Friday, July 8, 2011

Digital downloads now illegal?

The RIAA just announced new rules requiring your ISP to report you if it (the ISP, I guess) thinks you are illegally downloading stuff. My ISP is small and local, so it's hard to imagine them working this very hard, but my question is: how do they know that what you're downloading is illegal? I mean, they can probably tell that you're DLing an album-sized file, but what if it's something that Merge or Thrill Jockey sent you, that they clearly want you to have, that would cost them money to send you by mail? Is that illegal, too?

I mention Thrill Jockey because they're digital only (at least as far as I can tell, maybe they send physicals to "special" people), and I'll miss their stuff. But I'm not going to jail for them.

Here's an article about the new rules.

Life just gets more and more fun, doesn't it?

3 comments:

Jean-Luc Garbo said...

Is Thrill Jockey associated with the RIAA or A2IM? If not, this might not effect them. I'll bet that Jason Gross will have something good to say about this soon.

Syd The Squid said...

it seems to be aimed at P2P users:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388261,00.asp

Jean-Luc Garbo said...

FDL in great detail on the matter: http://tinyurl.com/3ugsphq.