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robotech_masterAnybody notice what the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America)'s been up to lately? Some pretty scary (and offensive) stuff.
They've been trying get an amendment attached to unrelated legislation, indemnifying them from incidental damages caused by hacking or other computer intrusions "that are reasonably intended to impede or prevent" electronic piracy. That in itself is bad enough, but what they were trying to tack it onto was the PATRIOT anti-terrorist bill.
Elsewhere, the RIAA has been coming up with a plan to fight MP3 trading services by feeding them a barrage of false transfer requests--what is known in Internet parlance as a "denial of service attack".
The hubris I see here is incredible. The RIAA is essentially trying to legislate its constituent companies the right to attack peoples' personal computers, just because they might be trading "pirated" MP3s. Isn't it funny that when individual people do that to companies' computers, they get thrown in jail? What's more, they're trying to do it by taking advantage of a tragedy that claimed the lives of 6,000 Americans. Do they honestly think they're going to get away with this? And we're not even getting into the issue of how it is not possible to tell whether an MP3 on someone's hard drive is illegal or not just by looking at the hard drive.
Copyright law no longer protects what it's supposed to or serves the interests it's supposed to. Our rights have been eroded over the decades by the big money interests who have vested interests in seeing that nothing reaches the public domain. Taken individually, some of the things they're doing seem strange or offensive; when you put them together, they add up to some outrages. America, the land of the free, where a foreign programmer can be arrested by the FBI because of a program he wrote in his native land. And it's only getting worse...
They've been trying get an amendment attached to unrelated legislation, indemnifying them from incidental damages caused by hacking or other computer intrusions "that are reasonably intended to impede or prevent" electronic piracy. That in itself is bad enough, but what they were trying to tack it onto was the PATRIOT anti-terrorist bill.
Elsewhere, the RIAA has been coming up with a plan to fight MP3 trading services by feeding them a barrage of false transfer requests--what is known in Internet parlance as a "denial of service attack".
The hubris I see here is incredible. The RIAA is essentially trying to legislate its constituent companies the right to attack peoples' personal computers, just because they might be trading "pirated" MP3s. Isn't it funny that when individual people do that to companies' computers, they get thrown in jail? What's more, they're trying to do it by taking advantage of a tragedy that claimed the lives of 6,000 Americans. Do they honestly think they're going to get away with this? And we're not even getting into the issue of how it is not possible to tell whether an MP3 on someone's hard drive is illegal or not just by looking at the hard drive.
Copyright law no longer protects what it's supposed to or serves the interests it's supposed to. Our rights have been eroded over the decades by the big money interests who have vested interests in seeing that nothing reaches the public domain. Taken individually, some of the things they're doing seem strange or offensive; when you put them together, they add up to some outrages. America, the land of the free, where a foreign programmer can be arrested by the FBI because of a program he wrote in his native land. And it's only getting worse...
