Sinabro

On Information Week:

Innocent consumers are being bothered by another round of the record industry behaving badly, via more lawsuits and anti-copying threats. This time, though, I’ve got a solution. We should do what we do to children who misbehave: Take away their privileges. Here’s the deal.

Er, I simply have to disagree with Mr. Wolfe.

The “punishment” he proposes is essentially equivalent to giving toy guns children who have been found to misuse real guns.

What he proposes as a “punishment” should have been the norm so … last century. It was already clear then that copyright was stifling innovation.

An appropriate punishment for misbehaving children will be taking the toy gun away and making him sit in the corner for 15 minutes. That would be, in real-world terms, putting the copyrighted work under dispute immediately in the public domain, as well as opening up possibilities for criminal suits against the abuser (if not an outright jail sentence).

That’s the punishment these immoral abusers of the public deserve.

P.S. And I would still say this is mild. In the old days, they would have been publicly flogged and then banished, if not a summary execution.

Ars Technica reports:

Nothing more than IP addresses sit at the foundation of most of the RIAA’s subpoenas and prelitigation letters, and the University of Washington says it has problems passing on legal threats based on them.

Although the amateur sysadmin in me says mapping a person to an IP is an easy task, the freedom-loving college student in me applauds the administration of these schools.

Really, it doesn’t matter how trivial the investigation is. RIAA, if they have any thread of conscience, even though it’s clear that they don’t, should do its own dirty work, not force innocent third party (school, as a general ISP, is protected by safe harbor provision of DMCA) or the government (RIAA tried to make DoJ bring civil suits on its behalf, I think).

“The unauthorized uploading or downloading of music is illegal. It is just as wrong as shoplifting from a local record store.” Well, beyond the question of legality (after all, RIAA wrote the damn law), I think it’s clear what’s more immoral: sharing (hopefully) good songs freely with others, or theft of the public domain by RIAA and media giants. Theft of the public domain by repeated retroactive extensions of copyright is utterly immoral, perhaps even more wrong than pilfering public coffers. Oh, they are in such a fine shape to discuss who’s committing a more grave wrong on whom.

Take this for an example. The morally-decrepit democrats want to give these scums “right to break any existing law” in order to protect their outdated business model and immoral practices. Under this situation, clearly only an idiot would take “the law” as defining what’s right, Socrates be damned.

Use your common sense. One group wants to share and share alike (to the public’s benefit), and another wants to hoard (for its own exorbitant profit to the public’s detriment) and break laws in order to continue hoarding. RIAA is immoral, and their agents, the democrats, are the devil’s tools.