Actually that should be “you need to understand how an application works before you can use it”. I think that Jammie Thomas would be better off today if she understood what could happen in the real world with using an application.
When I get Opensuse (this weekend I’ll get OpenSUSE 10.3) I’ll leave it running for a while to benefit others. Once I’ve done that long enough I’ll take it down. Contributing to the Opensuse torrent is a deliberate action on my part, it’s not automatic and does not share files on my hard drive. I’m not sure that I can use µTorrent to just share folders; never wanted to so I just don’t know.
Kazaa is a P2P file sharing app. IMHO It’s different from Bit Torrent because in Bit Torrent you need to leave the download running in order to share it. Apparently with Kazaa it’s trivial to share out your whole music library and this has gotten Kazaa into deep poo with the music industry.
This lady was sued by the RIAA and rather than settling for the extortion she went to trial. The RIAA behaves like a shake down organization and claims that if you rip the CD’s you paid for to your iPod then you are a thief. I did it with my CDs (can you get Basia on iTunes?), apparently so did the POTUS when he had the Beatles on his ipod. Soon I am sure they will insist on a pay-per-play model.
Oddly enough she lost. Her defense was basically “I don’t know how this happened, but it was not me. Maybe gremlins did it”. If she had used a different Kazaa account name than the one she uses for other services, then maybe. But her lawyer tried the dumbest defense possible by just claiming ignorance of the file sharing of those 24 music tracks.
I don’t like the RIAA. I think they should be shut down and let consumers alone instead of trying to scare them with “the sky will fall on you if you don’t contact our settlement extortion centers” tactics. I think that they are hurting their industry more than they are protecting it. But if you are caught doing something that is illegal, whether it should be illegal or not is moot, then you just might want to be able to demonstrate that it was not you instead of just saying it.
