Here comes my calling in life. Bitching. Lately, as I'm sure many of you have noticed, the record industry is suing users of Kazaa and other 'illegal' mp3 and filesharing programs. I would like to know what jackass bigwig decided this would be a good idea. Let's list the numerous problems of why this won't work, why its stupid, etc. First of all, you'll never get rid of filesharing in itself, even if you do manage to shut down Kazaa. Take Napster. A few years ago, Metallica and the record industries tried suing it, and eventually got it shut down. Two months later, Kazaa and (now extinct) Morpheus were up, as big as Napster was. What did Metallica have to gain from this? they lost alotta money, alotta fans, and the end result didn't make a difference. Seems like history seems to repeat itself, donit?
Continuing with the problems, Napster was actually a centralized program that could be shut down. Because Kazaa is completely user based, they'll never get rid of it unless they eradicate it from every computer that has ever used it. And that ain't gonna happen. Plus, check this. If you unshare your files, there is literally no chance you will get sued (because they have no way of detecting you). There's a miniscule chance they'll nab you anyway, but if you unshare your files you're safe- and you can still download. So even if every single Kazaa user in the U.S. unshared all their files, there's still users overseas that are safe from U.S. jurisdiction for us to get our files from.
Finally, the whole thing in itself is stupid. They're fining people up to $10,000 per song!!! seems a bit of overkill to me. They're also suing 12 year old girls, who don't have more than 100 songs downloaded. Is that fair? Is it smart? No. They are simply trying to make an example out of these people so they can scare the rest of the populace into thinking they'll be next.
So! Consider it your patriotic duty to flick off Uncle Sam and keep your P2P networks up. I'm not going to be intimidated by their idle threats and fucked up reasoning. So, paraphrasing from Dan Hsu, I'm gonna keep watching my American Pies, eating greasy, half pound burgers, and downloading all the freebie shit I want. What are people's thoughts on this?
Continuing with the problems, Napster was actually a centralized program that could be shut down. Because Kazaa is completely user based, they'll never get rid of it unless they eradicate it from every computer that has ever used it. And that ain't gonna happen. Plus, check this. If you unshare your files, there is literally no chance you will get sued (because they have no way of detecting you). There's a miniscule chance they'll nab you anyway, but if you unshare your files you're safe- and you can still download. So even if every single Kazaa user in the U.S. unshared all their files, there's still users overseas that are safe from U.S. jurisdiction for us to get our files from.
Finally, the whole thing in itself is stupid. They're fining people up to $10,000 per song!!! seems a bit of overkill to me. They're also suing 12 year old girls, who don't have more than 100 songs downloaded. Is that fair? Is it smart? No. They are simply trying to make an example out of these people so they can scare the rest of the populace into thinking they'll be next.
So! Consider it your patriotic duty to flick off Uncle Sam and keep your P2P networks up. I'm not going to be intimidated by their idle threats and fucked up reasoning. So, paraphrasing from Dan Hsu, I'm gonna keep watching my American Pies, eating greasy, half pound burgers, and downloading all the freebie shit I want. What are people's thoughts on this?
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