There's a lot to this whole mess that is just isn't coming to play.

Beware, this is going to be a long post.

First off, it's been pretty much established, that if you don't know something is happening on your computer it isn't your fault. We've seen this in cases where people had child porn, and they blamed it on a virus and got off. Or in the case of a virus, if you get one, it isn't your fault that your box was used in a DDoS.

Many people don't know that Kazaa searches their hard drive for ANY usable media, and places it for sharing. Either downloaded, or legitimately ripped. These companies that produce these programs also have very shady business practices, and it comes along in the software (I mean come on, these guys are promoting piracy, no matter how you look at it). And due to these shady practices, these people don't know that there's spy ware going on the system, that it's sharing every single file on their hard drive, or that it installs something that allows Kazaa to sell your computer to be used in a Distributed Computing system.

Not everyone is as geeky, and computer savvy, and reads the EULA and readme’s like we do. But yet, we can't say that "ignorance is bliss" either, cause if that was the case, then anyone could get off any crime by saying they didn't know what they were doing was wrong (which a lot of people are saying in this). So where is the line drawn on things like this?

Well first off, the media has been reporting that these are music DOWNLOADERS, which is not correct. In general, these are music sharers. Whether they downloaded something or not cannot be proven in a court of law, as there is no method to see who downloaded what. You can only see what songs someone is having if they are sharing. So it's the nice people that share their songs that are getting raped here, not the ass holes that don't want to get caught, and have a [censored] load of Pirated MP3's. The RIAA also needs to go after huge piracy groups like RNS, that release high quality (unlike the crap you get on Kazaa), full CD's, usually a week before they hit the shelves. They have an internal leak, that leads to full albums getting posted to newsgroups.

The point is, is that it isn't these people that are sharing MP3's that should be sued, but they are. They only reason that they are, is that this is the only way the RIAA has any evidence to state that they downloaded something, which may, or may not be the case.

But hey, I'm just a low life, in general, Pirate.

Arr! baby.

removed some misc crap


Edited by xanatos (15/09/2003 08:59)
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- Damien - Mk2a 24G Blue SN: 120001043