Viruses on Linux would be easier to clean as long as the user isn't running as Root all the time (and the virus doesn't wait for them to legitimately type in their password and then sneak in on the 5-minute timer that sudo has), but the trojan infection vector would be just as easy.
Guess I hit 'submit' too quickly--how's that for a political joke?
I wanted to add that your views on civil disobedience, particularly the selfish nature of them, are skewed. Most people who cry "civil disobedience!" aren't enacting true civil disobedience. It's not just about breaking the law that you feel is unjust. It's about dealing with the consequences, and using the attention you get from those consequences to fuel your cause and get people on your side.
If I pirate a movie, that's not civil disobedience. If I pirate a movie, get caught, refuse to pay the fine, go to court, refuse to pay out THERE, and get thrown in jail, that's civil disobedience. Folding the second you're offered a settlement so that you can get on with your life is just getting caught and trying to get out of trouble.
True civil disobedience is a huge gambit. You're risking your future and your freedom for a cause you believe in. I daresay that no one who promotes copyright-infringement disobedience really cares that much about copyright reform--they just use that to justify their actions.
They champion extremist libertarianism, where despite all the evidence and reasoning in favour of copyrights, they maintain will somehow be good for art. They come off sounding as extreme as Sony does when its representatives claim that ripping a CD is stealing. There isn't a lot of evidence and reasoning in favour of copyrights now. We live in a very prosperous age where few people have to work 16 hours/day in order to survive. In an age like this, where there is a lot of leisure time, art can flourish without the protection that copyright offers. We also have easy access to tools which can be used to make high-quality art and an unlimited distribution mechanism, both of which used to be very hard to do. Without this, copyright makes sense, because it's really quite hard to make and promote your product. But with computers and the Internet, anyone with an idea can basically create their work and promote it. Remember, promotion of the arts is the reason for copyright, not so that one can earn money off of their creativity. Being able to earn money was the original way that the arts were expected to be promoted, since writing a book or creating a painting would take a long time, and people just couldn't afford to create while working in the fields all day. Times have changed, but instead of copyright laws lessening (which they should given the times in which we are living), copyright is becoming more strict. It is wrong, based upon the entire basis for copyright.
No, I disagree. I believe that civil disobedience is highly immoral most of the time. This is a democracy, You lost me there. The country I live in isn't a democracy.
you do have a voice, you can change the laws. Ok, how could I do that?
All you need to do is convince people that this is a problem that needs fixing, and no matter how much lobbying goes on, a politician simply isn't going to get work unless they address the issue. Look, in America, you usually get a choice between two candidates for any given office. The primaries are pretty much a joke (although this year, there may be some interesting battles since the religious right may back a completely different presidential candidate from the GOP.) In senate and house races, you sometimes don't even get a choice on the candidate, but when you do, redistricting pretty much guarantees that one party or the other is going to win. Add in the "stupid American" factor (people vote like they root for sports teams, they're easily misled by spiritual leaders who focus on narrow issues, etc.) In order to have a shot in hell of getting a presidential candidate who was willing to fight for change for your narrow cause, you'd have to get both candidates to agree on this issue (and not just give lip-service to it while running, and then turn around and ignore it when they get elected.) Then you have to deal with congress, who are the ones actually making the laws. Think it was hard to convince 2 people? Try over 500.
The big joke in America is the idea that any peon here has a say in the system. The deep pockets of the varies lobbies run the show, and Americans pretend to make a difference every 2 years or so by going to the voting booth and declaring which team they want to win.
If America was a true democracy, you'd have a real shot at changing things. Just get everyone who wants copyright reform to vote for copyright reform. In this democratic republic, though. that's just not the way it works.
Many companies have policies that state that machines must be password protected--BitLocker, OS X, etc. handle encryption seamlessly if this is the case. There is no convenience reason not to use it on company laptops if they're managing sensitive data.
I could buy the "only have to support X hardware" answer if they didn't actively try to prevent people from running OS X on non-Apple hardware, both through the DRM and through DMCA takedown notices for people who hack their way around it. Not supporting non-standard configurations of hardware is easy--you just don't support it! The first thing they ask when you call Apple Customer Care is for the serial number of the device. If it's not Apple, they should end the call immediately.
Almost no users will ever change the operating system that their computer came with, anyway. The people who want to buy a Dell and run OS X on it are definitely in the "power user" category--and they're the ones least likely to need Apple support.
Besides, Microsoft has shown that it is possible to create a stable OS that interacts with third-paraty drivers. It's taken them a while to do it, but it's there. Apple should be able to do the same thing--they just don't want to because they make their money on the premium hardware.
As for low end machines I actually want everything I get on a Mac. I use wi-fi, bluetooth, and so on. So if I'm going to have to spec a machine with the same spec as a Mac and like OS-X why not just buy a Mac! Those components don't add much to the cost of Dell laptops. Hell, I don't think you can even configure a Dell notebook without wireless anymore, and Bluetooth modules are about $30. But as should be obvious, the reason to "not just buy a Mac" is that there is a premium on the hardware, and there is an increased cost. If it's worth it to you, by all means, buy one, but don't try to pretend that a cheaper machine wouldn't take you to the same Internet, let you perform the same tasks, etc.
It's quite possible to find Dell laptops comparably priced to Apple laptops. It's also possible to find one or the other cheaper, depending on the week (Dell changes their discounts weekly, and sometimes you can find huge discounts.) The biggest difference, though, is that you can customize the Dell to be lower priced, whereas Apple's offered customizations can only increase the price (for laptops--you can actually get a cheaper Mac Pro than Apple's "Starts At" price.)
The Macbook Pro is the obvious and easy example. You can have a Macbook Pro for $2000. You can get a Dell laptop computer for much less than that. Don't like that example? You can get a Macbook for $1100, and you can get a Dell laptop for $450. It doesn't matter that they aren't comparable specs--that Dell is going to do everything I want in a laptop except for running OS X. But there's no technological reason that it can't run OS X--there's just an artificial one created by Apple for vendor lock-in.
The issue is choice, pure and simple. Apple doesn't offer lower-end models because they want exclusivity. Owning a Mac is like belonging to a club with a membership fee.
I don't want to sound like I'm Apple-bashing--I'm really not meaning to. The computers are beautiful and the OS is fantastic, but there are reasons that they don't do low-end and that they keep OS X to themselves, and it has nothing to do with technology.
In this hypothetical scenario, the fines would have to be the cost of the infringed work times 1/(chance of getting caught) for it to be break-even. You need to fine more than that if you want to avoid people gaming the system. Any less, and it's economically better for me to make illegal copies of anything that I'd want to purchase anyway, as on average, I'll pay the retail price, but I get to defer it (and keep my money earning interest) until I'm caught.
So what are the chances of getting caught? That would be interesting to estimate.
I already keep a mail archive on my remote host--this would be primarily for emergencies. In an emergency, I'm pretty much going to download all the mail (POP is fine), decrypt it, and toss it in an mbox, which I can then easily browse with mutt.
If the emergency is pretty transient (I need one message, and I need it NOW, and my remote box is temporarily unreachable), then I'll at least have some basic idea of what I need--who it came from, approximate date, etc. that I can use to narrow down the search. It won't be the nicest interface in the world, but for something like this, it doesn't have to be.
Lots of people, when you need to get a console on a box that isn't reachable from the network. What, you want to lug a keyboard and monitor out into the field? A laptop and a serial cable are all you need.
I wonder what compiler options they used on the Gentoo distribution. There would be advantages to high optimizations for either speed or size in an application like this. Ubuntu would probably be the worst of both worlds, though it would have the advantage of not having to be recompiled (either slowly on that box or remotely.)
I don't take naked photos of myself, but if I did, I wouldn't e-mail them to myself, either.
Regardless, the answer to your question is that most people are simply that trusting. If it's a company, they think that they're going to do the Right Thing. They also don't understand that these services are constantly under attack by people either seeking thrills or trying to get valuable information.
Finally, people usually end up sending naked pictures of themselves to other people. In that case, you're always trusting third-parties that the pictures won't show up somewhere.
I'm pretty far from the limit, but I only use Gmail as my throwaway address. I'm thinking about forwarding PGP encrypted copies of my real mail over to Gmail for backup/archival purposes, but my 3 year old archives only weigh in at 1.3 gigabytes, and that's including listserv mail that I don't really need to archive (it's archived all over the place on the web.)
I don't do a lot of attachments, so I guess that's how I manage to weigh in so low.
Most RAID controllers let you add a disk to a RAID5, and the controller takes care of restriping so that you can use the new disk space. ZFS does not support this kind of function in its raidz. The only way to increase storage of a raidz is to upgrade each disk, one at a time.
This is probably the single biggest feature request for ZFS.
It would be a useful tactic if the jury knew about Jury Nullification. As it stands, it seems unlikely that they do. When they're told to go back and decide whether a law was broken, they're going to be told that they have to determine if the defendant broke the law. All the rigamarole about the industry as a whole is going to be pointless, unless they can understand that the current laws are unjust and that they are allowed to find in favor of the defendant despite the fact that she broke the law.
The thing is, most of the accused people have been doing this. Hate them all you want, but except for this case, when people have stuck to their guns and said, "I don't have any music on my computer," or "It was my roommate," or "I don't even have a computer," the RIAA has backed down.
In fact, this case is exactly the kind that the RIAA should pursue because it's so obvious (from the facts presented in the Ars articles) that she did it. Even with this inevitable win for the RIAA, it's unlikely to matter. This case hasn't been about whether or not file sharing should be illegal, or whether or not she was the infringer (it takes two to copy on the Internet.) They seemingly haven't brought Fair Use in at all. So this was never going to be the groundbreaking case that stopped the RIAA in their tracks, and even if it turned out to be, the RIAA could just buy another law to fix whatever loophole was used in this case.
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Ultimately, I'm basically ok with copyright, just not with the length or power of them. I should be able to make copies for personal use. Copyright should expire within about 20 years. I'm not sure that they should be transferrable. The basically unlimited copyright that we have right now is simply not acceptable (and it's really another justification for civil disobedience-style infringement--the cartels lobby for longer and longer copyrights, eventually obtaining virtually unlimited copyrights, and destroying the basis for the entire copyright system--if they're going to treat it like their own personal plaything, maybe there's something to be said for treating their works like our own personal playthings.) Piracy (or the facilitation thereof) is not the solution. You're right, of course. Like most issues, it's fighting extremism with extremism. The truth is, I'm not sure what is worse, though. Ideas and the expressions thereof are meant to be free--copyright is supposed to be an exception to this, and it is supposed to be limited. The cartels have mutated this into the concept of intellectual property. They own it now, and basically forever. But in the end, the art is supposed to belong to the people, and with new works, this will basically never be. So who is the real pirate? The person stealing the content now, or the people stealing the content from the people for all eternity?
sudo, at least, needs to be suid. A trojan would have to act as a wrapper, which could certainly work, but it would probably be more suspicious than /home/bin/happyfungame, which would just start a background process and wait for the user to run sudo.
Then again, we're talking about the more ignorant userbase, so a wrapper in their home directory might go unnoticed.
I'm not trying to be rude here, you probably shouldn't make a statement of fact based upon your own assumptions.
I've mostly used Debian-based Linux distributions, though I've also used Gentoo. I've installed Red Hat's enterprise solution, though I've never used it on the desktop. None of these have any special firewall beyond Netfilter (commonly called iptables.) Some are configured to block inbound packets that aren't part of an established connection, some don't have any rules by default (and use implicit pass in/out), but of the three, none have had implicit outbound-blocking. I've also never seen a Linux firewall that worked like ZoneAlarm (blocking by default, but alerting you and offering to let you allow the connection.)
No better than Windows on this front? Well, only as far as the defaults go. You're quite capable of blocking egress (outbound) traffic in Linux, you just have to turn it on yourself. In XP, you aren't even capable of blocking outbound traffic without third-party software--the Windows firewall only blocks incoming connections (as far as I can tell--since I don't run Windows myself, my experiences are limited to times when I've had to learn enough to support a user.) So Linux is a little better--at least the capability exists.
Are you suggesting that the user not be able to run things at startup? That would certainly work. You could also restrict what can be run to only things which have been approved by the vendor (in any particular OS), but it doesn't mean that it's a good solution.
Keep in mind that Windows could re-image itself every time that the computer is restarted, or every X hours. The registry startup entries could be cleared, each boot. The problem is that you lose functionality with any of these solutions. They're great for corporate environments, but they don't work so well for individual users at home.
It's not hard to stop malware from running on computers. It's just hard to do it while maintaining the freedoms that current users enjoy.
With Windows, almost everyone runs as Administrator, so the software doesn't have to do anything special to hook into the OS while beings stealthy. On Linux, being stealthy (against most non-knowledgeable users) would just mean adding a line to .xinitrc or .bashrc. If you set your parents up with Ubuntu, would they know to look there? Would most people who aren't deep into the Unix culture?
Viruses on Linux would be easier to clean as long as the user isn't running as Root all the time (and the virus doesn't wait for them to legitimately type in their password and then sneak in on the 5-minute timer that sudo has), but the trojan infection vector would be just as easy.
Which Linux firewalls block outgoing connections by default? In my 12+ years of using Linux, I have never seen this behavior configured by default.
Interesting points. I don't have much to add, but it's definitely given me more food for thought.
I wanted to add that your views on civil disobedience, particularly the selfish nature of them, are skewed. Most people who cry "civil disobedience!" aren't enacting true civil disobedience. It's not just about breaking the law that you feel is unjust. It's about dealing with the consequences, and using the attention you get from those consequences to fuel your cause and get people on your side.
If I pirate a movie, that's not civil disobedience. If I pirate a movie, get caught, refuse to pay the fine, go to court, refuse to pay out THERE, and get thrown in jail, that's civil disobedience. Folding the second you're offered a settlement so that you can get on with your life is just getting caught and trying to get out of trouble.
True civil disobedience is a huge gambit. You're risking your future and your freedom for a cause you believe in. I daresay that no one who promotes copyright-infringement disobedience really cares that much about copyright reform--they just use that to justify their actions. They champion extremist libertarianism, where despite all the evidence and reasoning in favour of copyrights, they maintain will somehow be good for art. They come off sounding as extreme as Sony does when its representatives claim that ripping a CD is stealing. There isn't a lot of evidence and reasoning in favour of copyrights now. We live in a very prosperous age where few people have to work 16 hours/day in order to survive. In an age like this, where there is a lot of leisure time, art can flourish without the protection that copyright offers. We also have easy access to tools which can be used to make high-quality art and an unlimited distribution mechanism, both of which used to be very hard to do. Without this, copyright makes sense, because it's really quite hard to make and promote your product. But with computers and the Internet, anyone with an idea can basically create their work and promote it. Remember, promotion of the arts is the reason for copyright, not so that one can earn money off of their creativity. Being able to earn money was the original way that the arts were expected to be promoted, since writing a book or creating a painting would take a long time, and people just couldn't afford to create while working in the fields all day. Times have changed, but instead of copyright laws lessening (which they should given the times in which we are living), copyright is becoming more strict. It is wrong, based upon the entire basis for copyright.
The big joke in America is the idea that any peon here has a say in the system. The deep pockets of the varies lobbies run the show, and Americans pretend to make a difference every 2 years or so by going to the voting booth and declaring which team they want to win.
If America was a true democracy, you'd have a real shot at changing things. Just get everyone who wants copyright reform to vote for copyright reform. In this democratic republic, though. that's just not the way it works.
Many companies have policies that state that machines must be password protected--BitLocker, OS X, etc. handle encryption seamlessly if this is the case. There is no convenience reason not to use it on company laptops if they're managing sensitive data.
Almost no users will ever change the operating system that their computer came with, anyway. The people who want to buy a Dell and run OS X on it are definitely in the "power user" category--and they're the ones least likely to need Apple support.
Besides, Microsoft has shown that it is possible to create a stable OS that interacts with third-paraty drivers. It's taken them a while to do it, but it's there. Apple should be able to do the same thing--they just don't want to because they make their money on the premium hardware. As for low end machines I actually want everything I get on a Mac. I use wi-fi, bluetooth, and so on. So if I'm going to have to spec a machine with the same spec as a Mac and like OS-X why not just buy a Mac! Those components don't add much to the cost of Dell laptops. Hell, I don't think you can even configure a Dell notebook without wireless anymore, and Bluetooth modules are about $30. But as should be obvious, the reason to "not just buy a Mac" is that there is a premium on the hardware, and there is an increased cost. If it's worth it to you, by all means, buy one, but don't try to pretend that a cheaper machine wouldn't take you to the same Internet, let you perform the same tasks, etc.
It's quite possible to find Dell laptops comparably priced to Apple laptops. It's also possible to find one or the other cheaper, depending on the week (Dell changes their discounts weekly, and sometimes you can find huge discounts.) The biggest difference, though, is that you can customize the Dell to be lower priced, whereas Apple's offered customizations can only increase the price (for laptops--you can actually get a cheaper Mac Pro than Apple's "Starts At" price.)
The Macbook Pro is the obvious and easy example. You can have a Macbook Pro for $2000. You can get a Dell laptop computer for much less than that. Don't like that example? You can get a Macbook for $1100, and you can get a Dell laptop for $450. It doesn't matter that they aren't comparable specs--that Dell is going to do everything I want in a laptop except for running OS X. But there's no technological reason that it can't run OS X--there's just an artificial one created by Apple for vendor lock-in.
The issue is choice, pure and simple. Apple doesn't offer lower-end models because they want exclusivity. Owning a Mac is like belonging to a club with a membership fee.
I don't want to sound like I'm Apple-bashing--I'm really not meaning to. The computers are beautiful and the OS is fantastic, but there are reasons that they don't do low-end and that they keep OS X to themselves, and it has nothing to do with technology.
But overly excessive is pretty subjective.
In this hypothetical scenario, the fines would have to be the cost of the infringed work times 1/(chance of getting caught) for it to be break-even. You need to fine more than that if you want to avoid people gaming the system. Any less, and it's economically better for me to make illegal copies of anything that I'd want to purchase anyway, as on average, I'll pay the retail price, but I get to defer it (and keep my money earning interest) until I'm caught.
So what are the chances of getting caught? That would be interesting to estimate.
I already keep a mail archive on my remote host--this would be primarily for emergencies. In an emergency, I'm pretty much going to download all the mail (POP is fine), decrypt it, and toss it in an mbox, which I can then easily browse with mutt.
If the emergency is pretty transient (I need one message, and I need it NOW, and my remote box is temporarily unreachable), then I'll at least have some basic idea of what I need--who it came from, approximate date, etc. that I can use to narrow down the search. It won't be the nicest interface in the world, but for something like this, it doesn't have to be.
I haven't tried Gutsy, but which applets are loaded by default? For 7.04, I don't think many were loaded at all.
Lots of people, when you need to get a console on a box that isn't reachable from the network. What, you want to lug a keyboard and monitor out into the field? A laptop and a serial cable are all you need.
I wonder what compiler options they used on the Gentoo distribution. There would be advantages to high optimizations for either speed or size in an application like this. Ubuntu would probably be the worst of both worlds, though it would have the advantage of not having to be recompiled (either slowly on that box or remotely.)
I don't take naked photos of myself, but if I did, I wouldn't e-mail them to myself, either.
Regardless, the answer to your question is that most people are simply that trusting. If it's a company, they think that they're going to do the Right Thing. They also don't understand that these services are constantly under attack by people either seeking thrills or trying to get valuable information.
Finally, people usually end up sending naked pictures of themselves to other people. In that case, you're always trusting third-parties that the pictures won't show up somewhere.
I'm pretty far from the limit, but I only use Gmail as my throwaway address. I'm thinking about forwarding PGP encrypted copies of my real mail over to Gmail for backup/archival purposes, but my 3 year old archives only weigh in at 1.3 gigabytes, and that's including listserv mail that I don't really need to archive (it's archived all over the place on the web.)
I don't do a lot of attachments, so I guess that's how I manage to weigh in so low.
I've heard that a judge can declare a mistrial if the lawyers do this, but I have nothing to back this up.
ZFS is REALLY memory intensive. I highly doubt that current AppleTV hardware will ever support it.
Most RAID controllers let you add a disk to a RAID5, and the controller takes care of restriping so that you can use the new disk space. ZFS does not support this kind of function in its raidz. The only way to increase storage of a raidz is to upgrade each disk, one at a time.
This is probably the single biggest feature request for ZFS.
It would be a useful tactic if the jury knew about Jury Nullification. As it stands, it seems unlikely that they do. When they're told to go back and decide whether a law was broken, they're going to be told that they have to determine if the defendant broke the law. All the rigamarole about the industry as a whole is going to be pointless, unless they can understand that the current laws are unjust and that they are allowed to find in favor of the defendant despite the fact that she broke the law.
Of course, since copyright has been around in the US, proving harm has been almost irrelevant. Copyright is about control, not money.
I'd be a lot happier with copyright (and the media cartel's tactics) if it was a lot shorter.
The thing is, most of the accused people have been doing this. Hate them all you want, but except for this case, when people have stuck to their guns and said, "I don't have any music on my computer," or "It was my roommate," or "I don't even have a computer," the RIAA has backed down.
In fact, this case is exactly the kind that the RIAA should pursue because it's so obvious (from the facts presented in the Ars articles) that she did it. Even with this inevitable win for the RIAA, it's unlikely to matter. This case hasn't been about whether or not file sharing should be illegal, or whether or not she was the infringer (it takes two to copy on the Internet.) They seemingly haven't brought Fair Use in at all. So this was never going to be the groundbreaking case that stopped the RIAA in their tracks, and even if it turned out to be, the RIAA could just buy another law to fix whatever loophole was used in this case.