rant

[dubstylee]

Your rights are being bought. And at a ridiculously low price. For a few thousand dollars, the RIAA is using puppets in congress like Howard Berman (http://www.zeropaid.com/news/articles/auto/07112002k ), Fritz Hollings, John Conyers Jr., Lamar Smith and Howard Coble to steal your rights away. Pretty soon, they’ll be suing users of p2p. Then they’ll be rounding them up and putting them in jails. What’s next? Tattoing my KaZaA id to my forearm? Sending me to the showers for “copyright re-education”?

What is going on here is nothing short of the hijacking of the ideals and government of the United States of America. These congressmen don’t care about you or I, I am firmly convinced of that fact. I can only guess that others are just not paying attention, because I cannot understand how one could observe the actions of these men and not assume they are on the payroll of the RIAA and MPAA. These men have repeatedly introduced one-sided legislation that reads as if Jack and Hilary (Cary Sherman is the new president of the RIAA, picking up where Hilary left off) wrote it themselves. The earliest of these bills was HR 5211 (http://www.house.gov/berman/p2p.pdf, http://www.house.gov/berman/p2p_faq.html), which is supposed to “allow copyright owners to protect their property.” What it really would do (in its original language) is give copyright holders the right to “defend their property” by being the judge, jury, and executioner for your pc. Basically, if the RIAA thinks you have a copyrighted song on your pc that is owned by one of the labels they represent, they can then hack into your pc and disable it. Without a warrant. Without a subpoena. Without even checking with a any law enforcement agency, or even any government agency for that matter. Kind of an aside here, I used to work for MP3.com when they were going through the whole My.MP3.com debacle (another aside: the RIAA would LOVE My.MP3.com right now), and I remember one of the big laughingstocks of the case was that when it came time for a judgement, the music industry had to ask for an extension while they figured out exactly what copyrights they owned. They had literally no idea. If it wasn’t a major hit in the last 20 years or so, It could take you months to find out who actually owns copyright for a particular song. The way the music industry works, it could be five different companies that own a copyright for a song. Let’s think about this for a minute. There are about 8,000,000 queries per minute on KaZaA’s network alone. So their response is to download copyrighted material from people who are sharing it, so they can be sure of catching the infringer. This allows them to search only for their material, Universal searching for Eminem, etc. But let’s say I am an up and coming rapper, I want to get more people to hear my stuff, so I put it in my shared folder and label it all Eminem to get people to download it. That’s probably why we have news like this (http://www.zeropaid.com/news/articles/auto/05112003c). Blah blah blah old news. So they moved on.

The RIAA’s new hotness is a flood of bills coming from their puppets in Congress. One would allow for the creation of a copyright czar (http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-...1417ih.txt.pdf) to oversee royalty rates (Hmm, Hilary just resigned as president of the RIAA, she’s available). Another (http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml...toryID=3104465) makes sharing songs on the internet a federal crime.



What the fuck are these guys thinking? Well, they aren’t. They are puppets of an industry remember? Howard Coble’s own chief of staff, Ed McDonald said his boss “wouldn't even know how to turn on the computer.” Feel better yet? John Conyers Jr. is sponsoring a bill to abolish racial profiling but just applauded a supreme court decision upholding affirmative action. Now, I’m not trying to make this a racial issue, just pointing out Mr. Conyers’ two-facedness. What I want to know is why. Here’s Howard Berman’s PAC contributions for his 2002 campaign: (http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/memb...expandAll=TRUE). All totaled, his contributions from the RIAA/MPAA and their members is less than $20,000. Think about that. For $20,000, the entertainment industry has bought everything they need to conduct a massive country wide witch hunt for those evil peer to peer swappers. That’s another thing! Every piece of legislation specifically names peer-to-peer as a method of piracy. P2P has nothing to do with piracy, it s a technology. If I sound a bit jaded when I am discussing this, its because I know they don’t care. At all. Technology means nothing to these people. Take the case of the students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (http://www.zeropaid.com/news/articles/auto/06252003g). All they did was create a search engine similar to Google. The RIAA responded by taking their life savings, with top legal pitbull Matt Oppenheim (yeah whatup tuff guy lets fight) bullying 19 year olds into submission "He stared down the barrel of a massive lawsuit," Oppenheim said. "I'd be very surprised if he or anybody else who is familiar with this would want to have to face this again."

I don’t know about you, but all this makes me want to move to New Zealand. Or Amsterdam. Or somewhere. But goddamit, this is my country too. I was born here, and I will probably die here. And I will be damned if I am going to sit by and watch as greedy soulless bastards exploit the very systems this country was built on to line their own pockets. I will be damned if I watch a hundred billion dollar industry steal the life savings of innovative college students. I will be damned if I witness another atrocity committed by this industry. I will not, cannot allow this to continue. And you shouldn’t either.

How can we stop them? Well, there are a lot of methods I cannot mention here. I know I will be doing everything in my power to bring these people down:

http://www.riaa.com
http://www.mpaa.com

Howard Berman
http://www.house.gov/berman/
Fritz Hollings
http://hollings.senate.gov/
John Conyers Jr.
http://www.house.gov/conyers/
Lamar Smith
http://lamarsmith.house.gov/
Howard Coble
http://www.house.gov/coble/


Here’s positive things you can do:

Join the EFF!
http://www.eff.org/share/

Vote for this chick:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,54693,00.html


Fun links:
where do they get their money from?
http://www.opensecrets.org/



disclaimer: this is reactionary, knee-jerk kinda stuff. sorry, I am just emotional over this morning's news. I will rewrite this and publish it properly another time

[Foreverboard]

Originally posted by dubstylee
Your rights are being bought. And at a ridiculously low price. For a few thousand dollars, the RIAA is using puppets in congress like Howard Berman (http://www.zeropaid.com/news/articles/auto/07112002k, ),

Yea, its lame Matt, but nice links thanks. =)

[Brycen257]

Excellent post, as well as great links, dubstylee. I agree with you 100 % . If these soulless bastards (great phrase) are going to continue attacking and ruining innocent people in their quest to destroy all those who participate in P2P programs, they need to be reminded at every opportunity that we will fight back until they and every crooked sleazeball that supports them are destroyed like the infectious vermin they are .

[Sockfulloflove]

long thread but with good info.

[Mel_Smiley]

Nice four letter words too!!!:cross :fire :fire :fire

[Krell]

Dub I dont know how anyone cant fathom the lobbying efforts and special interests at work here. THIS IS the way government works.

Untill people use their free cell long distance minutes and free time to lobby, theyre basically conceding defeat.

[Winphuk]

Through discussion with alot of people outside of the community, I came to realize that most people really don't care or don't know enough about it.
This is all just history repeating itself

[PowerMan57two]

Originally posted by Krell
Dub I dont know how anyone cant fathom the lobbying efforts and special interests at work here. THIS IS the way government works.

Untill people use their free cell long distance minutes and free time to lobby, theyre basically conceding defeat.

We use our free long disntance phone. Get like over 3k minutes a month. We can hardly use them all! Great plan for $39/month