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krj
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The Fourteenth Napster Item
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Apr 4 06:51 UTC 2003 |
I'm still obsessive; this item is back.
Napster the corporation has been destroyed, but the Napster paradigm
continues. This is another quarterly installment in a series of weblog
and discussion about the deconstruction of the music industry and
other copyright industries, with side forays into
"intellectual property, freedom of expression, electronic media,
corporate control, and evolving technology," as polygon once
phrased it.
Several years of back items are easily found in the music2 and music3
conferences.
Linked between the Agora and Music conferences.
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| 154 responses total. |
krj
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response 1 of 154:
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Apr 4 06:56 UTC 2003 |
The RIAA has sued four college students: two at RPI, one at Princeton
and one at Michigan Tech. The complaint is that the students ran
a program to make indexes of what was available on their local
networks through Microsoft Windows filesharing -- essentially
automating the process of looking up this public information.
The RIAA compares this to Napster; the Cnet story points out that
the students are not providing the software which exchanges the files,
as Napster did. Any file trading is done on through the standard
Windows software.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-995429.html
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jazz
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response 2 of 154:
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Apr 4 14:20 UTC 2003 |
So, essentially, the RIAA needs to sue Microsoft for writing the Server
Message Block protocol?
Sweet.
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gull
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response 3 of 154:
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Apr 4 14:38 UTC 2003 |
The Norwegian government is appealing the aquittal of DeCSS writer Jon
Lech Johansen. This is thought to be due to pressure from the MPAA;
they really need this legal precident to go the "right way".
Prosecution is apparently complicated a bit by Norway's lack of anything
like the US's DMCA. I'm not clear on exactly what the formal charges
are, mostly because I can't read Norwegian.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/30062.html
Also, an article on Security Focus about the FBI lobbying for "plug and
play" wiretapping capability on VoIP services and broadband Internet
connections, much like phone companies are currently legally required to
supply for ordinary phone service:
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/3466
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sholmes
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response 4 of 154:
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Apr 4 17:03 UTC 2003 |
I have been meaning to ask this for a long time now .. I use kazaa .. will
it put me in any trouble ?
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jaklumen
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response 5 of 154:
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Apr 4 21:09 UTC 2003 |
*shrug* From all the long discussion, that's really difficult to say,
although it looks like the RIAA will try anything it can.
resp:2 yes, two heavyweights going into the ring.. this could be
interesting.
Really, the trend that I seem to consistently see is that the
teenagers and young adults are doing the heavy p2p file sharing, and
the middle-aged adults are the ones who are still buying music. I
really don't see too many exceptions.
I am among the pirates. I can't afford to buy many CDs nowadays and
really not at today's prices. I don't figure to be a large threat--
most of my clips are more than 3 years old, quite a few are much older
than that, and I know a few are out of publication as far as I know.
That's not meant to be a justification, but my tastes are pretty
electic and not at all in line with what is currently considered
mainstream, period. They're not unusual-- most were popular at one
point-- but they don't fit into neat patterns.
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krj
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response 6 of 154:
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Apr 6 04:34 UTC 2003 |
The Detroit Free Press ran an article in which they attempted to
calculate the value of the damages being demanded of the Michigan
Tech student sued by the RIAA (resp:1):
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/newman5_20030405.htm
"Recording Industry has warning: File-sharers have to face the music"
Slashdot writers claim that the Freep columnist botched the math:
the correct value, they say, is 97.8 Billion dollars.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/05/1931233
A quote from an RIAA spokesman indicates that the RIAA remains
totally clueless about the technology involved:
"I wouldn't think there was a university in the country that
wouldn't notice this kind of activity on their servers." --
Matthew Oppenheim, RIAA senior vice president for business and
legal affairs.
This comes back to something I wrote in one of the earliest items
in this "napster" series; I argued that copyright law was never
intended to apply to the behavior of private individuals, but rather
was business law.
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goose
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response 7 of 154:
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Apr 6 16:03 UTC 2003 |
According to /. this student wasn't even sharing files, just created a program
to index files on a network....the RIAA is full of idiots.
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gull
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response 8 of 154:
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Apr 7 15:53 UTC 2003 |
All they have to do is select the right idiots for the jury to get a
legal precident set, though.
I did the math and I got about $90 billion, too -- I think Heather
Newman botched her math. Either way, it's ridiculous.
The RIAA is trying to make an example of these students, obviously.
They figure people will see what's happening to them, say "oh, shit",
and get rid of their file sharing software for fear of being sued next.
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gull
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response 9 of 154:
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Apr 7 15:57 UTC 2003 |
Incidentally, when I was at Tech the most common way to find movies and
songs on the dorm network was just to take a walk through Network
Neighborhood. It wasn't always a beautiful day in the Neighborhood --
MS Windows networking is incredibly unstable when you have a several
hundred machines on one subnet -- but you usually found some pretty good
caches of stuff. I wonder if the University could be sued for running a
WINS server, since it facilitated this kind of thing?
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scott
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response 10 of 154:
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Apr 7 16:26 UTC 2003 |
Oh, the same Heather Newman who guests on Todd Mundt for tech stuff? She
doesn't come across as especially bright. I remember her telling Todd that
Windows 2000 was much faster than Windows 95 - the MS party line, but
laughable to anybody who knows anything about OS bloat.
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polygon
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response 11 of 154:
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Apr 7 16:51 UTC 2003 |
Re 8. A jury verdict may be a precedent operationally, but juries do not
have the power to set legal precedent.
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gull
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response 12 of 154:
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Apr 7 20:25 UTC 2003 |
Re #10: She's one of the two tech columnists the Free Press has. I
think the other one is better. I don't think I can comment on her
intelligence, but her knowledge seems lacking sometimes.
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gull
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response 13 of 154:
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Apr 7 20:26 UTC 2003 |
(Incidentally, I'm not sure how it compares to Windows 98, but Windows
2000 is definately faster than NT 4.0, which is what it was intended to
replace.)
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