News

'Suing individual swappers?' on 2^nd July 2002 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ashok]

It seems the music industry, through the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is gearing up to sue individual users of file sharing networks. Dow Jones story on SmartMoney.com This is interesting, and pertinant for video-sharing applications like videdot in that there are still a number of open questions as to what forms of sharing are acceptable, legal or appropriate. It's also interesting to see how they might manage to do it, and whether it will just lead to another round of indirection, redirection, misdirection or continent-hopping to evade legal wrangling. Moreover, with published statistics about the small proportion of users on various file-sharing networks providing the vast bulk of the content, this may be an effective way to clobber those users.

'Site update' on 2^nd July 2002 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ashok]

Comments, news and progress. So, the site is shaping up to be something a little more useful. The front page still needs some work to show the the real meat a bit higher up. I'm working some things out which should help. Your input is always welcome here. Soon we'll need testers for this stuff, and suggestions are appreciated. Read the docs, and comment on them at the bottom, that keeps everything visible, which will matter as more people get involved. I'll set up proper forums later if there is need, and use some smart stuff I've planned out to tie forum posts in to locations on a site. Progress on the code is coming along, I'll add some screenshots of the functional BeOS-app listings soon. Some other projects have soaked up a fair bit of time lately, so the last couple of weeks have been less productive, but ideas are still flowing, and a practical local application isn't far away (August?). The fun is in the network though, as has always been the goal here.

The need for reputation >