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New RIAA Plan 'Just A Scarecrow'
All for show, to scare off P2P users...

Remember about a year ago, when the RIAA leaked word to the Wall Street Journal that they were replacing their misguided tactic of suing grandmothers and college students with a new anti-piracy system? That system involved ISPs, who would implement piracy filters and voluntarily boot heavy P2P users from the network. Of course as 2009 progressed the ISPs made it clear they wanted nothing to do with the RIAA's system, and a year later the program -- which supposedly already had companies like AT&T and Comcast on board -- is nowhere to be found. CNET takes a look at what happened to the plan:

quote:
Multiple music sources have told me over the past month the RIAA leaders were feeling pressure to drop the lawsuit campaign, but were also being lobbied by some at the labels to put some kind of deterrent in place, even if totally toothless. They didn't want the public to think there weren't any consequences to pirating music, even if the reality was exactly that. According to those sources, the announcement about the ISP strategy last December was little more than a scarecrow.
That's not to say that ISPs haven't ramped up the number of warnings they've sent users to keep the entertainment industry and lawmakers at bay, but those warnings remain largely toothless. Only one ISP we know of (Cox Communications) admits to actually booting repeat offenders from the network, and Cox tells us they only wind up booting a tiny fraction of their customer base -- after giving them countless warnings to scale back their P2P usage.

This won't make a dent in piracy, so it still only seems like a matter of time before Uncle Sam is convinced by his Hollywood friends to pass a law forcing ISPs to boot users and implement filters. We're curious: how many "Notice of Claim of Copyright Infringements" have you received from your ISPs? Have you ignored them? Has there been consequences for ignoring them?

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cline3621
Mr. Yuk is MEAN Mr. Yuk is GREEN
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join:2006-06-14
Clarksville, TN

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cline3621

Premium Member

Times change, so has the media, and medium.

My name is Brad. I am 33 years old. I was a child during the 1980's. Most children, (back then) didn't have much money at their disposal. Am I the only one to record music from an FM radio? I know I'm not. I would say millions of people did that at one point in their lifetimes. Is that 'copyright infringement'? According to the RIAA it is. Did that kill the music business? Of course not. Did it negatively impact their bottom line? Of course not. Were vinyl records, tapes, or early cds laden with drm? Of course not. When you paid for your music you got generally what you wanted, and you were able to do what you wanted with the media. However, when you recorded from the radio, you always got the one or two songs you wanted, as well as a few seconds of DJ banter sometimes, and you were still able to do what you wanted with the tape. Hell there are times I record from my Sirius satellite radio. And now that I think of it, the music industry had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the satellite radio/streaming music business. They fought like hell to kill the TimeTrax hardware and software.

Now, flash forward 27 years, to the present, where most people under the age of 20 have never seen or held a cassette tape, or vinyl record. They have their Ipod, or in my case the Archos 5 internet media tablet, which is better than the Ipod. (Take that Apple!) Why is people recording (or copying) music from a disinterested 3rd party, like a website, newsgroup or p2p a problem to the RIAA? I don't think its any different than the alternative we had in the 1980's. Just my personal opinion. Also before the corporate shills show up and call me a thief, and so on, I pay for Napster, I've been paying for Napster for about 3 years now, and will continue to pay for their service as long as i get value for my money. Or I completely download their entire catalog, and use tunebite to remove the drm. (I better buy more multi-terabyte hard drives then )

You want to know the reason most people pirate? Convenience! It's usually cheap or free, there is no drm, (I remove the drm that comes with Napster) you get what you want in a timely manner, and so on. When you want to be legal about something its usually the complete opposite of the qualities I listed above.
I remember getting into a pissing match with some lady at Microsoft years ago, due to getting a scratched windows98 oem cd. They wanted me to pay $50 to have a replacement sent to me after paying for the original copy. I think the lady on the other end of the phone got pissed when I laughed in her face, and told her, "No thanks ma'am, I'm gonna borrow my friends cd and make a copy". See? That was convenient for me. And yes I did make a copy of a Win98SE OEM cd. If and when its convenient for a person to pay for legal media, be it music, movies or software, most people will. Case in point. My copy of Windows 7. Totally legit, other than Vista this is the only other OS I've paid for, because it was convenient! I downloaded Windows 7 Ultimate X64 from Microsoft in about 1 hour, paid them $139 for it, and got emailed the key. It was that simple.

Unfortunately until the old geezers pushing their "its 1970" business model go away, we are going to be stuck with the logic of: This is our cd, (or software, or movie) your only paying to listen to it, by yourself, in your own house, and no one else may listen to it unless they pay us first, and you can only play it on this player. This is the type of bullshit that cause DIVX to fail. If you remember walking around a circuit city store around this time in 1998 you know what I'm talking about, and not the video codec.

On one final note, I can remember getting a nasty email from some of the people at Fox's corporate broadcast arm. I wished I would have saved them, as well as my replies. I thought they were quite comical. Anyways here is the story. Back in 2005 (i think it was 2005) they started showing "24" in January. They would play the entire season from January to end of April early May time frame. They would start by playing the first 2 episodes on a Sunday. Usually after the AFC championship game. Well on this Sunday, the game went off at 8:15pm eastern. No problem, start playing the tape at 8:15pm. Unfortunately there were several affiliates, who didn't preempt their local 10:00pm news. So people missed the last 15-20 minutes of the 1st episode. People got pissed. This is where I come in. I recorded said episode to my dvr. I then set up my own streaming media server. I went to fox's "24" message board and told people how to open their media player to my domain name (at the time) to watch the last 20 mins of the show. I was in such a hurry I actually left the commercials in. I started the streaming media center, and figured "oh hell 20 people or so will show up" oh god i was wrong. In that 20 minutes I was using windows media encoder 9, encoding at roughly 700kbps, and had at one point about 63,000 different computers connected and watching. The scary point is that
some really savvy people pulled an internet whois and started sending me emails. One guy actually pulled my phone number from it. The phone call and most of the emails were to say thanks and so on. The phone call scared the shit out of me though. I don't post personal info when I register domain names now, learned my lesson there. However I got 2 emails directly from fox. They were pissed off. You would think they would be happy I was rebroadcasting they show, with commercials in no less and not for any financial gain on my part. Basically the first was a cease and desist. The second seemed to me more of an arrogant and sarcastic 'up yours, don't you know who we are?' email, to which I replied "yes, your a multi-billion entertainment conglomerate, who can't even stream a show from your website, while one of your fans, using inexpensive computer hardware, did your job for you, at no cost to you, your welcome". I wished I would have saved those emails. I would have posted them on here for your reading pleasure. I haven't typed anything this long in some time now. I'm tired and going to bed. Good night, and merry Christmas.