Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
The argument accepted by the court is seductive: "If users of pirate peer-to-peer sites don't want to be identified, they should not break the law by illegally distributing music." That sounds fine, but in today's surround-sound world, everyone is a suspect, and so everyone has forfeit their right to privacy. The fact is, the RIAA (or anyone else, for that matter) cannot establish that a person has shared copyrighted materials without already having done a little packet-snooping or hard-drive hacking. After all, a Madonna MP3 looks pretty much like the soundtrack from one of my talks from the outside; you have to actually intercept and read the file to determine that it's contraband. So it's a bit much for them to allege that only the guilty will be punished. Everyone is punished is the suurveillance society.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2024 08:50 a.m.

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