Blackmoor Vituperative

According to the site TorrentFreak:

The ISP that supplied much of The Pirate Bay’s bandwidth before cutting them off yesterday, is reporting that it has been sabotaged. Calling in experts and the police, Black Internet says the attack on them is intentional and has caused substantial damage.

This makes me sad. It certainly does not reflect well on those who would see our current cartel-controlled copyright system reformed. Why attack Black Internet? They’re a victim of these thugs just as much as The Pirate Bay.

According to a new report on ZDNet, the SCO group won an appeal in its copyright case. In case you are wondering if this will halt or reverse the inexorable death spiral of SCO, or if it has any repercussions for the Unix/Linux world… it won’t, and doesn’t. All this means is that SCO owes money to Novell, and that SCO should have had a trial before they lost in Utah, rather than a summary judgment.

Bottom line: SCO will waste more of its investors money beating this dead horse. For Novell, it means a few more pennies, and for the rest of the Linux world, it’s a footnote in the history books.

The Digital Rights Mafia (RIAA and their ilk) won a major court victory yesterday: the jury awarded the plaintiffs $1,920,000.00, or $80,000.00 per song. $80,000 per song.

One more time: $80,000 PER SONG.

A jury did this. What the hell is wrong with people? What the hell is wrong with our justice system? When will our elected representatives stop twisting our legal system into pretzels for the benefit of the Digital Rights Mafia and the media robber barons?

One thing is certain: juries need to be better educated.

Ars Technica has a review of the book Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. I will have to pick this up.

By the way, don’t feel bad for record companies. They have been screwing artists for years. It was only a matter of time before something brought an end to the perverse market conditions that allowed the big record companies to survive.

The recording industry has spent (and continues to spend) millions of dollars on its litigation campaign against accused file-swappers, but if two lawyers have their way, the RIAA will have to pay all the money back. Not content simply to defend Jammie Thomas-Rasset in her high-profile retrial next week in Minnesota, lawyer Kiwi Camara is joining forces with Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson to file a class-action lawsuit against the recording industry later this summer.

The goal is nothing less than to force the industry to pay back the alleged “$100+ million” it has collected over the last few years. Perhaps the RIAA had good reason not to send those settlement letters to Harvard for so long.

(from Lawyers plan class-action to reclaim “$100M+” RIAA “stole”, ArsTechnica)

Give ’em hell, guys. It’s about time someone seriously took on the Digital Rights Mafia.

Check this out this article from RoughlyDrafted Magazine: Soviet Microsoft: How Resistance to Free Markets and Open Ideas Will the Unravel the Software Superpower.

Here is a surprisingly cogent argument for the reform of copyright law. Check it out.

An example of real piracy:

Somali pirates hijack ship; 20 Americans aboard
Somali pirates on Wednesday hijacked a U.S.-flagged cargo ship with 20 American crew members onboard, hundreds of miles from the nearest American military vessel in some of the most dangerous waters in the world.

The 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama was carrying emergency relief to Mombasa, Kenya, when it was hijacked, said Peter Beck-Bang, spokesman for the Copenhagen-based container shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk. It was the sixth ship seized within a week, a rise that analysts attribute to a new strategy by Somali pirates who are operating far from the warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden.

The company confirmed that the U.S.-flagged vessel has 20 U.S. nationals onboard.

I wonder how — or if — the news media will compare/contrast these real pirates with the so-called “pirates” who buy the latest Hannah Montana song and share it with their friends.

A reminder:

Sharing is not piracy
Copying is not piracy

On a side note, Somalia has not had a functioning government in a couple of decades. Piracy is their most lucrative industry.

Google-owned web site YouTube has decided to block music videos in the UK rather than give in to the Performing Rights Society (PSA) of Music, a group representing artists and publishers in the UK.

“… PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our license than before,” he wrote. “The costs are simply prohibitive for us – under PRS’s proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback.”

He also claims PRS is unwilling to even tell the video streaming site what songs are included in the licensing renewal being negotiated. Walker claims the deal is “like asking a consumer to buy an unmarked CD without knowing what musicians are on it.”

(from YouTube blocks music videos in UK, The Register)

Good for you, YouTube!

Penguin Pete is far more optimistic than I am. The history of media (words, music, images, etc.) in the USA and elsewhere is one of increasing layers of restrictions on consumers, and ever-expanding protections for the media robber barons and the Digital Rights Mafia (DRM).

It will get worse before it gets better. Or, as my grandmother once said, “You can’t get blood out of a turnip, but you can sure ruin the turnip trying.”