it's interesting

one of the sites i like to frequent is currently down. apparently, some asshole lawyer (or lawfirm, either way, assholes) decided to take it upon themself to send out cease and desist letters on behalf of the music industry. essentially a nastygram, and in the past, he would send it to the owners of websites.

so, if i am the owner of dippyshit.com hosted on hostingsite.com. i have a file named "u2 - the fly.mp3", so they would send me (on "behalf" of the music industry) one of these nastygrams. (the contents of which i don't know, but i'm sure it is rather threatening)

apparently, they decided rather than try and track down the owner of the website, with the offending file, they decided to send the nastygram to the hosting site. included in the nastygram is wording such that they hosting site has to shut down all of its servers.

so, rather than turning off dippyshit.com and contacting me (the owner of dippyshit.com), they forced the owner of hostingsite.com to shut down EVERY site they host. so including dippyshit.com, they turned off ilovedogs.com, ilovecats.com, ilovemyself.com, and every other website.

the catch is this: the file named "u2 - the fly.mp3" was found during a search of the entire dippyshit.com site from 4 years ago. in fact, as the owner of dippyshit.com, i have repurposed the entire website several times from a music site to a book review site to it's current itteration of extolling the continuing adventures of Dippy the Shit. and in doing so, i have removed all files for the music and book review site, rearranged the directory structure several times so the file is long since deleted.

yet my hosting site (hostingsite.com) is getting a nastygram which has turned off several sites, including the sales portions of ilovedogs.com and ilovecats.com which helps pay for their hosting.

all because 4 years ago i had a single mp3 file.

now, my guess is what happened is the owner of dippyshit.com shut it down 3 years ago, all files were deleted, and now all files on hostingsite.com are legit, but because of that single file, not only i, but thousands of other people have no access to a site i enjoy frequenting.

as i have been pondering this situation, i obviously don't know all of the details, prolly never will, but it got me thinking about this:

what would happen to the web as a whole, if this lawyer ordered sites like yahoo, google, MSN, aol to shutdown all of their servers. i am sure that on each of those sites, there are going to be copies of 'u2 - the fly.mp3' on each of them because there will be some user has the file on there. could you imagine the chaos that would generate?

and what about fan sites that have mp3s of songs that u2 sent to them to post so people would get a taste of the new u2? something like this could be very bad, and lots of people don't seem to understand the ramifications of what they are doing. on either side of the arguement.

hell, even a site like archive.org could get screwed by this lawyer.

that would make me very angry. you wouldn't like me when i'm angry.