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Technology Stocks : MPPP - MP3.com -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rocky Reid who wrote (965)	4/29/2000 3:26:00 AM
From: Jerry Whlan	Respond to of 1116

Yadda, yadda, yadda. Have you read the partial ruling that was handed down today, or even the plantiff's complaint? It has nothing to do with "allows easy and ILLEGAL access to copyrighted music." Because, guess what? So do CDs, anyone can lend a friend a CD and they can make an exactly perfect digital copy. Enabling illegal activity is not the same as doing the activity. If it were, no one would be allowed to drive a car because cars are an enabler of "drunk driving." In fact, the ruling is solely based on MP3.COM's assembly of the database and then giving people who already own the right to listen to that music the ability to listen to it via the internet. The plantif's filing goes on and on about how they have the sole right to make copies of the music, which is just not true because of the doctrine of fair use. You don't buy the media, you buy the content and are legally allowed to transfer it to any medium that you wish, for personal use. The RIAA and similar industry groups would love for fair use to somehow be declared null and void, but it ain't going to happen any time soon, seeing as how the principle has been around for hundreds of years dating back to british common law. As for all those artists interviewed recently? Guess what, another strawman there. Not a single one of them was talking about the my.mp3.com service. What they were talking about was the distribution of illegally copied mp3 files through services like IRC, Napster, Usenet, pireate web-sites and gnutella. All of those services make no attempt to verify right-to-use. The my.mp3.com service does verify right-to-use and that's why the music industry will cave, either through licensing or through an appeals court ruling. Even if you really did understand the details of the case, your argument that a US district court judge is the final word is ridiculous. Most of those guys are old grey hairs who have never logged on to the net and have no clue about how it works and its implications, they are still living the brick and mortar world. These kinds of rulings in the internet venue are routinely over-turned on appeal, c.f. the case of the judge who ruled that "deep linking" was illegal, or the case of the judge who ruled that linking to a site that contains illegal materials was itself illegal, all over-turned. I am confident this ruling will be overturned because as someone who has been on the net since 1989 and has had to deal with IP issues in the course of my professional work and family life, it is likely that I do have a better understanding of the interaction between the net and content delivery than a judge, who has not even heard expert testimony on the subject, does. Believe what you want, but so far you still have done nothing to support your argument except to show that you are so ignorant of the situation that you confuse napster with my.mp3.com and like to repeatedly set up strawmen.