RIAA and MediaSentry

This article was posted on slashdot today.  I would like to know when some government agency is going to step in an take some action against these two groups, the RIAA and MediaSentry.  The RIAA seems to be pushing their luck by hiring this company, MediaSentry.  Over and over again, there has been news of MediaSentry overstepping the bounds of what is legal.  The disruption of Revision3’s legal video distribution was what initially caught my attention.  I doubt that Revision3 will see any justice for the blatant DOS attack on their system.

Now a University and two university students in Michigan have resorted to filing lawsuits against the RIAA and MediaSentry (aka SafeNet).  These groups have been allowed, by our government, to harass people of all walks of life.  They seem to be targeting college students with all types of harassment.  They even want the universities to police students behavior, ie stop them from downloading music.  This alone is ridiculous.  Its a classic case of going after the person/group with the most money that happens to be associated with the person/persons “breaking the law”.

The RIAA is too old school.  They need some new blood in their ranks.  Maybe then, they would come up to the times and realize that they need to adjust their business model if they want to stay in business.  The RIAA makes claims that they do this to protect the artists.  I call BULLSHIT!  Where is the documentation showing the money that goes to the artists?  Oh yeah, there is none.  The artists should consider exactly what the RIAA is involved in, attacking the customers.

MediaSentry, a la SafeNet, needs to be fired.  First of all, they have no legal right to do what they are doing.  Second, they use automated tools to attack systems that are responsible for “pirating”.  Well, what was Revision3 pirating that Friday when the DOS attack was launched against them?  Third, any of us who launched a DOS attack against any company would receive a visit from the Feds, complete with a free trip to jail.

There are very few people born in the last 35 years that have not at some point copied a piece of music that they didn’t own.  It started, back in the day, with playing a cassette on one boombox and recording it onto a blank cassette with another boombox.  Then the two boomboxes could be linked an audio cable, which greatly improved the sound quality.  Next came the dual cassette decks that allowed a cassette to be dubbed on the same machine.  CD’s came along and recording those to tape was just as easy and made a pretty decent sounding copy.  After what seemed a long time, CD burners made there entry to the consumer market.  By this time people were already using their computers to store music and now they could make perfect copies.  Now we have .mp3’s and their variants.  Small little files with decent sound quality that allow a person to store and make available tons of music.  So I guess we all need to turn ourselves in now.  Of course, this last paragraph is all theoretical.