One more Lincoln cyclist blogging about cycling in and around Lincoln, NE.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

U2 Manager's Speech

Excerpt:
"It seems that the majority of downloads were through illegal P2P download services like BitTorrent and LimeWire..."

I've never been a U2 fan, but I can tell you this. Since the band has chosen to allow this drivel to represent them, on their website; if I were buying their music I'd stop: These kinds of slanderous (and now libelous) accusations of criminality on legitimate organizations like bittorrent are not acceptable. Thousands of people use bittorrent for legitimate purposes everyday, and the only people who have any right to complain are the ISP's who may not really be able to afford that level of bandwidth use.
The beauty of the internet right now is the lack of this kind of bullshit regulation: Shutting down your connection for using P2P services. This is why people are so concerned about net neutrality; often to the point where they forget that some non-neutral actions are needed for quality of service (example: My university used to give priority to traffic on port 80, which is what you use for browsing web pages).

Sorry that this doesn't relate to cycling, but it's high time music consumers stop paying people to steal from them, take away their rights, and destroy copyright law.*

* Note, I recognize that they aren't stealing from us. However, since they believe they can call copyright infringement stealing I don't see why I can't call collusion, price fixing, and lobbying stealing. In the end, we lose money they get and that's their argument for why copyright infringement is stealing. We'll say both our arguments rest on the same false premise, so we can give them up at the same time :).

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About Me

I'm a new cyclist. I ride a low end '07 Trek road bike and enjoy every minute of it.