Cider Press Hill

Happy New Year

I should be getting myself into the kitchen, any minute now, to fix a dish to take across the street tonight for New Year’s Eve celebrating. Isn’t that convenient? I don’t have to drive anywhere. I can walk to the party and I can walk home. Not more than 100 feet, either way.

I’m making stuffed potato skins. Yum.

Before I go, however, I thought I’d share this article (via Talking Points Memo) from the Washington Post about a dumb dinosaur industry that is working tirelessly to assure its own extinction. You just couldn’t come up with a more horrible business plan than aggressively suing your customers, while offering no alternatives that remotely address 21st century technology and convenience. Yes, we’re talking about the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). They are now suing individuals who ripped legally purchased CDs to store and play on their very own computers. Sharing those songs is not the issue. Just having copies of songs from your legally purchased CDs on your computer (and probably other portable devices) is, they claim, illegal. Good luck with that. Like we’re all going to drag around with a CD player and our entire CD libraries so we can listen to our tunes whenever and wherever. The thing I want to know, that the article doesn’t get around to addressing, is how the RIAA found out that the guy they’re suing had copies of his CDs on his computer. I’d really like to know to know the answer to that.

Tomorrow, I shall be back to the regularly scheduled programming with some odds and ends.

Hope you all have a safe and enjoyable New Year’s Eve.

Posted on 12/31/07 at 05:58 PM
 




Linkmeister

When I was in high school I had a portable record player I’d carry to parties in the neighborhood.  It wasn’t any fun, and piles of vinyl are heavy.  I don’t want to go back to that.

Hauoli Makahiki Hou!

United States   Posted by Linkmeister on 01/01/08  at  01:54 AM





steph

Actually, it took a bit of Googling, but the Post article is wrong.  See this.

Netherlands   Posted by steph on 01/01/08  at  06:17 AM





Kate

Thanks, Steph. My confidence in our newspapers just grew by another leap and a bound. The Post’s writer left a rather huge amount out of his story. Reflects poorly on the writer and makes it look like he was promoting an opinion rather than reporting facts. Just another day in the newspaper bidness.

So this guy did get some of his songs from Kazaa and stored a large number of tunes in his computer’s “shared” folder. I haven’t read the brief yet, but it should shed some more light on the subject. His attorney sounds as if he’s still claiming that storing ripped CDs on your computer is partially at issue and I’m wondering if this guy made the error of storing legally ripped CDs in his “Shared” folder where everything else was-- whether he actually shared them, I don’t know. If he didn’t, that would be an interesting wrinkle.

United States   Posted by Kate on 01/01/08  at  06:21 PM





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