You're missing the point. I'm assuming that by "newer technology" you are alluding to Taco's idea of a network of airplanes, each of which knows the other's location. Stop and think about this for a minute - anyone with a semester's worth of high school physics can tell you that once you have an object's velocity and direction (i.e. vector), hitting it with, oh, say, a missile, becomes as trivial as solving a math problem. It's quite obvious, really, that such a system won't exist until the military can be absolutely sure (110% in MilSpeak) that no one could intercept such data. And that will be a long time coming.
There have been many times when I've wanted to undertake a project and release the source but haven't simply because I'm self-conscious about the code I write. I feel almost embarassed at the thought of someone seeing sloppy, inelegant code with my name on it. I'm just curious if a.) you've ever had this problem and b.) in general, what have people's responses been (i.e. flames, a patch and some consoling words, etc.)?
My firewall is rather peculiar in that instead of blocking everything, it's open to the public *except* for my ISP's blocks. If you want, I can provide you with my script.
Can I just say that that's about the stupidest reason to have a firewall I've ever heard of. Besides irony, what exactly is such a device providing you with? Last I checked, Time Warner wasn't rooting peoples boxes, thrashing their hard drives, exploiting unpatched copies of Sendmail, or otherwise wreaking havoc. I get scanned once every two weeks on port 119, of all things, by my ISP. I get scanned approximately 3-4 times a day by random other hosts from around the world on pretty much every port between 1 and 1024. In my opinion your stance - "Your biggest threat won't be the script kiddies" - is highly naive.
I think you're missing the point. Placing a computer behind an NAT firewall is no safer than just running the firewall on the computer itself. Most all of the responses on this thread have been along the lines of "Dude, just NAT and firewall your box", which is pointless considering he only has one PC. An entire night to "bring it all together" seems like a waste of time when three or four firewall rules could do the trick just as nicely.
Oh they are not outrageous - c'mon. I can remember back to a time when the mere thought of getting 2.5mbps of bandwidth for $40 a month would have made me soil myself. It's time to gain a little perspective here. You have no idea what a good deal you are getting; before you go whining about pricing perhaps you should check out the going rates for a modem connection in most parts of Europe, which is still priced per minute of usage, and where DSL is almost nonexistant. @Home is providing you with an extraordinarily high level of service for your money, and the fact of the matter is that they don't charge too much for what they offer already. What they offer is T1 level service for a little more than a dollar a day. If you really think they charge to much, I'd invite you to make a few phone calls and verify the price of a full-blown T1 line.
A cursory glance at their website reveals that they distribute the source to the kernel they are running, which is modified. However the real bread-and-butter of the TiVo (their proprietary filesystem and, most importantly, their client software) is closed and will be forever and ever. You seem to be hinting at a GPL violation but if you read the GPL license more closely you'll see that they are in total compliance.
I agree that suing gun makers is ludicrous. Guns don't kill people. People kill people.
BUT we should and do have every right to sue the tobacco companies. You think the entertainment industry is insidious and sneaky and without morals when it comes to MP3/screwing artists/etc? You ain't seen nothing - nothing - yet. In terms of morals, tobacco companies make RIAA and the MPAA look like they were sanctified by the pope himself.
You take for granted the fact that smoking is addictive, but people didn't always know that. Tobacco companies knew that for about 60 years and never told anyone because it was such a great way to make money. The jacked up the levels of nicotine in cigarettes to hook more smokers. They advertised to kids (Joe Camel?! Hullo?). They are just complete scumbags and slimeballs and the simple truth is that they've done everything short of forcing cigarettes into people's mouths. One wonders how many smokers took up the habit just because they were smoking cigarettes that were engineered to be more addictive - that figure has got to be in the millions. As far as I'm concerned RJR, B&W, and all the rest of the tobacco companies can rot in hell for all of eternity and no one would really be worse off.
It's funny that Shamoon, who seems to be a very smart and lucid guy, just is totally blind to a couple of pretty obvious points.
Fallacy one: People will accept SDMI with open arms. This is incorrect for many, many reasons, not the least of which is the obvious fact that we've already got Napster and Gnutella. I'm not going to switch to SDMI at all - no matter how many marketroids preach to me about "enhanced end-user experience" or "value-added" or anything else. His faith in the underlying honesty of people is cute but a bit misguided. Of the hundreds of Napster users I know I can't think of a one having spontaneous paroxysms of guilt about "stealing" music. I can't think of anyone wishing they could pay, if only a quality service was available. People aren't going to take to SDMI unless forced, trust me.
Fallacy two: Audible watermarking is a-okay. Wrong again! This is my main point when it comes to how SDMI won't work. Watermarking for music is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't scenario. On one hand, you have audible watermarking. Audible watermarking sucks. Not only does it taint the music in the minds of a lot of audiophiles, but it really does sound bad! People won't just cotton up to it. OTOH there is inaudible watermarking, which is just completely beatable as demonstrated so adeptly by (thank you!) Microsoft and their WMA format. Anyone with enough motivation and experience can write a driver that spits out a virgin audio stream from deep within the bowels of the soundcard, and that will be that.
Fallacy three: Every hardware and software maker in the civilized world will be SDMI-complian t. Not if capitalism has any say in the matter. I don't care how well engineered SDMI will be - sooner or later it will be cracked. And when that happens, there will be someone making hardware that plays SDMI streams while ignoring watermarking, or someone that makes software that removes the watermark altogether. And people - lots of people - will be willing to pay for this hardware, and it will be profitable, and other people will start making it.
Isn't this just sort of a web tablet in disguise? Without a keyboard there isn't any need for the traditional two-paned laptop. Instead you'll just have an LCD screen used for both input and output. I've been hearing about these things for years but have yet to see one that really works and is here now - if there was, I'd buy it. Nothing like reading Slashdot on the shitter:)
Hah! What, you're saying it's unethical to screw the same record companies which have been unethically screwing artists for 50 years? That's your position? Come on. I think you need to make a distinction between murder - the evils of which I don't need to rehash - and reciprocity, which is exactly what these record companies are getting.
I sleep fine with 6000 MP3s on my hard drive, 15-20 queued for download, and thousands uploaded to people across the world. And that's not because I'm amoral - it's because I don't consider it unethical at all.
Bzzt. Napster is all about a new model of distribution. "Piracy" to me invokes images of swashbuckling on the high seas. In the sense of copyright it is merely a contrivance meant to paint copyright violation in a bad light.
But what if there are no copyrights? Napster suddenly becomes a new model of distribution (sound familiar?). They are making a business out of piracy only in a world where copyrights are protectable. Unfortunately, the internet has proven that they are increasingly not. Essentially, that is Napster's argument - that the whole entire system is going to undergo a fundamental change, and they are at the forefront of it.
You can go ahead and scribble and rant about piracy all you want, but the fact is it's only illegal as long as the law is on the books. The 20 million upper-middle class, educated white people (you know, the ones that vote) that have signed up with Napster represent a huge chunk of political equity. Some enterprising politician is going to realize this. It would not surprise me if you saw legislation as early as the 107th session extending the AHRA or amending the "fair use" clause to support Internet filesharing. "Piracy", at least in the Napster sense, looks to be an increasingly deprecated term.
ROFL.. Napster makes a fat whopping zero every month. They make a fat whopping zero every year. And that's just revenues. On the whole they're hemorraghing to the tune of millions of dollars every month.
When was the last time you paid to use Napster?
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Re:And THIS is why Gnutella / Freenet won't.
on
Two-Faced Napster?
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· Score: 2
Gnutella / Freenet arose from the "ashes" of Napster, but they won't "win" because of some grand decentralization theme--if the RIAA / gov't wanted to, they could shut them down. (Imagine a special, temporary court, JUST to issue orders to stop Gnutella servers and hear appeals...)
Oooh.. -1, Clueless. Freenet especially cannot be shut down, not only because there are servers in many countries, but because in order to shut the thing down you have to prove that a law was broken. In the realm of copyright, that means proving that a person is using their computer to distribute copyrighted material. With Freenet that's not even possible - not only is it impossible to determine what you actually have stored in your Freenet cache, you can't even tell who's sendin it to you. So no, Freenet is not going down without either the will of the people running it or large-scale military deployment.
Gnutella has safety in numbers. Do you really think, what with a 5 month (or more) backlog and tremendous legal fees, they are going to haul ten thousand people into court just to shut down their computer. Nonsense. They can fire off all the cease-and-desists they want, but the simple fact is that they don't even have jurisdiction. Not every computer is located in America.
The Internet (by that I guess I mean TCP/IP) was designed specifically for the "smoking crater" scenario. Remember that it was a product of a military institution, and came about during the 60s. Pretty much anything that the military developed during the cold war was built with nuclear war in mind, and TCP/IP is no exception. It's funny that you should use "smoking crater" because that's quite literally what they had in mind: the TCP/IP protocol was built so that traffic would be automatically rerouted in case something got nuked. The Internet hasn't changed much in thirty years. If America were to sink tomorrow, hypothetically the impact in terms of connectivity would not be too bad. Instead of passing through an American backbone, traffic would just go somewhere else. Add up all the links in the world, right down to the last analog modem, and there will always be a way to get from point A to point B, America or no America, given the vastness of the Internet.
Now, in the real world, it's not that simple. America definitely has more bandwidth than any other nation in the world as far as I know. Killing all the American connections would cause horrendous slowdowns through the web as all that traffic was suddenly routed through pipes that weren't built to handle it. Not to mention the fact that all American-run websites would be down, of which there are many. So, the bottom line is yes, there would still be a self-sufficient Internet, but whether it actually performed in a timely fashion is a matter open to discussion.
Do what my public school did when they got their Unix server: firewall the whole subnet into a proxy server so they can censor what web pages you access! Yay!
Oh, and consulting any one of the Learning UNIX books out there ain't too bad either. O'Reilly is always a good choice. "Unix for Dummies" is informative and pretty funny too.
I would concentrate on the comp.* and other technical newsgroups rather than trying to mirror the whole damn thing. I would hazard a guess that a lot of that 10% of traffic that Deja said made up their backpost searching was looking for technical support, hardware information, or software help. Having a 15 year backlog of rec.humor.jokes or alt.fan.brittany-spears (or any other pop-culture NG, of which there are thousands) might be cute, but it's really rather worthless.
Just as food for thought, there are also some privacy issues here. You have to ask yourself: do you really want a decade or two of your scribblings to be instantly available and indexable and searchable by anyone on the planet? Think about it - every immature flame, every embarrasing post, every moment you'd love to live down, now showcased and painfully easy to find by someone with a couple of minutes and a computer... I'm kind of glad that Slashdot "forgets" or de-indexes my comments after a few weeks. There are a lot that I'd just love to bury and in effect have as soon as they exit my user info page and leave the search index. Now imagine them staying with you for years, even decades.
And it can get worse than simple embarassment. I know for a definite fact of one case where two guys were engaged in a long-standing flamefest in a NG. Guy 1 went on dejanews.com to look at what else the other guy (Guy 2) was posting... and found some two-year old backposts to a cancer support group because guy 2 was battling some form of cancer. Guy 1 brought that up in his next flame and really just humiliated guy 2 in front of hundreds of people. Until deja killed their backlog, you could still find both those posts, and hundreds more just like it. Imagine trying to live that down.
It's incidents like that that really cause me to agree with privacy advocates about the danger the Internet poses. Never in human history has it been as easy to delve into a person's past as it is now even without a superorganized listing of their thoughts and opinions of everything they felt compelled to write about for years into the past. Such a complete archive really would pose a lot of problems for many people (imagine just a 10 year log of alt.support.cancer... !) Usenet has since its inception been a celebration of free expression. Stifling that because people have to worry about repercussions far in the future would be kind of shitty.
With that in mind, like I say stick to the tech newsgroups, and you'll run into far fewer problems.:)
Exactly. This study loses a lot of its credibility given that everyone is buying more music. CD sales were up 8 percent. These are prosperous times, and it's hard to judge how much Napster is bumping up music sales versus how much everyone's fat stock portfolio is:)
It reminds me a lot of local politicians where I live who try to take credit for the reduction in crime we've seen over the past few years. Uhm, well Mr. Mayor, the entire country has seen a drop in crime in the last decade...
Are surveys even relevant anymore? It seems like with enough of either motivation or number massaging or both, you can get a survey nowadays to say just about anything. Napster has two studies under its belt that say that its users buy more music, and RIAA has that many or more that say the exact opposite. Obviously, something isn't clicking here. I've heard studies that proclaim drinking increases life expectancy, studies that say that the oil on top of a new jar of peanut butter is carcinogenic and causes cancer in rats, even studies that say that eating chocolate may ward of some diseases. Supposedly eating Cheerios fends off heart attacks or leukemia cancer or something. In a day and age when every trade group can pull some study out of their ass favorable to their industry or product, I've learned to just ignore them. One wonders if the judge in the RIAA v. Napster case might do the same.
I've read a deposition from this guy Valenti (head of MPAA) before, and he really seems to lack a fundamental understanding of the technological status quo. Not only is he basically clueless of what's going on online, save a vague premonition that it's illegal and that he should sue, but any, and I mean any (wo)man who has traversed their way as far up the corporate ladder as he has should be astute enough to realize that the last thing to do right now is to sue.
I mean, talk about bad timing! Napster would have to rank at or near the top of the list of most covered Internet stories ever. You don't think the press isn't going to see this as a Napster analogue and just gobble it up? If there's one thing that really cemented Napster's growth, it's the fourth estate. I doubt if they would have anywhere near 20,000,000 users if Shawn Fanning wasn't on Newsweek and every newspaper and pop-culture rag in the country wrote multiple Op-Ed and news pieces on it.
And now this flaming idiot Valenti decides to sue! I really, really do feel for Scour - not because they're being sued. Ho no - I just hope that they have the bandwidth and servers to accomodate the five to ten extra million people that are going to sign on once the word "Scour" gets drag through the press just like "Napster" did a few months ago.
On one level Valenti is doing the right thing, I suppose. But come on. How stupid can you get? I would have at least waited until the Napster issue became stale with the public before throwing essentially the same lawsuit on the table again. It doesn't take a genious to tell you that Napster has benefitted from the RIAA suit far, far more than it has suffered. Even if they end up losing, they've built a brand-name that no amount of advertising could have ever hoped to achieve.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point. I'm assuming that by "newer technology" you are alluding to Taco's idea of a network of airplanes, each of which knows the other's location. Stop and think about this for a minute - anyone with a semester's worth of high school physics can tell you that once you have an object's velocity and direction (i.e. vector), hitting it with, oh, say, a missile, becomes as trivial as solving a math problem. It's quite obvious, really, that such a system won't exist until the military can be absolutely sure (110% in MilSpeak) that no one could intercept such data. And that will be a long time coming.
There have been many times when I've wanted to undertake a project and release the source but haven't simply because I'm self-conscious about the code I write. I feel almost embarassed at the thought of someone seeing sloppy, inelegant code with my name on it. I'm just curious if a.) you've ever had this problem and b.) in general, what have people's responses been (i.e. flames, a patch and some consoling words, etc.)?
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Heh.. moron. Clickitty click.
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Every press release is an advertisment. If you haven't learned that, I would implore you to actually read a few.
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My firewall is rather peculiar in that instead of blocking everything, it's open to the public *except* for my ISP's blocks. If you want, I can provide you with my script.
Can I just say that that's about the stupidest reason to have a firewall I've ever heard of. Besides irony, what exactly is such a device providing you with? Last I checked, Time Warner wasn't rooting peoples boxes, thrashing their hard drives, exploiting unpatched copies of Sendmail, or otherwise wreaking havoc. I get scanned once every two weeks on port 119, of all things, by my ISP. I get scanned approximately 3-4 times a day by random other hosts from around the world on pretty much every port between 1 and 1024. In my opinion your stance - "Your biggest threat won't be the script kiddies" - is highly naive.
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I think you're missing the point. Placing a computer behind an NAT firewall is no safer than just running the firewall on the computer itself. Most all of the responses on this thread have been along the lines of "Dude, just NAT and firewall your box", which is pointless considering he only has one PC. An entire night to "bring it all together" seems like a waste of time when three or four firewall rules could do the trick just as nicely.
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Oh they are not outrageous - c'mon. I can remember back to a time when the mere thought of getting 2.5mbps of bandwidth for $40 a month would have made me soil myself. It's time to gain a little perspective here. You have no idea what a good deal you are getting; before you go whining about pricing perhaps you should check out the going rates for a modem connection in most parts of Europe, which is still priced per minute of usage, and where DSL is almost nonexistant. @Home is providing you with an extraordinarily high level of service for your money, and the fact of the matter is that they don't charge too much for what they offer already. What they offer is T1 level service for a little more than a dollar a day. If you really think they charge to much, I'd invite you to make a few phone calls and verify the price of a full-blown T1 line.
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A cursory glance at their website reveals that they distribute the source to the kernel they are running, which is modified. However the real bread-and-butter of the TiVo (their proprietary filesystem and, most importantly, their client software) is closed and will be forever and ever. You seem to be hinting at a GPL violation but if you read the GPL license more closely you'll see that they are in total compliance.
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I agree that suing gun makers is ludicrous. Guns don't kill people. People kill people.
BUT we should and do have every right to sue the tobacco companies. You think the entertainment industry is insidious and sneaky and without morals when it comes to MP3/screwing artists/etc? You ain't seen nothing - nothing - yet. In terms of morals, tobacco companies make RIAA and the MPAA look like they were sanctified by the pope himself.
You take for granted the fact that smoking is addictive, but people didn't always know that. Tobacco companies knew that for about 60 years and never told anyone because it was such a great way to make money. The jacked up the levels of nicotine in cigarettes to hook more smokers. They advertised to kids (Joe Camel?! Hullo?). They are just complete scumbags and slimeballs and the simple truth is that they've done everything short of forcing cigarettes into people's mouths. One wonders how many smokers took up the habit just because they were smoking cigarettes that were engineered to be more addictive - that figure has got to be in the millions. As far as I'm concerned RJR, B&W, and all the rest of the tobacco companies can rot in hell for all of eternity and no one would really be worse off.
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Isn't this just sort of a web tablet in disguise? Without a keyboard there isn't any need for the traditional two-paned laptop. Instead you'll just have an LCD screen used for both input and output. I've been hearing about these things for years but have yet to see one that really works and is here now - if there was, I'd buy it. Nothing like reading Slashdot on the shitter :)
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hypocrisy - The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess.
No.
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I find this story vaguely hypocritical considering Slashdot obscured their source code for about 3 years to maintain security.
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Hah! What, you're saying it's unethical to screw the same record companies which have been unethically screwing artists for 50 years? That's your position? Come on. I think you need to make a distinction between murder - the evils of which I don't need to rehash - and reciprocity, which is exactly what these record companies are getting.
I sleep fine with 6000 MP3s on my hard drive, 15-20 queued for download, and thousands uploaded to people across the world. And that's not because I'm amoral - it's because I don't consider it unethical at all.
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Bzzt. Napster is all about a new model of distribution. "Piracy" to me invokes images of swashbuckling on the high seas. In the sense of copyright it is merely a contrivance meant to paint copyright violation in a bad light.
But what if there are no copyrights? Napster suddenly becomes a new model of distribution (sound familiar?). They are making a business out of piracy only in a world where copyrights are protectable. Unfortunately, the internet has proven that they are increasingly not. Essentially, that is Napster's argument - that the whole entire system is going to undergo a fundamental change, and they are at the forefront of it.
You can go ahead and scribble and rant about piracy all you want, but the fact is it's only illegal as long as the law is on the books. The 20 million upper-middle class, educated white people (you know, the ones that vote) that have signed up with Napster represent a huge chunk of political equity. Some enterprising politician is going to realize this. It would not surprise me if you saw legislation as early as the 107th session extending the AHRA or amending the "fair use" clause to support Internet filesharing. "Piracy", at least in the Napster sense, looks to be an increasingly deprecated term.
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ROFL.. Napster makes a fat whopping zero every month. They make a fat whopping zero every year. And that's just revenues. On the whole they're hemorraghing to the tune of millions of dollars every month.
When was the last time you paid to use Napster?
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Gnutella / Freenet arose from the "ashes" of Napster, but they won't "win" because of some grand decentralization theme--if the RIAA / gov't wanted to, they could shut them down. (Imagine a special, temporary court, JUST to issue orders to stop Gnutella servers and hear appeals...)
Oooh.. -1, Clueless. Freenet especially cannot be shut down, not only because there are servers in many countries, but because in order to shut the thing down you have to prove that a law was broken. In the realm of copyright, that means proving that a person is using their computer to distribute copyrighted material. With Freenet that's not even possible - not only is it impossible to determine what you actually have stored in your Freenet cache, you can't even tell who's sendin it to you. So no, Freenet is not going down without either the will of the people running it or large-scale military deployment.
Gnutella has safety in numbers. Do you really think, what with a 5 month (or more) backlog and tremendous legal fees, they are going to haul ten thousand people into court just to shut down their computer. Nonsense. They can fire off all the cease-and-desists they want, but the simple fact is that they don't even have jurisdiction. Not every computer is located in America.
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But of course! SETI is and always was a geek dick-measuring contest. There are people that really would have paid for one of these.
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The Internet (by that I guess I mean TCP/IP) was designed specifically for the "smoking crater" scenario. Remember that it was a product of a military institution, and came about during the 60s. Pretty much anything that the military developed during the cold war was built with nuclear war in mind, and TCP/IP is no exception. It's funny that you should use "smoking crater" because that's quite literally what they had in mind: the TCP/IP protocol was built so that traffic would be automatically rerouted in case something got nuked. The Internet hasn't changed much in thirty years. If America were to sink tomorrow, hypothetically the impact in terms of connectivity would not be too bad. Instead of passing through an American backbone, traffic would just go somewhere else. Add up all the links in the world, right down to the last analog modem, and there will always be a way to get from point A to point B, America or no America, given the vastness of the Internet.
Now, in the real world, it's not that simple. America definitely has more bandwidth than any other nation in the world as far as I know. Killing all the American connections would cause horrendous slowdowns through the web as all that traffic was suddenly routed through pipes that weren't built to handle it. Not to mention the fact that all American-run websites would be down, of which there are many. So, the bottom line is yes, there would still be a self-sufficient Internet, but whether it actually performed in a timely fashion is a matter open to discussion.
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Do what my public school did when they got their Unix server: firewall the whole subnet into a proxy server so they can censor what web pages you access! Yay!
Oh, and consulting any one of the Learning UNIX books out there ain't too bad either. O'Reilly is always a good choice. "Unix for Dummies" is informative and pretty funny too.
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Just out of curiosity, what added insight would a lawyer provide to this discussion?
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I would concentrate on the comp.* and other technical newsgroups rather than trying to mirror the whole damn thing. I would hazard a guess that a lot of that 10% of traffic that Deja said made up their backpost searching was looking for technical support, hardware information, or software help. Having a 15 year backlog of rec.humor.jokes or alt.fan.brittany-spears (or any other pop-culture NG, of which there are thousands) might be cute, but it's really rather worthless.
... !) Usenet has since its inception been a celebration of free expression. Stifling that because people have to worry about repercussions far in the future would be kind of shitty.
:)
Just as food for thought, there are also some privacy issues here. You have to ask yourself: do you really want a decade or two of your scribblings to be instantly available and indexable and searchable by anyone on the planet? Think about it - every immature flame, every embarrasing post, every moment you'd love to live down, now showcased and painfully easy to find by someone with a couple of minutes and a computer... I'm kind of glad that Slashdot "forgets" or de-indexes my comments after a few weeks. There are a lot that I'd just love to bury and in effect have as soon as they exit my user info page and leave the search index. Now imagine them staying with you for years, even decades.
And it can get worse than simple embarassment. I know for a definite fact of one case where two guys were engaged in a long-standing flamefest in a NG. Guy 1 went on dejanews.com to look at what else the other guy (Guy 2) was posting... and found some two-year old backposts to a cancer support group because guy 2 was battling some form of cancer. Guy 1 brought that up in his next flame and really just humiliated guy 2 in front of hundreds of people. Until deja killed their backlog, you could still find both those posts, and hundreds more just like it. Imagine trying to live that down.
It's incidents like that that really cause me to agree with privacy advocates about the danger the Internet poses. Never in human history has it been as easy to delve into a person's past as it is now even without a superorganized listing of their thoughts and opinions of everything they felt compelled to write about for years into the past. Such a complete archive really would pose a lot of problems for many people (imagine just a 10 year log of alt.support.cancer
With that in mind, like I say stick to the tech newsgroups, and you'll run into far fewer problems.
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Exactly. This study loses a lot of its credibility given that everyone is buying more music. CD sales were up 8 percent. These are prosperous times, and it's hard to judge how much Napster is bumping up music sales versus how much everyone's fat stock portfolio is :)
It reminds me a lot of local politicians where I live who try to take credit for the reduction in crime we've seen over the past few years. Uhm, well Mr. Mayor, the entire country has seen a drop in crime in the last decade...
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Are surveys even relevant anymore? It seems like with enough of either motivation or number massaging or both, you can get a survey nowadays to say just about anything. Napster has two studies under its belt that say that its users buy more music, and RIAA has that many or more that say the exact opposite. Obviously, something isn't clicking here. I've heard studies that proclaim drinking increases life expectancy, studies that say that the oil on top of a new jar of peanut butter is carcinogenic and causes cancer in rats, even studies that say that eating chocolate may ward of some diseases. Supposedly eating Cheerios fends off heart attacks or leukemia cancer or something. In a day and age when every trade group can pull some study out of their ass favorable to their industry or product, I've learned to just ignore them. One wonders if the judge in the RIAA v. Napster case might do the same.
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I've read a deposition from this guy Valenti (head of MPAA) before, and he really seems to lack a fundamental understanding of the technological status quo. Not only is he basically clueless of what's going on online, save a vague premonition that it's illegal and that he should sue, but any, and I mean any (wo)man who has traversed their way as far up the corporate ladder as he has should be astute enough to realize that the last thing to do right now is to sue.
I mean, talk about bad timing! Napster would have to rank at or near the top of the list of most covered Internet stories ever. You don't think the press isn't going to see this as a Napster analogue and just gobble it up? If there's one thing that really cemented Napster's growth, it's the fourth estate. I doubt if they would have anywhere near 20,000,000 users if Shawn Fanning wasn't on Newsweek and every newspaper and pop-culture rag in the country wrote multiple Op-Ed and news pieces on it.
And now this flaming idiot Valenti decides to sue! I really, really do feel for Scour - not because they're being sued. Ho no - I just hope that they have the bandwidth and servers to accomodate the five to ten extra million people that are going to sign on once the word "Scour" gets drag through the press just like "Napster" did a few months ago.
On one level Valenti is doing the right thing, I suppose. But come on. How stupid can you get? I would have at least waited until the Napster issue became stale with the public before throwing essentially the same lawsuit on the table again. It doesn't take a genious to tell you that Napster has benefitted from the RIAA suit far, far more than it has suffered. Even if they end up losing, they've built a brand-name that no amount of advertising could have ever hoped to achieve.
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