RIAA and P2P Music

In an article by Fred von Lohmann, the attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the issue of all the RIAA suits against individuals who are file swapping is discussed. Lohmann, inRIAA’s college lawsuits a wrong answer | CNET News.com, argues that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 makes people guilty until proven innocent because organizations can get subpoenas automatically by “merely making allegations of infringement.” (In other words, the federal court issues them automatically without review of a judge or a lawsuit being filed.) Universities are responding to these subpoenas that they don’t know who is responsible for the IP address, since they are assigned dynamically. Thus universities can’t help the RIAA – one wonders if universities are setting up their systems so they cannot know who used the offending IP address to frustrate the RIAA.
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Skins

Ruth Nichols has written a M.Sc. thesis on skins, “A study into the Useful Application of Skins for Information Filtering” (Computer and Software, McMaster University, 2003). She has brought out an interesting area of user interface design and theory that is connected with the work done on Mods in the gaming community – namely Skins.

She writes that “The original idea of skins was developed by Winamp, an MP3 player build by a small company Nullsoft. Winamp was first released in 1997.” (p. 20) Winamp was officialy released in 1998 and was bought by AOL in 1999. Skinning was added in 1998.
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