Well, in the short run, loan referrals are STILL worth $50, so spamming a spammer who is doing that will result in an insane windfall for said spammer.
At least the person who hired the spammer will go out of business, though.
If people started responding to just 1% of the spam we received, spammers would drown in the responses, and the mortage spam responses wouldn't be worth an email, much less $50.
As someone who has suffered through multiple Joe-jobs, receiving tens of thousands of bounces from just the incorrect addresses, I sincerely hope that no one takes this suggestion seriously.
Why are you factoring in long distance? Didn't you have a local ISP?
Also, does your cable internet access require you to have cable to get the $41/month? Around here they do, so it's cheaper to get DSL if you don't already have cable, in which case you have to have the phone line anyway.
Don't take the RIAA at [its] word. Presumably, you've heard of Big Champagne?
No, but I'm sure they use statistical methods. I don't think they're promiscuously looking at the unencrypted traffic between third parties. But maybe I just trust my ISP too much.
Obviously, you have more faith in their methods than I do.
Well yeah, obviously.
They may have made an effort to target (in their words) the heaviest downloaders. And in a few cases, they screwed it up.
"They screwed up" as far as I can tell in that they sued the wrong person, because an IP address is not a person. But all indications seem to be that they got the IP addresses right. Technically, they should have sued John Doe, and not changed John Doe to the actual person doing the downloading until they had better information. For that, I can blame them. But they don't seem to be randomly picking IP addresses. It seems that the IP addresses they are picking are the same ones through which the law is being broken.
Overall they seem to be doing a good job of suing the people who have violated the law. One or two mistakes out of 261 isn't so bad.
With the minimal legal oversight this has taken, we may never know just how badly.
I find it hard to believe that someone is going to settle with the RIAA for thousands of dollars if they weren't guilty. Once again it seems like pure bias against the RIAA on your part to suggest that they would.
Very unclear to know that this one is legal (emusic), and that one (Kazaa) is illegal.
Yeah, and the family should now turn around and sue Kazaa.
Well...since the RIAA itself uses download stats to market more effectively, evidently there is some mechanism to do just that.
You just pick and choose what parts of the RIAA's statements you're going to believe based on what best suits your purpose, don't you? Maybe the RIAA just looks in people's shared folders, and assumes that's all downloaded for marketing purposes. Maybe they just do a poll of 10 people, take the average, and multiply it by 100 billion. I don't know. I'm certainly not going to take their statement that there are X downloads as evidence that they know how many downloads there are.
I find it very easy to believe that the RIAA shotgunned a bunch of lawsuits, and this kid was one of them. Supposedly, they were going after "the heaviest downloaders". 261 out of millions. You really think this kid was in the top 0.0005%?
No. Obviously they didn't get exactly the top 261 out of millions. But from the very limited information I have about the situation, my guess is that that family was using Kazaa a lot. It wouldn't make sense for the RIAA to randomly pick IP addresses. It wouldn't make sense for them to randomly pick Kazaa users. If they're going to sue people, my guess is that they're going to make an attempt to sue people who are the largest infringers. That is in their best interests.
You can tell your friends about how a piece of hardware works, too. You just can't implement a circumvention of it or sell a device primarily designed to circumvent it without permission. The point of the DMCA is to stop people from violating copyright laws.
I agree with the original poster -- only a few years ago, the distinction between these things was pretty clear, even when the specifics were occasionally abused.
It really wasn't. You still had all kinds of myths about what was legal and what was not. You still had EULAs, and no one except the Supreme Court could know for sure whether they were enforcible or not. You still had ridiculous patents, you just didn't have news sites reporting them, because no one cared. You certainly had patents which were mathematical algorithms, RSA was patented in 1983. Perhaps the general sentiment was a bit closer to reality, but that's just cause you didn't have sites like Slashdot spreading misconceptions about the actual laws. Explain to an average Joe on the street what Dmitry Sklyarov or Jon Johannsen were doing and they'll be surprised that that wasn't already illegal way before the DMCA. Actually, it probably was, under contributory or vicarious copyright infringement.
Things have definitely changed for the worse.
I'd say the single biggest change in terms of the law was the No Electronic Theft Act. And yeah, that was a major change for the worse. But the DMCA? Oh boy, I can't distribute cracking software any more. BFD.
I inferred dialup, due to the fact of them being in subsidised housing. An extra $45 for cable/DSL might be tough.
Well, that certainly shows your bias against the RIAA right there. Surely there are people in subsidised housing with cable/DSL. I find it much harder to believe that the RIAA decided to go up against some random 12-year-old who wasn't even using Kazaa. Especially since they admitted to it. Unless of course the whole thing is just a publicity stunt.
1000 files was supposedly the cutoff for being a target of the RIAA.
1000 files in the shared folder? 1000 downloaded (how would they figure that out)? 1000 uploaded (same question)? 1000 downloaded from the RIAA? 1000 uploaded from the RIAA? Do different encodings of the same song count? Are they counting corrupted copies? All of this is unclear.
Hell, there aren't 1000 songs that would appeal to the average 12 year old.
When I was using napster back in the 90s I downloaded everything I'd ever heard of. Didn't matter if it appealled to me or not. I had free bandwidth and free music. To not use it would seem like a waste, forget about whether or not I actually wanted it.
Her brother was 9.
Yeah, I read that.
Or maybe, just maybe, the RIAA screwed up.
The initial defense of the family was that it wasn't illegal to download the files. It certainly appears to me like they were breaking the law. If, that is, the whole thing isn't a lie. If you believe the family, then the RIAA didn't screw up. The family admitted committing the crime.
Do I believe it? It's possible. I don't see where it says she was on dialup. And I don't see where it says she downloaded 1000 files during that period. Maybe she already had them, and just put them into her sharing folder. Maybe she had a high speed connection. Maybe her brother did it. Maybe the RIAA hired her as an actor as a scare tactic to get people to stop using Kazaa. I don't know.
And remember, this is a 12 year old honor student, obviously not spending all of her time downloading stuff.
Hmm, when I was a 12 year old honor student that's what I did with most of my free time.
I mean they'd use their monopoly powers to put the cooperative out of business.
If you could put together a stable business model where a cooperative could sustainably produce chips -- yeah, it would be allowed...what conceivable way could it be stopped?
Patent lawsuits, DMCA and copyright lawsuits, predatory pricing, collusive deals with other hardware manufacturers...
What possible rationalle would the powers that be have to WANT to stop it?
Campaign donations, bribes, protection of stock market investments, pressure from local constituents, tit for tat deals with others who have one of the reasons above...
"Consumers have a reasonable expectation that they can replace the original product with a competing universal product without violating federal law,"
IANAL, so I'm wondering how this statement is inapplicable to ink cartridges.
What makes you think the statement isn't applicable to ink cartridges? Consumers do have a reaonable expectation that they can replace the original product with a competing universal product without violating federal law.
No. Look at what the judge said. "Consumers have a reasonable expectation that they can replace the original product with a competing universal product without violating federal law." The judge never said that's why she ruled the way she did. The fact is, she didn't. She ruled the way she did because there was no violation of the law.
Could the RIAA take the shotgun/mass-sue approach if they had to cover the legal defense costs for everyone they wrongly sued?
Umm, who has the RIAA wrongly sued?
I'd modify your proposal just slightly. If the defendant in a suit wins, then the complaintant has to pay court costs. But those court costs can never exceed the costs spent by the complaintant in bringing about the complaint.
If the complaintant wins, they don't collect court costs. They might get punitive damages, under the current rules, but that's it.
Damn. Why does there have to be such a low friend limit. Someone on slashdot with a clue. It's rare percentage-wise, but there are a lot of you by the numbers.
Only a few years ago it was obvious that you can figure out how a piece of hardware works and tell your friends about it.
No it wasn't. We still had patent law. We still had copyright law. We still had laws against unfair business practices. We still had paranoid freaks who think that every law is way more broad than it is. And we still had greedy manufacturers that would sue anyone who dared to not be one of those paranoid freaks.
The rest of us work for those businesses. Who else would we work for?
Maybe ourselves? If all the corporate owned chains in the country went out of business and were replaced by mom-and-pop stores, you wouldn't see any tears from my eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in the short run, loan referrals are STILL worth $50, so spamming a spammer who is doing that will result in an insane windfall for said spammer.
At least the person who hired the spammer will go out of business, though.
Why do you need to keep your phone number private?
If people started responding to just 1% of the spam we received, spammers would drown in the responses, and the mortage spam responses wouldn't be worth an email, much less $50.
As someone who has suffered through multiple Joe-jobs, receiving tens of thousands of bounces from just the incorrect addresses, I sincerely hope that no one takes this suggestion seriously.
Why didn't you use your cell phone to make those calls?
Why are you factoring in long distance? Didn't you have a local ISP?
Also, does your cable internet access require you to have cable to get the $41/month? Around here they do, so it's cheaper to get DSL if you don't already have cable, in which case you have to have the phone line anyway.
What if you hated the only two resturants in the city? Would you then ask your city to open one up?
No. I'd eat in another city. With internet access, I don't have that choice.
Is the city in the resturant business?
If they opened up a resturant they would be!
For those of you not in the know, Rekall is a RAD DBMS similar to MS Access or Paradox
WOW! That's just what I was waiting for before I could switch!
Don't take the RIAA at [its] word. Presumably, you've heard of Big Champagne?
No, but I'm sure they use statistical methods. I don't think they're promiscuously looking at the unencrypted traffic between third parties. But maybe I just trust my ISP too much.
Obviously, you have more faith in their methods than I do.
Well yeah, obviously.
They may have made an effort to target (in their words) the heaviest downloaders. And in a few cases, they screwed it up.
"They screwed up" as far as I can tell in that they sued the wrong person, because an IP address is not a person. But all indications seem to be that they got the IP addresses right. Technically, they should have sued John Doe, and not changed John Doe to the actual person doing the downloading until they had better information. For that, I can blame them. But they don't seem to be randomly picking IP addresses. It seems that the IP addresses they are picking are the same ones through which the law is being broken.
Overall they seem to be doing a good job of suing the people who have violated the law. One or two mistakes out of 261 isn't so bad.
With the minimal legal oversight this has taken, we may never know just how badly.
I find it hard to believe that someone is going to settle with the RIAA for thousands of dollars if they weren't guilty. Once again it seems like pure bias against the RIAA on your part to suggest that they would.
Whatever. That's a dumb use of the word "boycott."
Very unclear to know that this one is legal (emusic), and that one (Kazaa) is illegal.
Yeah, and the family should now turn around and sue Kazaa.
Well...since the RIAA itself uses download stats to market more effectively, evidently there is some mechanism to do just that.
You just pick and choose what parts of the RIAA's statements you're going to believe based on what best suits your purpose, don't you? Maybe the RIAA just looks in people's shared folders, and assumes that's all downloaded for marketing purposes. Maybe they just do a poll of 10 people, take the average, and multiply it by 100 billion. I don't know. I'm certainly not going to take their statement that there are X downloads as evidence that they know how many downloads there are.
I find it very easy to believe that the RIAA shotgunned a bunch of lawsuits, and this kid was one of them. Supposedly, they were going after "the heaviest downloaders". 261 out of millions. You really think this kid was in the top 0.0005%?
No. Obviously they didn't get exactly the top 261 out of millions. But from the very limited information I have about the situation, my guess is that that family was using Kazaa a lot. It wouldn't make sense for the RIAA to randomly pick IP addresses. It wouldn't make sense for them to randomly pick Kazaa users. If they're going to sue people, my guess is that they're going to make an attempt to sue people who are the largest infringers. That is in their best interests.
It's only useless to people who don't mind being herded and treated like cattle at places like Best Buy.
If your reason for not buying there is that you don't like the way you're treated, it's not a boycott./p>
You can tell your friends about how a piece of hardware works, too. You just can't implement a circumvention of it or sell a device primarily designed to circumvent it without permission. The point of the DMCA is to stop people from violating copyright laws.
I agree with the original poster -- only a few years ago, the distinction between these things was pretty clear, even when the specifics were occasionally abused.
It really wasn't. You still had all kinds of myths about what was legal and what was not. You still had EULAs, and no one except the Supreme Court could know for sure whether they were enforcible or not. You still had ridiculous patents, you just didn't have news sites reporting them, because no one cared. You certainly had patents which were mathematical algorithms, RSA was patented in 1983. Perhaps the general sentiment was a bit closer to reality, but that's just cause you didn't have sites like Slashdot spreading misconceptions about the actual laws. Explain to an average Joe on the street what Dmitry Sklyarov or Jon Johannsen were doing and they'll be surprised that that wasn't already illegal way before the DMCA. Actually, it probably was, under contributory or vicarious copyright infringement.
Things have definitely changed for the worse.
I'd say the single biggest change in terms of the law was the No Electronic Theft Act. And yeah, that was a major change for the worse. But the DMCA? Oh boy, I can't distribute cracking software any more. BFD.
I inferred dialup, due to the fact of them being in subsidised housing. An extra $45 for cable/DSL might be tough.
Well, that certainly shows your bias against the RIAA right there. Surely there are people in subsidised housing with cable/DSL. I find it much harder to believe that the RIAA decided to go up against some random 12-year-old who wasn't even using Kazaa. Especially since they admitted to it. Unless of course the whole thing is just a publicity stunt.
1000 files was supposedly the cutoff for being a target of the RIAA.
1000 files in the shared folder? 1000 downloaded (how would they figure that out)? 1000 uploaded (same question)? 1000 downloaded from the RIAA? 1000 uploaded from the RIAA? Do different encodings of the same song count? Are they counting corrupted copies? All of this is unclear.
Hell, there aren't 1000 songs that would appeal to the average 12 year old.
When I was using napster back in the 90s I downloaded everything I'd ever heard of. Didn't matter if it appealled to me or not. I had free bandwidth and free music. To not use it would seem like a waste, forget about whether or not I actually wanted it.
Her brother was 9.
Yeah, I read that.
Or maybe, just maybe, the RIAA screwed up.
The initial defense of the family was that it wasn't illegal to download the files. It certainly appears to me like they were breaking the law. If, that is, the whole thing isn't a lie. If you believe the family, then the RIAA didn't screw up. The family admitted committing the crime.
I meant legally wrong, not morally wrong.
Do I believe it? It's possible. I don't see where it says she was on dialup. And I don't see where it says she downloaded 1000 files during that period. Maybe she already had them, and just put them into her sharing folder. Maybe she had a high speed connection. Maybe her brother did it. Maybe the RIAA hired her as an actor as a scare tactic to get people to stop using Kazaa. I don't know.
And remember, this is a 12 year old honor student, obviously not spending all of her time downloading stuff.
Hmm, when I was a 12 year old honor student that's what I did with most of my free time.
Thanks.
And if you believe our poster child 12 year old actually had >1000 tunes on her PC (on a dialup in less than 90 days), you're dreaming.
Where'd you get the 90 day figure from?
What do you mean "wouldn't allow it"?
I mean they'd use their monopoly powers to put the cooperative out of business.
If you could put together a stable business model where a cooperative could sustainably produce chips -- yeah, it would be allowed...what conceivable way could it be stopped?
Patent lawsuits, DMCA and copyright lawsuits, predatory pricing, collusive deals with other hardware manufacturers...
What possible rationalle would the powers that be have to WANT to stop it?
Campaign donations, bribes, protection of stock market investments, pressure from local constituents, tit for tat deals with others who have one of the reasons above...
"Consumers have a reasonable expectation that they can replace the original product with a competing universal product without violating federal law,"
IANAL, so I'm wondering how this statement is inapplicable to ink cartridges.
What makes you think the statement isn't applicable to ink cartridges? Consumers do have a reaonable expectation that they can replace the original product with a competing universal product without violating federal law.
No. Look at what the judge said. "Consumers have a reasonable expectation that they can replace the original product with a competing universal product without violating federal law." The judge never said that's why she ruled the way she did. The fact is, she didn't. She ruled the way she did because there was no violation of the law.
Trial lawyers know exactly what such a change would do to their business, and they also are a very powerful lobbying force.
Not to mention the fact that most lawmakers are lawyers.
Could the RIAA take the shotgun/mass-sue approach if they had to cover the legal defense costs for everyone they wrongly sued?
Umm, who has the RIAA wrongly sued?
I'd modify your proposal just slightly. If the defendant in a suit wins, then the complaintant has to pay court costs. But those court costs can never exceed the costs spent by the complaintant in bringing about the complaint.
If the complaintant wins, they don't collect court costs. They might get punitive damages, under the current rules, but that's it.
Damn. Why does there have to be such a low friend limit. Someone on slashdot with a clue. It's rare percentage-wise, but there are a lot of you by the numbers.
Only a few years ago it was obvious that you can figure out how a piece of hardware works and tell your friends about it.
No it wasn't. We still had patent law. We still had copyright law. We still had laws against unfair business practices. We still had paranoid freaks who think that every law is way more broad than it is. And we still had greedy manufacturers that would sue anyone who dared to not be one of those paranoid freaks.
You may get mom and pop selling you computers, but they won't be building the circuitry.
There's no reason a cooperative can't be formed to own a chip fabrication plant. Except of course that monopoly chip manufacturers wouldn't allow it.
The rest of us work for those businesses. Who else would we work for?
Maybe ourselves? If all the corporate owned chains in the country went out of business and were replaced by mom-and-pop stores, you wouldn't see any tears from my eyes.