RIAA Secret Meeting

[Declan McCullagh]

In the unlikely case anyone here was credulous enough to fall for it,
it's worth noting that this "meeting" was a complete hoax, fabrication,
spoof, and fantasy.

"Anonymous" sent John a purported copy of the below, and he posted it
on Cryptome without, as usual, vouching much for its validity one way
or another. But the Register, to its shame, ran a breathless article
insisting the meeting actually took place
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/22087.html).

I don't typically criticize fellow journalists -- we all make
mistakes, and I'm not a media critic -- but this article is beyond the
pale. Instead of checking to see whether the alleged participants were
still employed by their respective companies, or spending two minutes
on the phone asking RIAA for comment, the Register reported fiction as
fact.

In a grudging retraction Wednesday, the paper compounded its problems,
saying: "The trouble with the Internet is that it's just too darn
fast." (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/31/22138.html)

No, the trouble has nothing to do with the Internet. It has everything
to do with shoddy journalism. Worse yet, the halfhearted retraction
still argued, pitifully and implausibly, that the quotes supplied by
Anonymous "may" still be accurate.

Caveat lector.

-Declan


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."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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