Well, in the rumour I heard, MS was working with Intel so that Intel could keep selling new processors. Even if that were not the case, though, the majority of computer users only buy new computers, not new operating systems. Basically, if MS had to rely on people going to the store to buy each new version of Windows, they would be BeOS: long gone, bankrupt, and mostly forgotten.
This whole thing seems to support earlier rumours that MS was deliberately bloating Windows code in order to make people keep buying new computers. Now that the market has spoken, all of that bloat can be easily removed. Everything in Windows seems to be necessary until MS is forced to remove it.
These stories are completely Slashdotted. p2pnet.net appears to have completely removed them even though their front page still links to them (same links as the Slashdot post).
Can someone please provide the full text of both articles? Thank you:)
And they cannot "prosecute" anyone since these are all civil lawsuits -- "persecute", however, is a different issue. But the RIAA has managed to sue dead people. How can dead people be "consuming content"?
That sort of sentiment really just ignores one simple fact: that if you engage in piracy you are very unlikely to suffer any consequences for it. That's why the RIAA is attacking this with such broad strokes: it can't actually identify those who are committing piracy.
On the contrary, the pirates should be rather easy to catch: they are the ones selling the works for money. File sharers are not pirates. So, piracy obviously is not the problem.
Pretty shocking approach taken by EFF. Guess it too has fallen prey to the incorrect assumption that the RIAA represents the totality of music when in fact they represent a small number of deep pockets in the business.
I think it is more like the EFF just cannot go so far as to say that the record industry is just an anti-Constitutional cabal of criminals hell bent on stealing from society, and that "illegitimate" file sharing is actually Constitutionally protected Free Speech. They see the law on the books and try to apply it as it is written. The fact is that Title 17 has been violating the Constitution since 1978 (when the 1976 Copyright Act took effect), and it is difficult for lawyers to take such a bold step and call a spade a spade. Even Lessig believes that access to works should be restricted for the purpose of artists profits.
The Constitution never said anything about securing profits for artists. "Exclusive Right" was supposed to mean the artists were the only ones to profit from their work, not that they deserved to profit from their work, nor that they could stop people from sharing their work. If artists could restrict sharing of works based on copyright, why is it that we have libraries today?
Ultimately the entire business model needs to be scrapped. We need something akin to the street-performer protocol or some combination of multiple business models that channel people's natural inclination to share stuff they think is cool rather than attempt to fight against it as the current system does.
Or we could just continue to the use the current system where artists get paid at Starbuck's or McDonald's, and just stop paying the RIAA and its backers entirely. The artists, themselves -- with the exception of already rich ones like Madonna -- probably would not see a difference in their wages, but many more families could keep their life savings.
That is not a flaw in the Constitution. It is a law of nature. Culture and language change. If one defines a set of ideas at a given point in time, the cultural environment, language and society will change over time changing the context entirely. In addition, you will have wicked people, like the RIAA, trying constantly to find ways to circumvent those ideas for their personal gain.
For an example, look at how effective this "intellectual property" campaign has been. In 1776, if one used the term "intellectual property", the individual would have been laughed out of the English speaking world. These days, however, I have had people claim that they still "own" a copy of a book that I have purchased. I really do not care who the author is. The book is obviously mine, including all the words contained within it.
The results of this assault on the original meaning of the Constitution are obvious. In 1776, if a person published a book and copyrighted it, that person would have no way to restrict access to that book. The author would have no control over access at all whatsoever. In fact, the mere suggestion that the author could restrict access to the book would be considered as ludicrous as charging people to breathe.
Today, however, it is considered totally correct to use copyright restrict people's access to works. It is accepted that "downloading" a book is a violation of copyright by most people. Not only that, but many people believe that this monopoly privilege is a Natural Right, like the Right to Free Speech. In 1776, no one would have thought of restricting access to a work. In fact, copyright only really regulated reproduction and distribution. So, in reality, downloading should never have been a violation of copyright, and if it were not for an obscure computer software lawsuit (Mai v. Peak), it never would have been. Is that when we went from restricting distribution to restricting access to knowledge?
Therefore, the cultural context has changed, and even the Oracle at Delphi could not have predicted these events with sufficient clarity to allow the Founding Fathers to draft a document that would withstand the wicked cunning of generations of lawyers and the unfathomable stupidity of the general public. Oh, and do not forget to add the inability of the French to understand the Freedom that the US introduced into the Western cultural sphere. That misunderstanding led to the creation of the Berne Convention -- the biggest train wreck in the history of Intellectual Freedom.
So, instead of criticising the Constitution, you might consider trying to understand what the Founding Fathers were thinking back then and helping your friends understand. Certain contextual issues cannot be reversed (the fact that copying is now a necessary part of all non-face-to-face communication comes to mind). But understanding that ideas like "intellectual property", "sharing == theft", "downloading == stealing", etcetera, are completely wrong is a step in the right direction.
In short, we are wrong for allowing ourselves to be manipulated into being unable to understand our own Freedom by crooked entities like the RIAA.
So, let me get this straight. Students who do not buy record industry music because they believe that the record industry is evil and should not be supported cannot do so because their universities will charge them in place of the record industry. Even if such a fee covered all music downloads, individuals could still not choose not to pay, not to contribute to an organized cartel that takes people's life savings for keeping a CD or two on their hard drive. And remember folks, the RIAA has never sued a single person for downloading (even though that is what they claim to the press). It appears that these students are being forced to pay for something they would not even be sued for in the first place and forced to support an anti-social organisation profiting at the expense of the public and of Freedom.
It is nice to hear that college students get so much for their tuition these days!
This is one reason copyright is currently unconstitutional. Copyright currently exceeds the average human lifespan. In fact, it even exceeds the maximum possible human lifespan. So, from the point of view of any given individual, copyright is unlimited -- and therefore, unconstitutional.
Copyright has been unconstitutional since 1976, anyway. Since then, copyright conflicts directly with the First Amendment by regulating all recorded speech instead of regulating a very small spectrum of speech specifically produced for the purpose of being sold. The internet just makes this obvious by recording and reproducing all speech.
I have been saying this for years. It is about time some economists started backing me up!:)
Maybe my ideas are not so "radical" after all...
TV: One More Flavor of Speech
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 1
I have been saying this for a while, but people still are not getting it. This makes sense because, although I am right, the idea is so different from what everyone has been taught by the news and entertainment media over the last century and a half.
In a nutshell, all these forms of entertainment, broadcast media, music, books, comics, newspapers, movies, video games, and what have you, are just speech. In the real world, divisions exist between these things. The words in books are bound to paper. The stories in movies can only be accessed by buying entrance to a screen owned by someone else. Music comes on optical disks. Newspapers have a different size, shape, feel, and smell than books. Comics are books with more pictures.
On the internet and from the point of view of computers, these are all the same: just ones and zeroes. From the point of view of people, they are just words. If one has a conversation about a song, the conversation is rendered unintelligible if both participants have not heard the song. The song is therefore necessary for the continuation of the conversation and people will include a necessary song in a conversation if one of the participants has not heard it. Singing to someone is also a way to communicate.
In the real world, news is also distributed differently. In the real world, one might ask someone to look in the newspaper. Online, one just cuts and pastes the relevant passage, sends a link to the article in question, or just copies the entire article.
Movies and books are the same way. In the real world, people share books and movies that they have read or seen so they can talk about the concepts communicated through those media. Lending a friend a DVD has never been a criminal offence and neither has lending someone a book.
Online, we are now told that all of these previously legal and moral and even commendable activities are crimes. Everyone becomes "pirates" for engaging in activities that were normal in the real world. This is really where copyright is coming in conflict with everything, and it is copyright, not biologically programmed social behaviour that needs to change. Copyright is now in direct conflict with Mother Nature herself, and I, for one, never bet against good old Mother Nature. She is too powerful, and we are too small.
This phenomenon with TV going online is no exception to this. TV is rejoining its brethren as one manner of communicating ideas. It is going to subsumed into the cacophony of world communications. People will use shows and clips to speak to others, to enhance their points in arguments, to introduce newly learned concepts, or to point out erroneous ones.
Further, as this article quite elegantly points out, what we call TV will be destroyed by this change. It is because all of this information is speech that all of these forms of speech will cease to be delineated so clearly. They will meld into different combinations and outcroppings that will more or less destroy all of the categories for speech that we know today.
This is all inevitable. The only question that remains is: how much will the copyright holders punish us, the public, for exercising our First Amendment rights before they are ultimately evolved out of existence like the dinosaurs?
With all this talk about people giving up their computers for mobile devices, it would be nice to see a mobile device browser rundown. From what I have seen, most mobile browsers are atrocious.
For instance, Safari on the iPhone, which is a descendent of Konqueror, has no option to constrain text to the screen (just as Konq-e did not). There is no Firefox derivative for the mobile world. NetFront is ugly and slow and missing lots of character sets, but at least constrains text. PocketIE is so stupidly slow, memory inefficient, and painful to use it is hard to discuss without liberal use of expletives. Android's webkit browser is designed not to link to local URLs (ie: file:///).
That is only one criticism each, but a more appropriate figure would be much higher for each. The bugs in these browsers are sort of unbelievable. Even worse, unlike downloading from the net, these browsers all have a price. When one buys a mobile device, these browsers are included and part of the purchase price goes to these browsers. Why are the for-pay browsers worse than the free ones?
About the only mobile browser I would even say nice things about is Opera. Opera is missing some features I want, but considering the competition -- or lack thereof -- I cannot complain too much.
It is hard to believe that when everybody seems to believe that we are on the eve of the mobile computing revolution that there can be only one decent mobile browser to choose from. Further, it seems absurd that with all of this browser code floating around on the net, one cannot download and install any given mobile browser but must, instead, be stuck with a device vendor chosen browser for good or ill.
There is a feasible solution for this: Do not distribute music with the game. An automagic algorithm could be written to extract notes from any song. Then people could just plug in mp3s or whatever audio files they had on their computers, and the game makers could pay to license precisely nothing.
Players would benefit greatly from this as they could play along to any music they had, including concert bootlegs and other unlicensed recordings. The game could be cheaper without the record industry's nasty tax, too.
Before anybody tells me I do not know how the game works, you are right, I do not. So, if this is technically infeasible, well, it was a nice idea anyway. And any time anyone can reduce the amount of money any record label gets, they are doing something good for society, so I hope my speculation is not totally off base:)
True enough, and we should all expect that shortly, I suppose:
NYCL announces "No Copyrights on Mars"
In an effort to keep our solar system free of the excesses of the *AAs, Slashdot's own NYCL has recently lobbied Congress to pass its controversial "No Copyrights on Mars" (hereafter known as NCoM) bill. The president is expected to sign it into law within the next week. The NCoM provides protection for extraplanetary missions from lawsuits over digital materials while the astronauts are in space -- which in some cases may be the rest of their lives...
However, you have given NYCL one more geek badge of honour: an acronym. Unfortunately for me, such an honour can never be bestowed upon me for my name is as short as his acronym:(
So, just to clarify and summarize: When the RIAA sued the student, there was no proof of either downloading or uploading. They just viewed those seven files in his shared folder. As NewYorkCountryLawyer has pointed out, they do not have anything except their tentative claim that he made the songs "available" for other people to download. The RIAA has been attempting to claim this is synonymous with distribution -- which is a stretch at best.
Further, I would like to state that none of those things I said about reporters relate, even remotely, to PJ or Groklaw. PJ knows her stuff, both the technical and the legal.
... a guy who allegedly downloaded seven songs over Kazaa years ago when he was 17 and who is now facing a damages claim of $1 million dollars..
Are they making the claim because those songs were in his "shared folder"? You should be careful about the language reporters use in their articles. If the RIAA says to a judge, "John Doe was distributing File A over the internet and is guilty of infringement", they will turn around and say "John Doe downloaded Song A over the internet. John Doe is a thief!"
This practice is quite a lot like what SCO did. In court, "IBM is violating a license agreement in these specific ways." To the press, "Linux users are stealing our intellectual property, and they are going to have to pay."
If it is not obvious by now, the RIAA's press statements are no more truthful than SCO's (we all know where that went), and reporters generally do not speak or write English well enough to understand the difference. So when you see a statement like "allegedly downloaded seven songs over Kazaa", you should keep in mind that reporter probably has no idea what the difference between downloading and uploading are, does not know the difference between theft and copyright infringement, and only reports something when the RIAA seems likely to have a rare judgement that goes its way.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in the rumour I heard, MS was working with Intel so that Intel could keep selling new processors. Even if that were not the case, though, the majority of computer users only buy new computers, not new operating systems. Basically, if MS had to rely on people going to the store to buy each new version of Windows, they would be BeOS: long gone, bankrupt, and mostly forgotten.
Let's see . . .
With early 90's pricing, why would anybody think MacBooks were expensive?
This whole thing seems to support earlier rumours that MS was deliberately bloating Windows code in order to make people keep buying new computers. Now that the market has spoken, all of that bloat can be easily removed. Everything in Windows seems to be necessary until MS is forced to remove it.
"Then why are you pretending to be able to code Slashdot posts when you obviously can't. Why are you lying to us about your posting skills?"
These stories are completely Slashdotted. p2pnet.net appears to have completely removed them even though their front page still links to them (same links as the Slashdot post).
Can someone please provide the full text of both articles? Thank you :)
If there is value in this why can't they get a sponsor such as Microsoft to offer free software.
They can not because Microsoft does not offer Free Software, even when the do not charge money for software. They never did and never will.
And they cannot "prosecute" anyone since these are all civil lawsuits -- "persecute", however, is a different issue. But the RIAA has managed to sue dead people. How can dead people be "consuming content"?
That sort of sentiment really just ignores one simple fact: that if you engage in piracy you are very unlikely to suffer any consequences for it. That's why the RIAA is attacking this with such broad strokes: it can't actually identify those who are committing piracy.
On the contrary, the pirates should be rather easy to catch: they are the ones selling the works for money. File sharers are not pirates. So, piracy obviously is not the problem.
Filesharing != piracy.
Piracy is commercial.
Filesharing != piracy.
Piracy is commercial distribution of copyrighted works without the permission of the authors.
Pretty shocking approach taken by EFF. Guess it too has fallen prey to the incorrect assumption that the RIAA represents the totality of music when in fact they represent a small number of deep pockets in the business.
I think it is more like the EFF just cannot go so far as to say that the record industry is just an anti-Constitutional cabal of criminals hell bent on stealing from society, and that "illegitimate" file sharing is actually Constitutionally protected Free Speech. They see the law on the books and try to apply it as it is written. The fact is that Title 17 has been violating the Constitution since 1978 (when the 1976 Copyright Act took effect), and it is difficult for lawyers to take such a bold step and call a spade a spade. Even Lessig believes that access to works should be restricted for the purpose of artists profits.
The Constitution never said anything about securing profits for artists. "Exclusive Right" was supposed to mean the artists were the only ones to profit from their work, not that they deserved to profit from their work, nor that they could stop people from sharing their work. If artists could restrict sharing of works based on copyright, why is it that we have libraries today?
Ultimately the entire business model needs to be scrapped. We need something akin to the street-performer protocol or some combination of multiple business models that channel people's natural inclination to share stuff they think is cool rather than attempt to fight against it as the current system does.
Or we could just continue to the use the current system where artists get paid at Starbuck's or McDonald's, and just stop paying the RIAA and its backers entirely. The artists, themselves -- with the exception of already rich ones like Madonna -- probably would not see a difference in their wages, but many more families could keep their life savings.
That is not a flaw in the Constitution. It is a law of nature. Culture and language change. If one defines a set of ideas at a given point in time, the cultural environment, language and society will change over time changing the context entirely. In addition, you will have wicked people, like the RIAA, trying constantly to find ways to circumvent those ideas for their personal gain.
For an example, look at how effective this "intellectual property" campaign has been. In 1776, if one used the term "intellectual property", the individual would have been laughed out of the English speaking world. These days, however, I have had people claim that they still "own" a copy of a book that I have purchased. I really do not care who the author is. The book is obviously mine, including all the words contained within it.
The results of this assault on the original meaning of the Constitution are obvious. In 1776, if a person published a book and copyrighted it, that person would have no way to restrict access to that book. The author would have no control over access at all whatsoever. In fact, the mere suggestion that the author could restrict access to the book would be considered as ludicrous as charging people to breathe.
Today, however, it is considered totally correct to use copyright restrict people's access to works. It is accepted that "downloading" a book is a violation of copyright by most people. Not only that, but many people believe that this monopoly privilege is a Natural Right, like the Right to Free Speech. In 1776, no one would have thought of restricting access to a work. In fact, copyright only really regulated reproduction and distribution. So, in reality, downloading should never have been a violation of copyright, and if it were not for an obscure computer software lawsuit (Mai v. Peak), it never would have been. Is that when we went from restricting distribution to restricting access to knowledge?
Therefore, the cultural context has changed, and even the Oracle at Delphi could not have predicted these events with sufficient clarity to allow the Founding Fathers to draft a document that would withstand the wicked cunning of generations of lawyers and the unfathomable stupidity of the general public. Oh, and do not forget to add the inability of the French to understand the Freedom that the US introduced into the Western cultural sphere. That misunderstanding led to the creation of the Berne Convention -- the biggest train wreck in the history of Intellectual Freedom.
So, instead of criticising the Constitution, you might consider trying to understand what the Founding Fathers were thinking back then and helping your friends understand. Certain contextual issues cannot be reversed (the fact that copying is now a necessary part of all non-face-to-face communication comes to mind). But understanding that ideas like "intellectual property", "sharing == theft", "downloading == stealing", etcetera, are completely wrong is a step in the right direction.
In short, we are wrong for allowing ourselves to be manipulated into being unable to understand our own Freedom by crooked entities like the RIAA.
And at least you always know where you stand with Tony Soprano. Can you say that about RIAA? ;)
And would you trust Hesh without Tony keeping him in check?
So, let me get this straight. Students who do not buy record industry music because they believe that the record industry is evil and should not be supported cannot do so because their universities will charge them in place of the record industry. Even if such a fee covered all music downloads, individuals could still not choose not to pay, not to contribute to an organized cartel that takes people's life savings for keeping a CD or two on their hard drive. And remember folks, the RIAA has never sued a single person for downloading (even though that is what they claim to the press). It appears that these students are being forced to pay for something they would not even be sued for in the first place and forced to support an anti-social organisation profiting at the expense of the public and of Freedom.
It is nice to hear that college students get so much for their tuition these days!
I will tell you when I am using VoIP and IM on my mobile handset. For now, it is only usable if I use my wired internet connection at home.
The telcos of the future are all wireless carriers, right?
Android, curiously, seems to lack support for it as well -- so much for Free(dom).
This is one reason copyright is currently unconstitutional. Copyright currently exceeds the average human lifespan. In fact, it even exceeds the maximum possible human lifespan. So, from the point of view of any given individual, copyright is unlimited -- and therefore, unconstitutional.
Copyright has been unconstitutional since 1976, anyway. Since then, copyright conflicts directly with the First Amendment by regulating all recorded speech instead of regulating a very small spectrum of speech specifically produced for the purpose of being sold. The internet just makes this obvious by recording and reproducing all speech.
I have been saying this for years. It is about time some economists started backing me up! :)
Maybe my ideas are not so "radical" after all...
I have been saying this for a while, but people still are not getting it. This makes sense because, although I am right, the idea is so different from what everyone has been taught by the news and entertainment media over the last century and a half.
In a nutshell, all these forms of entertainment, broadcast media, music, books, comics, newspapers, movies, video games, and what have you, are just speech. In the real world, divisions exist between these things. The words in books are bound to paper. The stories in movies can only be accessed by buying entrance to a screen owned by someone else. Music comes on optical disks. Newspapers have a different size, shape, feel, and smell than books. Comics are books with more pictures.
On the internet and from the point of view of computers, these are all the same: just ones and zeroes. From the point of view of people, they are just words. If one has a conversation about a song, the conversation is rendered unintelligible if both participants have not heard the song. The song is therefore necessary for the continuation of the conversation and people will include a necessary song in a conversation if one of the participants has not heard it. Singing to someone is also a way to communicate.
In the real world, news is also distributed differently. In the real world, one might ask someone to look in the newspaper. Online, one just cuts and pastes the relevant passage, sends a link to the article in question, or just copies the entire article.
Movies and books are the same way. In the real world, people share books and movies that they have read or seen so they can talk about the concepts communicated through those media. Lending a friend a DVD has never been a criminal offence and neither has lending someone a book.
Online, we are now told that all of these previously legal and moral and even commendable activities are crimes. Everyone becomes "pirates" for engaging in activities that were normal in the real world. This is really where copyright is coming in conflict with everything, and it is copyright, not biologically programmed social behaviour that needs to change. Copyright is now in direct conflict with Mother Nature herself, and I, for one, never bet against good old Mother Nature. She is too powerful, and we are too small.
This phenomenon with TV going online is no exception to this. TV is rejoining its brethren as one manner of communicating ideas. It is going to subsumed into the cacophony of world communications. People will use shows and clips to speak to others, to enhance their points in arguments, to introduce newly learned concepts, or to point out erroneous ones.
Further, as this article quite elegantly points out, what we call TV will be destroyed by this change. It is because all of this information is speech that all of these forms of speech will cease to be delineated so clearly. They will meld into different combinations and outcroppings that will more or less destroy all of the categories for speech that we know today.
This is all inevitable. The only question that remains is: how much will the copyright holders punish us, the public, for exercising our First Amendment rights before they are ultimately evolved out of existence like the dinosaurs?
This browser is obviously broken: It does not work in Linux.
With all this talk about people giving up their computers for mobile devices, it would be nice to see a mobile device browser rundown. From what I have seen, most mobile browsers are atrocious.
For instance, Safari on the iPhone, which is a descendent of Konqueror, has no option to constrain text to the screen (just as Konq-e did not). There is no Firefox derivative for the mobile world. NetFront is ugly and slow and missing lots of character sets, but at least constrains text. PocketIE is so stupidly slow, memory inefficient, and painful to use it is hard to discuss without liberal use of expletives. Android's webkit browser is designed not to link to local URLs (ie: file:///).
That is only one criticism each, but a more appropriate figure would be much higher for each. The bugs in these browsers are sort of unbelievable. Even worse, unlike downloading from the net, these browsers all have a price. When one buys a mobile device, these browsers are included and part of the purchase price goes to these browsers. Why are the for-pay browsers worse than the free ones?
About the only mobile browser I would even say nice things about is Opera. Opera is missing some features I want, but considering the competition -- or lack thereof -- I cannot complain too much.
It is hard to believe that when everybody seems to believe that we are on the eve of the mobile computing revolution that there can be only one decent mobile browser to choose from. Further, it seems absurd that with all of this browser code floating around on the net, one cannot download and install any given mobile browser but must, instead, be stuck with a device vendor chosen browser for good or ill.
There is a feasible solution for this: Do not distribute music with the game. An automagic algorithm could be written to extract notes from any song. Then people could just plug in mp3s or whatever audio files they had on their computers, and the game makers could pay to license precisely nothing.
Players would benefit greatly from this as they could play along to any music they had, including concert bootlegs and other unlicensed recordings. The game could be cheaper without the record industry's nasty tax, too.
Before anybody tells me I do not know how the game works, you are right, I do not. So, if this is technically infeasible, well, it was a nice idea anyway. And any time anyone can reduce the amount of money any record label gets, they are doing something good for society, so I hope my speculation is not totally off base :)
True enough, and we should all expect that shortly, I suppose:
NYCL announces "No Copyrights on Mars"
In an effort to keep our solar system free of the excesses of the *AAs, Slashdot's own NYCL has recently lobbied Congress to pass its controversial "No Copyrights on Mars" (hereafter known as NCoM) bill. The president is expected to sign it into law within the next week. The NCoM provides protection for extraplanetary missions from lawsuits over digital materials while the astronauts are in space -- which in some cases may be the rest of their lives...
However, you have given NYCL one more geek badge of honour: an acronym. Unfortunately for me, such an honour can never be bestowed upon me for my name is as short as his acronym :(
So, just to clarify and summarize: When the RIAA sued the student, there was no proof of either downloading or uploading. They just viewed those seven files in his shared folder. As NewYorkCountryLawyer has pointed out, they do not have anything except their tentative claim that he made the songs "available" for other people to download. The RIAA has been attempting to claim this is synonymous with distribution -- which is a stretch at best.
Further, I would like to state that none of those things I said about reporters relate, even remotely, to PJ or Groklaw. PJ knows her stuff, both the technical and the legal.
Then what is this Sony v. Tenenbaum about then ?
Are they making the claim because those songs were in his "shared folder"? You should be careful about the language reporters use in their articles. If the RIAA says to a judge, "John Doe was distributing File A over the internet and is guilty of infringement", they will turn around and say "John Doe downloaded Song A over the internet. John Doe is a thief!"
This practice is quite a lot like what SCO did. In court, "IBM is violating a license agreement in these specific ways." To the press, "Linux users are stealing our intellectual property, and they are going to have to pay."
If it is not obvious by now, the RIAA's press statements are no more truthful than SCO's (we all know where that went), and reporters generally do not speak or write English well enough to understand the difference. So when you see a statement like "allegedly downloaded seven songs over Kazaa", you should keep in mind that reporter probably has no idea what the difference between downloading and uploading are, does not know the difference between theft and copyright infringement, and only reports something when the RIAA seems likely to have a rare judgement that goes its way.