Unfortunately for all of us, internet users, the RIAA got a victory in the Verizon case we reported earlier this year, the ISP had to unmask its subscribers "citing concerns about privacy and legal liability", quotes from CNet News article.

The Recording Industry Association of America said it has sent cease-and-desist letters to five people it suspects of illegally offering massive amounts of copyrighted music through peer-to-peer networks.

Whereas this is a [i]very bad thing[/i] for our US members, I'm not sure how this'll affect the rest of us...

RIAA has powers yes, but do they have powers abroad?

The MPAA tried to get DVD-John convicted here in norway (with the help of økokrim) for creating the DCSS (or something like that), but (thankfully) failed, due to the fact that the norwegian justice system is (still) based on consumer rights, and not manufacturers right (as it is in the US)...

So I'm not sure if they'd be able to get me if I were to share all my mp3's (ripped from cd's I own) on a p2p network...
The reason I'm unsure about what would happen is that we still have the right to make a copy of whatever we buy, and share/lend it out to our firiends...

Of course, the norwegian equivalent of RIAA (tono) woudln't be too happy, but since our laws haven't really caught up with current technology (it's still based on analogue recordings), it would be hard to find a way to convict us since we don't sell our copies, but rather give them away for free...

It'd be interesting to hear what other members (not from US) think about this, as it might have a bearing on what might happen here in Norway, and what will happen elsewhere in the world...

03:21 aka Mr.Garibaldi going to bed, dreading the hangover he'll have in the morning due to the party he just came back from...

well i think that the US companies are trying to rule the whole world and they will not !!!

or EU governments may have pressures from the US to add the same kind of laws one day maybe, but hopefully not