

RIAA Wants To Shutter Torrent Sites, And More - nextparadigms
http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-wants-to-shutter-torrent-sites-and-more-111116/

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jevinskie
“RIAA members are excited about the potential of the internet and other
communication technologies to provide an efficient means of distribution to
music lovers globally. Regrettably, this potential remains largely
unrealized—mired in a morass of piracy,” the letter addressed to the USTR
reads.

Wow, these guys are lying through their teeth. You can now legally listen to
music using an ever-increasing number of services services like iTunes,
Spotify, Pandora, and Amazon. The large majority of the people I know use
these services, along with CDs and FM radio, to listen to music. Only my most
technically adept friends care to pirate music.

~~~
slowpoke
The point isn't whether those services are legal or not. The RIAA fails to
accept the fact that the internet has made middlemen (gatekeepers) utterly
obsolete. The internet doesn't "have the potential" to be a an efficient means
of distributing digital data - it's the whole point of the net in the first
place.

The RIAA wants the advantages of the net without having to deal with the
consequences (namely, being obsolete), which is laughable, not to mention
futile. I hope they'll be out of business soon so we can look back at their
stupid whining in a few decades and heartily laugh at the faint memory of
copyright while we freely access the shared knowledge, culture and information
of mankind.

~~~
felipemnoa
They remind me of AOL but at a bigger scale. They are trying to do everything
they can to keep their ship from sinking. The fact that they seem like they
could be successful is worrying.

When AOL started to shrink/die it started doing really shady things to keep
users from switching internet providers [1]. One of the most insidious ones
was how they would screw with a user's computer so that they would not be able
to switch internet providers [2].

The fact that RIAA is trying to cripple the internet as a whole tells me that
the beast is desperate and dying. It knows that its death is near and as a
last bid for survival has gone for broke. If we can just keep it at bay for a
few more years it will probably finally die.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL#Controversies>
[2]<http://www.gcginc.com/cases/pdf/AOL/AOLNotice.pdf>

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noonespecial
What the RIAA wants is to make the internet a transmission medium and not an
exchange medium. That's all they've ever wanted (except at first, when the
figured they already had a perfectly good transmission medium and wished the
internet would go away).

They'll work as hard as they can for as long as they can (or exist) to make
this true. Nothing else done in service to this goal should come as surprise
anymore.

~~~
libraryatnight
I agree. Now if only they'd cease to exist, that'd be glorious.

~~~
Natsu
This is hard, because I think that there are few sound recordings that are out
of copyright and the way things have been going, I don't expect that to change
any time soon.

That said, I wonder what one could manage if they could dig up a bunch of old
public domain scores and start turning them into MIDIs or something. Actually,
I thought I heard about some guy who was doing that, but with an actual
orchestra. I wonder how that's going?

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wicknicks
I feel strange when I read such posts. USA was supposed to be the poster child
for freedom and liberty. It seems like that position has changed. As
unfortunate as RIAA loosing millions of potential dollars is, its worse that
the only country which supported all forms of freedom is now debating whether
it should cut the viens of the free digital world or not.

~~~
muuh-gnu
> As unfortunate as RIAA loosing millions of potential dollars is

Why should it be? Somebody else will get those dollars, nothing is lost.

~~~
esrauch
I agree with your sentiment but this is really not a convincing argument. You
could say the same thing about common thievery, don't worry about all those
people stealing TVs from stores, that just means the people who would have
bought those tvs will have more money to spend on other things!

~~~
slowpoke
That's a strawman. Theft involves actual loss for someone, and piracy - for
the I-lost-count-after-the-first-three-hundred-and-sixty-four-thousand-times -
is _not_ theft, it's an infringement against a nonsensical law. All the RIAA
and their clients are claiming is lost profits, which is major bullshit.

To pick your analogy, they are complaining that nobody is buying their TVs
because a competitor building better and cheaper TVs has appeared, and demand
that competitor be shut down to save their business model.

~~~
esrauch
I wasn't defending antipiracy law, I was pointing out that the argument as
written was completely wrong and pointless. You then say "BUT NO IT'S ACTUALLY
DIFFERENT BECAUSE OF X" where reason X is completely not mentioned in the
original post.

I guess I should have been more explicit; I agree with your conclusion but the
argument was not the right and wouldn't convince anyone. It's like someone
saying that Leprechauns aren't real because they know Lucky Charms commercials
are CG; sure, but that's not why Leprechauns aren't real.

> To pick your analogy

Actually if you are going to say that, the analogy is that a competitor is
building cheaper tvs that are otherwise exactly the same as your tvs, and they
are already breaking the law to do so, but the law isn't really effective at
stopping them from doing so. If you put it that way, it actually sounds awful.

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maeon3
RIP Internet. 1960 - 2011. Freedom had a good run. Please enter your credit
card info to access this restricted webpage.

Facebook surcharge: $.33

YouTube access: $2.51

Priemium internet package: $55.99

Super delux (fewer roadblocks) internet: $99.99

Establishing ownership of the internet is quite a prize. I wonder how much it
is worth? Probably wont be long until the big content makers slice and dice
and monitize the internet until it has a content payment plan delimited in
links clicked and actions performed and content viewed/downloaded.

~~~
jiggy2011
I'd be surprised if you suddenly got upfront charges for everything, stuff
seems to be moving away from this.

A more likely conspiracy theory is that you access everything through some
giant corporate proxy that is free at the point of use (which will not allow
access to anything that goes against their corporate policy) but it will track
every action you take on your computer and sell this data to anyone with a few
$.

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billpatrianakos
I'm no SOPA fan to say the least but is this a surprise? Of _course_ they want
to shut down torrent sites. That list was probably verbatim a list of people's
"Torrent" folder in their browser's bookmarks.

The Internet should be free and there are many out there trying to limit the
freedom we've come to enjoy and it really is a terrible thing. But let's get
real here. These sites are total copyright infringers. There's no two ways
about it. I admit I use them to get music and movies like the next guy but
it's still not all kosher. They really are just trying to save their business
which is looking more doomed each day. I almost feel like people who believe
that the big corporations are trying to take freedom away are tinfoil hat
sport conspiracy theorists. It's simple really. Online sharing is cutting
hugely into profits so they want to stop it. They've found a way to do that
but unfortunately that way has a lot of unintended side effects.

I'll probably be labelled an RIAA sympathizer but I'm really not. I'm like all
of you. I want to keep the freedoms the Internet affords us. I'm just looking
at this realistically. BitTorrent and p2p protocols have their legitimate uses
but shutting down the outlets that give us access is the only way the RIAA
sees they can stop piracy. It sucks.

If only the RIAA would invest as much time and energy into developing
something that could make piracy obsolete or some process thats a better
option for obtaining copyrighted material as they do in filing law suits and
supporting SOPA we could keep the freedom. But let's not pretend that getting
music and movies through torrent sites is on the up and up. It's one thing to
share with your friends but this basically large scale black market
distribution.

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maeon3
Big content providers need to be cut into tiny warring factions, not given
executive power over what can and cant exist on their internet. Bust those
trusts like Roosevelt did. Have riaa combat itself, not the fabric of the
internet itself.

