Anybody have a guess on how much this is intended to
stifle uncontrolled ideas and how much it's to reduce piracy?
In this case, both work together, though it sounds a
bit more like censorship. On the other hand, pro-piracy products
and freedom-of-speech products also cooperate here -
is anybody doing a Chinese Distributed Stealth NapsterClone?
The original Napster protocol was a disastrous bandwidth hog because
it didn't have caching behavior in its database,
though every Napster client is also a server and a cache.
Because of University pressure, the Napster folks are redesigning their
search engines to prefer local downloads over distant ones.
That's easy with a central database service - are there practical ways to
do it in a distributed database, especially one that's designed
as a moving target to avoid filtering?
At 10:37 PM 03/27/2000 -0000, Frog remailed:
Subject: Re: BXA, FCC FTC go global
>BEIJING, March 25 (Reuters) - China has imposed regulations on online
>trading of audio-visual products as part of its efforts to bring the
>budding Internet industry under its control, the official Xinhua news
>agency said on Saturday.
>
>China will forbid websites from conducting business in imported audio
>visual products, MP3 music downloads and wholesale trading, Xinhua
>quoted the Ministry of Culture as saying.
>Any website with foreign investment would be barred from doing online
>business in audio-visual products, Xinhua said.
>
>Authorised traders are also required to show the numbers of their
>operating licenses and the telephone number of the issuing departments
>on their web pages, Xinhua said.
>
>It also said violators would be punished by the audio-visual market
>supervision department, and current online audio-visual product dealers
>must obtain relevant licenses before May 1.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
