In a landmark judgement, Verizon online is being ordered to cough up the identity to an individule that was sharing a large amounts of copyrighted music on Kazaa. Privacy advocates and ISP's fear that this decision will open the "flood gates" to literally THOUSANDS of subpoenas to internet servcie providers who will get overwhelmed with the cost of the legal actions.

Read more: www.msnbc.com/news/862375.asp?0cv=CB10

So, to keep boycotting RIAA one have to use a proxy now?

the american government need to make rules that give consumers their rights, and rules to secure privacy.

Here is a cut and paste of a "web topic" I did for my Business Managment class. The follow article was from Wired.com if anyone is interested.

PLEASE.. Feel free to comment about my response or the general topic @ hand.

ISP?s Must Forfeit Download Data:

As of 2:30pm on Jan 21st it has been quite clear at Wired Magazine that ISP?s will be forced, as of now on to report on it customers and their activities on the ISP?s network. Version is one company that is refusing to disclose its information. This does not boost productivity for Verison but merely threatens to take down some of it best customers. In accordance with the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America), INET providers must ?turn over the name of a suspected pirate upon subpoena from any U.S. District Court clerk?s office, without a judge?s order.? (Associated Press, 2003)

Both legit and ?shady? customers will be reported on and have their traffic traced, like a GPS only for the internet. This is a huge step back for civil liberties, and can never assure that companies have to do background checks before they do business with their consumers.

Computer monitoring is necessary on many levels, however should never be a factor on whether can you do business or not. However, training and instruction variants must be used at all times. We as consumers must understand how our systems work, or else we may do something that the system can not take and accidentally shut it down. In business, there are no mistakes, just ignorance that feeds fear that in return just hurts our businesses.

Even though the peer-to-peer infrastructures for the most part infringe upon huge amount of online piracy and copy-write theft, we should implement a change to use this system to a legitimate use, instead of pirating copy-written material, but rather act as advertisements, or promote artists new or old, large or small. In a perfect world, we would not need monitoring, but instead understanding of how our technology worked, thus we need training or technical coaching in order to make the right decisions for our business.

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,57326,00.html

"Blaming ISPs for giving these hardened criminals the bandwidth for perpetrating their heinous file-sharing acts is akin to blaming the highway department for creating roads that are used by dope smugglers," said security consultant Robert Ferrell. "It just doesn't make sense."

Hits the head.. Dead on. :) Thank you Mr. Ferrell My thoughts excatly. Its also suiside for the the various ISP who will lose business, cause they don't want their information sent out to listserves or ANY businesses that would exploit them.

Oh America land of the free and brave .......oh well at least you have cheap gas and burgers :)