Well, April 4 has come and gone, and I haven't heard anything from the LOC about testimony regarding DMCA exemptions. Hopefully, I'll receive some word from them on Monday about this.
Friday's Washington Post carried an article about Alan Greenspan's remarks about restoring balance to copyright law.
"Are the protections sufficiently broad to encourage innovation but not so broad as to shut down follow-on innovation?" was one of the questions he posed in his presentation.
Since Alan Greenspan represents "the voice of God", as I've heard it put, to those in the financial and investment businesses, this should most definitely spur some thinking, and possibly some change, from these sectors.
The RIAA is suing 4 college students, 2 from RPI, 1 from Princeton, and 1 from Michigan Tech, for up to an estimated $97.8 billion dollars each for running programs which indexed public Windows shares. Not for having the files on their computer, or even knowing what kind of files were being shared through information gleaned from the programs, but for merely running a program to index open Windows shares. In this case, those that the RIAA should be going after are the ones with the open shares of music, not the ones who wrote a program to index those, and also any other shares. The lawsuit comes without any warning, as network admins for the school's did not receive any notification from the RIAA, which the admins say they would have acted on.
$97.8 billion dollars, the amount sought from the MTU student, is close to 9 times the total revenue of all the RIAA members, according to their own figures. And that's just what they're seeking from ONE of the students.
Look for a larger update on lots of things tomorrow.