posted 09-05-2003 01:30 AM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by David:
Early rap wasn't too bad but this newer stuff needs to be re-catagorized to >>>
'C-rap'...
Seems that anyone who can keep cadence and cuss really well is now a C-rap star.

---

Johnny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It's somethin' you did
God knows when
But you're doin' it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin' for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap
In the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin' that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone's tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the D. A.
Look out kid
Don't matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don't try "No Doz"
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows

Get sick, get well
Hang around a ink well
Ring bell, hard to tell
If anything is goin' to sell
Try hard, get barred
Get back, write braille
Get jailed, jump bail
Join the army, if you fail
Look out kid
You're gonna get hit
But users, cheaters
Six-time losers
Hang around the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin' for a new fool
Don't follow leaders
Watch the parkin' meters

Ah get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance, learn to dance
Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don't steal, don't lift
Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift
Look out kid
They keep it all hid
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don't wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals
Don't wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don't work
'Cause the vandals took the handles<

posted 09-08-2003 08:35 AM            

Online piracy criminal prosecution hailed as a world first
Sun Sep 7, 3:40 AM ET

SYDNEY (AFP) - Three Sydney men face jail after pleading guilty last week to breaking copyright laws in what the Australian recording industry believes is the world's first criminal prosecution for online music piracy.

Until now legal action against music websites such as Napster have relied on civil law and record industry representatives said the criminal case sent a powerful message that music piracy would face the full force of the law.

Tommy Le, 19, Peter Tran, 20, and Charles Kok Hau Ng, 20, last week pleaded guilty to infringing the copyright of music giants Universal Music, Sony, Warner, BMG , EMI and Festival Mushroom Records.

Police arrested the trio in April after raiding their homes in Sydney following a joint investigation with Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), a record industry-funded watchdog.

They face up to five years' jail and 60,500 dollars (39,325 US) in fines for illegally distributing up to 60 million dollars' worth of music on a website called "MP3 WMA land".

MIPI investigator Michael Speck said his organisation would ask the court to ensure the punishment meted out to the three reflected their crimes, although he declined to say whether this meant MIPI would push for a custodial sentence.

Speck told AFP it was believed to be the first criminal prosecution of its type in the world.

"This is an important copyright case for industries all over the world because it confirms the view that you can be found and you can be prosecuted even though you hide behind the anonymity that the Internet offers," Speck said.

"It shows courts are prepared to see this as just another form of illegal misappropriation of property. Hopefully that will send an incredibly strong deterrent message," he said.

Le, Tran and Kok Hau Ng will be sentenced on November 10.

Speck, a former detective with the New South Wales state police, said the case also showed police were now taking online copyright infringement as a serious crime.

"It's one from being perceived as a very low-level, almost innocuous, activity to being part of a portfolio of professional criminals," he said.

"It's become increasingly sophisticated and the profits of pirates have skyrocketed."

MIPI estimates online piracy costs the Australian music industry up to 200 million dollars in revenue every year.

Speck said the methods used to track down online pirates were improving and his organisation had a global monitoring system that could detect online infringement of Australian copyright no matter where it occurred.

"The sleuth work is becoming increasingly easy to do, it's almost impossible to wipe your fingerprints off a digital crime scene," he said.

Speck said the Internet service providers who hosted music pirates websites could become the industry's next target.

"They're clearly not immune from prosecution," he said.

"They spend a great deal of their marketing effort exonerating themselves or distancing themselves from responsibility for this activity and increasingly courts are recognising the connection between this activity and their benefit," he said.

"They stay silent on their moral and legal position, they're clearly making a significant proportion of their gross revenue directly from the traffic of music."

Copyright lawyer Adam Simpson said the view of online pirates as teenage geeks operating from a back bedroom was outdated and organised crime was muscling into the area.

"There's certainly a lot of big organisations behind it," he said.

"I've had Asian clients threatened by gangsters from the Chinese mainland, using scare tactics to frighten legitimate licencees. Pirates is the right word for them."

posted 09-08-2003 09:51 AM            

As I understand it, music sales have slumped because of high prices of the CD's. If they start with the prosecuting of the average person, the person building his or her personal collectionby downloading, I'll bet the sales will really hit a slow down in protest.

posted 09-08-2003 05:03 PM            

In the latest salvo in the recording industry's battle against online piracy, a trade group today sued 261 people in the United States it accuses of violating copyright laws by swapping online files.

The lawsuits were filed in federal courts throughout the country and could be followed by thousands more such complaints in the coming months, said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which filed the lawsuits on behalf of its member recording companies.

The action is expected to help define the legal boundaries of a common practice for an estimated 60 million people in the United States who use file-sharing networks.

"Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation," Mr. Sherman said during a conference call with the news media today. "But when you are being victimized by an illegal activity, there comes a time when you have to stand up and take appropriate action. We simply can not allow online piracy to continue destroying the livelihood not only of songwriters and recording artists, but also of tens of thousands of less-celebrated people in the music industry from entertainers and technicians to record-store clerks and CD plant workers."

The recording industry blames the practice for a 25 percent drop in sales of CD's since 1999. Under copyright law, the group can be awarded damages of $750 to $150,000 for each copyrighted song that is distributed without authorization.

The recording association also announced today that it was offering amnesty to copyright violators who had not yet been subpoenaed or sued. Under the terms of the program, music swappers can avoid prosecution if they sign a notarized affidavit promising to delete all songs they have acquired illegally and to respect recording copyrights, Mr. Sherman said.

During the summer, the Recording Industry Association of America put the file-sharing world on notice that it was planning the legal barrage. On June 25, the major music companies said they intended to sue hundreds of individuals as a form of deterrence. The association obtained more than 1,500 subpoenas demanding that more than a dozen Internet service providers and several universities disclose the names of subscribers who swap files using file-sharing software, which allows users to copy music, movies and other files from one another's computers through the Internet.

The recording industry had tried to educate file swappers about the illegality of the practice through antipiracy television and radio commercials, newspaper and magazine advertisements, and four million instant messages warning people using KaZaA, the most popular file-sharing software, that they were violating the law.

When the educational campaign proved unsuccessful in stemming the traffic of Internet files, the industry launched its dragnet, which it hopes will scare people from using the software.

"We hope that our actions will convince doubters that we are serious about protecting our rights," Mr. Sherman said.

He added: "This is a program that is designed to affect deterrence."

Mr. Sherman and other officials from the Recording Industry Association of America did not offer any details about the identities of the defendants in the cases, or where the lawsuits had been filed, except to say they were filed in federal civil courts "across the country in a host of jurisdictions."

Mr. Sherman said the defendants in the 261 cases were "major offenders" and were each making available for distribution an average of about 1000 music files.

The music industry has tried suing the makers of the most popular file-sharing software, but in April, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that two peer-to-peer systems, Morpheus and Grokster, were legal even though people used them to make illegal copies of music and movies. Music executives said they were left with little choice but to pursue the users themselves who violate copyright laws by functioning as defacto illegal distributors of copyrighted music.

Earlier this year, the Recording Industry Association of America also sued four college students it accused of making thousands of songs available for illegal downloading on campus networks. Those cases were settled for $12,500 to $17,000 each.

The recording association is only conducting its legal offensive in the United States "at this point," Mr. Sherman said, though he added that copyright owners might have legal jurisdiction in the American courts to go after alleged infringers abroad. Recording industry groups around the world, meanwhile, have already embarked on their own education campaigns, he said.

Under the guidelines announced today, users facing lawsuits or already identified in a recording association investigation would not be eligible for the amnesty program. Those who are eligible must sign a sworn declaration that they have eschewed illegal file sharing and have deleted all illegally acquired music from their computers. Mr. Sherman said participants will be held to an "honor system" and that investigators will not be reviewing participant's hard drives to insure that the files have been deleted.

Information about the program is available at the web site www.musicunited.org.

Mr. Sherman said that several file swappers not targeted in today's lawsuits had already stepped forwarded and brokered settlements with the recording association. He said each settlement was "in the range of" $3000 but warned that the terms of those settlements were "more generous" than what defendants in today's lawsuits or others already slapped with a subpoena could expect should they decide to settle.

"Nobody should be getting a free pass here if you've been targeted," he said.

posted 09-09-2003 08:18 AM            

File-sharers scoff at lawsuits

By Shawn Langlois, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 6:51 PM ET Sept. 8, 2003

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- The recording industry continued to push mounds of paper Monday, filing suit against 261 people for allegedly pirating songs on file-sharing Websites like Kazaa.

That leaves about 59,999,739 to go.

But if the countless tune-swappers trolling through cyberspace were intimidated by the spate of lawsuits, you wouldn't know it. The consensus message from a bounty of cavalier posts aimed at the Recording Industry Association of America became abundantly clear: Bring it on!

Nanuk, for example, heartily pounded his chest along with his cronies on Yahoo: "You can take away my MP3's when you pry my mouse out of my cold dead hands."

It's all about the money, according to Tnintbubse: "Consumers will not tolerate their price gouging and they need to come up with something else besides suing college kids. The industry has gone unchecked too long and has passed the cost down to us. Now they are crying."

Howler24 drew a line of futility between what he feels are two ill-fated crusades: "Yes, you can cry and moan about the 'evils' of drugs and file sharing. But when you're through foaming at the mouth, you have to realize that they are BOTH here to stay. No law, no court can change that. The best thing to do is to control it and make it profitable, instead of driving it underground."

Needless to say, the RIAA's option for file-sharers to turn themselves in didn't go over to well. See full story.

From Rmonster: "I have a feeling that anyone who signs up for this 'amnesty' is going to find themselves up the creek. Sending a notarized copy of your ID and statement that you did, in fact, break the law (in their eyes at least) does not sound like amnesty, but suicide."

As Apophis sees it, the RIAA is out of touch "It's time for the RIAA as we know it to go away and an agency more in tune with the 21st century needs to be put in its place. One that looks forward and not stuck in decades old business practices."

Though greatly outnumbered, some did play devil's advocate --AndyCane, for instance, didn't see much wiggle room for the virtual apologists: "I'm no huge fan of the RIAA, but they have a right to protect their copyrighted material and (neither) you, nor I, nor anyone else, has the right to 'share' it without paying for it, at least not on the scale that it's done on file-sharing sites."

Then, of course, there was plenty of cheeky advice. This morsel from SkyPilotTB: "Stop book sharing. Sue libraries."

And WWWFairfield hinted at hopping aboard the Justin and Britney bashing bandwagon with his take: "Look at the top ten -- THAT explains why sales of CDs are lacking. Stop looking for pretty faces and recruit real musicians to record and sell music."

Finally, ArbaCadarba painted the picture just about everyone on line has been clamoring for since the rise and fall of Napster: "Now what I would love to see is all music artists selling their stuff directly to music lovers, bypassing the music industry completely.

"That would bring more money to the artists, more music to the people, and the extra pleasure of watching rich music industry execs pulling their hair out."

posted 12-23-2003 11:57 AM            

Record Industry May Not Subpoena Providers

Dec 19, 10:44 AM (ET)

By TED BRIDIS

WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal appeals court on Friday rejected efforts by the recording industry to compel the nation's Internet providers to identify subscribers accused of illegally distributing music online.

In a substantial setback for the industry's controversial anti-piracy campaign, the three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned a ruling by the trial judge to enforce a copyright subpoena.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates had approved use of the subpoenas, forcing Verizon Communications Inc. to turn over names and addresses for at least four Internet subscribers. Since then, Verizon has identified dozens of its other subscribers to music industry lawyers.

The appeals court said one of the arguments by the Recording Industry Association of America "borders upon the silly," rejecting the trade group's claims that Verizon was responsible for downloaded music because such data files traverse its network.

Verizon had challenged the constitutionality of the subpoenas under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The law, passed years before downloading music over peer-to-peer Internet services became popular, compels Internet providers to turn over the names of suspected pirates upon subpoena from any U.S. District Court clerk's office. A judge's signature is not required. Critics contend judges ought to be more directly involved.

Verizon had argued at its trial that Internet providers should only be compelled to respond to such subpoenas when pirated music is stored on computers that providers directly control, such as a Web site, rather than on a subscriber's personal computer.

In his ruling, the trial judge wrote that Verizon's interpretation "makes little sense from a policy standpoint," and warned that it "would create a huge loophole in Congress' effort to prevent copyright infringement on the Internet."