The RIAA Armageddon has begun

"although publicly, none of the network operators have agreed to “terminate” a customer’s service."

interesting.

So basically, if no injunction filed, no more downloading free shit from Mediafire, et al after July 1.

*July 12

would slsk downloads register here?

really don't download a lot of officially released/in-print stuff, but am bummed that this probably means the end of all the cool bootleg-y/live blogs out there. including mine!

They'll pry tyler's 82 tom verlaine solo gig bootleg mp3s from my cold dead hands

amen to that!

was thinking i'd just start doing a "bootleg of the month" CDR-by-mail subscription club. they aren't opening everyone's mail yet, are they? they probably are.

just sort of constantly amazes me how much power the RIAA and the MPAA really have

yea look what they did to District 13

how can they know what is being downloaded? wont that break data protection acts? They brought in a new law doing away with data protection??

really think the music industry needs to go to a model where all musicians get paid a base salary by the label, and gives them bonuses based on incentives (ie sales benchmarks like a bonus for going platinum, etc), and quit focusing on who paid for which individual unit.

make all music available via some pay for service that doesn't charge by unit, but just a flat rate or something.

the old model just ain't gonna fly anymore.

you'll have to pry the old model out of their cold dead hands... which I am totally cool with.

yeah I don't realistically see it happening until some kind of impasse is reached, and well given how much leeway they're given to do whatever they want, don't think that's anywhere near.

arranging chairs on the titanic

RIAAgnarok

All of this might just bring back the era of paying for bootlegs...

or the days of driving by the library to torrent shit

If this keeps on we'll end up in a terrifying world in which every piece of content is made available simultaneously worldwide at a reasonable price

No, I'm fairly certain that this will be the measure which finally prompts the populace of earth to view their wanton disregard for intellectual property rights with shame and disgust, vowing forevermore to keep their noses clean and suckle contentedly at the teats of their corporate masters. It'll be like when we won the War on Drugs back in the '80s.

restrict access to only certain major websites like Google, Facebook or a list of the top 200 sites going

The future of the internet: TV.

Agreed, when the people stop worrying about the rights of artists and start weeping for the lost sales of conglomerates we'll be in a better place xp

in the future there will be no recorded music. bands will play their music live into a microphone on demand.

in that case, RIP loudness war

as much as I was hoping this would be fake I suppose it does succeed in 1) pissing off customers and 2) generating virtually no revenue, so it at least seems like a legitimate RIAA idea

Even if they shut down the whole internet for good, most people already have more music than they could possibly listen to in several lifetimes.

lol frogbs

july 12th is my birthday!

They can require that an alleged repeat offender undergo an educational course before their service is restored. They can utilize multiple warnings, restrict access to only certain major websites like Google, Facebook or a list of the top 200 sites going, reduce someone’s bandwidth to practically nothing and even share information on repeat offenders with competing ISPs, effectively creating a sort of Internet blacklist — although publicly, none of the network operators have agreed to “terminate” a customer’s service.

This is so goddamn stupid, people pay for internet service and are likely going to drop their ISP the instant they pull any of this shit, and whichever ISP decides to actually not spy on their customers is going to be the go-to company for anyone who's even a little internet savvy. Throughout their entire existance "give the customers what they want" has never been an option for the RIAA so this is not surprising in the least.

It says so much about the fucked wiring in their heads that they always opt for taking punitive measures towards (potential) customers over restructuring their business model in response to changing trends. Western Union didn't send thugs around to shoot people's dogs if they deigned to use a telephone, iirc.

unfortunately most people in America don't have real choices when it comes to ISPs. For broadband internet I can choose between Verizon, Comcast and RCN. The first two have agreed to sign up for this program, not sure about RCN (which I use). I can't just drop RCN because they decided to send me copyright nastygrams because the alternatives aren't any better.

I'm kind of in the same boat, but I assume for people in bigger cities there's more of a choice?

I would guess that one major ISP would opt out of this? Honestly if the RIAA's learned anything (obviously they haven't) it's that measures like this NEVER produce the intended result; look at all the fallout from copy-protection. I'd assume if one ISP just publicly came out and said "we'll keep everything private", they'd get a ton of business post-July?

There's a case like this going on in Australia, in which AFACT (a shady group funded by Hollywood) is suing an ISP for 'authorising' copyright infringement. AFACT lost the case and the appeal, and now they're thrashing out a further high court appeal. You know, instead of selling their stuff.

My property management company only allows Comcast in their buildings, not only for cable and internet, but for land line telephone, too, for Christ's sake.

Someone told me this is illegal, but idk. Whether it is illegal or not, it's fucked up.

Wouldn't encrypted browsing/file sharing get around this? I'm kinda dumb about this stuff, but you know... TOR or something?

or a VPN

or SoulSeek?

i'm told that an offsite seedbox is the answer.

if ISPs are trying to control certain protocols, they are going to lose that battle -- people will just mask them as "acceptable" protocols like http and gaming servers.

i don't you guys, i don't think these measures are intended to stop the internet savvy types that already have work-arounds in place, they're going after the millions of Americans who either don't know how, or won't bother, to do these things and just give up when googling "Taylor Swift megaupload" doesn't work any more.

Wow, this came out of nowhere. Metal Archives, also known as Encyclopedia Metallum, was shut down. I'm not sure what happened because, afaik, it was just a resource similar to wiki that listed metal bands and had album lists and reviews. Unless there was something going down in the forums, I never spent any time there. This is weird.

http://www.metal-archives.com/banner2ha.jpg

Nevermind me, I just realized the date today.

i was about to say...

there's a spot where you can click through on that page.

http://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-the-us-government-is-wrong-heres-why-120326/

CaptainCrawl went down today:

Dear music blogosphere,

due to legal reasons and intense server costs CaptainCrawl has to go offline - forever.
And - sadly - this is not an April the 1st joke.

In the past 4 years CaptainCrawl has been one of the most visited sites in the music
blogosphere, with more than 4,500,000 (searchable and tagged) music blogs posts,
16,000,000 unique visits and some 10,000s of high quality one-click audio previews
(tracks, mixes, talks). From April 1st 2012, this site will be offline.

The possibility to perform full text searches within the entire music blogosphere was always a problem for labels & lawyers. CC got serious complaints from major labels and major artists, so CC has to react on that. And we are talking about big names here. Like Coldplay.

Pretty good article about getting a copyright claim for video of a presidential speech. Gives some insight into how Youtube & Google use manipulation and how one-sided the whole thing is.

http://jotman.blogspot.com/2012/03/youtube-helped-ioda-steal-my-video-of.html

anymore updates on this coming armageddon? How many of you have, er, complied?

Am I totally paranoid for thinking that this sounds shady, particularly given the July deadline? It just seems like an awfully easy way to open your computer up to scanning/monitoring by the FBI.

How many of you have, er, complied?

well my experience has been that you can't find anything at all online anymore, no mediafire, no nothin'. so I guess I am "complying" but somewhat involuntarily. I'm sure there's some private trackers that still torrent, but I'm not motivated enough for that. End of an era, etc.