North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Dave Farber comments on Re: Major Labels v. Backbones

  • From: Stephen Stuart
  • Date: Mon Aug 19 14:07:33 2002

> Or maybe, the four providers named are the same 4 being used by Internap at
> that node, so effectively terminating the announcement from all 4 directions
> to Internap solves the problem.

There is a "historical" precedent that supports this theory.

For those who can set their Way-Back Machines far enough to remember,
Opus once had a brief career as a paparazzi. While photographing
Madonna, he was punched in the node by Sean Penn. The camera
manufacturer was sued, though, on the basis that they had the money.

The application of logic to this situation is laudable; as many of you
know, I'm a big fan of logic myself. It would seem, though, that the
brand of logic being applied at the RIAA is not technology logic (our
favorite, clearly), but a logic designed to encompass as many people
in their definition of infringement as they can. The more entities
they can encompass, the more "control" they can exert. Shutting down a
specific website probably has much less appeal than establishing a
precedent to force backbones to filter.

What's truly sad in this case is that if the RIAA (and MPAA) would
spend a little bit of time listening to what people want and thinking
about how to implement it, instead of furiously entrenching themselves
in the 1970s, *real* content delivery as the next "killer app" might
lift our little corner of the tech industry out of the muck. If they
spend all their energy playing whack-a-mole, though, they'll just
continue to contribute to the stagnation (and hopefully progress will
pave them over sooner rather than later).

kc pointed out some very thoughtful commentary by Janis Ian on this
topic, URLs are:

    http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html
    http://www.janisian.com/article-fallout.html

The notion of a "risk-free" trial of the content delivery business
concept using the out-of-print catalog is very appealing.

Stephen