A friend just pointed me to a really interesting development in the fight against RIAA. Apparently William and Mary stood up to their John Doe subpoenas and the judge actually threw the case out. A quick snippet follows, the full article can be found here, as I’m about to go to sleep.
For the past few weeks I’ve been working for Harkins, specifically for NearbyGamers, to build a Facebook application. Work was going nicely, and this afternoon I finally got close enough to being done to set a release date for myself: Friday afternoon. Now, if that went as planned, would I be writing this post? I left my SSH session open, grabbed some dinner, and sat down to play Chez Geek with a friend. I wandered back about an hour later to find my SSH session hung. This happens often, not sure why, so I thought nothing of it, closed the terminal and logged back in. But when I got to the file I’d been working on, it appeared to hang again. Maybe the file was getting too big to load in a quick manner? 10 seconds later and vi still showed no data. Then, to my horror, I realized it was because the file was empty. A quick ls -al showed the following:
Also a waste of time. My internet’s been down all day, which means no coding from home, no email, no nothing. I work during the summers mostly from home, and every day without Internet has a direct impact on my quality of life during the school year. Anyways, I just got off the phone with a comcast “technician” trying to fix this minor inconvenience of not being able to make money. This is to the best of my recollection how it went, I was trying to type and talk on the phone at the same time, AND dealing with power flickering.
I saw a commercial on TV the other day that made me laugh. I’m sure normal people see this commercial as a sign of how advanced our technology is, and how convenient modern life is, but all I see is theft.
Friday night I wen over to a friend’s apartment for a nice dinner, as his parents were coming through town on their way home. It was a nice evening, though I didn’t really jump into the conversation until it turned to more technologically oriented ideas. One topic we got onto was music downloading, or “piracy”, as my friend ran afoul of RIAA at one point in time. By that, of course, I don’t mean he DID download anything, merely that they claimed he did, and his school was too scared to offer any form of defense. I ended up butting heads with my friend’s dad on this topic, as I think RIAA has stepped way over the boundary of protecting their property and now is just using scare tactics trying to keep online music purchases from taking off any more. Now, at the time I really couldn’t think up a good argument articulating why I felt so strongly against RIAA (besides just their tactics in general, I mean why I dislike their underlying ideals), and how to get across to someone in their early 50’s who may have never bothered to download music, legally or otherwise, what the real issues are. Luckily I always replay conversations in my mind for days afterwards to rethink my positions and prepare myself should that topic ever come up again.