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End the tyranny of bomb-happy RIAA

Letters Re:
RIAA attacking our culture, the American Mind

The RIAA's continuing war on the USA's culture and heritage - and in particular its latest efforts to bomb our computers - provoked these brave and true words from a former combat Marine.


Subject: Semper Fi

Hello Andrew :

It is very upsetting indeed . I thought the Broadcast-Flag law talk was very excessive just by itself . You knowAndrew it has occurred to me something is very wrong here with all of this talk .

How is it that just 560 men and a few other company owners can force a law upon millions of others that don't want it.

Have we forgotten that the power is in and with the people . It takes millions of voters to put one man in office THAT THEYCHOSE .

It is odd to me that RIAA EMPLOYEES can go to one US REPRESENTATIVE and the both of them can decide and force millions of others and command an entire legal regime against its people.

You know .... by way of "emanate domain" a local government can take your property against your will for the greater good of the community. It is by the will of the community as a whole that forces the owner to submit .... they gang up on him .... lol .... but true .... and they force him/her off the land ..... if necessary by arrest and what ever means necessary to accomplish that.

It is the American way to put things to a vote

I feel that Congress as a whole have done a very poor job of representing the American people on many occasions as they are swayed by reelection money , very small interest groups with lots and lots of money.

Sense the American public agreed to allow our military to go kill thousands of Iraqi's to give those people a choice then it seems fit to me WE OURSELVES should have a voice in our own affairs . . .. ... What do ya think ????

Certainly no law could stand that the majority of the American people do not want ...... and if the government refuses to give us ( the majority ) what we want then we have a governmental tyranny

What we need is a national coalition of signers demanding the present THINKING and law to be permanently changed forever according to our WILL now at present ..... in fifty years it may change .... who knows .... but it is what I think we want now ...... and the US CONSTITUTION guarantees us the right to change if we want . The power is vested in the American people .... not the congress .... not the president ..... but in the majority of the Mass Will of the People.

So we need to have fair-use and file sharing declared acceptable American culture and not criminal as some are trying to make it be.

If the American people are not allowed to have a refurrendum or vote .... If the American people are not allowed to decide this at large then we do not have a government by the people and for the people. It is just plain and simple as that ...... our US CONSTITUTION is not worth anything.

Wayne Fuller ( Semper Fi )

Yes ..... I am a disabled combat Marine ....... I lost my leg and use of the other and other wounds .... i paid a dear price to be able to talk to you about this issue as i have .

If only our lawyers had such vision, Wayne.

Does the RIAA seriously believe that the ONLY use for the MP3 format is to pirate music?

I reach this conclusion by the statement "deletes all the MP3s it can find on your computer so you have to buy the music again in DRM'd form"

OK...how does it handle these scenarios: the voicemail on my home PC records any messages I receive in MP3 format. I'm an amateur musician, and I record all my music on my PC, in MP3 format. My favorite games have built in radio stations, that are stored on my drive in MP3 format. I'm a regular at mp3.com, where I can download free music from unpublished artists, in MP3 format. My business uses a bespoke software program (let's call it ManagePeople 3.0) to hold details of all my staff and customers. The data files use the .mp3 extension.

On another angle: My illegally downloaded MP3's are actually stored on a dedicated fileserver, which is a headless machine sitting in my loft, and all access to this machine is over the local network. Having passed through my firewall and gained access to my main PC, do they now have the right to compromise my network to find and destroy these files?

If the RIAA seriously think that they can just delete files indiscriminately on systems which are outside their control with absolutely no proof that they are illegal, and not face legal repercussions, they must be mistaken. Surely even the USA isn't that much of a slave to corporate demands?

Tim Boswell

Apparently so, Tim.

Is it possible that Hilary Rosen could find herself on the cover of Time as terrorist of the year?

George P. Nelson
Kitty Hawk, NC


If a normal human being - such as myself, for example - were to plant a "bomb" of this kind in a third parties computer without their consent, or without their knowledge (both of which would be requisite for the bomb to work otherwise I could just disable it) that "bomb" would be very swiftly recognised as a virus. I would incur almost immediate "virus writer" status and become a criminal and fugitive from justice.

Being a sysadmin who is responsible for a number of mail systems in small businesses I would be among the first to be rather peeved if a virus like that were allowed through the system - however it got there - whether by downloading a file from the internet, or by receipt of an email or simple by the (rather old fashioned, I know) expedient of inserting an infected floppy.

So perhaps, this "bomb" idea may rather unexpectedly explode in the RIAA's own hands. Because, deleting a file means its not there - and if it was a LEGAL (fair use) copy of a self owned CD, then that's theft of time (the time taken to recopy the legal copy onto your hard drive) and destruction of property. Perhaps someone will be able to tie them up with some form of legal battle.

And if a company loses computer time because legal (fair use) mp3's exist on a company employees computer ... you get the picture.

And the nice thing is, we don't have far to look for the virus writers, unlike the rather more slippery klez and nimda writers of the underground. Hell, they're already admitting it openly.

Josef Moffett
®

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