Saturday, February 24, 2007

Boing Boing: RIAA declares war on open WiFi:

The RIAA is asking a judge to rule that anyone who provides bandwidth should be responsible for all the activities of his users. This would doom open WiFi -- and all other public networking efforts. But who needs anonymous speech, anyway? After all anonymity fuels irresponsible behavior, like when some anonymous flamer wrote The Federalist Papers and fomented the American Revolution?

The RIAA just wants to stand up for freedom. First they convinced Russia to force licensing and 24-hour inspection of presses, now they want to eliminate anonymous speech here at home.

Record companies are quick to cite the First Amendment when someone suggests banning music with "suggestive" lyrics, but they're not so big on free presses and anonymous speech. It's like they love free speech, but not enough to share it with the rest of us.