The Null Device

GUILTY. The 9th US circuit court has dealt a crushing blow to Napster, throwing out its appeal, and handing the RIAA a resounding victory. The court has stopped short of shutting down Napster but demanded that Napster ensure that users cannot swap copyrighted files, a technically impractical task; make no mistake, Napster is back on death row.

The next step for the RIAA will probably be mandating "indemnity filters" at all ISPs, which block anything that looks like a copyright violation (large transfers of highly compressed data without accompanying cryptographic copyright certificates), and suing ISPs which do not comply with contributory infringement.

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