In their latest attempt to intimidate users of P2P services, the RIAA is sending threats to individual users.
The record industry opened a new front in its war against online piracy on Tuesday by surprising hundreds of thousands of Internet song swappers with an instant message warning that they could be "easily" identified and face "legal penalties."
About 200,000 users of the Grokster and Kazaa file-sharing services initially received the warning notice on Tuesday and millions more will get notices in coming weeks.
"We're expecting to send at least a million messages or more per week because these users are offering to distribute music on Kazaa or Grokster," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America.
Yeah? Well guess what buttmunch, YOU can be easily identified, and YOU can face legal and other penalties as well. Keep pushing your thug act, and you'll wish a cute little minor web page hack like Madonna got was all you were getting thrown at you.
Besides that, there are many more of us pursuing the free exchange of information than there are of you industry hacks. We have votes. Screw with us enough to motivate the base, and we'll throw all your paid-off congressmen out of office, and get the copyright laws put back into some proper balance.
Do you think you can get your hack judges and congressmen to start sending millions of people to jail for swapping song files? You ain't near got the juice.
Go ahead, keep screwing with us and see where it gets you.
UPDATE
Here is the text of the message:
- COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT WARNING: It appears that you are offering copyrighted music to others from your computer. Distributing or downloading copyrighted music on the Internet without permission from the copyright owner is ILLEGAL. It hurts songwriters who create and musicians who perform the music you love, and all the other people who bring you music.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
Al, very nice, if deeply wounded post. Having analyzed it via this post I now see your category selection philosophy, which has found some people confused. It makes plenty of sense and is consistent, but it isn't the way anyone else I'm aware of is doing it. Rather than describing the Amazon products that you choose to include along with the post (which are very subjective and can be selected for any number of reasons), in this case the various books, the other, shall we say majority, method would be to simply use the categories to describe the subject of the post, ie where would you look if you were looking for a post on the threatening political actions of the RIAA re file sharing?
I would look under Music: News, Et Cetera: Internet, Et Cetera: Politics, possibly Et Cetera: Electronics. There aren't any books involved in the post itself, so i wouldn't include those, though as I said, I understand why you did because you are describing the Amazon products you (quite correctly)included along with the posI am making this public because there has been A LOT of confusion about categories, especially with newer members, and I thought it would be helpful for everyone to see my thinking on this.
Yours isn't "wrong," just different.
The last, and in some ways, main question here is what is the Primary Category. Now it becomes pretty subjective: is the Primary Category Music because the story is about the actions of the RIAA? Or is it Et Cetera because it's really about the Internet. Either makes sense, but since the headline begins with "RIAA" I would probably pick Music, but it could go either way.
Beyond that, great job lately, inspired.
2 - Al Barger
Hmm, wouldn't describe my reaction to the RIAA as "wounded". "Defiant" or perhaps "belligerant" might be better adjectives. :)