flynn23 wrote:
] The EFF's ultra radical stance is not a bad thing. Sometimes
] you have to stand a little further off balance than you would
] normally do just so you can make your point crystal clear. I'd
] rather they endorse file sharing rather than some cockamamee
] scheme that the RIAA buys into. If anything, maybe people will
] see this stance and realize that the entire argument of owning
] intellectual property in perpetuity is bullshit. Maybe owning
] ANY intellectual property is bullshit.

This just looks like the right place to hop in this EFF stance thread.. I'll just start my babble here.

Owning IP in perpetuity is bullshit.. However, we must be careful about dismissing the idea of IP ownership as a whole because we think the way it's being used right now sucks. The same framework that makes the RIAA's use of copyright go is also the basis of open licensing al la GPL and Creative Commons. I think thats the key place where you can walk over a line and become ultra radical.. Simply dismissing IP as a whole is like burning down a forrest because you are pissed at a tree house.. Our society is strongly based in law, that's good. Thats not the part of things we want to break down. The concept of IP isn't going anywhere, and we need it.

If I can't take a work and apply some enforceable rule structure that allows me to control its use, not only does it break these closed and restrictive systems we dislike, but it also makes it impossible to enforce open IP systems. Instead of the end-consumers stealing information it's just going to be the big companies stealing innovation. Think SCO. We can be bent over in both directions..

We don't need to completely pull back from the system.. We need to fix the damn system. And the only real way of doing that - if we are to actually buy into our own line of ethics babble - is to setup a system that works better right along side of it. Unfortunately, that's really hard. And all us open framework people work by group think.. "They" can watch "us", and we don't necessarly move faster. Maybe we are just more redundant? shrug.. Its always going to seem like the man is one step ahead. They'll just read the damn blogs.. :) Hopefully we will just be right, and not have our rights gutted before we can prove it.

And then, the one place where I am an extremist comes into play.. I don't give a flying fuck about the law wherever it does something to break my rights to tinker, exercise speech, or any of my other real hot button "I'm-an-American-and-these-are-my-rights" issues. I enjoy breaking law under such circumstances. Its necessary, fun, and patriotic duty! Its really the only time you can do it without being an ethical slob.

That being said, I also think it would be a really bad thing if all intellectual property law as we know it just "went away".. Then we would be getting into Gibson novel territory with s... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

RE: [Politech] Reply to EFF over its position on RIAA, file swapping [ip]

Available in 80G and 120G models. Guess who is going to be very unhappy about this. Good timing with the broadcast flag situation. Its nice to have something handy to point at as an example of a device that could be either useless or illegal soon.

Pioneer DVD Recorder with Built-In TiVo - DVR/DVD Burner in One

] The RIAA said from now on it would send out warning
] letters first, allowing suspects to negotiate a
] settlement before being served with a lawsuit. Those who
] do not respond within 10 days will be sued.
]
] "In light of the comments we have heard, we want to go
] the extra mile and offer illegal file sharers an
] additional chance to work this out short of legal
] action," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement.

And the "extra mile" they go..

Yahoo! News - Net Song-Swappers Get RIAA Letter Before Lawsuit

] City Music, also in Indianapolis, was raided the
] following week. "They came in and took anything that was
] on a recordable CD," manager Jerome Avery says. "The only
] DJ mixes I had were behind the counter for personal
] listening, and they confiscated them. How can it be
] illegal if the artist is making them for the street? They
] came without a notice - no warrant, no nothing.
] They're making up their own laws, if you ask me."
]
] The City Music raid happened on October 1, the day the
] enormous Universal Music Group's new prices went into
] effect - more bad news for small, independent record
] stores. Universal's widely publicized $9.09 wholesale
] prices only apply to the largest retail chains, and only
] to stores that are willing to buy 30 copies of a disc at
] one time. Most smaller stores, though, deal with
] "one-stop" sub-distributors that can fill orders for a
] disc or two quickly, and take a markup of their own. And
] many retailers are frustrated that customers have been
] coming in for weeks, asking where their $9 CDs are.
]
] Eric Haight of Record World in Petoskey, Michigan, notes
] that a new Sting album before the price drop cost the
] store $12.69, with a suggested retail price of $18.98.
] Now it costs them $10.79, with a retail price of
] $12.98 - the profit margin has been slashed by almost
] two-thirds, and Universal will no longer help them out
] with advertising costs. "I think their motives are
] suspect," Haight says. "This won't affect the Best Buys
] of the world, but I can't see our store making it through
] 2004."

RIAA raiding small music stores for selling DJ mix CDs

SunnComm drops its lawsuit.. That was quick.

] Jacobs said in an interview late last night that a
] successful lawsuit would do little to reverse the damage
] done by the paper Halderman published Monday about his
] research, and any suit would likely hurt the research
] community by making computer scientists think twice about
] researching copy-protection technology.
]
] "I don't want to be the guy that creates any kind of
] chilling effect on research," Jacobs said.

] I just thought about it and decided it was more important
] not to be one of those people. The harm's been done . . . if I
] can't accomplish anything [with a lawsuit] I don't want to
] leave a wake," he said.

The Daily Princetonian - Threat of lawsuit passes for student

] You are most likely visiting this page because you noticed
] an entry in your web server log file that references this
] page. NPBot is the NameProtect Inc. web crawler. As a
] Digital Brand Asset Management company, NameProtect
] engages in crawling activity in search of a wide range of
] brand and other intellectual property violations that may
] be of interest to our clients. For more information on our
] services, please visit the NameProtect website at
] http://www.nameprotect.com

The brand police.

NameProtect Inc :: NPBot Notification

] The landscape has not changed so much that if you had a
] vote taken today, even with all the horror stories of
] RIAA subpoenas sent to grandmothers and honor students,
] the vote would come out in favor of seriously altering or
] removing" that section of the law, Godwin said. "I think
] what you are getting is some impulse, somewhat more
] strongly from the Republican side of the aisle, toward
] some slightly higher level of judicial review and some
] safeguards and remedies for misuse of process."

The DMCA supeonas are a way of removing judicial oversight (and therefore the rule of law) from the information collection phase of intellectual property proceedings. Congress has shown a repeated interest in removing the rule of law from the equation when it benefits their friends in the media industry. Some Republicans are starting to point out that the DMCA supeonas can be used (and abused) by other people, some of whom Congress doesn't like. This is a good thing in general because this law needs to be tightened up. Fortunately its unconstituional for the goverment to give a specific interest group a special right, so they are going to have to lock this thing down across the board. The RIAA offers the same sort of non-technical, and therefore irrelevant response that you're seeing to questions about the security of voting machines. That means they are wrong, and are probably going to loose. This is progress.

Congress starts to look critically at the DMCA

] 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

Comments from Decius:

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

] JENIN, West Bank, Aug. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- In response to
] the email received today from the Motion Picture
] Association of America (MPAA) to Earthstation 5 for
] copyright violations for streaming FIRST RUN movies over
] the internet for FREE, this is our official response!
] Earthstation 5 is at war with the Motion Picture
] Association of America (MPAA) and the Record Association
] of America (RIAA), and to make our point very clear that
] their governing laws and policys have absolutely no
] meaning to us here in Palestine, we will continue to add
] even more movies for FREE.

Dare I make a suicide bomber joke?

PRWire | Earthstation 5 Declares War on MPAA