That's a pithy sound bite, but not necessarily true. If Napster users buy much less music than they would have otherwise, then it would be in the industry's best economic interest to stop Napster at all costs.
It would also be in the auto maker's interest to ensure metal and plastics are weak and never improve, as more people would then have to buy more cars more often. The point is that there are many things companies can do, ofetn unethical, to boost their sales. There are a lot situations that an industry's consumers can be forced into that would increase their revenue. Crushing online music distribution may indeed bring sales even higher, but at the cost of innovation and forward movement. No doubt most executives would be happy to make this tradeoff; however, the ideal of the free market is to PROMOTE new ideas, not step on them.
Could point out where it states this, I'd like to see it... the most detail I can find is "New research from Jupiter shows that Napster users are 45 percent more likely to have increased their music purchasing than non-Napster users.", which is a very ambiguous statement at best. They even suckered me into signing up so I could try and find some more explicit information on their research study, but to no avail... of course, won't Ingok of the Arctic Tundra be surprised when he starts getting their spam mail...
People are saying that just because Napster users buy more music doesn't imply causation. This is true, however... The study didn't just measure the current level of spending; it measured an increase in spending since starting to use Napster. At the Jupiter Communications website, you can see that Napsters users have increased their spending more than other online music fans. This is a very important distinction, because it does imply causation.
While I agree with the overall point of your comment (which is probably the same overall point as everyone's comment, which is generally "stick it to RIAA where the sun don't shine"), I have to argue the logic that you claim proves the causality.
The problem is that we basically run into the chicken and the egg scenario: did usage of online music services increase spending on music? Or did the increase in spending encourage the use of online music services? The question was "whether the money they spent on music purchases had increased, decreased or remained the same since they began visiting music destinations on the Web." It was NOT, as it should have been to prove the causality, "whether the money they spent on music purcahses had increased, decreased or remained the same as A RESULT OF beginning to visit music destinations on the Web."
Or, maybe, they aren't directly related at all -- it could simply be that the people in the survey, for whatever reasons, became more interested in music at that point in their lives, and as a result increased their spending AND their online music service usage independently. It's entirely plausible that both of these factors are in fact dependent on some third factor, such as the average temperature in their underwear drawer, and are independent of each other.
It is also dangerous to imply causation. Even if you prove that Napster users buy more music, you can't say that Napster causes people to buy more music. Just as likely is that those people attracted to Napster are music enthusiasts who buy lots of music.
The causal relationship isn't neccessarily important here. What is important is the fact that, for whatever reason, Napster users tend to also buy more CDs, which means by alienating the users of Napster, the RIAA is alienating one of its better customers. Regardless of the industry or the reason, finding fault with your best customer base is ALWAYS, from an economic standpoint, a bad thing to do.
I think more than anything this validates the Senatorial comments made in this article concerning the fact that the music industry has little grounds to go after the online trading of MP3s if they are not going to take advantage of the medium themselves. The labels could argue that it would not be economically feasible to pursue the online medium as a method of distributing legitimate music, but not after the results of a survey like this. No doubt they have their own statistics that swing the other way, but it's nice to see something ressembling hard facts that show that the SOLE reason the recording industry is going after online music distribution is FEAR OF CHANGE! These results show that it's definitely NOT about money...
Like we really need this bit of technology. As if people don't already come up with enough ways to cheat, we certainly don't need to be making it even easier for them. Sure sure, "it's just a game". But a) people pay good money for many of these games, and cheating can really ruin it for them, and b) how you play reflects how you live. I know most people still don't believe this simple precept, but if you're willing to cheat in a game, or even encouraged to do so with tools like these, chances are your real world behavior is going to learn a bad lesson from your gaming experience.
How do you get the IP address associated with the dialup port being used by the target.
This is easy to do anyway, but espcially if you have access to the ISP's hardware. Since they're already putting their Carnivore device inside the ISP's office and on their network, it would actually be less invasive to just tap the ISPs radius logs (dial-in modem authentication program used by most ISPs as far as I know) for when the account(s) you're interested in signs on, and what IP they're using.
Incoming mail is being delivered to a SMTP server, not directly to the target. If you want to capture the target's incoming email, you have to sniff port 25 on the SMTP server(s).
True, but adding in the ability to poll the ISP's mail server (since you will have their password anyway and the ISP's cooperation) would be a 10 minute session for a halfway decent programmer. Plus, if you don't need to get the mail immediately, you can always just wait for the user, because at some point they have to download the mail, and when they do you will see it going over their connection just like any other data...
It wouldn't work to merely tap his home phone because you can (and many people do) access the Internet from all sorts of locations; cell phones, pay phones, airplane phones, etc... sure not every criminal is going to be running around like a technophile doing this kind of thing, but probably enough will that standard phone taps will be frustrating at best...
When Carnivore is placed at an Internet service provider, it scans all incoming and outgoing e-mails for messages associated with the target of a criminal probe.
I hope the FBI computer crimes division is just a little smarter than this... if you know who you are going after, you should be able to find out their account id and, consequently, whatever IP they may be using at any given time... as such, you would only have to scan incoming traffic for it's source address, which is no more an invasion of privacy than any standard router. For that matter, with access to the ISP's hardware, you wouldn't even have to do that (being subject to spoofing et. al. anyway). You should just tap directly the data from whatever modem/router the suspect's account is currently being accessed with.
This much more discriminatory system should be combined with a wiretap order that is ACCOUNT SPECIFIC, meaning you have to explicitly state which ISP accounts you are going to be monitoring, just as (I assume) you have to explicitly state which phone numbers you are going to be tapping in a standard wire-tap order.
Together these two simple provisions (which should be in place anyway) would mean that the government would have the hardware purposefully designed only to listen to traffic destined to a specific account, and would be explicitly stating ahead of time which accounts it intended to tap. As a result, police stepping outside of their bounds would be easier to catch, easier to regulate, and easier to punish.
The net result is that you have to prove to a judge ahead of time that you think someone's account might reasonably be used to transmit information to/from/about the suspect, before you can get the tap in the first place. This is the same as phone taps; you can't just go randomly tapping phone lines in the hope of netting a conversation about a suspect. You have to have a reasonable belief that the line you are tapping is somehow related to the investigation BEFORE hand. This shouldn't be hard to justify or implement with internet taps; after all, if you're tapping the suspect's account and all his outgoing data, you're going to know from there exactly what other e-mail addresses or ISP users you may be interested in. All of this protects the privacy of those who are innocently involved or completely uninvolved, while at the same time providing the police all the power they need to get the evidence on their suspect.
Sue Panasonic because they make cd-writers.. sue them again for making walkmans that can play cd-r's..
Actually, funny you should mention this, because makers of any media capable of storing music are already paying levys to various groups in control of the recording industry. See this page for more info...
If you make your package stand out too much, it won't fit properly and the stores will get mad at the manufacturers.
Screw the stores -- it makes ME mad when the boxes won't fit on MY shelves. I hate it when manufacturers make their damn box a half inch higher than everyone else, just so I have to crumple the damn thing to get it to fit in my bookcase, or else move the entire shelf up two inches and screw up my perfect shelving layout just to accomodate one box with delusions of grandeur. ARGGGG...
I remember in the early 90s when Sierra made a conscious effort to slim down their packaging, produce smaller boxes, use recycled papers, and get rid of extra liners. The idea is slowly catching on; more and more boxes are being made of a single layer of thick cardboard, instead of the outside paper cover with an inside cardboard box.
Additionally, a lot of companies have started putting manuals on CD, though this is more annoying than anything; especially when you know that they aren't doing it to help the environment, but merely to cut down on publishing costs.
You're making the assumption that Gnutella cares about novices in some fashion, or is otherwise targetted to be an idiots pirating tool. Well, from what I glean from their webpage and from usage of the program, both of these assumptions are completely invalid. Your arguments are true, but irrelevant.
True because, yes, the freedom to host and grab whatever you want makes it more powerful, and thus more open to abuse. Irrelevant because users who care are more interested in a utility that is powerful and versatile than they are concerned about disruptions caused by abuses of that versatility.
It does make you wonder as to the flatness of the learning curve for the human species... how hard is it NOT to double-click on something you weren't expecting from someone, with weird extensions you've never seen before, and has an always tacky filename? Save yourselves, people! Think once!
You know, this incident brings up an entirely tangential point that makes it really hard to be a/.er... I'm really getting tired of controversial sites getting yanked FIRST, then judged later. Whatever happened to being innocent until proven guilty? Doesn't it seem reasonable that a site should be allowed to remain open until a court actually issues an injunction against it, regardless of how blatant it may violate any law? (Or, as in the many numerous cases of late, how gray or absurd the supposed violation may be?) It's getting really difficult to form an opinion on ANY issue these days when the offending or targetted site is pulled from the 'net as soon as the first hint of controversy and legal action starts flying.
For a long time the Internet social structure worked pretty well, usually without hitch, and generally without interferrence. It was a great model of a way a society could behave and interact that was different from the rules out in the real-world. It provided an alternative social structure to those who were interested in learning how the new system worked. As a result, the Internet got very big, very fast. So now that it has drawn some attention, the real-world has decided that it's not going to learn any lessons from the Internet. Instead, it'll just try to change the social rules of the Internet to conform to those of the real-word.
Anyone who knows anything about the Internet social makeup is going to have a very hard time swallowing someone bitching about getting defamed on the 'net. What someone says about you -- good OR bad -- means practically nothing here. I'm sure anyone who's been around for a while on the 'net has had the glorious opportunity to be defamed, verbally attacked, and otherwise misaligned by a few people here and there on the 'net. I know I've faced more than my share of such attacks. The great thing about the 'net, though, is that anyone whose opinion I might give a damn about will find out my side of the story and decide for themselves. Does ANYone out there still take someone else's word for it when you have access to so much raw data nowadays?
The best part of the Internet is that, traditionally, you CAN say whatever you want. The part that's even better than that, though, is that what you say has the impact of an ant sneezing. You'd either have such an incredible sneeze that someone notices, or else get a million other ants to sneeze with you, if you want anyone to hear. This kid did neither; he called a couple of people some bad names, which isn't very remarkable, and he did it all by himself, which isn't very influential.
Compared to the following law, their provisions violate standing Trademark fair-use law. Specifically, non-commerical use and all forms of news reporting and commentary are protected as fair use of any Trademark. I'd like to see the newer laws that specifically overturns this. Plus, if I write an opinion, it's my own: how can anyone say it violates anything? How much closer to the First Amendment can you get?
Importantly, the Act has a provision exempting "fair use" of the mark in comparative advertising, non-commercial uses of the mark, and "[a]ll forms of news reporting and news commentary."[41] Senator Moorhead, in the legislative history of the Act, specifically stated that this exemption was intended to address the legitimate first amendment concern espoused by the broadcasting industry and the media. The bill would not prohibit or threaten noncommercial expression, such as parody, satire, editorial, and other forms of expression that are not a part of a commercial transaction.
- Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995, 104th Cong., 1st Sess., 141 Cong. Rec. H14317 (1995). See also Summary of Testimony of the International Trademark Association on H.R. 1295 and 1270 available in 1995 WL 435750 (July 19, 1995). Failure to consider these free speech implications caused an earlier attempt to pass such a dilution statute to fail. See, David S. Villwock, The Federal Dilution Act of 1995, 6 DEPAUL-LCA J. ART & ENT. L. 213, 221 (1996). - www.loundy.com
Think of libel or slander; just because you have a right to free speech does NOT mean you are completely immune from responsibility for its repercussions. If you say something that is wholly untrue about someone, specifically for the purpose of defaming them, you are not going to be protected by any free speech rights. Similarly, if you write code specifically to destroy data, cost people money, and negatively impact their lives, you are likewise not going to be protected by any free speech rights.
(See also response to other similar reply) These laws only truly defend the speaker, not the distributor. In the case of Napster, this means that you can publish an MP3 that was created anonymously, but you enjoy no similar rights as the vehicle of distribution of that MP3.
Further, how anonymous are you when you stand at a public meeting and hand out the brochures to people in person? The reality of these court decisions is that the anonymity is protected only insofar as the fact that you are not really anonymous at all. Anyone could discover your identity, either by approaching you or others present while you were distributing your "anonymous" free speech. What we're plainly seeing is that when "true" anonymity becomes possible; a system of distribution in which it really IS very difficult to track down an anonymous individual who intends to remain unfound, there is a lot less impetus to protect your right to remain hidden.
The decisions cited are full of dissenting viewpoints, such as this excerpt which shows that, in the interest of preventing fraud (as is the primary case with Napster), the burden of identifying yourself is negligible compared to the benefit to the state in helping prevent illegal activity.
The minor requirement imposed by R.C. 3599.09 that those persons producing campaign literature identify themselves as the source thereof neither impacts the content of their message nor significantly burdens their ability to have it disseminated. This burden is more than counterbalanced by the state interest in providing the voters to whom the message is directed with a mechanism by which they may better evaluate its validity. Moreover, the law serves to identify those who engage in fraud, libel or false advertising. Not only are such interests sufficient to overcome the minor burden placed upon such persons, these interests were specifically acknowledged in [First National Bank of Boston v.] Bellotti[, 435 U.S. 765 (1978),] to be regulations of the sort which would survive constitutional scrutiny." 67 Ohio St. 3d, at 396, 618 N. E. 2d, at 155-156.
I always have to laugh when people become vehemently offended and surprised at government and business attempts to reduce the level of anonymity on the 'net and actually glean some useful personal data on the people out there using it. The reality is that anonymity has, until the Internet, been essentially a mythical thing. The "real world" certainly doesn't have any anonymity at all, and I always find it at least peculiar, if not downright weird, that the Internet generation feels that it's somehow your RIGHT to be anonymous in this world; because it isn't, and it never has been. Don't get me wrong; I think it may become that way and, more importantly, I HOPE it becomes that way. But don't get up in arms because they're thinking of taking away something you never really had in the first place. Anonymity on the Internet was through obscurity alone; well, we got our wish; the Internet's no longer obscure.
I'm assuming the HSBC is holding the hearing on this because, when you get right down to it, small businesses are who stand to lose the MOST if services and technology like Napster and others are banned or restricted. The only argument keeping Napster and other new distribution channels alive at this point is the fact that it can and HAS enabled small-time artists (aka small business) to distribute and profit on their works when, in all likelihood, they would not have had the opportunity otherwise. You can't get much more pertinent to small-business than that...
Slashdot Mirror
That's a pithy sound bite, but not necessarily true. If Napster users buy much less music than they would have otherwise, then it would be in the industry's best economic interest to stop Napster at all costs.
It would also be in the auto maker's interest to ensure metal and plastics are weak and never improve, as more people would then have to buy more cars more often. The point is that there are many things companies can do, ofetn unethical, to boost their sales. There are a lot situations that an industry's consumers can be forced into that would increase their revenue. Crushing online music distribution may indeed bring sales even higher, but at the cost of innovation and forward movement. No doubt most executives would be happy to make this tradeoff; however, the ideal of the free market is to PROMOTE new ideas, not step on them.
Could point out where it states this, I'd like to see it... the most detail I can find is "New research from Jupiter shows that Napster users are 45 percent more likely to have increased their music purchasing than non-Napster users.", which is a very ambiguous statement at best. They even suckered me into signing up so I could try and find some more explicit information on their research study, but to no avail... of course, won't Ingok of the Arctic Tundra be surprised when he starts getting their spam mail...
People are saying that just because Napster users buy more music doesn't imply causation. This is true, however... The study didn't just measure the current level of spending; it measured an increase in spending since starting to use Napster. At the Jupiter Communications website, you can see that Napsters users have increased their spending more than other online music fans. This is a very important distinction, because it does imply causation.
While I agree with the overall point of your comment (which is probably the same overall point as everyone's comment, which is generally "stick it to RIAA where the sun don't shine"), I have to argue the logic that you claim proves the causality.
The problem is that we basically run into the chicken and the egg scenario: did usage of online music services increase spending on music? Or did the increase in spending encourage the use of online music services? The question was "whether the money they spent on music purchases had increased, decreased or remained the same since they began visiting music destinations on the Web." It was NOT, as it should have been to prove the causality, "whether the money they spent on music purcahses had increased, decreased or remained the same as A RESULT OF beginning to visit music destinations on the Web."
Or, maybe, they aren't directly related at all -- it could simply be that the people in the survey, for whatever reasons, became more interested in music at that point in their lives, and as a result increased their spending AND their online music service usage independently. It's entirely plausible that both of these factors are in fact dependent on some third factor, such as the average temperature in their underwear drawer, and are independent of each other.
It is also dangerous to imply causation. Even if you prove that Napster users buy more music, you can't say that Napster causes people to buy more music. Just as likely is that those people attracted to Napster are music enthusiasts who buy lots of music.
The causal relationship isn't neccessarily important here. What is important is the fact that, for whatever reason, Napster users tend to also buy more CDs, which means by alienating the users of Napster, the RIAA is alienating one of its better customers. Regardless of the industry or the reason, finding fault with your best customer base is ALWAYS, from an economic standpoint, a bad thing to do.
I think more than anything this validates the Senatorial comments made in this article concerning the fact that the music industry has little grounds to go after the online trading of MP3s if they are not going to take advantage of the medium themselves. The labels could argue that it would not be economically feasible to pursue the online medium as a method of distributing legitimate music, but not after the results of a survey like this. No doubt they have their own statistics that swing the other way, but it's nice to see something ressembling hard facts that show that the SOLE reason the recording industry is going after online music distribution is FEAR OF CHANGE! These results show that it's definitely NOT about money...
Like we really need this bit of technology. As if people don't already come up with enough ways to cheat, we certainly don't need to be making it even easier for them. Sure sure, "it's just a game". But a) people pay good money for many of these games, and cheating can really ruin it for them, and b) how you play reflects how you live. I know most people still don't believe this simple precept, but if you're willing to cheat in a game, or even encouraged to do so with tools like these, chances are your real world behavior is going to learn a bad lesson from your gaming experience.
How do you get the IP address associated with the dialup port being used by the target.
This is easy to do anyway, but espcially if you have access to the ISP's hardware. Since they're already putting their Carnivore device inside the ISP's office and on their network, it would actually be less invasive to just tap the ISPs radius logs (dial-in modem authentication program used by most ISPs as far as I know) for when the account(s) you're interested in signs on, and what IP they're using.
Incoming mail is being delivered to a SMTP server, not directly to the target. If you want to capture the target's incoming email, you have to sniff port 25 on the SMTP server(s).
True, but adding in the ability to poll the ISP's mail server (since you will have their password anyway and the ISP's cooperation) would be a 10 minute session for a halfway decent programmer. Plus, if you don't need to get the mail immediately, you can always just wait for the user, because at some point they have to download the mail, and when they do you will see it going over their connection just like any other data...
It wouldn't work to merely tap his home phone because you can (and many people do) access the Internet from all sorts of locations; cell phones, pay phones, airplane phones, etc... sure not every criminal is going to be running around like a technophile doing this kind of thing, but probably enough will that standard phone taps will be frustrating at best...
When Carnivore is placed at an Internet service provider, it scans all incoming and outgoing e-mails for messages associated with the target of a criminal probe.
I hope the FBI computer crimes division is just a little smarter than this... if you know who you are going after, you should be able to find out their account id and, consequently, whatever IP they may be using at any given time... as such, you would only have to scan incoming traffic for it's source address, which is no more an invasion of privacy than any standard router. For that matter, with access to the ISP's hardware, you wouldn't even have to do that (being subject to spoofing et. al. anyway). You should just tap directly the data from whatever modem/router the suspect's account is currently being accessed with.
This much more discriminatory system should be combined with a wiretap order that is ACCOUNT SPECIFIC, meaning you have to explicitly state which ISP accounts you are going to be monitoring, just as (I assume) you have to explicitly state which phone numbers you are going to be tapping in a standard wire-tap order.
Together these two simple provisions (which should be in place anyway) would mean that the government would have the hardware purposefully designed only to listen to traffic destined to a specific account, and would be explicitly stating ahead of time which accounts it intended to tap. As a result, police stepping outside of their bounds would be easier to catch, easier to regulate, and easier to punish.
The net result is that you have to prove to a judge ahead of time that you think someone's account might reasonably be used to transmit information to/from/about the suspect, before you can get the tap in the first place. This is the same as phone taps; you can't just go randomly tapping phone lines in the hope of netting a conversation about a suspect. You have to have a reasonable belief that the line you are tapping is somehow related to the investigation BEFORE hand. This shouldn't be hard to justify or implement with internet taps; after all, if you're tapping the suspect's account and all his outgoing data, you're going to know from there exactly what other e-mail addresses or ISP users you may be interested in. All of this protects the privacy of those who are innocently involved or completely uninvolved, while at the same time providing the police all the power they need to get the evidence on their suspect.
Sue Panasonic because they make cd-writers.. sue them again for making walkmans that can play cd-r's..
Actually, funny you should mention this, because makers of any media capable of storing music are already paying levys to various groups in control of the recording industry. See this page for more info...
If you make your package stand out too much, it won't fit properly and the stores will get mad at the manufacturers.
Screw the stores -- it makes ME mad when the boxes won't fit on MY shelves. I hate it when manufacturers make their damn box a half inch higher than everyone else, just so I have to crumple the damn thing to get it to fit in my bookcase, or else move the entire shelf up two inches and screw up my perfect shelving layout just to accomodate one box with delusions of grandeur. ARGGGG...
I remember in the early 90s when Sierra made a conscious effort to slim down their packaging, produce smaller boxes, use recycled papers, and get rid of extra liners. The idea is slowly catching on; more and more boxes are being made of a single layer of thick cardboard, instead of the outside paper cover with an inside cardboard box.
Additionally, a lot of companies have started putting manuals on CD, though this is more annoying than anything; especially when you know that they aren't doing it to help the environment, but merely to cut down on publishing costs.
You're making the assumption that Gnutella cares about novices in some fashion, or is otherwise targetted to be an idiots pirating tool. Well, from what I glean from their webpage and from usage of the program, both of these assumptions are completely invalid. Your arguments are true, but irrelevant.
True because, yes, the freedom to host and grab whatever you want makes it more powerful, and thus more open to abuse. Irrelevant because users who care are more interested in a utility that is powerful and versatile than they are concerned about disruptions caused by abuses of that versatility.
It does make you wonder as to the flatness of the learning curve for the human species... how hard is it NOT to double-click on something you weren't expecting from someone, with weird extensions you've never seen before, and has an always tacky filename? Save yourselves, people! Think once!
While the network can be used to exchange any files, most files are pirated copies of music and software or porn.
I thought the majority of file transfers on Gnutella were blueberry pie recipes...
You know, this incident brings up an entirely tangential point that makes it really hard to be a /.er... I'm really getting tired of controversial sites getting yanked FIRST, then judged later. Whatever happened to being innocent until proven guilty? Doesn't it seem reasonable that a site should be allowed to remain open until a court actually issues an injunction against it, regardless of how blatant it may violate any law? (Or, as in the many numerous cases of late, how gray or absurd the supposed violation may be?) It's getting really difficult to form an opinion on ANY issue these days when the offending or targetted site is pulled from the 'net as soon as the first hint of controversy and legal action starts flying.
For a long time the Internet social structure worked pretty well, usually without hitch, and generally without interferrence. It was a great model of a way a society could behave and interact that was different from the rules out in the real-world. It provided an alternative social structure to those who were interested in learning how the new system worked. As a result, the Internet got very big, very fast. So now that it has drawn some attention, the real-world has decided that it's not going to learn any lessons from the Internet. Instead, it'll just try to change the social rules of the Internet to conform to those of the real-word.
Anyone who knows anything about the Internet social makeup is going to have a very hard time swallowing someone bitching about getting defamed on the 'net. What someone says about you -- good OR bad -- means practically nothing here. I'm sure anyone who's been around for a while on the 'net has had the glorious opportunity to be defamed, verbally attacked, and otherwise misaligned by a few people here and there on the 'net. I know I've faced more than my share of such attacks. The great thing about the 'net, though, is that anyone whose opinion I might give a damn about will find out my side of the story and decide for themselves. Does ANYone out there still take someone else's word for it when you have access to so much raw data nowadays?
The best part of the Internet is that, traditionally, you CAN say whatever you want. The part that's even better than that, though, is that what you say has the impact of an ant sneezing. You'd either have such an incredible sneeze that someone notices, or else get a million other ants to sneeze with you, if you want anyone to hear. This kid did neither; he called a couple of people some bad names, which isn't very remarkable, and he did it all by himself, which isn't very influential.
The entire 1995 Trademark Dilution Act can also be found here.
Think of libel or slander; just because you have a right to free speech does NOT mean you are completely immune from responsibility for its repercussions. If you say something that is wholly untrue about someone, specifically for the purpose of defaming them, you are not going to be protected by any free speech rights. Similarly, if you write code specifically to destroy data, cost people money, and negatively impact their lives, you are likewise not going to be protected by any free speech rights.
(See also response to other similar reply) These laws only truly defend the speaker, not the distributor. In the case of Napster, this means that you can publish an MP3 that was created anonymously, but you enjoy no similar rights as the vehicle of distribution of that MP3.
Further, how anonymous are you when you stand at a public meeting and hand out the brochures to people in person? The reality of these court decisions is that the anonymity is protected only insofar as the fact that you are not really anonymous at all. Anyone could discover your identity, either by approaching you or others present while you were distributing your "anonymous" free speech. What we're plainly seeing is that when "true" anonymity becomes possible; a system of distribution in which it really IS very difficult to track down an anonymous individual who intends to remain unfound, there is a lot less impetus to protect your right to remain hidden.
I always have to laugh when people become vehemently offended and surprised at government and business attempts to reduce the level of anonymity on the 'net and actually glean some useful personal data on the people out there using it. The reality is that anonymity has, until the Internet, been essentially a mythical thing. The "real world" certainly doesn't have any anonymity at all, and I always find it at least peculiar, if not downright weird, that the Internet generation feels that it's somehow your RIGHT to be anonymous in this world; because it isn't, and it never has been. Don't get me wrong; I think it may become that way and, more importantly, I HOPE it becomes that way. But don't get up in arms because they're thinking of taking away something you never really had in the first place. Anonymity on the Internet was through obscurity alone; well, we got our wish; the Internet's no longer obscure.
I'm assuming the HSBC is holding the hearing on this because, when you get right down to it, small businesses are who stand to lose the MOST if services and technology like Napster and others are banned or restricted. The only argument keeping Napster and other new distribution channels alive at this point is the fact that it can and HAS enabled small-time artists (aka small business) to distribute and profit on their works when, in all likelihood, they would not have had the opportunity otherwise. You can't get much more pertinent to small-business than that...
I'd much rather see .odd than .god
.allah soon?
Of course, this does leave room for some great domains... wrathof.god, oh.god, iam.god... I wonder, though, if we'll see a
Barring all else, I can't wait to see what the Christian/Catholic community has to say about this...