... and print out "Your Wireless Network is insecure,
Please fix it!"?
Probably a nice, and polite thing to do, but it could end up with you in jail
for life -- especially if you warn a government office (using unauthorized access to a government computer to cause a change in (security) policy).
POLICE!. FREEZE!
Keep your hands in the air, and step away from the computer!
About the only one of those three that MS-Windos has over linux would be the ability to switch display modes quickly.
At this point, I'd say that Linux is easier to install than MS-Windows (and you don't need to go begging to someone everytime you change your hardware). I've seen a Windows user gawk at the ease with which I was able to video boards and have the new drivers automagically loaded by kudzu.
Have you ever tried swapping motherboards on Windows? How much hair did you lose? Try doing it with Linux.. It's almost painless.
Going against Joe's diner is pretty easy -- Threaten to beat him into submission with litigation unless he cops a plea.
Going aginst Joe MegaCorp is a bit harder. They can afford to put massive effort into stoping your prosecution. Note the work of Microsoft in the DOJ case. Also: the tobacco companies for the last 50 years.
Before MS, it was IBM. When the government moved against IBM, the litigation took the better part of a decade. The government had an entire floor of a building taken up by the legal team working against IBM. When IBM found out about this they decided to do a bit of psychological warfare. They demolished the building across the street from the government team, and raised a new building for the IBM legal team (with big 'IBM legal' logos facing the Government team's offices).
Between opposition like that, and the fact that your congresboss is getting worried about loosing thousands of dollars in bribes^w donations,
it's easier to go after the little guy.
While I'm at it, I'm going to use some information that they used at their site in a slightly different order:
First, the FTC said that [Microsoft] failed to implement and document procedures to prevent, detect, monitor or document unauthorized access.
Hence, [Microsoft knows] of no instance where a Passport user's information has ever been compromised, in hindsight we wish we had held ourselves to an even higher bar.
Now whack me on the back of the head with a two-by-four if I'm wrong, but given that they had been lax in monitoring for security violations, is it any shock that they don't know that we^w someone violated them seven ways from tuesday?
Sometimes, the government may feel that it is in the interest of the (short/medium-term) public good to turn a blind eye on violations.
That's not a reason. That's an excuse-- often put forward by big-business-controled media outlets. The incessant blinking at violations
is what caused enron, WorldCom, and the current trashing of the stock market.
Blinking at violations by the big boys is in the interests of the big-money criminals -- who happen to also pay big money bribes^wdonations to the
politicians who make the rules.
The truth of the matter is that just about
everybody in congress today should be charged with influence peddling -- but that migh be 'un-american' and 'get in the way of the war on drugs'.
(someone else said:)
In the long long term I have confidence that things will be OK. Unfortunately, by "long long" I mean centuries.
Given the direction things are going, the closest thing to an 'OK' solution would be the peaceful collapse of our society (as opposed to widespread horror and tyrany). I have a friend (a very thoughtful friend) who is declining to have children because he and his wife refuse to bring children into the future that they see coming. I see the same future, but am only slightly less defeatist about it.
Actually, it just might be illegal. They're using their market monopoly in desktop systems to muscle their way into financial services and
personal information warehousing. This might be very framable as a Sherman Act violation.
Anybody got a spare fortune and a couple of good lawyers?
I'm not going to give up my right to not be deemed a criminal until proven otherwise. The government can't protect all of the citizens all of the time, nor should it. Just by living, we take a risk.
Agreed. The people on those airplanes and in the World Trade Towers died because we live in a society where we are taught to let the government take care of our security. People were calling for help on their cell phones. They didn't consider the fact, that -- unlike in the movies -- the cavalry can't help you at 10,000 feet.
For the 4'th plane, the cavalry did arrive -- in the form of an F-16. They did the only thing that they could do, and shot the airliner down (apparently after the passengers had retaken control of the plane, but nobody knew that at the time).
I do believe the first news reports that indicated that the 4th plane was shot down (along with the fact that one engine was found miles away from the impact site). Not that I blame them. If I was an air commander under similar circumstances, I would have probably ordered the same thing. At best, I might have waited a bit longer, but we're talking a matter of minutes here.
My point is that if the passengers of the first 3 airliners had also taken responsibility for their own safety and security, 9/11 would have never occurred, and the 4'th airliner would never have been shot down. It's now the case for airline passengers, but still not the case for the rest of the country. -- and we're still not being responsible for the fact that our freedoms are more likely to be supressed by our own lawmakers than some suicidal yahoos from outside the country.
Hardware router/hub/firewalls may be a more interesting problem.. The patent seems to apply to using rules to figure out which (physical) port to send stuff to... I don't think it references anything like the idea of rewriting packets so that they go (for example) to a machine at a different address or a different TCP/UDP port on the recieving machine.
This isn't a serious lawyer-cease-and-desist type of situation. It's just someone bringing up the possibility that an old patent infringes, and noting that the probability is that it does not.. ianal/ymmv.
It'd be nice if someone had a few thousand dollars to hire a lawyer and get a more definitive answer, but it seems like prior art was also mentioned in the (two message) thread, so this isn't (yet) a serious issue.
The patent seems to only apply if you use numeric offsets into fields.
If the patent is an intent to patent just about any rule-based firewalling, just about any commercial firewall product -- like FW1 product for Solaris would be simple examples of prior art. If this isn't the case, then it's got too many differences between itself and IPFilter or IPtables to be of much use in shutting down the IPfilter project.
Just because the Nazi government was vicious, nasty, violent and engaged in the nastiest act of genocide since North America's Indian Wars, doesn't mean that everything that they did was without a decent purpose.
If you accept that cars are a good thing (debatable), the purpose of the VW bug was to have a car that most people could afford. Kinda like the Model T but cheaper and better.
6...... An unknown band will have a hard time getting known if there is no place for people to first find out about them. This is the biggest thing major labels offer, even bigger than the money...... They have the power to get people to listen to the music, and that is something that P2P doesn't offer.
A place where people can go to listen to bands that they otherwise wouldn't know about is precisely what P2P offers to bands, and is exactly why the RIAA is afraid of P2P. That's why they sued Napster into oblivian even though napster increased their sales.. Napster -- and other P2P networks provide a marketing venue that's independant of the RIAA monopolies. If P2P is allowed to live, bands will have an actual choice if they want people to hear what they're putting out. Once the companies lose their monopoly they'd have to offer reasonably fair contracts to artists to get them to sign. That would cut back on their profits (and, yes they do profit off of small artists).
If Napster were alive today, I could go look up Dog Wokers' Union and hear what they were did before I decided whether to go see them. The Wokers would only have to have one small server up for me to find them -- but if people liked them, there might be dozens (or even thousands) of peer sites making their music available. The more popular their music, the more numerous the sites.
P2P provides a cheap auto-scaling distribution system and a (semi) centralized catalogue of music that any would-be listener can easily find and search -- and it also allows the users to choose what they want to hear, rather than waiting for some paid bobbin to decide to let let them hear what they're looking for. It has the potential to provide everything that an artist needs without having to sign away their soul, hip-hop, R&b , or whatever it is that they play.
Record companies do make money on the small bands, but the contracts are put together in such a way that it doesn't look like that to the bands. Consider, for example, the practice of giving away $2 CDs and charging the bands $11 each for them.
The "costs" that the record company charges to the bands are often inflated so that the band officially loses money, but the record company makes money off of the charges that they assign to the band (and almost never has to pay royalties).
The way that the royalty system seems to go is that there are royalties that go to the recording company and friends, and then there are royalties that go to the band. All costs come out of the royalties that go to the band. Profits have generally been rolling onto the record company books long before the band actually sees black ink. Add in the inflated costs assigned to the band, and I think that record companies do quite nicely by even the smaller bands that they sign.
1. Artists are not robbed. They willing sign unfair contracts of their own free will. I agree the contracts are unfair, but if you agree to give me $5 in exchange for me giving you nothing, you can't complain that I have robbed you.
Part of the reason why bands are willing to sell their souls to the record companies is that the record companies have pretty much sewn up the market on marketing of bands. If you want to have airplay, you have to play by their rules.
Company agents sometimes also have a nasty way of getting a band to sign. They will get the band in a happy moment, and get them to sign a pre-contract agreement. With words like "It's harmless", and "It just says that we're going to negotiate", it's generally done under circumstances where the band members don't have much opportunity to really read and understand the agreement -- "but that's OK, because your lawyers will have a chance to OK the full final agreement".
Once it sees the light of day, the terms of the 'interim' contract binds the band into near oblivian until and unless they sign a final contract. The band then has pretty much two choices: "Sign whatever we hand you, or die".
There, franky, isn't that much legal stuff people would be interested in sharing that way.
There's a LOT of stuff that doesn't get canned by the RIAA corporations -- and that's what they're actually worried about. There are a few things to remember here:
Recording contracts rob artists blind
everybody BUT the musicians makes money on most recording contracts
90% of all recording artists end up owing money to the record label.
most artists are just happy to know that somebody is listening to their stuff.
Most musicians make money from touring. They eat losses on the recording contracts because it gives them exposure for their tours
P2P music distribution could replace recording contracts for many musicians.
Let's say, for example, that I hear that "The Dog Woker's Union" (a mythical band) is going to play at a local venue. The best deal for me would be to go to AudioGalaxy and see if they've made some, or all of their songs available. I download a couple and listen to them.
If I like what I hear, I'm MUCH more likely to gather my friends together for a live go-listen, where they get much of the door money. For me. this is far better than listening to the local top-40 station and praying that they'll play a Dog Wokers' Union song.
If they've self produced a CD, then I can pay them $10 for the CD and they get to keep $7 after printing costs (as opposed to them having to pay Sony Records $11 for their own CD, selling it for $15, and keeping $4).
Also: those bands that really have hopes of making money selling CDs can still sell the CDs on the net -- and make more money off of a few thousand sales than they'd ever get from 1 million sales on an RIAA contract.
If you don't want the RIAA to use your bandwidth, don't make their stuff available. The actual purpose of this setup would be to effectively make RIAA stuff unavailable. If any RIAA content was available, then it would generally have to be posted by RIAA staff. Think of it as an effective RIAA boycott (and at their request, too!).
I guess I didn't make it clear: Each user wouldn't have to register every work tht he/she downloaded and then made available again. A work would only have to be authenticated the first time it was posted (nominally by the artist that made the word). Once a work was authenticated, users would be able to share it freely.
In terms of the long term fight for the freedom to use P2P networks to distribute Indie works, this may actually be good. I was thinking about the AudioGalaxy takedown, and I think that I came up with a scheme that allowed them to make legit works available by making the people who post the songs responsible for them:
Before submitting a song to AudioGalaxy, a user has to 'appropriately identify' themselves. Once a user is identified, they can submit songs to the AudioGalaxy universe to be authenticated for distribution. When an identified user submits a song for use, the song is fingerprinted, and identified as 'good'. A properly identified song is the responsibility of it's submitter. AudioGalaxy is simply a tranmission medium. If a copyright holder feels that their song is improperly submitted, then they can go to the person responsible for the song for the 'publishing' of it. If a user is identified as consistently submitting unauthorized copyright material, then their entire set of authentications can be revoked.
user authentication
Users can be authenticated by any of a set of means -- eg:
A credit card authorization (should appear on credit card summaries as something obvious like "ID verification audogalaxy-id.com" with the domain (and www.domain) pointing to a page that precisely describs what the ID was for and about and what the associated person would be responsible for [[in case the ID was the result of a credit card theft]]).
Thawte (www.thawte.com) allows all sorts of ways to authenticate the identify a person -- including their 'web of trust' system which is free, and various paid methods.
Persons who don't have access to (or don't want to use) other methods, could mail in a notarized copy of personal ID,
Pick your favorite other method of verification.
Once a user is verified, they would be issued an SSL certificate that would allow them to submit songs (automatedly) for authentication.
SSL certificates allow for repudiation, so if someone's ID was used inappropriately, they would be able to issue repudiation.. It should be
possible to issue repudiation starting from a specific date (when the
certificate was compromised), generally (e.g. if the identity was issued
improperly), or even for specific songs (if a publishing authorization turns out to have been mistaken, or the publisher has second thoughts.).
Sharing would then be checked for authentication of a song, rather than a record company claim (after the fact) of copyright infringement. If a record company claims copyright on a song, they would identify it by fingerprint (or a fingerprint summary) then DMCA procedures for notifying the 'owner' of the impugned song would follow.
The point here is that the users are then explicitly responsible for the songs that they post -- combining this with the fact that the RIAA is now proving themselves capable of going after the individual violators, this means that they should have a much harder time going after distribution services like AudioGalaxy for actions that individual customers are really responsible for. (and able to be held responsible for)
On the other hand, the RIAA's high-handed tactics may backfire on them, and provide a real boost to the indie music industry.
Jean Jacques Perry was one of my favorites (from the mid-late '70s). I loved his "Moog Indigo". It actually took me years to realize tha one of the tracks was actually 'Turkey in the Straw'. If you can find his music, I'd highly recommend it.
Most mines are made of plastic or (in old cases) metal. Metal cases are no longer used because they're too easy to find with metal detectors.
Very few (if any) organisms are able to eat raw plastic or pure metal {,alloys).
They were happy enough to find something that could eat oil slicks.
Once you breach the case, you could get something to eat the explosives inside, but once the case is breached, the chemicals would probably be leached out and/or eaten by bugs, etc...
Courtney Love was pretty much neutral on the effect of Napster on the artist. Her real point was that it didn't care. The RIAA was claiming to be defending the rights of the poor artists, but it's the RIAA who was butt-fscking them with a sliver-filled baseball bat. Most artists never get the money that comes from their albums, even if they sell a million units.
+ or - 10% in sales because of the difference that napster makes doesn't matter to the artist because they don't get any of that money anyways. The RIAA was simply using artists as a shield in their fight for more control of the artists..
The RIAA sold 10.8 percent more CDs that year even after increasing the price on those discs by over 12.3 percent.
Do you know where I can get some of those sales stats? I pointed them out to Jan in a feedback on her site, and she responded with a query as to where I could substantiate those claims. (I originally saw them on a slashdot response many moons ago). A proper pointer to a source of those stats would be very useful.
BTW I had no idea she was such a good writer. There are lots of well-considered articles on her site, on all manner of topics. Gotta spend a day there sometime soon!
From the information of an earlier poster: Her father was able to repeatedly get teaching jobs despite being branded a 'communist' by the FBI and having his employers harrassed by them on an ongoing basis.
This indicates that he was
a free thinker
a good teacher
as likely to pass these abilities on to his daughter as his students.
P2P sharing has a grey area where the RIIA can throw millions of dollars worth of legal fees into the fray to beat someone into submission. They are also nice big juicy and (most importantly) popular sites that provide a real alternative to RIIA marketing.
Janis Ian's site would never have been seen by most of us had it not been for the posting of this article... Similarly for CDs put out by my friends. Most people don't know where to go to find such things.
P2P networks, on the other hand, are a well-known venue for access to artist's music that do not have any connection to the RIAA. If a budding artists have a choice for the distribution of their music, they might not agree to recording deals that give the record companies effective ownership of all the artist's output for years or decades. That is why the RIIA has been beating these P2P networks into submission despite the fact that they clearly appear to be increasing music sales...
They threaten the RIAA's monopoly on the market, and give artists some choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably a nice, and polite thing to do, but it could end up with you in jail for life -- especially if you warn a government office (using unauthorized access to a government computer to cause a change in (security) policy).
POLICE!. FREEZE!
Keep your hands in the air, and step away from the computer!
At this point, I'd say that Linux is easier to install than MS-Windows (and you don't need to go begging to someone everytime you change your hardware). I've seen a Windows user gawk at the ease with which I was able to video boards and have the new drivers automagically loaded by kudzu.
Have you ever tried swapping motherboards on Windows? How much hair did you lose? Try doing it with Linux.. It's almost painless.
That's why I'm looking for someone with the money to do a private prosecution.
Then, of course, there's MS's council of record (at the end of the consent decree:
Charles E. Buffo[o]n.
Going aginst Joe MegaCorp is a bit harder. They can afford to put massive effort into stoping your prosecution. Note the work of Microsoft in the DOJ case. Also: the tobacco companies for the last 50 years.
Before MS, it was IBM. When the government moved against IBM, the litigation took the better part of a decade. The government had an entire floor of a building taken up by the legal team working against IBM. When IBM found out about this they decided to do a bit of psychological warfare. They demolished the building across the street from the government team, and raised a new building for the IBM legal team (with big 'IBM legal' logos facing the Government team's offices).
Between opposition like that, and the fact that your congresboss is getting worried about loosing thousands of dollars in bribes^w donations, it's easier to go after the little guy.
While I'm at it, I'm going to use some information that they used at their site in a slightly different order:
- First, the FTC said that [Microsoft] failed to implement and document procedures to prevent, detect, monitor or document unauthorized access.
-
Hence, [Microsoft knows] of no instance where a Passport user's information has ever been compromised, in hindsight we wish we had held ourselves to an even higher bar.
Now whack me on the back of the head with a two-by-four if I'm wrong, but given that they had been lax in monitoring for security violations, is it any shock that they don't know that we^w someone violated them seven ways from tuesday?That's not a reason. That's an excuse-- often put forward by big-business-controled media outlets. The incessant blinking at violations is what caused enron, WorldCom, and the current trashing of the stock market.
Blinking at violations by the big boys is in the interests of the big-money criminals -- who happen to also pay big money bribes^wdonations to the politicians who make the rules.
The truth of the matter is that just about everybody in congress today should be charged with influence peddling -- but that migh be 'un-american' and 'get in the way of the war on drugs'.
(someone else said:)
In the long long term I have confidence that things will be OK. Unfortunately, by "long long" I mean centuries.
Given the direction things are going, the closest thing to an 'OK' solution would be the peaceful collapse of our society (as opposed to widespread horror and tyrany). I have a friend (a very thoughtful friend) who is declining to have children because he and his wife refuse to bring children into the future that they see coming. I see the same future, but am only slightly less defeatist about it.
Anybody got a spare fortune and a couple of good lawyers?
Agreed. The people on those airplanes and in the World Trade Towers died because we live in a society where we are taught to let the government take care of our security. People were calling for help on their cell phones. They didn't consider the fact, that -- unlike in the movies -- the cavalry can't help you at 10,000 feet. For the 4'th plane, the cavalry did arrive -- in the form of an F-16. They did the only thing that they could do, and shot the airliner down (apparently after the passengers had retaken control of the plane, but nobody knew that at the time).
I do believe the first news reports that indicated that the 4th plane was shot down (along with the fact that one engine was found miles away from the impact site). Not that I blame them. If I was an air commander under similar circumstances, I would have probably ordered the same thing. At best, I might have waited a bit longer, but we're talking a matter of minutes here.
My point is that if the passengers of the first 3 airliners had also taken responsibility for their own safety and security, 9/11 would have never occurred, and the 4'th airliner would never have been shot down. It's now the case for airline passengers, but still not the case for the rest of the country. -- and we're still not being responsible for the fact that our freedoms are more likely to be supressed by our own lawmakers than some suicidal yahoos from outside the country.
The patent is (as I remember) from 1995. I.E. relatively young, as the internet goes.
Hardware router/hub/firewalls may be a more interesting problem.. The patent seems to apply to using rules to figure out which (physical) port to send stuff to... I don't think it references anything like the idea of rewriting packets so that they go (for example) to a machine at a different address or a different TCP/UDP port on the recieving machine.
It'd be nice if someone had a few thousand dollars to hire a lawyer and get a more definitive answer, but it seems like prior art was also mentioned in the (two message) thread, so this isn't (yet) a serious issue.
The patent seems to only apply if you use numeric offsets into fields. If the patent is an intent to patent just about any rule-based firewalling, just about any commercial firewall product -- like FW1 product for Solaris would be simple examples of prior art. If this isn't the case, then it's got too many differences between itself and IPFilter or IPtables to be of much use in shutting down the IPfilter project.
If you accept that cars are a good thing (debatable), the purpose of the VW bug was to have a car that most people could afford. Kinda like the Model T but cheaper and better.
A place where people can go to listen to bands that they otherwise wouldn't know about is precisely what P2P offers to bands, and is exactly why the RIAA is afraid of P2P. That's why they sued Napster into oblivian even though napster increased their sales.. Napster -- and other P2P networks provide a marketing venue that's independant of the RIAA monopolies. If P2P is allowed to live, bands will have an actual choice if they want people to hear what they're putting out. Once the companies lose their monopoly they'd have to offer reasonably fair contracts to artists to get them to sign. That would cut back on their profits (and, yes they do profit off of small artists).
If Napster were alive today, I could go look up Dog Wokers' Union and hear what they were did before I decided whether to go see them. The Wokers would only have to have one small server up for me to find them -- but if people liked them, there might be dozens (or even thousands) of peer sites making their music available. The more popular their music, the more numerous the sites.
P2P provides a cheap auto-scaling distribution system and a (semi) centralized catalogue of music that any would-be listener can easily find and search -- and it also allows the users to choose what they want to hear, rather than waiting for some paid bobbin to decide to let let them hear what they're looking for. It has the potential to provide everything that an artist needs without having to sign away their soul, hip-hop, R&b , or whatever it is that they play.
The "costs" that the record company charges to the bands are often inflated so that the band officially loses money, but the record company makes money off of the charges that they assign to the band (and almost never has to pay royalties).
The way that the royalty system seems to go is that there are royalties that go to the recording company and friends, and then there are royalties that go to the band. All costs come out of the royalties that go to the band. Profits have generally been rolling onto the record company books long before the band actually sees black ink. Add in the inflated costs assigned to the band, and I think that record companies do quite nicely by even the smaller bands that they sign.
1. Artists are not robbed. They willing sign unfair contracts of their own free will. I agree the contracts are unfair, but if you agree to give me $5 in exchange for me giving you nothing, you can't complain that I have robbed you.
Part of the reason why bands are willing to sell their souls to the record companies is that the record companies have pretty much sewn up the market on marketing of bands. If you want to have airplay, you have to play by their rules.
Company agents sometimes also have a nasty way of getting a band to sign. They will get the band in a happy moment, and get them to sign a pre-contract agreement. With words like "It's harmless", and "It just says that we're going to negotiate", it's generally done under circumstances where the band members don't have much opportunity to really read and understand the agreement -- "but that's OK, because your lawyers will have a chance to OK the full final agreement".
Once it sees the light of day, the terms of the 'interim' contract binds the band into near oblivian until and unless they sign a final contract. The band then has pretty much two choices: "Sign whatever we hand you, or die".
There's a LOT of stuff that doesn't get canned by the RIAA corporations -- and that's what they're actually worried about. There are a few things to remember here:
- Recording contracts rob artists blind
- everybody BUT the musicians makes money on most recording contracts
- 90% of all recording artists end up owing money to the record label.
- most artists are just happy to know that somebody is listening to their stuff.
- Most musicians make money from touring. They eat losses on the recording contracts because it gives them exposure for their tours
- P2P music distribution could replace recording contracts for many musicians.
Let's say, for example, that I hear that "The Dog Woker's Union" (a mythical band) is going to play at a local venue. The best deal for me would be to go to AudioGalaxy and see if they've made some, or all of their songs available. I download a couple and listen to them. If I like what I hear, I'm MUCH more likely to gather my friends together for a live go-listen, where they get much of the door money. For me. this is far better than listening to the local top-40 station and praying that they'll play a Dog Wokers' Union song.If they've self produced a CD, then I can pay them $10 for the CD and they get to keep $7 after printing costs (as opposed to them having to pay Sony Records $11 for their own CD, selling it for $15, and keeping $4).
Also: those bands that really have hopes of making money selling CDs can still sell the CDs on the net -- and make more money off of a few thousand sales than they'd ever get from 1 million sales on an RIAA contract.
I guess I didn't make it clear: Each user wouldn't have to register every work tht he/she downloaded and then made available again. A work would only have to be authenticated the first time it was posted (nominally by the artist that made the word). Once a work was authenticated, users would be able to share it freely.
Before submitting a song to AudioGalaxy, a user has to 'appropriately identify' themselves. Once a user is identified, they can submit songs to the AudioGalaxy universe to be authenticated for distribution.
When an identified user submits a song for use, the song is fingerprinted, and identified as 'good'. A properly identified song is the responsibility of it's submitter. AudioGalaxy is simply a tranmission medium. If a copyright holder feels that their song is improperly submitted, then they can go to the person responsible for the song for the 'publishing' of it. If a user is identified as consistently submitting unauthorized copyright material, then their entire set of authentications can be revoked.
user authentication
Users can be authenticated by any of a set of means -- eg:
- A credit card authorization (should appear on credit card summaries as something obvious like "ID verification audogalaxy-id.com" with the domain (and www.domain) pointing to a page that precisely describs what the ID was for and about and what the associated person would be responsible for [[in case the ID was the result of a credit card theft]]).
- Thawte (www.thawte.com) allows all sorts of ways to authenticate the identify a person -- including their 'web of trust' system which is free, and various paid methods.
- Persons who don't have access to (or don't want to use) other methods, could mail in a notarized copy of personal ID,
- Pick your favorite other method of verification.
Once a user is verified, they would be issued an SSL certificate that would allow them to submit songs (automatedly) for authentication.SSL certificates allow for repudiation, so if someone's ID was used inappropriately, they would be able to issue repudiation.. It should be possible to issue repudiation starting from a specific date (when the certificate was compromised), generally (e.g. if the identity was issued improperly), or even for specific songs (if a publishing authorization turns out to have been mistaken, or the publisher has second thoughts.).
Sharing would then be checked for authentication of a song, rather than a record company claim (after the fact) of copyright infringement. If a record company claims copyright on a song, they would identify it by fingerprint (or a fingerprint summary) then DMCA procedures for notifying the 'owner' of the impugned song would follow.
The point here is that the users are then explicitly responsible for the songs that they post -- combining this with the fact that the RIAA is now proving themselves capable of going after the individual violators, this means that they should have a much harder time going after distribution services like AudioGalaxy for actions that individual customers are really responsible for. (and able to be held responsible for)
On the other hand, the RIAA's high-handed tactics may backfire on them, and provide a real boost to the indie music industry.
Jean Jacques Perry was one of my favorites (from the mid-late '70s). I loved his "Moog Indigo". It actually took me years to realize tha one of the tracks was actually 'Turkey in the Straw'. If you can find his music, I'd highly recommend it.
Very few (if any) organisms are able to eat raw plastic or pure metal {,alloys). They were happy enough to find something that could eat oil slicks.
Once you breach the case, you could get something to eat the explosives inside, but once the case is breached, the chemicals would probably be leached out and/or eaten by bugs, etc ...
+ or - 10% in sales because of the difference that napster makes doesn't matter to the artist because they don't get any of that money anyways. The RIAA was simply using artists as a shield in their fight for more control of the artists..
"Patriotism is the last refuge of the despot".
Do you know where I can get some of those sales stats? I pointed them out to Jan in a feedback on her site, and she responded with a query as to where I could substantiate those claims. (I originally saw them on a slashdot response many moons ago). A proper pointer to a source of those stats would be very useful.
samuel(at)bcgreen.com
From the information of an earlier poster: Her father was able to repeatedly get teaching jobs despite being branded a 'communist' by the FBI and having his employers harrassed by them on an ongoing basis.
This indicates that he was
Janis Ian's site would never have been seen by most of us had it not been for the posting of this article... Similarly for CDs put out by my friends. Most people don't know where to go to find such things.
P2P networks, on the other hand, are a well-known venue for access to artist's music that do not have any connection to the RIAA. If a budding artists have a choice for the distribution of their music, they might not agree to recording deals that give the record companies effective ownership of all the artist's output for years or decades. That is why the RIIA has been beating these P2P networks into submission despite the fact that they clearly appear to be increasing music sales. ..
They threaten the RIAA's monopoly on the market, and give artists some choice.