What the RIAA really said.

[Chris Gehlker]

On Jan 1, 2008, at 5:21 PM, Craig White wrote:

> and one more thing that is quoted in the referenced motion for Summary
> Judgment (by the plaintiffs) which was actually taken from the jury
> instructions of Capitol Records v. Thomas...
>
> "The act of making copyrighted sound recordings available for  
> electronic
> distribution on a peer-to-peer network, without license from the
> copyright owners, violates the copyright owners’ exclusive right of
> distribution, regardless of whether actual distribution has been  
> shown."
>
> Which basically means that if you have both copies of copyrighted  
> music
> files on a hard disk that has smb/nfs/ssh/sftp/ftp/http/afpovertcp  
> file
> sharing protocols, you are deemed in violation of the copyright  
> owners,
> which clearly comes back to the original supposition...that it's
> probably illegal to turn on your computer.

Craig, I just don't understand this need for so many in the technical  
community to make these hysterical sounding straw-man arguments. I  
don't agree at all that the RIAA is equating Kazaa with "smb/nfs/ssh/ 
sftp/ftp/http/afpovertcp" since both common usage and technically  
correct language don't identify any of the latter as forms of a "peer- 
to-peer network". And if your chain of reasoning actually leads you to  
literally believe that the RIAA is so foolish as to assert that "it's  
probably illegal to turn on your computer", then you really need to  
examine you chain of reasoning.

If the RIAA were really silly people who would make such clearly  
specious arguments then they would  be no threat at all. Let  me  
assure you that, despite a few egregious missteps, they are serious  
people who understand the difference between someone sharing a file  
between her personal computers behind a NAT router and sharing files  
with the whole world over Kazaa.
---
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely  
or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

-Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate  
(1872-1970)