January 10, 2004

More RIAA yumminess "A large percentage [of the vendors] are of a Hispanic nature," Langley said. "Today he’s Jose Rodriguez, tomorrow he’s Raul something or other, and tomorrow after that he’s something else. These people change their identity all the time." via squoogy, er...kimberly, uh, I mean jim_t. I get so confused.
posted by Scott 20 years ago
  • Vigilanties? That's freaking wierd. How credible is the LA Weekly?
  • It doesn't matter if its credible or not. This brings me to the ground: "They tried to scare me," Borrayo said. "They told me,
  • The LA Weekly is one of the best liberal papers in the city, so I have no doubt that the quote is real--especially coming from someone associated with the RIAA. I'm just going to sit back and wait for the lawsuits to start rolling in.
  • pirates are all at sea. It's true!
  • Oh my God. That has to be illegal. That HAS to be illegal. I don't get why the RIAA decides it's special like that. You don't see car manufacturers donning black suits and leaping down on people selling stolen cars, or the Marlboro man proudly leading away a lassoo'd cigarette vendor... But when it comes to CD's...
  • Our top scientists are working towards the day when even thinking of committing copyright infringement results in painful electric shocks to the private parts, followed by lawyers parachuting out of the sky. The RIAA, we're here to protect the music.
  • Wanted for Piracy: Captain Raul Something-or-Other, scourge of the seven CDs. Arrr!
  • What disturbs me about this article is the assumptions about these vendors as being shadowy figures due to their ethnicity. (I gather this mostly from the quote that was the intro to the MoFi post.) Also, I see a potential for an abuse of power over "these people" through the visual association of the RIAA SWAT with real police. Even more disturbing is the EFF stance written in the article: "The more time the association spends rousting vendors, the thinking goes, the less it will spend subpoenaing KaZaa and BearShare aficionados." It seems to smack of something like "As long as the focus is on Jose Rodriguez, street vendor, is getting busted I can breathe easier as long as I have the time and money to access the internet." Maybe I am simplifying this copyright enforcement issue to some sort of pseudo racial/class one, but these are thoughts that come to mind.
  • Treeboy, the difference between street vendors selling pirated cds and KaZaa is that in the first case, money is changing hands, and that's a clear case of copyright infringement, whereas KaZaa has plenty of non-infringing uses, and the RIAA's legal arguments against online file-sharing are not as watertight. As much as I loathe the RIAA, and disagree with the assumption that "hispanic" somehow equals "bootlegger," the EFF got it exactly right.
  • While the RIAA continues to battle evildoers and/or normal people, I find I'm still interested in the pirate link from before. Of course, that may be because of various piratey activities I've been engaged in of late. (Which are naturally more silly than the scary news of contemporary pirates).