Stolen from another board......Dude this aint right.


Do you believe this? The Recoding Industry must be loving this. The Register.

RIAA orders US Navy to surrender
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 24/11/2002 at 22:43 GMT


In a timely reminder of who's really in charge here, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has mounted a daring raid on the US Navy.

Acting unilaterally at the behest of the RIAA, Navy officials confiscated 100 computers on suspicion of harboring illegally downloaded MP3s, The Capital, an Annapolis, MD daily. A Naval official quoted confirms the raid, adding that punishment ranges from "court martial to loss of leave and other restrictions".

For the RIAA - there are no half measures: you're either with them, or against them. So even if you're risking having your ass blown off for your country, there's no mercy.

It's no picnic in the Navy, as many Register readers serving in the forces remind us. From a terrific account of Gulf War combat by a US marine sniper in the new Harper's magazine we learn that shortly before entering a live combat, infantry are required to remove "foreign material" from their packs: letters from women who aren't their girlfriends or wives, and pornography, because in the event of death the personal effects will be dispatched to their next of kin in their entirety.

So have MP3s now joined this list of "foreign material"? Any Reg readers in the know? ®

PC Bullshit!

Our people give up enough when they "take the oath".

The Register is British, and it's American journalists are whining liberal wannabe geeks who see a right-wing conspiracy around every corner. I wouldn't goive too much credit to that story.

Anyway, I am also pretty sure that personal belongings will be sanitized before being handed over to the next of kin. At least that was custom back in the German Army of WW2. Since this makes perfect sense, I can't see how a contemporary army would do it differently.

At West Point the Oath is " A cadet will not lie, cheat, or [b]steal[/b], not tolerate those who do.

I suppose it has something to do with that. It would be considered stealing.


Aviator

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
[rolleyes]

Anyone know the amount of fines the lawyerskum will be attempting to make them pay? Last I read it was some rediculous amount per song, way out of line with any cost the recording industry faced from that individual's crime.

Yeah right.

"Sir, Can you tell me how fast you were going before I pulled you over?"

or

"Do you want that last piece of pizza?"

and

"Who farted?"

Dishonest answers to these questions, while perfectly acceptable, generally constitute absolute lies.  Any Cadet that answers dishonestly to the above questions should be thrown out of West Point shouldn't they?  Wouldn't this be a good use of a court martial???


Anywho, having MP3's on your hard drive does not make you a thief.  Only a fucking Nazi would think that way.  That's right, A LEMMIWINKS STUFFING, FUCKING NAZI HEAD!!!

I hope the Navy JAG(off's) and their new bitch-whore, the RIAA, have fun proving that these midshipmen don't already own previously purchased copies of every song that they've found on their laptops.

FTN

For some, downloading MP3s is just another way to sample a song before actually buying the CD/tape. In fact, many reports show that sales go up when music lovers download songs just to see if it's good. The RIAA just makes it worse. They can expect sales to go down more and more.

Maybe this is just a touchy subject with me right now, but that simply is not true.  The courts have upheld that you have the right to convert your CD's to a different media.  In the 80's, the RIAA whined about people copying CD's to tape so that they could listen to them in their cars.  One relative of mine lost his internet connection at his college when his roommate mentioned to their RA that he had converted many of his CD's to MP3's.  The university's position was that possession of an MP3 was illegal.  It's not!  Are they going to also arrest me for copying my LP's to MP3's?z

zoom, nothing you wrote about concerns the RIAA.

They are far more concerned with people who download scores of entire albums [i]just so they wouldn't have to pay for them![/i]

I have lots of MP3's, however, I never download an entire album for the express purpose of stealing it.  If an album is that good, I wouldn't mind spending the $14 for it.  

If a song plays on the radio, it's fair game in my opinion.  These are the songs that the industry is "giving away" in order to attract you to buying more music from the artist.

theres a diffrence between fair use (owning a copy and backing it up like what your doing with lps to mp3) and piracy just dling but not paying. same goes with copying software just cuz everyone does it doesnt make it legal.

After talking to my brother and a couple of his friends in WP, I found out that downloading MP3's is NOT a sanctionable offense at this time.  HOWEVER, this story has been circulating around the school all day and they are waiting to hear something.  In the meantime, the cadets have been deleting them furiously.

You can be court martialed for anything, including not taking out the trash from your barracks room.  Not that this happens, but just about anything you do or do not do can be used by a commander as a reason to take action against a member of his command.

[img]http://www.orangizer.com/cgi-bin/ber/archives/mp3.jpg[/img]