Astounding quotes from Hilary Rosen: "The drop in CD sales can be directly attributed to the new generation of file swapping services. Because of their de-centralized nature, it is impossible to determine whether usage has surpassed that of Napster at its heyday." gbn translation: "Even though CD sales have increased, they haven't increased as much as we dreamed. Therefore, we need to blame something we can't even measure. The only sound alternative is to consider that our lowest-common-denominator pablum-puking crappy products simply suck." "We must ask that the safeharbor provision of the DMCA be removed. Because of the magnitude of the problem, Internet service providers can no longer be shielded from the wrath of the law." gbn translation: "I am the law" (spoken with a Judge Dredd sneer) "Once we stem piracy, we will be able to raise prices in order to regain lost profits from piracy." gbn translation: "If we're unable to stem piracy, we will need to raise prices to fight piracy better." I'm a little worried that "Anonymous" misspelled Hilary Rosen's name, but at least he/she got the gender right (http://images.google.com/images?q=Hilary+Rosen) for pics. The only remaining question is whether the fact of the meeting can be verified via other sources. -- Greg On Mon, Oct 08, 2001 at 11:24:40PM -0700, John Young wrote:

Anonymous reports on a secret meeting of RIAA:

http://cryptome.org/riaa-secret.htm

Excerpt:

"On Thursday October 4 there was a closed-door RIAA meeting at the Ritz-Carlton, which was 'a direction setting' meeting. The individuals of note attending were:

Hillary Rosen - RIAA Chief Steve Heckler - Sony Music Strauss Zelnick - BMG Edgar Bronfman - Universal Gerald Levin - AOL Time-Warner Ken Berry - EMI Leonardo Chiariaglione - SDMI Chair (Leaving Soon) Francis Jones - Codex Data Systems Fritz Hollings - Senator Ted Stevens - Senator Michael Eisner - Disney CEO Jack Valenti - President, MPAA Andy Grove - Intel CEO Lou Gerstner - IBM Yoishi Morishita - CEO Matsushita Tsutomo Kawata - CEO Toshiba Jay Berman - IFPI Chair Paul England - Microsoft Advanced Cryptography research group

One particularly disturbing fact is that Codex Data System's DIRT software is supposed to be restricted to law enforcement agencies, yet the RIAA, MPAA, and IFPI have all purchased it, and use it routinely to monitor servers which are suspected of infringing content, yet are password protected such as servers which require one to sign up for a password account like hotline servers that have no guest download."