The whole point, I think, is that telemarketers make people unhappy. It's an industry right now, sure, but there are plenty of blackmarket "industries," and these industries are outlawed because they make life better for the majority of people. And so there it is, what is a crime but a thing that harms or makes people unhappy in some way? They're not physically hurting anyone (as far as I know, heh), and they're not taking physical money out of anyone's pockets, but they're taking away from people's time, and as we all know, time is money. So let's throw them all in jail for stealing! =P Seriously, though, anything can be a livelihood, but that doesn't make it okay. "I'm not a mugger, I'm a salesman! I sell the value-added service of not beating people too badly if they hand over their money quickly enough."
Of course, it shows that they are not interested in simply handing over names and IP address without actually needing too.
That's exactly the point, I think. The way I see it, it means one of two things: They are either gearing up to legitimately fight the RIAA, or it's simply an image thing - they're showing that they won't be pushed around, giving a token response. Only time will tell, I suppose.
Having famous, reputable organizations defying the RIAA is very important, because it lends credibility to the fight against the music industry, which is crucial at this point.
Despite all this battling against the RIAA's lawsuits, though, it seems to me that the real issue here (which isn't being addressed) is not file sharing but everything the RIAA stands for and represents. Why isn't anyone attacking their price-fixing and essential monopoly of the industry? I know there was a lawsuit against them for the price-fixing, I believe, but I for one am not seeing any changes.
Obviously, I'm not the most informed on the details of the whole issue, but is it possible that the RIAA's big scare tactics and legal onslaught against file sharers is just to take peoples' eyes off of the real problem?
If I understand this correctly, wouldn't it contain the potential for the computers to become very desynchronized. What I mean is that, since each computer may become slightly off from all the others on its own, if each computer synchronizes to another random computer in the group, couldn't some of the computers become massively off?
> However, a viable P2P business could be created with MP3 license fees being paid for by corporations who pay for distributed storage. Basically, your P2P archive would be a big data archive of some sort and you could export data you have privileges to. --- Interesting idea, but a few big problems: 1) It's unreliable storage, even despite its redundancy. Unreliable in terms of it staying intact (hard drives get reformatted, things get accidently deleted, etc.) and in terms of connectivity (people disconnect from the internet, have network troubles, etc.). 2) If the encryption of the privilege system is broken, quite a few people will have access to the data, a possibility which means that no company will be interested in storing any relevant information via distributed storage. 3) Hard drives are pretty cheap nowadays.
The only way I could see this possibly being used is by NASA or some organization that has something on the order of a few terabytes of data and figures that it might as well make it as reduntant as possible, for posterity and interested parties, and all that jazz (speaking of which, go see the movie version of Chicago if you haven't yet, it turned out great).
This might be helpful, but a lot of little shops don't go to the trouble of coming up with "data backup procedures" and such, they just do whatever it takes. In some cases, this is good, because the employees are knowledgeable and skilled, in other cases, it's terrible, because they don't know how to do anything except buy new parts or break old ones.. In any case, requiring a certification would put a lot of people out. I'd rather see some sort of definitive/rigorous computer certification that would give customers assurance of the person's skill. The A+ certification is the only relevant one that I know of, and from what I've seen, it's a complete joke. My 10 year-old brother has breezed through a variety of A+ practice exams, and I really wouldn't trust him to fix my computer.
I think you're right on the money - making it _legally_ (in addition to ethically) wrong
will make cracking down on spammers much more possible. Right now, they're trying to claim that what they're doing _isn't_ unethical and is a good, respectable business (see article in the latest Newsweek)..
There is another argument that spam is a world-wide problem and that US laws wouldn't have much impact. While it's true that it wouldn't stop all spam, it would cut the volume.
Yes, I believe the figure is something like 95% of all spam originates from the US.
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The whole point, I think, is that telemarketers make people unhappy. It's an industry right now, sure, but there are plenty of blackmarket "industries," and these industries are outlawed because they make life better for the majority of people. And so there it is, what is a crime but a thing that harms or makes people unhappy in some way? They're not physically hurting anyone (as far as I know, heh), and they're not taking physical money out of anyone's pockets, but they're taking away from people's time, and as we all know, time is money. So let's throw them all in jail for stealing! =P Seriously, though, anything can be a livelihood, but that doesn't make it okay. "I'm not a mugger, I'm a salesman! I sell the value-added service of not beating people too badly if they hand over their money quickly enough."
Of course, it shows that they are not interested in simply handing over names and IP address without actually needing too.
That's exactly the point, I think. The way I see it, it means one of two things: They are either gearing up to legitimately fight the RIAA, or it's simply an image thing - they're showing that they won't be pushed around, giving a token response. Only time will tell, I suppose.
Having famous, reputable organizations defying the RIAA is very important, because it lends credibility to the fight against the music industry, which is crucial at this point.
Despite all this battling against the RIAA's lawsuits, though, it seems to me that the real issue here (which isn't being addressed) is not file sharing but everything the RIAA stands for and represents. Why isn't anyone attacking their price-fixing and essential monopoly of the industry? I know there was a lawsuit against them for the price-fixing, I believe, but I for one am not seeing any changes.
Obviously, I'm not the most informed on the details of the whole issue, but is it possible that the RIAA's big scare tactics and legal onslaught against file sharers is just to take peoples' eyes off of the real problem?
Could they really successfully track down all offenders? Do they have the resources to do so, and are they willing to use them?
If I understand this correctly, wouldn't it contain the potential for the computers to become very desynchronized. What I mean is that, since each computer may become slightly off from all the others on its own, if each computer synchronizes to another random computer in the group, couldn't some of the computers become massively off?
> However, a viable P2P business could be created with MP3 license fees being paid for by corporations who pay for distributed storage. Basically, your P2P archive would be a big data archive of some sort and you could export data you have privileges to.
---
Interesting idea, but a few big problems:
1) It's unreliable storage, even despite its redundancy. Unreliable in terms of it staying intact (hard drives get reformatted, things get accidently deleted, etc.) and in terms of connectivity (people disconnect from the internet, have network troubles, etc.).
2) If the encryption of the privilege system is broken, quite a few people will have access to the data, a possibility which means that no company will be interested in storing any relevant information via distributed storage.
3) Hard drives are pretty cheap nowadays.
The only way I could see this possibly being used is by NASA or some organization that has something on the order of a few terabytes of data and figures that it might as well make it as reduntant as possible, for posterity and interested parties, and all that jazz (speaking of which, go see the movie version of Chicago if you haven't yet, it turned out great).
This might be helpful, but a lot of little shops don't go to the trouble of coming up with "data backup procedures" and such, they just do whatever it takes. In some cases, this is good, because the employees are knowledgeable and skilled, in other cases, it's terrible, because they don't know how to do anything except buy new parts or break old ones.. In any case, requiring a certification would put a lot of people out. I'd rather see some sort of definitive/rigorous computer certification that would give customers assurance of the person's skill. The A+ certification is the only relevant one that I know of, and from what I've seen, it's a complete joke. My 10 year-old brother has breezed through a variety of A+ practice exams, and I really wouldn't trust him to fix my computer.
I think you're right on the money - making it _legally_ (in addition to ethically) wrong will make cracking down on spammers much more possible. Right now, they're trying to claim that what they're doing _isn't_ unethical and is a good, respectable business (see article in the latest Newsweek)..
There is another argument that spam is a world-wide problem and that US laws wouldn't have much impact. While it's true that it wouldn't stop all spam, it would cut the volume.
Yes, I believe the figure is something like 95% of all spam originates from the US.