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more on RIAA Sues a 12-year old girl
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2003 11:10:44 -0400
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2003 08:03:16 -0700 From: "J. Paul Reed" <preed () sigkill com> Subject: Re: [IP] RIAA Sues a 12-year old girl To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Cc: ip () v2 listbox com, Richard Forno <rforno () infowarrior org> On 09 Sep 2003 at 10:25:55, Dave Farber arranged the bits on my disk to say: > >Story here: > >http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,96797,00.html This story ends with the quotation: "It's not like we were doing anything illegal," said Torres. "This is a 12-year-old girl, for crying out loud." While I totally agree that the RIAA and MPAA are going too far in their recent effort to sue all their customers, this isn't the... best example to illustrate why the "**AAs" actions are wrong. Robert Cringely argued in a column almost a year ago (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020926.html) that to repeal things like the DMCA (which the RIAA is using to serve their subpoenas to the ISPs to turn Kazaa names into addresses), we *all* need to break the law, and break it early and often. Consumers have to bring Thoreau's age-old civil disobedience to cyberspace. But to *be* civilly disobedient, practitioners have to know that they're breaking the law, be willing to accept the consequences, and consciously break it anyway. We can't "win" this fight by claiming ignorance of this country's copyright laws (which aren't all bad; they protect us too). Putting a bunch of people on TV that say "Uhhh... I didn't know I was breaking the law" does not help the cause of fixing broken legislation like the DMCA or breaking monopolies like the RIAA. It just makes all consumers look like lawless, ignorant idiots who are trying to "steal" intellectual property. And that only serves the RIAA's rhetoric. Later, Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------------ J. Paul Reed -- 0xDF8708F8 || preed () sigkill com || web.sigkill.com/preed To hold on to sanity too tight is insane. -- Nick Falzone, Pushing Tin I use PGP; you should use PGP too... if only to piss off John Ashcroft
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