In the digital work, it makes no sense at all; people can mix together all sorts of different versions, all having an equal claim to being a "master recording". Hence my comment "whatever that may be".
There is one final mix that is used to press CDs from, make audio clips, etc.
This may or may not be toned down to CD quality; it may be higher, it may be lower (as in, if the originals were analog tapes.)
If your ears aren't built to perceive it, it makes no difference.
"yes, it does."
You don't need to agree with me; it's a subjective thing. The fact is that there are people who can hear the removal of minute (and meaningless) sound detail.
I'm really curious about why digesting milk is such a big deal? Until the 20th century we had absolutely no way of storing milk long enough to consume it.
Cows and cheese.
Milk only needs to last for a few hours, at most, outside of the cow. Cheese lasts for quite a bit longer--and quite a few types of cheese set off "lactose intolerant" people.
A cow can subsists on grass--a person cannot, though they can subsist on milk from goats or cow. Cut the grass, thus making for a safer home, and get food too--yeah, that's a big thing.
Unless you are psychic, you won't be able to tell the difference between an MP3 ripped from a "master recording" (whatever that may be) and an MP3 ripped from a CD. And unless you are an alien, a dog, or an infant, you are lucky to hear anything meaninful above 16khz, which means that 44khz sampling is plenty.
Two bits.
Firstly, "Master recordings" are the final mixed high-quality media, before the darn thing is formatted for CDs, tapes, or vinyl. I'll make no claims as to the quality of digital copies of said masters, but the marketing-assertion that music recorded directly from them does make sense, at the very lease.
Secondly, music is more than just "meaningful sound." A little bit of speaker noise is just about meaningless, but it still effects the quality of the music. What people can hear and what can effect someone's enjoyment of what people hear are seperate things.
(It's like the slight green or blue (?) coloring in The Matrix; it's so slight that it's just about a meaningless abberation, until you watch it in context with the movie.)
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
If enough of the states vote for a law (such as "no UCITA" or "Alcohol is legal") and want it to be The Law of the Land, Congress can be essentially left out of the picture.
One more time: if it was indisputable, there would be no dispute, no contention, no disagreement, certainly no beatings and killings.
If there could be moral dispute, beatings and killings would not be necessary.
Perhaps from a modern perspective, it might seem "indisputable", to all but a few cranks. But the course of history often seems obvious after the fact, an illusion of perspective.
Course of history my arse.
I believe in objective morality. Ergo, any event can be judged by the morals as they are understood today, with historical abberations altering only what is prevalent and possible for a given situation.
Self-rule has nothing to do with it. If "Free India from Britsh rule" was indisputable, the British rulers wouldn't have been beating and killing Indian subjects. Indeed, they would never have formed the East India Company.
Y'see why Gandhi's position was the indisputable moral high ground? Because of how badly the British treated them.
Civil Rights had indisputable moral high ground--the arguments against it were inherently fear-mongering and selfish, not rational or moral.
Actually, Free Software can only compete on its merits--zero to no cost being one of them, interopability being another.
If Linux could match even three-year-old MS Windows 2000 feature-for-feature, it'd probably win. But it can't. Linux has a lot more variation and inherent complexity of design than Windows, which is good for geeks and bad for people who just want the job done.
Don't presmue that Linux is as good or better than Windows; it is for a few niches, which is where it succeeds, but not for all of them.
If the devices are within 2 feet of each other, how is Bluetooth easier than just hooking them up with a cable that takes about 1 second to plug in?
If you can skip the wire, then you don't need to worry about the wire getting tangled, the wire getting lost, the wire getting broken--or wanting to plug in two things at once.
Let's say that, for the sake of argument I replace all of my signal wires with bluetooth, so my two printers, digital camera, and PDA all no longer need wires.
If a friend brings over a bluetooth-enabled laptop, they can just send the signal over without me fumbling for a cable that I don't use, or digging out my PC to get at the ports in the back. Similarly, if I buy a new PDA, I don't need to worry about getting a sync cradle.
It is easier. It may not be sufficiently easier to justify the expense, but it IS easier.
So, I guess we're at GhandiCon Three, then. May four come quickly... I want my workstation at work to be running Linux already!
Gandhi got his nonviolent revolution because he had clear and indisputable moral high ground.
GNU, Stallman, ESR, et cetera, do not. Even if they do have the moral high ground, it is not indisputable.
Plus, a quote like that commits a fallicy of predestiny, which is a hallmark of eventual downfal for any social movement. The prohibitionists, Internet Semi-revolutionaries, and the American communists who wanted to make us like the USSR all believed that their victory was definite.
I believe that, all things being equal, a long enough time scale will have all software being free software, simply because the profit window for proprietary innovations will continue to be smaller and smaller. But this is not a certainy, and thinking that it is will let "them" "win."
Why would it run on Windows? The convincing outlook replacement is Evolution, and it runs on the Ximian desktop.
Evolution makes Ximian a replacement for Windows--it is NOT by itself an Outlook killer.
There are oodles of reasons to keep windows as the OS--installed base of user knowledge being the chief one--and answering a "why isn't there a different app for this on Win32" with "there is on Linux" is rather unhelpful.
The arguments for Outlook sound a lot more convincing until you send someone a calendar appointment, and they ask you later "why did you send me a blank email?", or when the boss is constantly wondering why people have no idea of important events because "they're on the outlook server, all you need to do is..." and nobody knows about them.
Ok, so you work in companies with idiots. Lots of people work in companies with Outlook configured properly, and they simply don't have the problems you quote.
(If you are working in a place where Outlook is just used to access POP or IMAP mail, then dump it and install something like Eudora, Minotaur, or PINE.)
IME even the most computer-illiterate people can learn how to work an e-mail calendar, provided that the tech set it up the way it was designed to be set up.
Good point, the killer app portion of Outlook at my company is the calendar. The rest of the features go mostly unused and the power-users would figure out how to accomplish the same things on any other system we went with, so why isn't there anything to buy?
If all that you use is the Calendar and e-mail, and you don't care about proprietary Office interopability or a massive journal you don't use, try selling them Novell's Groupwise.
We use it at work, NYS uses it in several agencies, and, though the HTML mail's a bit funky (the plain-text translation doesn't have any line breaks), it does work.
Actually, Outlook looks rather nice for office e-mail. If they can cope with the virus, security breaches, et cetera that come with being the biggest, there's a fair bit going for them.
Install Outlook with the rest of office, and take a look at all the spiffy things that can get done--E-mail mail merge (useful for things other than SPAM, y'know), calendar tracking & sharing, keeping track of what files you opened when...
The question isn't "why are people still using Outlook", but rather "why isn't there a real Outlook killer for Windows?"
Imagine if you were the person at the 7-11 buying a pre-packaged muffin in the morning and couldnt figure out the instructions.
Geeks and marketoids obviously have very differnt senses of humor. Directions on a muffin are just like directions on a napkin--they're there to show how "simple" the activity is, or perhaps to point out that there is a wrapper (no 7-11s in Upstate NY, so I haven't seen a muffin from then in quite a while and can't say how well the wrapper blends.)
Besides which, if there really were people that stupid, how did they get the money to come to 7-11 and buy a muffin?
This forces variety, and by snowball effect, either the need to add support for dozens of different schemes (expensive as hell), or use none at all.
Not really.
MS will institute Palladium, and not support anything that isn't Palladium. They'll lose some market share--(or maybe they'll have "insecure windows") but their monopoly will, for the most part, remain intact.
No one has a reason to require one scheme through legislation. It can be done by market dominance, PR, and simple market economics.
I mean, after all, USB never had legislative backing, and it works.
Weight is defined as "the force exerted by gravity upon an object with mass". Your kitchen scales then measure this force and coverts it to a mass on the basis that 1 Newton is the force required to accelerate a mass of 1 Kg at 1 meter per second per second. Thus at any given point in a gravity well, 1 kg of bricks will weigh the same as 1 kg of feathers.
(Well, actually, my scale measures this fairly directly, being Imperial and all...)
Thanks for proving my original tounge-in-cheek answer: "Which weighs more? The lower one."
What is illegal about having a list of file names with filled with/dev/random available to anyone on the internet?
Possibly it could be construed as fraud or conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. There's nothing illegal about standing on the street--unless you're doing it to learn the police patrols to aid in a bank robbery.
Did you see a car that resembles one you had stolen? Try calling your DMV with a plate number and see if the give you the persons phone number
This wouldn't work over the phone.
However, if you catch the plate of someone who sells you faulty flowers, you can probably get contact infromation from the DMV by walking up to the office.
Or, you could just hire a private eye to watch out for the same car with the same license plate.
It won't work, you call the police and they investigate based on hearing your claim.
The examples you gave were crimes. Copyright infringement on the scale that RIAA investigates is (usually) a tort but not a crime--thus, the police won't investigate, and so you have to do it yourself.
The P2P public had the trust of the creative industries--and then Napster came along, and they/we stomped all over that trust. Palladium is trust as in "you can now trust us not to break the law."
Palladium, as I understand it, makes circumventing the system more trouble than its worth. Which, theoretically, would let us get back to our familiar balance of copyright and individual use.
How can DRM "protect rights" when it denies basic rights of fair use?
Fair use is not now and never has been a "basic right." It's an exception to a government-granted monopoly intended to ensure the profitability of creative works.
DRM doesn't manage your "bill of rights" rights--it manages what rights you are granted by an IP holder to copy their IP.
Oh, and you still have as much fair use as anyone did before the digital boom. A slightly degraded automated copies, or tediously sampled manual copies, are still going to work.
I didn't say it was. But it is RIAA's simple, legal, and ethical intent.
This case isn't about if the files shared were illegal--or even if file-sharing is illegal. It's about RIAA wanting to know the identities of some Verizon customers, so it can take them to court for file-sharing.
There is nothing that prevents me from creating hundreds of files with names to fool them, once noticed by the RIAA, I will have to spend my time and resources to prove that their system of determining illegal files is 100% garbage.
Aside from the absent morals and dubious legality of your plan, you can just write a letter and include an image of your system.
And it's obviously not 100% garbage--70% or so, maybe, and certainly not something you hook up to a subpoena-o-matic... but it's still useful.
I think most people would say they weren't violating any rules of ethics. Since your concept of ethics seems to concern "honesty" and "consistency" though I don't see this being a useful discourse as I tend to think ethics involves right, wrong and moral standards.
Due to a rather prickly run-in I had with a devout atheist awhile back, I seperate "ethic" and "moral". Morality, IMO, is things that are right or wrong inherently. Ethics, OTOH, are things that are right or wrong based on experience.
Once could even see a point where RIAA's actions were moral--they acted to defend their rights using the laws as written, and following the law and defending ones own rights are both moral acts.
I think it's very reasonable to have a special exception on the right to privacy for legal proceedings--in fact, I believe that such is the case. If you grow pot in your house, "privacy" isn't going to keep your name out of the papers, for example.
And Verizon's point is that the law as written is unjust.
Which is fine. And is why this had to go before a court.
This isn't about getting names, it's about granting large corporations unprecendented rights over the individual citizen.
Being able to LEARN YOUR NAME is an unprecidented right? Damn. When did we change the meaning of "precident?"
What exactly is your definition of ethical?
An action that is consistent with a logical and sensible worldview. Consistency and honesty are the only real universal constants when it comes to ethics, IMO.
If one feels that the DMCA is unconstitutional and decides to ask a judge instead of a clerk to sign off on a subpoena, who is the supposed audience that is going to declare this action unethical?
RIAA was ethical in following the DMCA as written. Verizon was ethical in (essentially) asking for judicial review of the action and of the law.
RIAA does not feel that the DMCA is unconstitutional, and so it would be unethical of them to act as though it were.
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In the digital work, it makes no sense at all; people can mix together all sorts of different versions, all having an equal claim to being a "master recording". Hence my comment "whatever that may be".
There is one final mix that is used to press CDs from, make audio clips, etc.
This may or may not be toned down to CD quality; it may be higher, it may be lower (as in, if the originals were analog tapes.)
If your ears aren't built to perceive it, it makes no difference.
"yes, it does."
You don't need to agree with me; it's a subjective thing. The fact is that there are people who can hear the removal of minute (and meaningless) sound detail.
I'm really curious about why digesting milk is such a big deal? Until the 20th century we had absolutely no way of storing milk long enough to consume it.
Cows and cheese.
Milk only needs to last for a few hours, at most, outside of the cow. Cheese lasts for quite a bit longer--and quite a few types of cheese set off "lactose intolerant" people.
A cow can subsists on grass--a person cannot, though they can subsist on milk from goats or cow. Cut the grass, thus making for a safer home, and get food too--yeah, that's a big thing.
Unless you are psychic, you won't be able to tell the difference between an MP3 ripped from a "master recording" (whatever that may be) and an MP3 ripped from a CD. And unless you are an alien, a dog, or an infant, you are lucky to hear anything meaninful above 16khz, which means that 44khz sampling is plenty.
Two bits.
Firstly, "Master recordings" are the final mixed high-quality media, before the darn thing is formatted for CDs, tapes, or vinyl. I'll make no claims as to the quality of digital copies of said masters, but the marketing-assertion that music recorded directly from them does make sense, at the very lease.
Secondly, music is more than just "meaningful sound." A little bit of speaker noise is just about meaningless, but it still effects the quality of the music. What people can hear and what can effect someone's enjoyment of what people hear are seperate things.
(It's like the slight green or blue (?) coloring in The Matrix; it's so slight that it's just about a meaningless abberation, until you watch it in context with the movie.)
Nope.
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
If enough of the states vote for a law (such as "no UCITA" or "Alcohol is legal") and want it to be The Law of the Land, Congress can be essentially left out of the picture.
One more time: if it was indisputable, there would be no dispute, no contention, no disagreement, certainly no beatings and killings.
If there could be moral dispute, beatings and killings would not be necessary.
Perhaps from a modern perspective, it might seem "indisputable", to all but a few cranks. But the course of history often seems obvious after the fact, an illusion of perspective.
Course of history my arse.
I believe in objective morality. Ergo, any event can be judged by the morals as they are understood today, with historical abberations altering only what is prevalent and possible for a given situation.
Self-rule has nothing to do with it. If "Free India from Britsh rule" was indisputable, the British rulers wouldn't have been beating and killing Indian subjects. Indeed, they would never have formed the East India Company.
Y'see why Gandhi's position was the indisputable moral high ground? Because of how badly the British treated them.
Civil Rights had indisputable moral high ground--the arguments against it were inherently fear-mongering and selfish, not rational or moral.
Actually, Free Software can only compete on its merits--zero to no cost being one of them, interopability being another.
If Linux could match even three-year-old MS Windows 2000 feature-for-feature, it'd probably win. But it can't. Linux has a lot more variation and inherent complexity of design than Windows, which is good for geeks and bad for people who just want the job done.
Don't presmue that Linux is as good or better than Windows; it is for a few niches, which is where it succeeds, but not for all of them.
If it was indisuptable, what was all the beating and killing of Indians about?
His moral high ground was "Free India from Britsh rule." Not "The Indians are great at self-rule."
If the devices are within 2 feet of each other, how is Bluetooth easier than just hooking them up with a cable that takes about 1 second to plug in?
If you can skip the wire, then you don't need to worry about the wire getting tangled, the wire getting lost, the wire getting broken--or wanting to plug in two things at once.
Let's say that, for the sake of argument I replace all of my signal wires with bluetooth, so my two printers, digital camera, and PDA all no longer need wires.
If a friend brings over a bluetooth-enabled laptop, they can just send the signal over without me fumbling for a cable that I don't use, or digging out my PC to get at the ports in the back. Similarly, if I buy a new PDA, I don't need to worry about getting a sync cradle.
It is easier. It may not be sufficiently easier to justify the expense, but it IS easier.
So, I guess we're at GhandiCon Three, then. May four come quickly... I want my workstation at work to be running Linux already!
Gandhi got his nonviolent revolution because he had clear and indisputable moral high ground.
GNU, Stallman, ESR, et cetera, do not. Even if they do have the moral high ground, it is not indisputable.
Plus, a quote like that commits a fallicy of predestiny, which is a hallmark of eventual downfal for any social movement. The prohibitionists, Internet Semi-revolutionaries, and the American communists who wanted to make us like the USSR all believed that their victory was definite.
I believe that, all things being equal, a long enough time scale will have all software being free software, simply because the profit window for proprietary innovations will continue to be smaller and smaller. But this is not a certainy, and thinking that it is will let "them" "win."
Hey, that's a rather cool idea.
Limit Exchange's intranet benefits internally, and plug the virus hole with a filter on incoming mail. Sweet.
How do users check for false positives on the virus scan?
Why would it run on Windows? The convincing outlook replacement is Evolution, and it runs on the Ximian desktop.
Evolution makes Ximian a replacement for Windows--it is NOT by itself an Outlook killer.
There are oodles of reasons to keep windows as the OS--installed base of user knowledge being the chief one--and answering a "why isn't there a different app for this on Win32" with "there is on Linux" is rather unhelpful.
The arguments for Outlook sound a lot more convincing until you send someone a calendar appointment, and they ask you later "why did you send me a blank email?", or when the boss is constantly wondering why people have no idea of important events because "they're on the outlook server, all you need to do is..." and nobody knows about them.
Ok, so you work in companies with idiots. Lots of people work in companies with Outlook configured properly, and they simply don't have the problems you quote.
(If you are working in a place where Outlook is just used to access POP or IMAP mail, then dump it and install something like Eudora, Minotaur, or PINE.)
IME even the most computer-illiterate people can learn how to work an e-mail calendar, provided that the tech set it up the way it was designed to be set up.
Good point, the killer app portion of Outlook at my company is the calendar. The rest of the features go mostly unused and the power-users would figure out how to accomplish the same things on any other system we went with, so why isn't there anything to buy?
If all that you use is the Calendar and e-mail, and you don't care about proprietary Office interopability or a massive journal you don't use, try selling them Novell's Groupwise.
We use it at work, NYS uses it in several agencies, and, though the HTML mail's a bit funky (the plain-text translation doesn't have any line breaks), it does work.
Actually, Outlook looks rather nice for office e-mail. If they can cope with the virus, security breaches, et cetera that come with being the biggest, there's a fair bit going for them.
Install Outlook with the rest of office, and take a look at all the spiffy things that can get done--E-mail mail merge (useful for things other than SPAM, y'know), calendar tracking & sharing, keeping track of what files you opened when...
The question isn't "why are people still using Outlook", but rather "why isn't there a real Outlook killer for Windows?"
er, west. Past Syracuse in the WEST.
Albany, Schencteady, Utica.
The closest one I know of is in MA to the east, and, AFAIK, they don't start appearing until well past Syracuse in the north.
Where the hell are you?
Imagine if you were the person at the 7-11 buying a pre-packaged muffin in the morning and couldnt figure out the instructions.
Geeks and marketoids obviously have very differnt senses of humor. Directions on a muffin are just like directions on a napkin--they're there to show how "simple" the activity is, or perhaps to point out that there is a wrapper (no 7-11s in Upstate NY, so I haven't seen a muffin from then in quite a while and can't say how well the wrapper blends.)
Besides which, if there really were people that stupid, how did they get the money to come to 7-11 and buy a muffin?
And just having them on file and being in the wrong place can make you suspect in something which you have no idea about.
Just being in the wrong place can make you a suspect, holmes.
This forces variety, and by snowball effect, either the need to add support for dozens of different schemes (expensive as hell), or use none at all.
Not really.
MS will institute Palladium, and not support anything that isn't Palladium. They'll lose some market share--(or maybe they'll have "insecure windows") but their monopoly will, for the most part, remain intact.
No one has a reason to require one scheme through legislation. It can be done by market dominance, PR, and simple market economics.
I mean, after all, USB never had legislative backing, and it works.
Weight is defined as "the force exerted by gravity upon an object with mass". Your kitchen scales then measure this force and coverts it to a mass on the basis that 1 Newton is the force required to accelerate a mass of 1 Kg at 1 meter per second per second. Thus at any given point in a gravity well, 1 kg of bricks will weigh the same as 1 kg of feathers.
(Well, actually, my scale measures this fairly directly, being Imperial and all...)
Thanks for proving my original tounge-in-cheek answer: "Which weighs more? The lower one."
What is illegal about having a list of file names with filled with /dev/random available to anyone on the internet?
Possibly it could be construed as fraud or conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. There's nothing illegal about standing on the street--unless you're doing it to learn the police patrols to aid in a bank robbery.
Did you see a car that resembles one you had stolen? Try calling your DMV with a plate number and see if the give you the persons phone number
This wouldn't work over the phone.
However, if you catch the plate of someone who sells you faulty flowers, you can probably get contact infromation from the DMV by walking up to the office.
Or, you could just hire a private eye to watch out for the same car with the same license plate.
It won't work, you call the police and they investigate based on hearing your claim.
The examples you gave were crimes. Copyright infringement on the scale that RIAA investigates is (usually) a tort but not a crime--thus, the police won't investigate, and so you have to do it yourself.
Your... content... ?
The P2P public had the trust of the creative industries--and then Napster came along, and they/we stomped all over that trust. Palladium is trust as in "you can now trust us not to break the law."
Palladium, as I understand it, makes circumventing the system more trouble than its worth. Which, theoretically, would let us get back to our familiar balance of copyright and individual use.
How can DRM "protect rights" when it denies basic rights of fair use?
Fair use is not now and never has been a "basic right." It's an exception to a government-granted monopoly intended to ensure the profitability of creative works.
DRM doesn't manage your "bill of rights" rights--it manages what rights you are granted by an IP holder to copy their IP.
Oh, and you still have as much fair use as anyone did before the digital boom. A slightly degraded automated copies, or tediously sampled manual copies, are still going to work.
That is NOT the main issue with this case.
I didn't say it was. But it is RIAA's simple, legal, and ethical intent.
This case isn't about if the files shared were illegal--or even if file-sharing is illegal. It's about RIAA wanting to know the identities of some Verizon customers, so it can take them to court for file-sharing.
There is nothing that prevents me from creating hundreds of files with names to fool them, once noticed by the RIAA, I will have to spend my time and resources to prove that their system of determining illegal files is 100% garbage.
Aside from the absent morals and dubious legality of your plan, you can just write a letter and include an image of your system.
And it's obviously not 100% garbage--70% or so, maybe, and certainly not something you hook up to a subpoena-o-matic... but it's still useful.
I think most people would say they weren't violating any rules of ethics. Since your concept of ethics seems to concern "honesty" and "consistency" though I don't see this being a useful discourse as I tend to think ethics involves right, wrong and moral standards.
Due to a rather prickly run-in I had with a devout atheist awhile back, I seperate "ethic" and "moral". Morality, IMO, is things that are right or wrong inherently. Ethics, OTOH, are things that are right or wrong based on experience.
Once could even see a point where RIAA's actions were moral--they acted to defend their rights using the laws as written, and following the law and defending ones own rights are both moral acts.
I think it's very reasonable to have a special exception on the right to privacy for legal proceedings--in fact, I believe that such is the case. If you grow pot in your house, "privacy" isn't going to keep your name out of the papers, for example.
And Verizon's point is that the law as written is unjust.
Which is fine. And is why this had to go before a court.
This isn't about getting names, it's about granting large corporations unprecendented rights over the individual citizen.
Being able to LEARN YOUR NAME is an unprecidented right? Damn. When did we change the meaning of "precident?"
What exactly is your definition of ethical?
An action that is consistent with a logical and sensible worldview. Consistency and honesty are the only real universal constants when it comes to ethics, IMO.
If one feels that the DMCA is unconstitutional and decides to ask a judge instead of a clerk to sign off on a subpoena, who is the supposed audience that is going to declare this action unethical?
RIAA was ethical in following the DMCA as written. Verizon was ethical in (essentially) asking for judicial review of the action and of the law.
RIAA does not feel that the DMCA is unconstitutional, and so it would be unethical of them to act as though it were.