All our boycotting of their crap music and physical products like CDs will be for naught if the industry pulls off their biggest trick by getting money for nothing every month due to blanket fees. That should NEVER happen or all our won battles would be for nothing, they would have won the war.

/CJ

Course not, Jon. All I meant by that, was: the first nation to explicitly state that fact, is the one where all the best technological stuff happens for twenty years or more, afterward. That’s why the RIAA/IFPI/MPAA are flailing around wildly, attempting to “gum up the works” the way they’re doing with TPB. (They can’t actually win, but they’re too short-sighted to understand that fact)

As to the “copyrighted files” aspect, we’re all pretty clear that copyright has mutated into something seriously different from what it was original supposed to be (It’s not particularly heping “science and the useful arts”, nor is a term of life-plus-75 “limited” in any meaningful sense of the term). Whether or not copyright terms are severely restricted on paper, you have to admit that if somewhere explicitly protected Bittorent trackers etc. from bullshit like TPB is experiencing, there’d be forty or fifty new trackers/search engines/social networks launched within a year. Napster and everything since has gotten people to fundamentally rethink what copyright is supposed to be (even though “the industry” manages to destroy/lobotomize apps, making people go on to the next, bigger thing.)

Now think what would happen if, for example, you combined trackers, a search portant, discussion forums, social networking features, hosted in a nation that was a “safe-haven” from such idiotic lawsuits? I’m pretty sure it would grow over time, and it’d have time to mature into something. A good example of how this is almost happening now is soulseek.

By the way: thanks for publishing my article submission: glad the edits made it easier to understand.

Everyone needs to repeat this fact to someone else at least once a day!
Propaganda is a dangerous thing to let roam free of challenge!

Cheers!

Then, the only alternatives will be for every OTHER nation to realize that anything they say about it is effectively unenforceable (beyond the current sort of harassment), or for that nation to attempt to neuter it’s internet connectivity. The only nation that’s really managed to “control” it’s Internet connectivity is North Korea — and that’s only because they’re a bunch of jack-booted thugs, and their citizenry is too pathetically cowed and “law-abiding” to do anything much against it.

Whichever nations finally explicitly “legalizes” file-sharing, is the nation that immediately gets to assume technological leadership, in that there’s going to be a huge number of folks creating stuff there that’ll make TPB look like a weekend hobby-project.

Plus, and let’s never forget this — it’s not like the current “laws” are being obeyed that much. You can bet that even if they DO manage to ratchet things up somewhere — since the opposition is global, their “local” efforts will fail to achieve anything substantive, just like now.

YA that would be funny.

PS: why hasn’t anyone done to this Kennedy the same that the president had happen?

And ah the old classics “All previous technology advances have led to fears that the older format would die,”.