If you want to know why so many people think the PROTECT IP censorship bill is so dangerous, you don't have to look any further than how the RIAA misuses current laws to attack non-infringing content.
DMCA takedowns submitted to Chilling Effects show the RIAA claiming links posted to Twitter pointed to infringing content when in reality they were direct links to a label owned website.
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Listening to Ric Ocasek who is a member of the late '70s early '80's hit makers, "The Cars" stated the is no longer a music industry. The powers at be are lawyers, Guns and Money.
I've said this before... Look for more independent labels, artists selling their music on line or out of the back of their vehicles.
Now that I'm 56 and rarely play the amount of music I did on the guitar when I was younger, I would distance myself far away as possible from the RIAA. Maybe the Moon or Mars....
Jeff
There was a time when the internet was just IP addresses...piracy was everywhere and half the websites were dedicated to stealing credit card numbers or making IEDs. There was no facebook, no myspace, no twitter, no DRM, and almost no users. This is what will be created if the RIAA gets their way. They think this will drive normal users to stores to buy music at insane prices, just like in the 1980's...and they don't care if they destroy the economy of the entire country in the process.
Even without the internet, DRM and Piracy existed.
I remember on my brother's old Amstrad-CPC (cassette based), some of his software had a security feature called Lenslok... each time you ran the program (taking half an hour to get there), you were required to hold a distorting plastic lens in front of you to un-mangle a word shown on screen. Each lens was unique and apparently paired specifically to that cassette, thus rendering copies useless.
The problem was... it was crap! Several times a session he had to re-load from scratch (another half hour), as a wrong code would reset the computer.
So even then, we also had DRM causing users with paid for, legit software problems just to use it!
Strange how little DRM has actually changed really!
edit:
I can't believe I actually looked on Wikipedia for it, and I REALLY can't believe there's an article on it!
"Even without the internet, DRM and Piracy existed."
Maybe copy protection but not DRM.
In my Amiga days piracy was a bigger problem then it is today.
At one point point most games were not written in Amiga DOS. You had to boot them from floppy disk(s) which were copy protected. The manufacturer like Electronic Arts did the dirty work.
It still didn't curb piracy with programs like Alcohol 120. Yep, A120 has been around for ages.
Games like F-18 that were written with Amiga DOS which was not completed because the developer jumped ship to the PC platform... Man it had a weird ending EA finished it with....
All you had to do is open a hex editor, change all the references from the floppy drive to the hard drive allowing you to install the game on the hard drive.
Jeff
