On Jan 1, 2008, at 6:28 PM, Craig White wrote:
> It's not straw-man arguments at all...A business exists behind a NAT
> router and the RIAA would never differentiate between whether the
> files
> were shared within behind the NAT router or through the NAT router.
It's a straw-man argument because the guy was using Kazaa. Courts,
juries and politicians understand the common sense distinction between
choosing to listen to a CD you paid for on your computer as opposed to
a stand alone CD player and "stealing" music with Kazaa or one of its
competitors. This is precisely why the the original story, which
asserted that the RIAA didn't understand that distinction had legs.
But the RIAA understands the distinction perfectly well.
The RIAA has always had one strike against them. Copyright law doesn't
criminalize downloading audio files, it criminalizes uploading them.
And yet most of us learned on the playground that sharing is good and
stealing is bad. So the RIAA has had to walk a fine line. They have
had to convince the courts that the person they are after has done
something illegal, uploading, while also convincing the courts, the
politicians and the general public that they are doing something
wrong, downloading.
The RIAA will never convince anyone that that merely turning on you
computer is wrong. You know that. That's why you want to convince us
that that is indeed their position.
You are perfectly correct that if college students download a bunch of
music files that they didn't pay for, nobody is going to care whether
the files resided on a server or a genuine p2p network. But you are
pretending to miss my point which is simply that people distinguish
between paying for your music and not paying for it.
Let me recap.
Initial reports in the Washington Post and elsewhere indicated that
the RIAA had made a big mistake by asserting that there was something
wrong with ripping you own CDs to your own computer. Many people,
myself included, trumpeted this news widely.
Later reports clarified the issue. The RIAA was accusing Hansen of
using Kazaa, not of merely ripping his own CDs for his personal
listening.
Some people made various arguments that the original reports were
correct and that the RIAA must somehow have meant what they were
originally alleged to have said.
I think arguments of the form 'The facts are not as I understood them
but my position remains unchanged' are inherently loosing. I think
those of us who aren't willing to say 'It's perfectly OK to use Kazaa'
should pick a better battle.
---
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)
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