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American senator makes wacky suggestion
damn, why don't these stupid anti-piracy people just give up already, it was their fault they didn't ride the MP3 wave when it first came out years ago.
Quote:
Senator: Trash illegal downloaders' PCs
Powerful lawmaker earns song-writing royalties
WASHINGTON (AP) --Illegally download copyright music from the Internet once, or even twice, and you get a warning. Do it a third time, and your computer gets destroyed.
That's the suggestion made by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at a Tuesday hearing on copyright abuse, reflecting a growing frustration in Congress over failure of the technology and entertainment industries to protect copyrights in a digital age.
The surprise statement by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, that he favors developing technology to remotely destroy computers used for illegal downloads represents a dramatic escalation in the increasingly contentious rhetoric over pirated music.
Protected by anti-hack laws
During a discussion of methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.
"No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer," replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to deliberately download pirated material very slowly so other users can't.
"I'm interested," Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."
The senator, a composer who earned $18,000 last year in song-writing royalties, acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions.
Urging action
Some legal experts suggested Hatch's provocative remarks were more likely intended to compel technology and music executives to work faster toward ways to protect copyrights online than to signal forthcoming legislation.
"It's just the frustration of those who are looking at enforcing laws that are proving very hard to enforce," said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former Justice Department cybercrimes prosecutor.
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee's senior Democrat, later said the problem is serious but called Hatch's suggestion too drastic.
"The rights of copyright holders need to be protected, but some Draconian remedies that have been suggested would create more problems than they would solve," Leahy said in a statement. "We need to work together to find the right answers, and this is not one of them."
Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Virginia, urged Hatch to reconsider. Because Hatch is Judiciary chairman, "we all take those views very seriously," he said. But Kerr said Congress was unlikely to approve any bill to enable such remote computer destruction by copyright owners "because innocent users might be wrongly targeted."
Escalating the fight
A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, Jonathan Lamy, said Hatch was "apparently making a metaphorical point that if peer-to-peer networks don't take reasonable steps to prevent massive copyright infringement on the systems they create, Congress may be forced to consider stronger measures." The RIAA represents the major music labels.
The entertainment industry has gradually escalated its fight against Internet file-traders, targeting the most egregious pirates with civil lawsuits. The RIAA recently won a federal court decision making it significantly easier to identify and track consumers -- even those hiding behind aliases -- using popular Internet file-sharing software.
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src: http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/interne....ap/index.html
just for kicks, here's a really good rant I came across a while back.
Quote:
Darwin said it best:
EVOLVE OR BECOME EXTINCT
Those are your only choices. The record industry as we know it today has become obsolete. Their business model is flawed as a large part of that model was focused on physical distribution of music. That "value added service", as the years progress, will no longer be needed, as music will be distributed digitally over the phone and cable lines direct from production to end customer.
Don't go around complaining and suing people just because you failed to see the future of the industry and misjudged the significance of digitized music. The record labels knew, long before anyone else, about mp3's, yet they dismissed it as a niche phenomena utilized by the most uber of computer geeks. They were wrong, and now they are paying for it. I'm sure a lot of "real people" suffered when cassettes replaced albums as the standard music-recording format, then again when cassettes were replaced by CD's. Now store bought CD's are being replaced by mp3's. Just as workers in the previous industries had to evolve and contribute to the economy in some new fashion, so shall these record label workers. They should be glad they're not candle makers around the time Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. I'm sure all the big candle-makers got together and lobbied the lawmakers to
shut down Thomas' invention from proliferation, but guess what? It was
better for mankind to advance with electricity than to remain in the dark, wax-lit, ages.
Consumers are SICK of paying $18.99 for a CD that contains only 2 hits while the rest are just filler tracks. Where's the ethics in that? Record labels have (legally) stolen from the consumer for years, and now they are getting their panties all up in a knot because some of us are taking it back. Fuck them. I hope hackers all over the world unite and proliferate piracy until the record labels all file Chapter 11. Maybe then they can re-educate and re-train themselves in a profession that actually BENEFITS society, instead of being the greed-driven blood sucking leaches that they were.
The only way to stop people from downloading free music is to develop
Counter-ripping technology to prevent all illegal copying of music.
Offering people a paying alternative, from $18.99 down to $9.99 per album, will do diddly squat. "Oh, you were raping me 2 times a day, but now you only want to rape me once a day... um OK!!" How bout I not let you rape me at all?
Music will never die, but the way music are distributed must change. Artists must realize and take risk of singling out record labels and distribute their works directly through the consumers. Sadly, I don’t see it happening anytime soon with stupid musicians like Madonna, Dr Dre, and many more. Oh well!
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Jun 19, 03
