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ISP’s will no longer offer user info to the RIAA etc.

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Until now, the steps for the RIAA tracking P2P file sharers has been somewhat straight forward.

1) A ‘cyber cop’ will find your shared folder and upon finding considereble or targeted file sharing, they will capture you IP address and country of origin and finally ISP.

2) The ISP was then turning over the user namea and contact information.

3) You receive a letter from an RIAA watchdog who warns you to cease and desist sharing or face possible legal action.

The ISP’s are no longer obligated to offer user contact information without a court order or warrant for information release.

This has made the previous step #2 much harder now and will with no doubt effect the RIAA’s attempt to reduce file sharing.

Many have avoided the Cybercops by simply turning off file sharing so that your files cannot be seen, yet this makes it harder to download files also as many will cut off your download if you do not share your files. Therefore,a list of garbage or unpopular files will work for both of these problems.

Now with the further walls neing erected between cybercops and the ISP’s, the RIAA is going to look for another way to reduce file sharing or look at a complete restructure of the industry and it’s marketing angles.

I guess that’s what happens when you capitalize on artists for too long, you start to charge too much for material and have people lookig for anyway to work around paying high prices for CD’s with perhaps only one or two songs you enjoy.

Before anyone starts talking about the rest of the world doing this too, stats from the cybercops showed that over 73% of people sharing online were from the USA. The music industry in the USA has been bastartdized by the large corporate music giants and as a result people are looking for other ways out. Many independant artists are now INTENTIONALLY releasing thier music to P2P programs while heavily advertising it on P2P chat channels.

If the bands want to be heard, they will. If the corporations want to exploit the nads and use them as an over marketed, temporary cash-crop, they will find it harder and harder as people realize that the quality of music produced and engineered today is substandard to what they COULD be hearing. They sill soon give up on supporting the media’s marketing efforts or at least look at them with much more acrutiny.

Topic

Hear hear

In reply to ISP’s will no longer offer user info to the RIAA etc.

I to am happy that the right to privacy survived the fight. If they want to make it illegal to share then stop it at the source and leave the people alone. As we usher into a new world of information there has to be the right to privacy, no profiling. Peoples reputation could be ruined through sensationalism of having gone to this “site” once. The RIAA need to be scared as well as the record lables that they need to provide quality or there will be no sales. To me that is the beauty of the controversy. I’ll admit that everyone’s out for a free ride and will take anything as long as it’s free, but this is a consumer fight for quality of money spent. Too long has the consumer been hoodwinked by advertizing and hype and special edition after the basic edition. These people have mad far too much money off of others and their lecherous ways are almost at an end, hooray for the little guy!

Nice to hear

In reply to Hear hear

Usually such a discussion would raise, thief, file leech, scammer etc. Very few seem to see the reasons outlining this craze for free music and DVD’s.

If CD’s were sold with interesting inserts, or even a full 10 or 12 GOOD songs that represent the artists taste, it wouldn’t be so bad.

Being SOLD on an artist that has a hit that is played every 46 minutes on the radio only to find that it is the ONLY song you like or that the rest of the CD is so diverse it doesn’t reflect the artist at all is a scam. Record companies in North America sell CD’s, not music. They don’t care if it is a one song wonder, in fact most new artists will only get an engineering grant for a single track, the rest is just thrown on the disk.

I remember when you’d hear a song on the radio, buy the LP and it would all ersemble the song you’d heard. You MAY not care for a few songs, but the album was not falsely represented to sell copies, you got what you thought you were buying.

One day they’ll get it together, drop the BIG funding and let artists just create music just like the rest of the world.

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