Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

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.

"Plaintiffs' motion and accompanying brief neglect to mention that Congress provided a framework for subpoenas to identify internet infringers in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 'DMCA'), specifically 17 U.S.C. § 512(h)," wrote the judge. "Section 512 of the DMCA establishes safe harbor provisions for four categories of internet service providers ('ISP') based on the function which the ISP performs with respect to the infringing material—'transmitting it per § 512(a), caching it per § 512(b), hosting it per § 512(c), or locating it per § 512(d).'"

And in English....

In order for a subpoena to be issued under the DMCA, according to Judge Kelley, the record labels must first issue a DMCA takedown notice to the ISP: in this case, William and Mary. However, since the college did not host, cache, or transmit the music in question, there's no place for a takedown notice... and no room for a subpoena to be issued.

What does this mean? It means William and Mary is safe for students. I'm not condoning piracy, but this means that if, for instance, your computer was trojaned, and used to download media which is entirely possible, the students wouldn't be out on their own!

Of course, any good dark net would try to recruit a student or two on that campus to be their go to person for new music, or just install proxies on some select computers, but that is neither here, nor there.

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:

<18:00:53 nearbygamers>$ ls -al
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 snarky pg4xxxx 9548 Jul 15 17:42 facebook.php
-rwxr-xr-x 1 snarky pg4xxxx 23146 Jul 15 17:42 facebookapi_php5_restlib.php
-rw-rw-r-- 1 snarky pg4xxxx 0 Jul 15 17:42 functions.php
drwxrwxr-x 3 snarky pg4xxxx 4096 Jul 15 17:42 images
-rw-rw-r-- 1 snarky pg4xxxx 2154 Jul 15 17:42 index.php
...

The file was zeroed. And it happened, according to the timestamp, just 15 minutes before I got back to my computer. How or why that happened, I have no clue, and this shouldn't really matter except I had no version control. That's right, I once again decided that this project would be over before any catastrophes could happen. Man was I wrong. To say I freaked out would be an understatement, and finally I filed a ticket with my host, Dreamhost, pleading with them for any backups they might have. Literally within a minute I got a response which pointed to a page on their wiki about a wonderful (and secretive) backup system of theirs. After a little digging and a call to Harkins, I was able to pull a file out of thin air. During the time that I had waited before submitting the ticket I set up the SVN repo for this project, it took a whopping 2 minutes to create, move my files, check out in place, and do an initial import of all the other files. All that grief to save 2 minutes, I'll never make that mistake again.

Now, at this point I have to give major kudos to Dreamhost. Not only do they have the system in place to save my butt when its my fault and they don't owe me any help, but their crack support team was able to get back to me minutes after submitting my ticket, and I'm writing this just about half an hour after I submitted that ticket. I have my file back (minus maybe an hour or two) and my peace of mind to sleep tonight.

I've been a Dreamhost fan for a long time, they've got great servers for the sites I build, very decent uptime, and Shell access that I oh so love. This may just be the last in a series of events that made me love their service, but it is by far the most important, and telling about their service and their customer-oriented mindset in general.

Thanks Dreamhost, you've got a customer as long as you're in service!

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.
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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.

Here's the video

Watch that through, then think about this. Elephants can't obtain credit cards, so that must have been the trainer's card. Not one clerk ever thought to get a signature for their sales. The elephant spent $40 without ever having an ID checked or even needing to know a PIN.

To quote Mastercard's offer: "Signature is not required for purchases under $25 at participating locations. PIN may be required for debit transactions," so this would be fairly limited in the US, aside from doing a bunch of small purchases stealing groceries or small items.

But this card is valid in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Turkey, Lebanon, Malaysia, Australia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Africa. Some of those places are hardly known for being safe to not have your credit cards stolen, and I'm sure shop keepers would be fairly lax regarding getting signatures for large purchases.

Anyways, I just found it really funny that Mastercard touts this great new service, when in reality its showing how easy it is to use their service to steal!

Friday night I went 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.

Just before America started the Revolutionary War, many colonists took up the slogan "No Taxation without Representation" because the American colonies were being taxed by Britain, yet given no say in the British Parliament. The British claimed a 'virtual [funny they should use that word] representation' by British representatives across the ocean. James Otis is recorded as having said "Taxation without representation is tyranny." What he meant by that is if some power can take a group's money, and yet give them no way to express themselves, they are no better than slaves under a dictator. Most Americans, would agree what was happening was unjust, and our fighting against those policies was justified.

Now imagine that RIAA is Britain back in 1765, and the colonists are music lovers. Don't quite see the comparison? Try this. The 'Taxation' that we're speaking of is the price of buying music, or movies in any format, hard or soft copy. Obviously it is necessary to pay for these, otherwise there'd be no music out there. However, the 'Representation' is the customer's rights. In our current society they don't exist. Hence we have a case where the consumer is being taxed ($12 for a CD), but then getting no representation (No rights to copy that CD for themselves, and if things go as RIAA plans something like a one CD per one player could happen). Wow, all of a sudden our outlook changes. Now its not tyranny, but necessary for our country. Congress even took time our of their busy schedule to write 15 major American universities to pressure them to expel more students for downloading.

I know exactly what will be said at this point. "Aha! You said downloading, it is illegal and therefore your whole argument is invalid!" That's interesting, as a major event in our (American) history would be the Boston Tea Party, where 90,000 lbs of tea (worth 10,000 pounds) were dumped into the harbor. 8,000 soon-to-be Americans cheered when they saw this. It is important to note this took place on the night of the biggest protest they had held against the British, it wasn't just 5 guys in Indian costumes acting on their own. Yet we are proud of that moment, many see it as one of the sparks for the American Revolution!

Lets jump back to today. We have millions of music lovers oppressed by crappy DRM schemes, the DMCA, and RIAA's lawyers who go so far as to set up fake music sites to catch and sue people. Yet we now accept that as the norm, and absolutely warranted to protect the sacred intellectual property. I put forth that something must be done to end this tyranny, as something was done over 200 years ago. With a big enough outcry the RIAA will be forced to recognize that what they're doing won't fly. With enough calls to your representatives they will understand that to keep signing things such as the DMCA, and writing letters asking for good students to be expelled for downloading one song will mean the end of their time in public service. The government is in place to serve the people, not the lawyers or the greedy, and it is time for RIAA's tyranny to end. I am not advocating any illegal action, obviously the choice to download music is your own to make, but it did take illegal actions for our country to be free, so I won't limit my call by criminalizing downloading either.

So tell me, how do you feel? If you were back 200 years ago, would you have cheered when they dumped that tea overboard? Or would you have said that property is sacred, and the rights of those being oppressed should take a back seat to the law?

EDIT: Ideas for how to get this 'revolution' to work. Boycott major labels that institute the worst DRM. Call your congress representatives. Refuse to buy music online unless it comes DRM free (While Apple supports this now, I'm boycotting their service as they make you pay a higher premium to get your rights). Encourage friends of yours that are in a band to look up the Creative Commons license for their work. Petition your favorite band to write their label and express discomfort at the scare tactics RIAA is using now. IF you download illegally, do it in such a way that you can't be caught, the more RIAA catches people the stronger they become (Yes, it is entirely possible to acquire DRM free music undetectably. No, I won't tell you how).