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Thursday, August 28, 2003 |
RIAA turns up heat on subpoena fighter: The Recording
Industry Association of America leveled a full legal barrage at the sole
Kazaa user fighting its attempts to identify file swappers, saying she was
indisputably a major
copyright infringer. By John Borland, CNET News.com.
Technically, neither the RIAA nor "Nycfashiongirl," the Kazaa
user's online nickname, are supposed to be fighting over the details of
what she may have downloaded or when and where she got the files. The only
open proceeding is the subpoena for her identity, which will be approved or
blocked on different grounds.
But the filings appear to be aimed as much at the court of opinion as at
the real court bench, and both sides seem to be fighting a case that hasn't
yet been filed. Last week, Nycfashiongirl's attorney told the court that
his client had purchased a computer with music on it, had legally ripped
her own CDs to her hard drive, and had used the Kazaa application to listen
to that music. She had tried several times to prevent sharing that music
with the outside world, her attorneys wrote.
. . .
In a preview of what will likely show up in many of the infringement
lawsuits next month, the RIAA demonstrated that it not only had found the
small number of songs listed in the subpoena request, but had examined the
full contents of Nycfashiongirl's shared folder, looking in detail at the
"metadata" attached to each file such as song name, artist, notes attached
by earlier file swappers, and even at the contents of the file itself.
Some of the files exactly matched the "fingerprints," or specific digital
characteristics, of songs earlier identified on the now-defunct Napster
service, the RIAA said. All those factors indicated that the anonymous
computer user was a "frequent and significant participant in illegal
downloading and distribution of music," the group wrote.
Also, Music industry
discloses some methods used to track file swappers (AP).
Using a surprisingly astute technical procedure, [!!!] the
Recording Industry Association of America examined song files on the
woman's computer and traced their digital fingerprints back to the former
Napster file-sharing service, which shut down in 2001 after a court ruled
it violated copyright laws.
. . .
The woman's lawyer, Daniel N. Ballard, of Sacramento, Calif., said the
music industry's latest argument was ,i>merely a smokescreen to divert
attention from the related issue of whether her Internet provider,
Verizon Internet Services Inc., must turn over her identity under a
copyright subpoena.
You cannot bypass people's constitutional rights to privacy, due process
and anonymous association to identify an alleged infringer, Ballard said.
Ballard has asked the court to delay any ruling for two weeks while he
prepares detailed arguments, and he noted that his client -- identified
only as ``nycfashiongirl'' -- has already removed the file- sharing
software from her family's computer.
1:28:14 PM 
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I got this
pop-up ad today from the Inland revenue.
11:27:54 AM
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Calif. Privacy Battle Not Over. Congress may soon pass a bill favored by the banking industry that would invalidate California's strong new financial privacy mandates. Congressional backers say they can't have states doing 50 different things. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News]
6:19:05 AM
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Reaching Parents Early, by William Raspberry, in The Washington Post.
. . . it is beyond unrealistic to expect schools to fix children who enter school -- even preschool -- already behind.
Here's what the authors, Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, found:
- Verbal stimulation (roughly the number of words a young child hears at home) may be the most important predictor of the child's future academic, economic and social success.
- The difference in the amount of verbal stimulation received by children of poor families and those of the middle class is so huge as to be essentially unbridgeable.
. . .
To keep the language experience of welfare children equal to that of working-class children, the welfare children would need to receive 63,000 words per week of additional language experience. . . . Just to provide an average welfare child with an amount of weekly language experience equal to that of an average working-class child would require 41 hours per week of out-of-home experience as rich in words addressed to the child as that in an average professional home.
. . .
Even full-day, high-quality child care can't begin to close that gap.
What might? It occurs to me that the most reasonable place to try to break the cycle is with one generation of parents.
Poor parents love their children and want them to be happy and successful. The problem is, they don't always know how to make it happen.
I've concluded that it may be easier to teach the parents some of the necessary "tricks" than to rescue children who've already fallen behind. Indeed, I believe it so strongly I've decided to invest time and personal resources to see how much meaningful difference can be accomplished in the small community that happens to be my Mississippi hometown.
I'll let you know how it goes.
6:11:21 AM
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They can't go home again. Hunkered down in a New Mexico Marriott with the 11 Texas Democrats whose heroic stand against Tom DeLay's power grab is going into its second month. [Salon.com]
6:04:37 AM
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Cloudy, With a Chance of Theft. A computer scientist and a criminologist get together to make like meteorologists -- but their aim is to predict crime waves, not heat waves. Can they chart crime 'demand' like businesses forecast consumer trends? By Wilpen Gorr of Wired magazine. [Wired News]
6:00:27 AM
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