I had an idea at dinner tonight that I'm going to try. With all our recent talk about gatekeepers and whatnot, and now that I'm actually starting to get some traffic, it's time to do my part to open the gates a little.

Every now and then, when I'm nosing around Technorati reading about a topic that interests me, I am going to try to find and link to something interesting written by someone I don't know who doesn't have a ton of links.

I hope others will consider doing this or something similar on their blogs.

I'm going to tag these posts "second opinion."

So here we go.

RIAA & CD Ripping

I am utterly amazed that the RIAA can even imply with a straight face that ripping a CD you have bought for your own use is not fair use. Not only is that sheer insanity, it also flies in the face of intellectual property law.

Granted, the RIAA hasn't really come out and said this directly; it's merely implied in language buried in some boring Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) review filing. But the RIAA has thus far demonstrated the judgment and restraint of a housefly, so you can be sure if there's a way to keep us from copying our CDs for our own use, the RIAA will try to find it. As I said earlier today, it's all about making us pay over and over for the same thing.

Grain of Salt (9 links) has an interesting post about this issue, complete with quotes from RIAA's website that are wholly inconsistent with the implication of the DMCA filing.

It's a good read. Check it out.

And if you think it's a good idea, link to a second opinion on your blog sometime.