Escape the Riaa's tyranny

Amazingly enough the RIAA still tosses around lawsuits and makes life miserable for the average person as a result. But what exactly could I possibly have to comment on this week thats new and fresh... well its actually much more interesting then you think.

Recently the RIAA have been exploiting a facet of the civil court system, and once again its in a little 'gray area' of the law thats JUST legal, but still makes them look really ...well I'll let you pick the adjective.

Source-p2p weblog
Starting with the quote "RIAA now has dropped several copyright infringement lawsuits against suspected P2P file sharers, including Warner v. Pidgeon and Interscope v. Leadbetter and Elektra v. Santangelo . Generally this is so RIAA can amend or refile the claim against a related person. ".

Basically what the above could be easily summed up as is the RIAA's exploitation of the civil court system's not having a double jeopardy law the way the criminal court system does. This exploitation could in the future lead to a 'blanket' effect of the Riaa suing LITERALLY EVERY American and having to prove our innocence. Civil court, unlike criminal court does not function under the context of 'innocent until proven guilty'. Thousands of dollars in court costs later you MAY be awarded with a settlement in your favor for court costs and attorney fee's... there has been 1 case so far where this has been the case. With records of ISP's being seized and collected how can anyone be safe?

I have decided to do the only thing that I can to save each of you from the onslaught of the RIAA, educate you all on how to get music legally, or illegally (but being smart about it). So without further adieu I think I should show all of you some great ideas on how to get around the RIAA's watchful eye.

1. radio. We all know about internet radio is out there and its a pretty good, free, legal, viable way to use your bandwith to get and discover more music that you like a few good sources of online radio are....

Legal

Winamp Shoutcast
Winamps shoutcast service is one of the largest, albeit best communities of radio stations out there, you can find ALMOST anything, from 80's rock, to japanese techno, to german underground industrial... its all on there.

Pandora.com
Pandora.com must be one of the coolest websites that i have ever stumbled across. The basic idea of it is you make your own radio station based off of a song that you like. For instance one of my stations is based off of J-pop pheonominon Ayumi Hamasaki. It plays one of her songs every hour or 2. Aside from that it selects other music in the same genre (based off of lyrical tone, background instruments, tempo, and a load of other aspects) and plays it for me. I can give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down and it will / will not play more music like that song. The website is pretty amazing and requires a simple, validation free signup.

Di.FM (digitally imported radio)
Digitally imported is really only for us techno lovers, with about a dozen stations and 40k+ listeners and really good audio fidelity, their a great place to listen to all your (techno)music.

Soma.Fm
Soma.fm is a california based chain of net-radio stations. I have NO idea how i came across this site, but im sort of glad that i did. They play a lot of music that you would expect to hear on a 'college' radio station. it, like pandora, is a GREAT way to find new music.

The NOT so legal way

Before i begin I will tell you a few things that your going to need to have ANY luck in evading ANYONE on the net.

Things you will need to preserve your privacy / computers stability.
1. A knowledge of proxies and how they work (if your not sure what a proxy is / where to get them or how they work jump over to this url for help Link- Stay Invisable)
2. A good Spyware util (spyware doctor, ad-aware, and spybot work well in conjunction with one another (google them) )
3. A good antivirus utility (just in case you end up getting something fishy while your downloading.
4. A good 'cleaner' (I recommend CCleaner for every day deletes and and http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/ For drive wipes (7 times is the DOD(department of defense) standard.)
5. A good Dc++ client. (at present Dc++ and MIRC are the easiest ways to pirate music, I will go over MIRC in a follow up.... maybe)
Dc++ Client is found Here.

As far as how to work with Dc++, its pretty self-explanatory / well documented, so i leave that to you.

things to avoid

just a small list of things to avoid because their spam / easily tracable / etc.
Kazaa / limewire / bearshare / usenext / imesh (most all direct p2p clients ).

Good luck and if you have any questions feel free to ask.
Xero- Back at last.