I should have mentioned before, I agree with you on this one. I was too lazy to mention it on the pyjama pants wearing girl Pit thread, though. (I’m bad. I’m lazy.)
Er, if you’re running a 98 version, before you fdisk, I’d try a few simple repairs.
First, get or make a Win98 Boot Disk.
Boot with it.
1: fdisk/mbr
to flush your master boot record. This will kill any resident virus in there, so you can safely do the second part.
2: sys c:
This’ll copy the system files back over.
3: If it still doesn’t boot, try reinstalling Windows over the old one.
If you’re running 2K, then go to 3, try a repair. You’ve got a repair disk? If not, just cross your fingers and hope for the best.
If it works, you’ve got some time to copy your files somewhere. Got an old hard drive to put them on?
Then Fdisk and reformat, and go from scratch, then copy the files back.
Lots of luck. You’ll need it.
Oh, yeah–as if we need more of those :rolleyes:
I’d be interested if someone could either give us a link for the threads Anth refers to, or give us some cite for this. I thought you were allowed to make a reasonable number of copies of music you’d purchased. I certainly tend to make compilations and other copies for my own use, and would be surprised if this was viewed as unreasonable.
As for the OP, I really don’t understand why RealityChuck was being such a judgemental prick about The Mermaids question.
Gary - I tried, and I think they are both older than the 1-year back that Search allows. I can’t find them.
Thanks for the effort, Anth, appreciate it.
Do you recall if it was just downloading that was illegal, or if personal use copies were also out?
Can’t you just enter one year and then click “and older” just below it? And that would search those particular threads.
It all comes down to redistribution of a copyrighted work. That’s what’s happening. And the law is pretty darn clear that for it to be legal, you must get permission from the relevant copyright holders. Here’s a pretty good explanation although the urls at the end are out-of-date or broken. And here is a judgement against MP3.com, which allowed users to unlock CDs by proving that they owned them (kind of) and then allowed them to access the MP3s off of that CD (made previously by MP3.com) from anywhere. Since the users didn’t make the conversions themselves, it was deemed to infringe the relevant copyrights.
Now, if you could somehow convince a judge that the place you downloaded the tune(s) from was a library or archive, and that you were using them to do scholarly research, then you could get coverage from 17 U.S.C Ch. 1 Sec. 108. And, if you were to convert the tunes yourself, you can cite RIAA v. Diamond and Sony V. Universal to make a good argument that what you were doing falls under fair use. But, otherwise…yes, you are technically violating the copyright.
The good news, however, is that were the RIAA to take its ever-so-powerful legal arm and sue you, or the website, or Al Gore, for inventing the Internet, that unless they can prove that the sued parties violated copyrights with the intent to cause them economic harm, then the most money they can get is actual damages, not punitive damages. Which would probably be about twenty bucks. Plus legal fees.
Of course, who knows how much they’d claim in legal fees…
And, finally, FWIW:
What the world needs now,
Is another death metal thrash band
Like I need a hole in my head.
Apologies to Cracker.
Thanks.
As far as I know I am not being prosecuted for copyright infringment. The fact is I rarely use Kazaa or any other P2P program because I am afraid of what some lengths people will go to to get their jollies. I literally have thousands of CD’s and spend a good deal of time and money collecting them. One of the things I most enjoy is reading the liner notes and the art work.
I enjoy putting a lot of music on my computer so that I can listen while I surf and also make mix discs and such for my car or whatever.
I am still pissed that both evilhanz and reality chuck took it upon themselves to call me to task on even having kazaa on my computer. Fuck both them up the ass with a rusty sledghammer.
I have been unable to get my pc back up even with a boot disc or system restore disk. I keep getting non-valid system disk message. I am posting from the library now and am going to take my puter in to the repair shop to see if they can get it to boot. Norton had already quarantined all the infected files, but wouldn’t boot afterward. Perhaps somethings can be salvaged.
So what I’m only out about $50 and 20 gigs of files. I hope someone may be able to derive some small amount of joy in that.
<sigh> And I was hoping that someone was going to complain about how we shouldn’t find joy and hapiness when someone gets a unexpected groinal injury 
If you’re system isn’t even recognizing the current HD you may have to buy a new HD and get your system up and running on that, then quarentine that and try repairing the virus infected one.
This reminds me that I need to renew my norton subscription. Must protect my porn.
Oh yeah, and for people who bitch about mp3’s and what not being illegal and taking money from the reccord companies/artists…
Artists: Get better agents to negotiate your contracts!
Recording industry: STOP PAYING thousdands of dollars per song to get them played on the radio!!! (Good NPR piece on this from last friday?)
I’ve recorded every CD I have as an MP3. What takes up a nice chunk of space in my room takes up not even 3 gigs on my computer. A Nomad Jukebox holds 6 gigs. When I want access to 90+ hours of music, do you think im going to lug around over 100 cds?
And how about an end to disc swapping? Who needs the lag time of a 100-disc changer when you’ve got WinAmp running your 90+ hour playlist on shuffle?
The RIAA can suck it. Evolve or die. Look at what the movie industry did with DVD. They took advantage of a new format, and I buy far more DVDs than I ever bought VHS movies.
If you want to stop piracy fine. But not at the expense of fair use.