The RIAA trips up old people
The hoariest content piece of the old Internet that still survives today has to be Usenet, the mother of all bulletin boards. Originally it had it's own protocol with a dedicated port number and it survived by the unique strategy of having its contents passed around from machine to machine (more or less). A user would subscribe to the feed at some cooperative server.
Usenet thrived right up until two immigration lawyers, Kanter and Siegel, spammed it with legal ads, shocking all the old net heads who didn't believe that the Net could be commercialized. The Usenet feed, although still around in academia, has become corporate and distributed for a small subscription fee by the Usenet Corporation, who continued the good works.
Not for too much longer apparently. The Darth Vader of the Internet, the RIAA, has decided that its newest target is the Usenet company. Now Usenet.com does not own copyrighted material, nor store them (well mostly it doesn't); rather it acts as the facilitator for a large, decentralized network.
Because Usenet is decentralized, it would be difficult for the RIAA to sue its users because they can't track the song to the source. So they're suing the service.
When will someone stop these clowns? The RIAA is responsible for a great deal of frivolous litigation. And remember the RIAA is protecting the interests of the distributors and not the recording artists. Several artists like Nine Inch Nails and Tori Amos have broken with the traditional music industry over issues like these and disgust at the growing percentage of the take raked in by the distributor instead of the artist.
Posted on October 17, 2007
