The RIAA reveals itself to be a bunch of script-kiddie wannabes in a recent NYT article. No attention appears to be paid to the idea that just about any technical "countermeasure" they come up with only drives developers to improve the system.
For example, should the swamping of file-trading networks with bogus files (like Madonna did recently) really become a problem, I bet you'd start seeing file-sharing software start to support signed checksums that other users could issue when they find a file they think is legit. I wonder if any of them are doing this - I saw a Gnutella developer yesterday, I should have asked him. Even this is beyond most of the "countermeasures" described in the article, most of which would be simply solved by better protection against viruses.
Maybe it's too early for Apple's successful experiment to convince the industry that there really is another way to go about it. Shouldn't be long, though, at $1M its first week in use. Congrats to them and all the other companies (Listen.com (now part of Real Networks), eMusic, and others) pursuing this model.
Posted by brianb at May 5, 2003 07:49 AM | TrackBack |
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