Bill Lets Music Firms Hack Napster-Like Systems

[powertoad5000]

The recording companies seem more concerned with quarterly profits, and such financial business, than the artists. They are trying to show the shareholders that they are taking steps forward. Record company thought process: profit go down, this bad, how make profit go up?? i know! shut down nasty bad sharing people! Share price go up! collect bonus!

This is probably why you don't see any major group or solo artist championing this 'innovative approach to combating the serious problem of Internet piracy'. In most cases, they are still making ends meet, and they are not going to see the immediate benefits of supporting a cause such as this. They also wouldn't feel any pressure to damage their image by supporting sabotage attacks on KaZaA and other services. I am sure there are many people, such as myself, who buy plenty of music, but still download a fair bit of music just to see what it's like. I would lose respect for any band that supported this idea.

I can only recall one band that has been significantly damaged by MP3 distribution, and that is King Diamond. This is quite sad, but until it actually becomes a serious problem to many artists across the spectrum, I don't think people will stop downloading music. Recording companies also don't seem to realise that no matter how hard they try, dedicated software programmers will always find a way around their attempts to shut down P2P.

[cheesegoduk]

I Posted this in a board on the same subject

The record industry is annoyed that sales are going down, so they try to find any excuse they can to explain this, eg that file-sharing is stopping sales. Maybe if they stopped making wave after wave of annoying bands which all sound the same, and stop paying people so much money, then sales would improve.
Also from what has happened in the past, annoying people on the net is a bad thing, they usually team up and get revenge eg DDOS a server, or take over a network

[8*B@LL]

allenb, do you mind if i upload and re-post that letter on a few other forums i frequent(with due credit of course)?

[allenb1963]

By all means feel free to distribute it in any manner you see fit...thats what I wrote it for.

[lord_darkside_x]

i think that the government sanctioned hacking is a bad idea, although... there may be ways to stop it... hehe... not that it matters, cause it didn't pass.

[roswell1329]

3 words...

State Sponsored Vigilantism

[bombayofpigs]

Right on guys...

Glad to know this article pissed off other people besides me.

[MidNyte]

What we need to do it:

Ok lets say your using Kazaa to grab music, now every user would have to take part in this but what we could do is everytime one of use downloads a song, we check it out, if its fake we get rid of it and take it out of the sharing circle. So if everyone, and I stress everyone, does this we can almost trace what users are putting the bad files on the net, if we could somehow confine these users and use DoS attacks or just plain hack them we could stop the music industry from taking away our rights. I know this is easy to say but if we all work together we can control this. The internet is ours, not some money hungry piece of **** record producer.................

[zepherin]

and again IRC prevails

[allenb1963]

The thing is, zephrin, that IRC won't prevail. Nor will F-servers or FTP sites. These guys want carte blanc access to your system, your privacy be damned. It doesn't matter to them if you use Kazaa, Limewire, IRC or AudioGalaxy. They want file-sharing stopped at any cost, so long as it's the consumers who pay it. If they win, we ALL lose, no matter WHAT method or program we use to share files. IRC, FTP, or P2P... it doesn't matter to them what they shut down as long as they get their way. If we don't take action, if we don't BOMBARD congress with protests, the only winners will be the RIAA and the MPAA. Worse yet, however, is the fact that ANY copyright holder can do this, no matter how big of a fruitloop they might be. That, my friend, is an outcome that I simply cannot accept...and I hope you can't accept it either. It so happens that I have some material that has a copyright on it. Do you really want ME to have the ability to nose around in YOUR system?