---
date: "2000-05-15T13:09:00Z"
title: Witchhunts, Lawyers, and the RIAA... Oh My!
---
Well, I've been working on a bunch of small stuff. I wrote a quick
bookmark wrapper for feh called cam, you can probably find more info
over on Tom Gilbert's (aka
gilbertt on #e) page. Oh yeah, I've also been reading
Kuro5hin a lot lately; they're
kinda like Slashdot, only smaller and easier to digest (ie less stupid
people). Oh yeah, I wrote a neat little auto-refresh JavaScript so
raster's web cams would updated without a page refresh. Check it out
on raster's page.
I found an
interesting article that seems to ahve been lost in the all the
RIAA vs. Napster noise. Hey, if you're one of the
300,000
people who were banned from Napster, don't let it get you down. You
can always pay Lars,
assasinate Metallica, or just
keep
using Napster anyway. I prefer the latter; the
RIAA really overprices CDs
(here
is an excellent Slashdot post justifying my position). Either way,
this whole thing is silly; the RIAA and their lawyers will eventually
put Napster down. Unfortunately, they're fighting a losing battle:
Hotline (and the unofficial
Linux client),
FTP, and ICQ are here to stay, and
peer-to-peer search solutions are on the way (check out
Gnutella,
Freenet, and
OpenNAP
if you're interested). And before I get a bunch of junk mail, this is
__not__ about piracy:
piracy
is theft, rape, and murder on the high seas,
not exchanging computer data (I'll reserve the discussion about
the effect of mass marketing memes effecting the connotation and
eventually the denotation -- as witnessed by the second definition under
the first result returned by that link -- for another day). I plan
on writing a paper about
this soon (I need to do somehting to the Bits page
or remove it from my navigation bar), but the gist of the situation is
this: people have been exchanging music via cassette tapes for almost
20 years with little or no intervention from the RIAA (ie they have
_not_ sued the makers of high-speed CD-to-cassette dubbing equipment),
yet they prop up a cookie-cutter
band with a lot of mind-share due to a musical fad from over 15 years
ago and use them to attack
a method of sharing music which
is statistically insignificant when compared against to the method
which the RIAA is implicitly condoning. Why? Because greed is a
powerful motivator, the public doesn't really understand what's going
on, and big corporations don't like technological innovations fucking
with their distribution channels. Whew, this news post is getting a
bit hefty, so I'll stop there.
This Slashdot article is a pretty funny discussion about Computer
Support people: I like
this comment, but
this one takes the cake. In case anyone is interested, I
added a Screenshots page, and I plan on
adding a new shot every week or so. Speaking of keeping things up to
date, the Projects page is due up for an
overhaul. I have a ton of new goodies to add, and none of my active
projects are currently up. Basically, I've been spending all my time
writing code, and
playing Quake 3 Arena.