Actually, if you read the article Mike links to she wouldn't allow a computer in her house so it's unlikely in the extreme that she had a connection. To wit:
"Once tried to sue a dead grandmother to extract what it felt was its rightful pound of flesh for files allegedly downloaded to a house in which the dead woman wouldn't even allow a computer to be installed."
Do follow a link now and then before spouting off.
It as actually the curb that downloaded the songs.
Either that or the telco crew there the day she died allegedly splicing the cable while they used every wifi in the area to clear out everything on the Pirate Bay.
Oh, and don't put too much faith in forensic hard drive analysis. There's lots of utilities around that will wipe hard drives clean. Almost all Linux distros come with at least one of them as part of the standard 'Nix suite of utilities and you can find stuff for Windows at legit downloads sites. If you want even more assurance of a clean wipe there are utilities on SourceForge that do just that. Technically it's not all that hard to do, it just takes a lot of time.
Regretfully Granma's in heaven while the Associations are in the 7th ring of hell as described by Dante though the devils are trying to find somewhere worse as the Associations and their bought and paid for politicians seem to be enjoying the company of Nero, Caligula, Attila The Hun, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Napoleon and Jack The Ripper far too much as they swap stories and give each other advice.
I suggest we genetically modify the tiger, also a species at risk, so that it recognizes genus lobbyist as delicious food and acts appropriately while recognizing homo sapiens as friends who dearly love to scratch their ears, pet and stroke them and surrender 9/10ths of their bed to them like they do with the domestic cat.
Oh she was dead, alright, Right there on the couch, eyes half open, jaw slack, greenish smelly drool coming from her mouth and other orifices while the neighborhood dogs were sniffing around and looking at her like they do when they find something that just MIGHT be good to eat,
Oh yeah, blue lips and nails and that sort of thing.
This all overlooks that SOPA supporters haven't come up with a new definition of "life" that will be one of the first things filtered out because the RIAA will have a copyright on so downloading the PDF would be considered piracy.
The more I ponder what happens with those elected to high office for an extended period of time the more I become convinced that the simple act of sitting in Congress, Parliament or a town council for a long period of years leads to chronic brain damage that only accelerates as the years pile up and lead to the early onset of a special from of Alzheimer's disease that the rest of us have been conditioned to thing of as somehow normal behaviour.
This illness is more commonly known as George III Syndrome.
You know, I just can't figure out the hostility of elected members of Congress for their hostility towards the tech sector in general, their inexcusable ignorance of it besides.
I guess it's just easier to understand Hollywood and their whinging after coming to work following watching "Sons of Guns", that they downloaded just before retiring so they could watch it with breakfast. Kinda feel more manly and aggressive that way. And it's not piracy at all because they wipe it off their disk drive right after breakfast. Or they have their maid or other member of their domestic staff do it for them because they just can't seem to get the hang of that trash can looking thing up in the corner there and what it's for.
That darned tech sector! Whatever happened to rotary dial telephones? Whatever happened to answering machines instead of this voice mail thing stuff? Whatever happened to the delivery boy with the paper? And why is the car telling me it's going to run out of gas, needs an oil change or the tires are low? And WHY does it talk to me and want me to talk back at it sometimes when I hit those funny buttons on the steering wheel? Why can't we just go back to everyone being happy with 55 Chevy's? Now THERE was car!!!!!
The RIAA has argued in court that that defense isn't valid,AFAIK. Certainly they've made it clear to those they send nasty letters and emails to that the "cousin johnny" defense isn't worth a hill of beans bringing in the traffic light speeding camera illustration that if you end your vehicle to someone who was caught speeding you, as the registered owner of the vehicle are responsible for its use. True enough in insurance land, where anything to get them off the hook is allowed and in collecting-traffic-fines-land where it seems to hold true as well.
It takes some cheek for them to pull that one out of the hat now and indicates a delicious lack of a sense of irony that one of their songwriters or muscians would have reminded them of after telling them a label still owed them money from the last pair of million selling CDs.
Actually, Joe, the IP address in question isn't one the RIAA "subscribes" to in any sense of the word it's part of a block that's "owned" and controlled by them and only them.
So there is no question that someone at an IP address assigned only to the RIAA downloaded "infringing" material (notably the RIAA isn't denying that) but they're using the "some vendor" excuse instead of the "cousin johnny" defense, the same defense they insist that others can't use because their "investigations" say that the person who is assigned that address at that time is responsible for any and all actions done at that address, similar to your traffic light camera argument. Therefore, the responsibility for the piracy lays WITH the RIAA and not "cousin johnny" by your and, up till now, their logic and equating it with the speed trap camera lights.
THAT, my friend, is the irony, even if every word the RIAA is saying in its defense of itself is true.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Sigh... This type of schlock news is tiresome.
Oh, it's real enough, alright. As far as a city goes it's real.
It's also a fantasy in that it's been a fantasy factory for well nigh on a century now and has been reading far far too much of it's own press releases and has been believing that the fantasy is reality.
To the point the story makes. The very argument the RIAA is making here to "prove" it's innocence is something they won't accept from anyone else. Kinda like they won't accept a defense in a private home of "cousin johnny was here that weekend so he must have done it, not us". In the RIAA's case it proves nothing when they say "a contractor had to have done it" or words to that effect.
So if we are to accept the RIAA's word for it, as it doesn't appear that they're disputing that the block if IP addresses belong to them, then it seems that there's a better than even chance that they've been party to sending out cease and desist messages and taking people to court (and winning sometimes) on extremely flimsy information that their now admitting is next to useless or someone DID in fact "infringe" on MPAA "property" from inside the RIAA.
There's nothing schlocky about it unless Techdirt, CNET and others are all dealing in that according to you.
And no, the RIAA is not an officer of the court in the sense of law enforcement nor was it conducting an investigation or claiming that it was.
I do LOVE your drawing a parallel between Hollywood and drug dealers though. It's amazingly accurate.
Not for a while yet. You can get far more converts to the cause of stopping SOPA/PIPA while lampooning them and making fun of it all while at the same time educating people about the consequences.
just a widdle detail here. It was largely the Lords and nutty old King George III who didn't care what the colonists wanted or cared about. The Commons was stuffed full of supporters of the revolutionaries. Sadly it wasn't until 35 some odd years later that the Commons finally knackered the Lords so that something like what happened in America wouldn't ever happen again.
It helped that a certain Queen Victoria was as disgusted with what the Lords and George the Nutty had done that where the Commons couldn't directly overrule the Lords, she did. The legal and full neutering of the Lords didn't really happen till the early 20th Century by which time no one really cared all that much what they thought.
No, silent movies were silent as the sound track hadn't been developed when they were made. Pianists and ogranists in theatres would often play something "on the fly" that would accompany the picture to accompany it, help to increase tension and all that stuff. Later some movie companies would send out music to play while the movie played and the musicians in the theatres would riff on that. It's that that you can sometimes hear on copies of silent movies made after the sound track came along. The rest of the time the music is just someone jamming and riffing as the movie goes on.
If the music played was in the public domain before the movie was made and the sound track (much later) was added containing that music the music itself is still in the public domain. It's just the specific combination of music and pictures that is subject to a new copyright.
That didn't work to combat talkies so that soon died, anyway.
The CarrierIQ software is supposed to be needed so that operators of cellular and mobile phones can better diagnose their networks and why and when things fail.
Yet 90% or more of what CarrierIQ claims to do is already available to the carriers from data collected in and by their switches and other network devices should they want to look at it. And look at it the carriers do. Even then CarrierIQ doing what the company says it does and only that already have better data and better diagnostics available to them to analyze their networks from switches to antennas, to switch to switch connections through backbones and other routing devices all under pretty much constant surveillance. And that's been there from the days of electromechanical switching. All CarrierIQ can give them is a "phone's eye" view which is largely useless anyway.
So pardon me if I feel that the "law enforcement" angle is the end goal here rather than network improvement as I don't see a thing in CarrierIQ's claims that would be of much use in network improvement than what's already there.
Network improvement in whole or in part has been part of my craft/trade/profession for 35+ years and all I see there is something that I'd be better served by ignoring it completely. I'll get to the problem faster if I do, I guarantee that. Too much useless data is worse than none at all. Particularly when I already have better data available than can possibly come from the "phone eye" view at all.
And certainly from capturing any keystroke presses from the phone itself because, from a diagnostic perspective, that tells me nothing at all outside of the less than trivial fact that the switch received and passed on the message the keystrokes sent. If I want, I can find that anyway, something by law I can't share with anyone outside the business, even the cops unless they have a valid court order that forces me to. But as a diagnostic tool it's useless or worse 99.9999999% of the time.
Oh well. IF it's for network improvement it's for the call centre fools in the Philippines who won't understand it and I'll get a trouble ticket reading "such and such doesn't work" as usual before calling them back and asking "just WHAT THE HELL isn't working????" Well, why didn't you just say too many dropped calls or a sudden increase in dropped calls? Oh, nothing on the computer form for that? OK, thanks, I'll get up there the moment the Force 10 gale blows over."
You do understand, do you not that everything is built on the ideas and expressions of what came before. The odds after 200.000 years of humans writing that someone coming up with something entirely original are enormously against it. Even then what was written is based on stories and creations communicated orally before someone took pen to parchment or dried reeds, or a stick to blocks of clay.
Even the pyramids were built on principles discovered and used before they were constructed, not by slaves it turns out but by free people.
The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Hebrews and Persians knew the world was round, not flat. Though some technically "advanced" people today insist it's flat.
Every great symphony is built on the works around it from previous compositions to folk music around it. Rock and blues and modern country owe to those who write and performed inner city black music, white and black gospel music and country and western that came before, with injections of Jamacian music particularly from the British Invasion.
And all of this isn't creative but is somehow wrong in your world because it borrowed and absorbed what came before it almost always without pay? How do you pay the guy or gal around the campfire a thousand or so years ago that first sung or played to tune to what became your favourite hymn or dance tune?
All of this means Mozart, Litz, McCartney & Lennon, Rogers and Hammerstien, Gilbert and Sullivan, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare, the writers of the Bible, Homer and every other notable creative people and hundreds of thousands more all have "typical content grifter mentality" because they built their own works influenced by or borrowimg from those who came before both known and unknown?
Oh heck, I didn't know piracy what THAT widespread. I had no idea what it cost us and the world culturally. Now if only the RIAAs and MPAAs of the time had only stopped it! It's so horrible, it's unbelievable what it's cost us! Where was Congress, SOPA and PIPA to stop all this cultural carnage and laying waste. pillaging, rape and destruction of culture!
Oh. wait a second. It's our culture I've just described. Isn't it? All of it borrowed, recast and remixed by content grifters. Not at all a bad outcome. Pretty damned good one I'd say.
And you want to stop this? Are you nuts? Of course you are. Freeze something dynamic into something static and surrounded with amber so that it never, ever moves again, never ever creates again.
Even the English language "pirates" words from other languages when it needs them. Remember "detente"? A French word? Our language didn't trot of the L'Academe Francaise in Paris to arrange for royalties to that language. English just "pirated" it. Just as it pirated the world "chuck" meaning water from the Salish of the pacific northwest. Guess we owe them big time, too.
Either you're nuts or the rich, varied dynamic culture around us is. I vote for you as the nutty one.
On the post: Do We Really Want To Hand Over Control Of The Internet To A Group That Sued A Dead Grandmother
Re:
"Once tried to sue a dead grandmother to extract what it felt was its rightful pound of flesh for files allegedly downloaded to a house in which the dead woman wouldn't even allow a computer to be installed."
Do follow a link now and then before spouting off.
On the post: Do We Really Want To Hand Over Control Of The Internet To A Group That Sued A Dead Grandmother
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Either that or the telco crew there the day she died allegedly splicing the cable while they used every wifi in the area to clear out everything on the Pirate Bay.
Oh, and don't put too much faith in forensic hard drive analysis. There's lots of utilities around that will wipe hard drives clean. Almost all Linux distros come with at least one of them as part of the standard 'Nix suite of utilities and you can find stuff for Windows at legit downloads sites. If you want even more assurance of a clean wipe there are utilities on SourceForge that do just that. Technically it's not all that hard to do, it just takes a lot of time.
On the post: Do We Really Want To Hand Over Control Of The Internet To A Group That Sued A Dead Grandmother
Re: Re:
On the post: Do We Really Want To Hand Over Control Of The Internet To A Group That Sued A Dead Grandmother
Re: Re: We must fight for our rights (to parttty)
On the post: Do We Really Want To Hand Over Control Of The Internet To A Group That Sued A Dead Grandmother
Re: Re: Re: Are you all Doctors now?
Oh yeah, blue lips and nails and that sort of thing.
This all overlooks that SOPA supporters haven't come up with a new definition of "life" that will be one of the first things filtered out because the RIAA will have a copyright on so downloading the PDF would be considered piracy.
On the post: Do We Really Want To Hand Over Control Of The Internet To A Group That Sued A Dead Grandmother
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Demolishing The Reasoning Behind Senators Bogus Grandstanding Against Google
This illness is more commonly known as George III Syndrome.
On the post: Demolishing The Reasoning Behind Senators Bogus Grandstanding Against Google
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On the post: Demolishing The Reasoning Behind Senators Bogus Grandstanding Against Google
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I guess it's just easier to understand Hollywood and their whinging after coming to work following watching "Sons of Guns", that they downloaded just before retiring so they could watch it with breakfast. Kinda feel more manly and aggressive that way. And it's not piracy at all because they wipe it off their disk drive right after breakfast. Or they have their maid or other member of their domestic staff do it for them because they just can't seem to get the hang of that trash can looking thing up in the corner there and what it's for.
That darned tech sector! Whatever happened to rotary dial telephones? Whatever happened to answering machines instead of this voice mail thing stuff? Whatever happened to the delivery boy with the paper? And why is the car telling me it's going to run out of gas, needs an oil change or the tires are low? And WHY does it talk to me and want me to talk back at it sometimes when I hit those funny buttons on the steering wheel? Why can't we just go back to everyone being happy with 55 Chevy's? Now THERE was car!!!!!
On the post: Demolishing The Reasoning Behind Senators Bogus Grandstanding Against Google
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On the post: RIAA's Response To Infringement Via Its IP Address... Is To Note Someone Else Did It
Re: Re:
It takes some cheek for them to pull that one out of the hat now and indicates a delicious lack of a sense of irony that one of their songwriters or muscians would have reminded them of after telling them a label still owed them money from the last pair of million selling CDs.
On the post: RIAA's Response To Infringement Via Its IP Address... Is To Note Someone Else Did It
Re:
So there is no question that someone at an IP address assigned only to the RIAA downloaded "infringing" material (notably the RIAA isn't denying that) but they're using the "some vendor" excuse instead of the "cousin johnny" defense, the same defense they insist that others can't use because their "investigations" say that the person who is assigned that address at that time is responsible for any and all actions done at that address, similar to your traffic light camera argument. Therefore, the responsibility for the piracy lays WITH the RIAA and not "cousin johnny" by your and, up till now, their logic and equating it with the speed trap camera lights.
THAT, my friend, is the irony, even if every word the RIAA is saying in its defense of itself is true.
On the post: RIAA's Response To Infringement Via Its IP Address... Is To Note Someone Else Did It
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Sigh... This type of schlock news is tiresome.
It's also a fantasy in that it's been a fantasy factory for well nigh on a century now and has been reading far far too much of it's own press releases and has been believing that the fantasy is reality.
To the point the story makes. The very argument the RIAA is making here to "prove" it's innocence is something they won't accept from anyone else. Kinda like they won't accept a defense in a private home of "cousin johnny was here that weekend so he must have done it, not us". In the RIAA's case it proves nothing when they say "a contractor had to have done it" or words to that effect.
So if we are to accept the RIAA's word for it, as it doesn't appear that they're disputing that the block if IP addresses belong to them, then it seems that there's a better than even chance that they've been party to sending out cease and desist messages and taking people to court (and winning sometimes) on extremely flimsy information that their now admitting is next to useless or someone DID in fact "infringe" on MPAA "property" from inside the RIAA.
There's nothing schlocky about it unless Techdirt, CNET and others are all dealing in that according to you.
And no, the RIAA is not an officer of the court in the sense of law enforcement nor was it conducting an investigation or claiming that it was.
I do LOVE your drawing a parallel between Hollywood and drug dealers though. It's amazingly accurate.
On the post: SOPA Is So Bad, Political Cartoonist Comes Out Of Retirement To Create New Comics Warning About It
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I detect some fear here.
On the post: SOPA Is So Bad, Political Cartoonist Comes Out Of Retirement To Create New Comics Warning About It
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Damned pirate!!!!
On the post: SOPA Is So Bad, Political Cartoonist Comes Out Of Retirement To Create New Comics Warning About It
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It helped that a certain Queen Victoria was as disgusted with what the Lords and George the Nutty had done that where the Commons couldn't directly overrule the Lords, she did. The legal and full neutering of the Lords didn't really happen till the early 20th Century by which time no one really cared all that much what they thought.
On the post: Big Entertainment Companies Issuing Wrongful YouTube Claims On Public Domain Works
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And it isn't reliable.
On the post: Big Entertainment Companies Issuing Wrongful YouTube Claims On Public Domain Works
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If the music played was in the public domain before the movie was made and the sound track (much later) was added containing that music the music itself is still in the public domain. It's just the specific combination of music and pictures that is subject to a new copyright.
That didn't work to combat talkies so that soon died, anyway.
On the post: The Carrier IQ Saga (So Far) -- And Some Questions That Need Answers
One minor little detail
Yet 90% or more of what CarrierIQ claims to do is already available to the carriers from data collected in and by their switches and other network devices should they want to look at it. And look at it the carriers do. Even then CarrierIQ doing what the company says it does and only that already have better data and better diagnostics available to them to analyze their networks from switches to antennas, to switch to switch connections through backbones and other routing devices all under pretty much constant surveillance. And that's been there from the days of electromechanical switching. All CarrierIQ can give them is a "phone's eye" view which is largely useless anyway.
So pardon me if I feel that the "law enforcement" angle is the end goal here rather than network improvement as I don't see a thing in CarrierIQ's claims that would be of much use in network improvement than what's already there.
Network improvement in whole or in part has been part of my craft/trade/profession for 35+ years and all I see there is something that I'd be better served by ignoring it completely. I'll get to the problem faster if I do, I guarantee that. Too much useless data is worse than none at all. Particularly when I already have better data available than can possibly come from the "phone eye" view at all.
And certainly from capturing any keystroke presses from the phone itself because, from a diagnostic perspective, that tells me nothing at all outside of the less than trivial fact that the switch received and passed on the message the keystrokes sent. If I want, I can find that anyway, something by law I can't share with anyone outside the business, even the cops unless they have a valid court order that forces me to. But as a diagnostic tool it's useless or worse 99.9999999% of the time.
Oh well. IF it's for network improvement it's for the call centre fools in the Philippines who won't understand it and I'll get a trouble ticket reading "such and such doesn't work" as usual before calling them back and asking "just WHAT THE HELL isn't working????" Well, why didn't you just say too many dropped calls or a sudden increase in dropped calls? Oh, nothing on the computer form for that? OK, thanks, I'll get up there the moment the Force 10 gale blows over."
On the post: New Anti-SOPA Song & Crowdsourced Video From Dan Bull
Re:
Even the pyramids were built on principles discovered and used before they were constructed, not by slaves it turns out but by free people.
The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Hebrews and Persians knew the world was round, not flat. Though some technically "advanced" people today insist it's flat.
Every great symphony is built on the works around it from previous compositions to folk music around it. Rock and blues and modern country owe to those who write and performed inner city black music, white and black gospel music and country and western that came before, with injections of Jamacian music particularly from the British Invasion.
And all of this isn't creative but is somehow wrong in your world because it borrowed and absorbed what came before it almost always without pay? How do you pay the guy or gal around the campfire a thousand or so years ago that first sung or played to tune to what became your favourite hymn or dance tune?
All of this means Mozart, Litz, McCartney & Lennon, Rogers and Hammerstien, Gilbert and Sullivan, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare, the writers of the Bible, Homer and every other notable creative people and hundreds of thousands more all have "typical content grifter mentality" because they built their own works influenced by or borrowimg from those who came before both known and unknown?
Oh heck, I didn't know piracy what THAT widespread. I had no idea what it cost us and the world culturally. Now if only the RIAAs and MPAAs of the time had only stopped it! It's so horrible, it's unbelievable what it's cost us! Where was Congress, SOPA and PIPA to stop all this cultural carnage and laying waste. pillaging, rape and destruction of culture!
Oh. wait a second. It's our culture I've just described. Isn't it? All of it borrowed, recast and remixed by content grifters. Not at all a bad outcome. Pretty damned good one I'd say.
And you want to stop this? Are you nuts? Of course you are. Freeze something dynamic into something static and surrounded with amber so that it never, ever moves again, never ever creates again.
Even the English language "pirates" words from other languages when it needs them. Remember "detente"? A French word? Our language didn't trot of the L'Academe Francaise in Paris to arrange for royalties to that language. English just "pirated" it. Just as it pirated the world "chuck" meaning water from the Salish of the pacific northwest. Guess we owe them big time, too.
Either you're nuts or the rich, varied dynamic culture around us is. I vote for you as the nutty one.
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