Long story short is I bought another one (same model) and just swapped it out with the new one (using the old power supply). Well it was doing some weirdness every 24 hours or so where the power light would flash and it would loose Internet connectivity (all other lights were fine) and if you unplugged it and plugged it back in, you were golden again. Everything I looked at online was saying a flashing power light meant the firmware was screwed up (I didn’t change anything with it). Finally I decided to look closer at the power supply… even though it was the same model, the new version runs on 12 volts and the old one ran on 5 volts.

So I guess you can run a 12 volt piece of equipment on a 5 volt power supply and it will work (for awhile anyway).

Universal City Studios Productions (the entity suing me [more or less] on behalf of the MPAA) doesn’t actually have a legal right to sue because they didn’t own the copyright. {lol}

You can read the motion to dismiss over here if you are bored.

It is of course a technicality, and assuming the whole case is indeed thrown out, I’m sure once they get their heads screwed on straight they will probably start the whole process again with the correct entity (you know, one that actually owns a valid copyright).

Regardless if they do (or don’t) want to come after me again (again, assuming it is thrown out), it opens up a whole new can of worms. For the hundreds of people that “settled” for $2,500, are those settlements even legal/valid? If they turn out to be invalid, what can I do to help everyone get their settlement money back from Universal/MPAA? They’re legal right to make settlements with people would be along the same lines as me settling with you for downloading Star Wars. I’m thinking if people were paying me because I told them I owned the copyright to Star Wars (but I didn’t really) may be illegal in itself.

I saw it on Tech Dirt, but I knew about it first (I swear!).. hah

http://techdirt.com/articles/20061031/192204.shtml

The RIAA/MPAA should take a note here… I never heard of this song until Tracy told me to go find it on YouTube… and I just purchased the whole album via iTunes Music Store because of it. I would have never gone to the store to buy it, but one-click purchasing of the album makes it easy. Now if you could just do this with DVDs, I would buy/watch more. And I guarantee I don’t have a unique viewpoint.

They should just setup an affiliate program and pay affiliate marketers 25% of the fees they collect from the lawsuits/threats. Dude, I would be the biggest affiliate marketer for the MPAA in the world (seriously, I can guarantee that). Anyway, here’s a freebie for the MPAA (if they want to do an “under the table” affiliate program, they have my address for the check)…

Oh also, I would like to turn in Mark Cuban for movie piracy.

http://www.muc.muohio.edu/~natedogg/main.htm

The orange arrow coincides with the day I first heard about the lawsuit (and posted about it).

The odd thing is it actually looks like their site is getting less traffic over time (not a good direction to go). Maybe they would like to buy some advertising space on my blog for their anti-piracy propaganda? Hey, you never know… it could happen!

Well now the MPAA has at least one other partner that is also on the Pyramid of Piracy… and this one is higher up in the pyramid. Guba.com is a Top Site on the pyramid.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2019308,00.asp

It will be interesting to see how long before an MPAA partner is at the top of their pyramid as a “Supplier”. Oh wait, maybe the MPAA is saving that slot for itself.

The documentary that is critical of the MPAA was given an NC-17 rating by the MPAA. In their own words, it means this:

I can’t wait to see this movie now… Something critical of the MPAA, and we might get excessive violence, sex and drugs thrown in there as well (I’m hoping for all of the above). Either way, it surely will be interesting to see what’s in there that the MPAA is trying to protect our youth from.

While I can’t be 100% critical of the MPAA since I haven’t seen the movie (for all I know, maybe 50% documentary and 50% porn), from the description it sounds like every other PG-13 Hollywood flick to me…

Maybe the fact that it’s a documentary and not a work of fiction makes it more damaging to our youth or something. If that’s the case, then I guess the MPAA more or less confirmed the movie’s validity that the MPAA’s rating system is whacked out. {shrug}

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,,1862074,00.html

From Bram Cohen (BitTorrent CEO):

From Dan Glickman (MPAA Chairman and CEO):

So, uhm… I wonder how well that’s working out for the MPAA these days… They are the MPAA’s strategic partner, so I can only assume that what they do with movies has the MPAA’s full blessing. With that in mind, I went to BitTorrent.com, and did a search for the movie that I allegedly downloaded via BitTorrent. BitTorrent.com will give you 15 different options for downloading Meet The Fockers.

They are even kind enough to give you some HTML you can copy/paste so you can find anything you want (see search box in the upper right of this post).

Now by the MPAA’s own definition, BitTorrent.com is a “facilitator” on the Pyramid of Internet Piracy.

It seems to me like it’s a very odd and confusing message the MPAA is giving to everyone. On one hand, they promote the usage of BitTorrent.com in their own press releases, yet they issue another release outlining the “Pyramid of Internet Piracy”, which includes one of their major strategic partners.

Huh? So the MPAA wants to sue the bottom feeders on the pyramid, but publicly promote the facilitators. Maybe the MPAA will just keep moving up the pyramid and start promoting “top sites” and “suppliers” too. {shrug} I don’t generally consider myself a stupid guy, but I’m confused.

Although when you think about it, it may actually be a brilliant idea… “Let’s show consumers how to download our movies, then we can extort bill them for $2,500. Check it out, we just sold a $9.43 DVD for $2,500 (a 26,500% markup).”

I got a proposal in the mail today from a film production company that wants me to invest/fund their movie for a 14% return on the investment plus title of “Executive Producer” on the movie.

I wonder if they know that if they submit a movie for rating to the MPAA with me as the executive producer that it will automatically be stamped NC-17?

The last 24 hours saw more traffic to my blog than any other day (it was a good stress test for WordPress, and my caching mechanism seems to have worked well).

But here’s the low down… Wired Magazine issued their August issue in the last few days, which had an article about the whole MPAA lawsuit in there. Slashdot picked it up, and made it’s front page. Digg then picked it up (front page there too) and it was one of the most popular stories for the week within a few hours. Then Fark picked it up and it was a front page story there too.

Now here’s the funny part… today Slashdot is running a front page story about how popular that Slashdot article was yesterday.

Looks like it also made the front of del.icio.us too.

The Important Part

Okay, so now that I have 150 million eyes, I want to take advantage of that situation for the greater good of mankind, and ask a favor… if you are reading this and you happen to know Alessandra Ambrosio, will you send me her phone number? (BTW, if you don’t know who she is, click here.)

So I guess at this point the world knows about it, so if you want to read it, here it is…

http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/start.html?pg=3

P.S. – it was kind of funny to see my mug shot in Wired Magazine’s table of contents (in the August print edition).

The MPAA/Universal Studios hired someone to steal my car. They didn’t do it because just want to annoy me or because they thought it had anything cool in it (which it didn’t… except for my sunglasses). Nope… the real reason is they want to see if I would lie to my insurance company to try and claim I had other stuff in it which I didn’t, then have my car magically turn up with whatever stuff they were hoping I would claim not there. Then they could somehow use that against me to show my “bad character”.

Oh… speaking of my car, it looks like it’s going to be around 7 weeks before I have a replacement. I had to put in a special order to get the exact one I had before (color and options), so they have to build it especially for me. Lame.

So here’s two pictures of some DVDs I own in my living room. I don’t even feel like counting how many movies I have (maybe someone reading this will do it for me and post a comment letting me know how many), but I’m guessing well over 200. The dumbest thing is that of the movies I own, I’ve probably watched (in its entirety) 40 of them. And I’m guessing that 50+ of them, I’ve never even put in a DVD player to TRY to watch (I just don’t have the time to watch TV/movies anymore… but it’s nice to have them in case you ever have nothing else to do… like on a plane).

When it really comes down to it, I’ve probably spent $5,000+ on DVDs that I never watch more than once (and in most cases, never at all) because I’m too lazy to make two trips to Blockbuster (one to rent and then again to return it). And since I buy movies (but don’t immediately watch them), sometimes I forget which movies I already own, so I end up with 2 copies (see 2nd picture).

So uhm… if I’m damaging the movie industry, who in the heck is supporting it? Hell, I support the movie industry so much that I be willing to feed (okay, buy dinner) some movie stars (see this post).

BTW… when shopping for furniture, I realized that entertainment center/media storage units was the hardest stuff to find when looking for something that is quality. So if you are ever looking for good stuff, check out Salamander Designs (Synergy line for me). Good stuff.

{scratching head} All I know is clusters of high speed computers with extraordinary speed and power are f’ing expensive (I happen to have first hand knowledge of this – digitalpoint.com gets so much traffic that I’m in the process of building out web and database clusters because a couple servers can’t handle the traffic).

Forgetting about the legality of running a “Topsite” for a second, from a pure business standpoint, why in hell would anyone spend what I can only assume is 6 figures on server clusters to distribute something for free? Whoever is running these “Topsites” should find something better to do with their money/resources IMO. Then again, maybe Topsite servers are cheap (but still having extraordinary speed and power). If that’s the case, maybe I should have purchased some Topsite servers and converted them into web/database servers and saved some money.

I Googled “Top Site(s)” and “Topsite(s)” and I couldn’t find any information about it.

I always thought “top sites” were those stupid directories that list the top 10 sites for a category or whatever…

According to the MPAA’s pyramid of piracy, bittorrent.com (which has partnered with MPAA) is a “Facilitator” (see previous post). Strange.

From this: http://mpaa.org/press_releases/pyramid_of_piracy.pdf (don’t ask me why they insist on using PDFs for everything, including images)

I hope the MPAA won’t sue me for using their image. Oh wait, they already are… my bad.