http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31833.html

((U))
M

Michael wrote:

"attack on US culture"
"the large, mostly foreign-owned, music conglomerates"
"the crime of sharing"
"the RIAA's actions make new criminals "
"a thousand music-lovers had already been busted."
" If the RIAA was to be indulged in its whims, the statistics suggest
that the USA would rapidly become a vast, continent-wide penal colony."
"foolishly assumes that you can modify normal human behaviour with LAW."
" Music belongs to us all."
"I'll be damned in hell before I accept the notion that I and my
ancestors who love to listen to the audio arts are in any sense guilty
of anything that is illegal, wrong, evil, immoral or improper."


What a load of crap.
The RIAA is a heavy-handed bureaucracy; but whining defenders of theft
as a God-given right, noble tradition, and form of freedom of expression
just sound dumb.
--
"It isn't even *good* bullshit."

In <news:bfmfq9$gj0ku$1@ID-179272.news.uni-berlin.de>,
trout said:

I thought it was perfectly good bullshit. :-)

I especially liked the "RIAA actions make new criminals" part... as if
copyright laws hadn't existed previously.

((U))
M

"Michael" <muirhead@island.net> wrote in message
news:bfmao70ukr@enews2.newsguy.com...
From the RIAA site itself:
http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/062503.asp

While the RIAA goes to bat and protects the infringements caused by the
electronic media so easily, who goes to bat for the little guy when his
copyrighted material is stolen and illegaly used by others?

What if the material being shared has nothing to do with the RIAA at all?
For instance, someone creates an original musical piece with a MIDI keyboard
and shares it to the world.
How does a p2p network know for a fact that a certain work is protected by
copyright?
What if I make a home movie of what ever and call it "terminator.mpg"?
Does the p2p network overtly assume that the title alone denotes a
copyrighted item?
There has to be something more concrete to determine what is copyrighted and
what is not.
In essence, all published works are copyrighted automatically.

Then what if, the artist who wrote the material and performed it, says, "I
bequeath this work to the public domain".
Then the RIAA comes along and says you obtained his work illegaly?


In my humble opinion, I say that eventually the courts will get agitated by
the abuse imposed by the RIAA and tell the RIAA to back off. Until the
whiners "Metallica" stepped in and cried about how much they were losing in
napster users, everything was just fine.
but napster screwed themselves because they were obtaining many of the works
illegaly and should have been slapped for it.

File sharing systems are not to blame. Leave the little guys alone.

In <news:bfmk4i01b7u@enews2.newsguy.com>,
Richard said:

Napster wasn't "obtaining" any works.

All they did (like all p2p systems) was to provide software and a network
through which people could do the "obtaining" and providing all by
themselves.

You're partly right.

File sharing systems only make it easier to break the law. A little like a
"service" that provides people with keys to other people's homes.

They don't make people criminals... people decide to be criminals, or they
don't... but they certainly make it easy to *be* a criminal.

((U))
M