[- Jesse Jordan vs the RIAA
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By Johnvon Seggern, Section whatever... Posted on Wed Jun 11th, 2003 at 07:54:25 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
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RIAA Wrath Hits Teen
On April 3, 19-year-old Jesse Jordan received a call that changed his life.
The freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., learned he was being sued by one of the most powerful trade groups in the United States, the Recording Industry Association of America...
This story is making the rounds of the Internet right now, and has been the #1 story on blogdex since this morning. Poor Jesse Jordan set up a general-purpose peer-to-peer file-sharing engine on campus and after being threatened with a massive lawsuit by the RIAA, he has settled out of court and will be paying them his entire life savings: $12,000. I'm sure this seems wrong to many people -- but why?
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I think it's because many of us intuit that a dramatically faster freer flow of information such as the Internet makes possible is a good thing generally, leading to innovation and general human advancement and betterment. In fact, a relatively free Internet might be the greatest tool for the propagation of knowledge ever invented (although such things are difficult to measure).
To those of us who share this view to any extent, trying to punish those who are using the network for precisely the purpose for which it was designed (the propagation and sharing of knowledge and information) seems willfully perverse and (if successful) will only lead to crippling the Net and making it much less useful than it might be otherwise. As a musician myself, I wholeheartedly agree with those who argue that creators need to get paid, but it seems like it is well-past time for a thorough overhaul of the way that gets accomplished. Perhaps even our ideas of intellectual property more generally need to be reconceptualized in light of the radical acceleration of the flow of ideas and information which digital technology has brought. |
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