It seems that the RIAA going around scaring children again.
Last summer our university’s CIO wrote a letter against the RIAA “educational” videos.
Harold has written well here on wetmachine (link?) about government and media trying to get away with delegating their dirty work to others (i.e., extorting a third party to try to make them enforce behavior that the government and media could not get away with enforcing themselves).
John has written recently about an RIAA-like organization making up new rules for charging people. (See my counterproposal comment.)
Now comes word that the RIAA is trying again to get the universities to pass scary messages to students, hoping the most vulnerable will cut a “pre-litigation” deal and pay a reduced “fine” by dealing directly with their anonymous Web-site. Hmmm. Forcing others to pass on scary phishing solicitations to children, on activity that they have extra-constitutionally decided that they control. And no court involved. (Not that our courts are very open, honest, uncorrupted, fair, or impartial these days.) Charming.
Anyway, our CIO has sent out a new letter saying that the university will not be a party to this, and will not pass on such threats to the students.
Refs:
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About Stearns
Howard Stearns works at High Fidelity, Inc., creating the metaverse.
Mr. Stearns has a quarter century experience in systems engineering, applications consulting, and management of advanced software technologies. He was the technical lead of University of Wisconsin's Croquet project, an ambitious project convened by computing pioneer Alan Kay to transform collaboration through 3D graphics and real-time, persistent shared spaces. The CAD integration products Mr. Stearns created for expert system pioneer ICAD set the market standard through IPO and acquisition by Oracle. The embedded systems he wrote helped transform the industrial diamond market. In the early 2000s, Mr. Stearns was named Technology Strategist for Curl, the only startup founded by WWW pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. An expert on programming languages and operating systems, Mr. Stearns created the Eclipse commercial Common Lisp programming implementation.
Mr. Stearns has two degrees from M.I.T., and has directed family businesses in early childhood education and publishing.
Go get ’em, devil dog.