] The music industry has turned its big legal guns on
] Internet music-swappers - including a 12-year-old
] New York City girl who thought downloading songs was fun.
]
] Brianna LaHara said she was frightened to learn she was
] among the hundreds of people sued yesterday by giant
] music companies in federal courts around the country.

FOXNews.com - Top Stories - 12-Year-Old Sued for Music Downloading

The RIAA's Clean Slate program.

This website is positively creepy. I guess they are holding it under a different domain name so that people who are basically not very bright won't get that these are the same people that are filing the lawsuits. Having said that, reading explanations of "what your liability might be" knowing that the writer is the person filing the suit feels like listening to the mafia explain in a concerned and polite tone that you wouldn't want anything bad to happen to your family and the best way to avoid that is to pay the protection money. I realize thats been said before, but I can't think of a better way to explain it.

Typical corrupt logic abounds:

Upfront on the site is says that copying music is just as illegal as stealing CDs, which is correct. Its also just as illegal as running a red light, or on the other hand, committing international terrorism. This analogy is chosen for another reason, which they shore up deeper in the content by saying that copying music is just as "wrong" as stealing CDs... The typical obligatory and incorrect analogy between theft and information crimes. Later the site says that theft of physical CDs is "legally no different" then copying music. In reality, the penalty for copying music is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more severe.

Parents are literally set against their children through the use of fear. "You could be liable for your child's actions, so start monitoring their computer use..."

"Tell that to the struggling young musicians in a garage band who can’t get signed because record sales are down." Sure... Your friend's band isn't getting signed because of Gnutella... Right...

Their list of places to "legally download music on the web" is mostly (although not entirely) a list of internet CD stores.

"Copyrights don’t last forever." No, they DO last forever. Limited copyright is a legal fiction in the United States. The definition of fiction is something written on paper that doesn't actually happen in the real world. I am 27. No copyrighted material has entered the public domain during my lifetime. Repeat after me: If it doesn't actually happen, then it is not real.

"We are not against P2P services." Really, you could have fooled me at the P2P "porno" hearings last week!! From NYT: "P2P stands for piracy to pornography," quipped Mr. Lack. (That's "Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment.")

"We think MP3 technology is a great thing—as long as it’s used legally and properly." REALLY!? Then why did you sue to ban the sale of portable mp3 players in 1998??
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,15535,00.html

musicunited.org

] The recording industry filed 261 lawsuits against
] individual Internet music file sharers Monday and
] announced an amnesty program for people who admit they
] illegally share music files across the Internet.

It begins...

CNN.com - 261 music file swappers sued; amnesty program unveiled - Sep. 8, 2003

] The entertainment industry says these digital versions
] of Prohibition-style speakeasies are of little concern. Since
] darknets typically include no more than 50 or 100 people
] because of technology limitations or security concerns, music
] and movie companies think they can't do much damage. "If
] they are using private networks, there is very little
] risk of being caught, but there is very little risk of
] them really doing much harm to the entertainment
] companies," says Randy Saaf, president of MediaDefender
] Inc., a copyright-protection security company.

This article is kind of annoying because it invents this term, "darknet," and then applies it to a bunch of different things without defining it. This allows them to say that Glaxo's VPN and FreeNet are the same type of thing. There are important similarities, but there are also important differences. Use of private networks by companies is not under some new growth spurt, and has no relationship to the development of private file trading networks.

Having said that, this article is public acknowledgement that we have now moved to the next phase. People are moving over to anonymous networks. Also, the spin from the recording industry has changed. Their first statements where "we can crack this technology." That was good spin. They can spread FUD for a long time that way and they never have to prove it. Here they instead say that private networks are not going to cause large financial problems for them. Thats quite an interesting take. If they think these networks will be less effective they are confused. Maybe they think they will be less visible (I.E. Shareholders will be less concerned about them)...

[IP] Businessweek Article on Darknets

] Mysteriously snuffed out candles, weird sensations and
] shivers down the spine may not be due to the presence of
] ghosts in haunted houses but to very low frequency sound
] that is inaudible to humans.
]
] British scientists have shown in a controlled experiment
] that the extreme bass sound known as infrasound produces
] a range of bizarre effects in people including anxiety,
] extreme sorrow and chills -- supporting popular
] suggestions of a link between infrasound and strange
] sensations.
]
] "Normally you can't hear it," Dr Richard Lord, an
] acoustic scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in
] England who worked on the project, said Monday.
]
] Lord and his colleagues, who produced infrasound with a
] seven meter (yard) pipe and tested its impact on 750
] people at a concert, said infrasound is also generated by
] natural phenomena.
]
] "Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound
] may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so
] cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute
] to a ghost -- our findings support these ideas," said
] Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the
] University of Hertfordshire in southern England.

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage

This is the first time I've ever recommended a TV show. (Like an actual episode rather then a program in general.)

1. This is illegal as hell.
2. If the ads are included there is no good reason for ABC to have a problem with this.
3. This looks like an interesting program.
4. The ensuing discussion is exactly why I want to connect mythtv to memestreams.
5. If it is legal, and it is, for me to save television programming off the wire, and view it at any time, why should it not be legal, and it isn't, for someone else to download television programming, and provide it to me. This is assuming we aren't talking about cable, and we aren't cutting out the ads. Seems to me that people who make television like this, which is entirely ad supported, could simply increase their viewers, as well as revenue, by posting the archives online. There might even be some money to be made in selling access to complete archives. I think there is a short term strategic advantage for the company that does this first....

(U: Its about 20 minutes of video. No commercials (hrmph). Comstock does a good job of defending the act. She handles Koppel well. Its clear that the "enemy combatent" issue is more serious then the Patriot act. Its clear that the level of secrecy makes it difficult to know if the FBI is abusing the law. They clearly state that they can't discuss specifics, and then they offer specific examples about notification timeframes for "sneak and peek" warrants that are probably reasonable. I.E. The secrecy allows the FBI to only release information that is politically useful to them, and they clearly take advantage of that here. Can we say "I rest my case" yet? When Koppel comes back for his closing remarks, however, he lets them have it. Its totally worth watching to see him come back and tear into them.)

On Lisa Rein's Radar: Ted Koppel On The Dangers Of The Patriot Act

] Her hero is the Linux author, Linus Torvalds, and she
] spends a lot of time on the internet.
]
] She gets called a "geek" by lots of people, but she knows
] it is true and is rather proud of it.
]
] Georgy Russell also wants to be the California state
] governor.

She's cute. She's a geek. She's political. She could be the next governor of California. I think I'm in love!

BBC NEWS | Technology | The geek who would be governor

inignoct wrote:
] fnord wrote:
] ] "Newspapers ... serve a very valuable function. ... (They)
] ] help us figure out what's really important."
] ]
] ] what a motherfucker
]
] indeed. i can't think of a worse situation for democracy than
] when all media is controlled by the same source (no matter
] what it is). But it's not surprising -- seems like most
] americans (maybe most people everywhere, but i only live here)
] are intellectually lazy, and don't want to have to grapple
] with differing viewpoints or complex situations, so it's
] easier when all the media says the same thing.

I think this one of the key impacts that the internet is having on our society. The medium is the message, right? Well, this medium, unlike the ones we've had previously, forces you to make choices. In the past there were only a handful of broadcasters and everyone assumed that everything they were saying was true. That was sometimes a bad assumption, but it worked well enough that people have developed a tendancy to always beleive in everything they read. You can see Powell struggle with this himself in this interview.

A lot of the stuggles over the internet have been related to this new reality. You are now exposed to a lot of junk. You have to figure out what makes sense and what does not make sense. You have to think. People are not yet very good at that. They are worried, for example, about children not being able to make these choices. Their response, instead of teaching their kids to filter (which they can't do because they don't know how to do it themselves) is to install net nannys, which allow professional filters to do the work for them.

Over time... Maybe over the course of a generation, we'll learn to do the filtering ourselves, and this will make us a stronger society. A populace with strong bullshit detectors, armed with good information, will, I think, make better collective decisions.

Weblogs are an important part of this process. You need to be able to share your decisions about what makes sense so that we can break up the work and so that we can teach eachother how to do this right.

RE: asshole

] When CBS goes to sell advertising, don't doubt for a
] second, that Madison Avenue rep asks why should we pay
] you that when we can do it on the Internet (or somewhere
] else) ... The reality is their value is diminished and
] fragmented by the ability to reach consumers other ways.
] It's already happened. That's an objective fact.
] [Broadcast] television used to own 80 percent of the
] viewership in the United States. It's below 50 percent.
] That's amazing.

Michael Powell talks about the impact of the internet on politics, education, marketing, and news. Some very interesting and frank observations from someone who is up to their neck in it.

A very interesting interview with Michael Powell

] The world has known about the small-world phenomenon
] since sociologist Stanley Milgram's 1967 study found that
] it took, on average, six exchanges among acquaintances to
] get a letter from a random correspondent in Omaha,
] Nebraska to a Boston recipient identified only by a brief
] description.
] ...
] Columbia University researchers have filled in the blanks
] by carrying out a larger, more detailed experiment over
] the Internet. The results match many of the broad
] conclusions of Milgram's work, but show that Milgram's
] conclusion about the importance of hubs -- people who
] have many connections -- may be off, at least in regards
] to social networks.
]

It turns out that social networks do not behave like the scale-free networks exhibited by web page linking. There is a cost to participation in a social network. Folks with fewer connections were more likely to pass on the message.

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