March 21, 2007: Vernal Equinox… Spring is here!

For some reason Yahoo Travel has a page of pictures of hotels with a really old picture of me right in the middle of it all! The Internet is a strange place indeed.

But even better is the fact that one of my photos was used as the main picture for Come Visit Canton! My family will be very proud to know that a photo that I took when I was young is now on the visitor website for my family’s home town!

The RIAA, the lawsuit driven arm of the music recording industry, sued a woman for intentionally providing stolen music via the file sharing on her home computer.  Their evidence is based solely on IP assignment records from the woman’s ISP.  The case has been dragging on for two years and it appears that the RIAA is attempting to make it financially impossible for the woman to continue to defend herself.  Today the judge involved in the case told the RIAA that they would not be allowed to drop the case at this point – they will either have to consent to the woman’s right to trial by jury in which case the RIAA is expected to lose based on precedent or to have the trial dismissed with prejudice which means that the RIAA loses and could be counter sued in civil court and would very likely have to pay a heap of legal fees for dragging on a case and then walking away.  It would mean basically admitting that it was a trumped up charge and that they were trying to work through intimidation.  This is a huge loss for the RIAA.

The RIAA is having a really bad day as they are now taking a beating after having lost the Capital vs. Foster lawsuit where they are now being told that they have to produce a lot of records to the defendant.  And then, if it wasn’t all bad enough for the RIAA, now the University of Nebraska is suing the RIAA directly for wasting their time trying to make the university track network traffic of its transient network population.  Perhaps the RIAA should concentrate on making music instead of suing its customers.  No wonder music remains so expensive.

Not much to report today.  I worked as usual and came home.  We spent the evening at home hanging out with Oreo and watching the third season of The Facts of Life.  My textbook for my Master’s class at RIT arrived today so I had reading and homework to catch up on.  I ended up staying up until two in the morning working on that but it needed to be done.  At least I am mostly caught up at this point.  I think as long as I keep on top of it this weekend I will be okay.

Tomorrow night Dominica and I are heading for Geneseo.  We will be in Geneseo for three days doing all the packing that we possibly can as quickly as possible.  It is going to be a long, busy weekend.

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