Something I stumbled across and thought I'd post for all those people that don't buy music or don't always buy it. Not sure how public this protest is and how many people will participate to make an impact to the industries so only word of mouth is the best announcer.
I'm predicting not many will take part. There are other ways to get music other than File Hosting sites, P2P such as LimeWire died over night and it seems from Megauploads' arrests that occurred during last week has other sites putting a zip on their hosting like FileSonic suddenly did, didn't see any other sites came to light when I read about these two though. RapidShare has gone tight for a very long time that you need to be registered and signed in to download files they host so I guess then they keep track of what you're doing. Isn't Google watching us all though? Anyhow, what's still going strong and searching for particular things hasn't been much of a let down is Usenet. Providing you're subscribed to a reliable NewsGroup Provider such as Giganews or though any other servers but don't come in as close to Giganews in my opinion, anyhow you can find thousands, if not millions of available songs, music videos, TV Shows, Movies, Cracked Apps to download at whatever speed you are connected at either broadband or 3G Mobile. Your ISP may provide Usenet access but they are cut down to mainly text post and binaries are usually filtered out.
So why isn't Usenet being shut down or Giganews get arrested for making money from File Share access? Good question! From Wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
While binary newsgroups can be used to distribute completely legal user-created works, open-source software, and public domain material, some binary groups are used to illegally distribute commercial software, copyrighted media, and obscene materials.ISP-operated Usenet servers frequently block access to all alt.binaries.* groups to both reduce network traffic and to avoid related legal issues. Commercial Usenet service providers claim to operate as a telecommunications service, and assert that they are not responsible for the user-posted binary content transferred via their equipment. In the United States, Usenet providers can qualify for protection under the DMCA Safe Harbor regulations, provided that they establish a mechanism to comply with and respond to takedown notices from copyright holders.Removal of copyrighted content from the entire Usenet network is a nearly impossible task, due to the rapid propagation between servers and the retention done by each server. Petitioning a Usenet provider for removal only removes it from that one server's retention cache, but not any others. It is possible for a special post cancellation message to be distributed to remove it from all servers, but many providers ignore cancel messages by standard policy, because they can be easily falsified and submitted by anyone. For a takedown petition to be most effective across the whole network, it would have to be issued to the origin server to which the content has been posted, but has not yet been propagated to other servers. Removal of the content at this early stage would prevent further propagation, but with modern high speed links, content can be propagated as fast as it arrives, allowing no time for content review and takedown issuance by copyright holders.Establishing the identity of the person posting illegal content is equally difficult due to the trust-based design of the network. Like SMTP email, servers generally assume the header and origin information in a post is true and accurate. However, as in SMTP email, Usenet post headers are easily falsified so as to obscure the true identity and location of the message source. In this manner, Usenet is significantly different from modern P2P services; most P2P users distributing content are typically immediately identifiable to all other users by their network address, but the origin information for a Usenet posting can be completely obscured and unobtainable once it has propagated past the original server.Also unlike modern P2P services, the identity of the downloaders is hidden from view. On P2P services a downloader is identifiable to all others by their network address. On Usenet, the downloader connects directly to a server, and only the server knows the address of who is connecting to it. Some Usenet providers do keep usage logs, but not all make this logged information casually available to outside parties such as the RIAA.
If you participate, good luck, be interested to know if anyone benefits from this by the end, as I don't see this stopping the Music Industry and Governments putting a stop to everything. Censorship will always be available somewhere, just look around, join a group, ask, beg and all should be playing in your iTunes no matter what the Law does to try and stop it.
Disclaimer before being shut down and sued, harassed, arrested, whatever. This is an opinion only and doesn't relate to any fact except where linked to wiki or articles, web sites or such.
Andrew Johnson
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