Congressman Unite in Bi-partisan Effort Against File-sharing! Onlookers Startled By Puddles of Blood!

New 'let's hope the software industry's lobbyists are better than the RIAA's lobbyists' answers here.

The Article on the Washington Post The Debate on Slashdot

Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Mission Hills, CA) is putting the final touches on a bill he says should help curb copyright infringement.
hahahahahahahaha! hoooh!
I can imagine the debate on C-Span sounded like this:
Berman: "See if we make it illegal the problem magickally goes away. Just like how we made rape, murder, burglary and sex illegal and suddenly no-one got raped, murdered, burgled or...um..sexed...anymore."
Reporter I: "But P2P runs across the internet, which is global, non-local, and spread across the whole earth, even into countries where are laws have no jurisdiction."
Berman: "...other countries. You lost me. Can you explain this?"
Reporter II: "Waitasec...your corporate overlords scheme is merely the equivalent of a DoS (Denial of Service) attack. Aren't DoS's considered to be an act of terrorism under the new laws?"
Berman: "Well...its not illegal when my masters do it. Its just illegal when an american citizen does it. They are all naughty peasants and must be punished."

/. comments are good as long as you have your filter set to 5.

I wonder how much the RIAA can do?

As /. points out this doesn't suggest pinging to bring down super- servers (though elsewhere I heard this suggested.) If they try, this will hurt the whole network including legit files those superservers are serving ... I wonder if that's gonna be legal?

Decoy files are just a kind of noise ... most people who download them won't keep them on their machines, so they'll be filtered by the network. Of course not filtered out entirely, but kept in the minority.

Decoy servers, when discovered, can be reported to a "decoy list" which acts rather like spam blocking lists. Your client can check this and avoid downloading. Hence the RIAA decoy servers will have to keep changing their IP address.

Apparently the RIAA put up versions with extra choruses etc as spoilers? Oh you mean like remixes? Perhaps people won't care, or will prefer these kinds of decoys. (I like to imagine some clueless RIAA guy going "you know that bit in the middle, where they stop playing and the drum just marks time by playing the rhythm. Let's spoil the file by looping that for a whole coupla minutes in the middle of the song.")

whoopty-whoo. maybe we should just make 'our' representatives wear sandwich boards everywhere reading "your congressman - 0wn3d by Disney/Vivendi/RIAA" etc, etc. fucking disgusting, and the way the RIAA insists on playing this makes me hope they go down in flames. burn, motherfuckers, burn.

Better than sandwich boards: Treat them like you treat a Nascar vehicle. Put advert stickers on their suits so we know who owns them.

What has this got to do with Sophie Ellix-Bextor?

She secretly runs the RIAA, and thus must be destroyed.