doggod's Journal: Bushite Congress Kills RIAA's Anti-piracy Efforts

The Law of Unexpected Consequences is expected to soon take an ironic twist. As reported in The Guardian, the WTO will issue its long-awaited ruling next week on Antigua's complaint against the US for its law that prohibited banks from allowing money to flow to and from offshore Internet gambling sites.

That law, stuffed at the last minute into an anti-terrorism bill after it failed several times to pass on its own, was widely seen as a sop to Las Vegas and Atlantic City gambling interests who were feeling a pinch from the Internet competition.

Now, if Antigua gets its way, it will be able, as a form of retribution for the losses it suffered, to legally sell pirated music, movies and software to the US market. Meaning that, presumably, as long as they go through servers in Antigua, college kids will be able to resume music file sharing without fear of the big RIAA hammer coming down.

So as a logical consequence, one imagines this headline in the future: "RIAA sues Las Vegas Casinos for uncollectable piracy damages." Oh, wait, that wouldn't work, because the link between the casinos and Congress is well concealed. Maybe the RIAA will try to sue Congress then instead?

Non-sequiter

[Stanislav_J]

I don't follow your reasoning. If you are talking about P2P file sharing, this would have no effect -- if someone in the U.S. sets up a shared folder and "makes available" copyrighted tracks for others to download, Antigua is totally irrelevant as the computer and files are on U.S. soil. However, I could foresee some sort of allofmp3 type service setting up on Antigua. (Sure beats the weather in Moscow...)