In-class debate on filesharing
 

Okay, it isn't as good as it sounds :(

For English, our class was told we had to do a either a persuasive speech, a one-on-one debate, or a two-on-two debate on any topic we wanted (excluding a few 'highly controversial' subjects :rolleyes: ). My friend and I chose to do the issue of filesharing and the RIAA/MPAA. It is his job to provide an argument FOR the RIAA/MPAA, and mine to provide an argument against it. But, knowing how school is, our grades don't have to affect one another if we work together and do good. So what we've chosen to do is cooperate and have a really good debate that no one will win, but it will give the class a good idea about our topic and blow them all away :)

I took a poll of a few of the people in the class and got some great results that will help. We also looked up a ton of resources, several coming from writer Cory Doctorow, who has a 'soapbox' in Popular Science, if any of you are familiar with him. As stupid as it sounds, we can only have certain types of sources. I begged the teacher for five minutes trying to explain how the internet works, but she insisted that our internet information MUST be from a .GOV, .ORG, or major .COM site, as "most dot com sites can just be made by joe schmoe" ... despite that I am the curator of the not-quite-up-yet styfiles.no-ip.org :/

But, screw all that mumbo jumbo. TFP is a .org website! Yay for Tilted Forum Project! So, i'm curious, what is your input on all of this? Do you have anything that could help us out in this debate to end all debates? If so, i'd appreciate anything that's relatively constructive :D

http://legacy.randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/


take a look at that site.. it has a ton of info about file sharing.. even an online powerpoint presentation along with audio.. great thing to check out..

Just read the comments on www.slashdot.org under any story to do with files sharing and the MPAA/RIAA, should give you some ideas about how to argue your side of the debate.

Yup, been reading slashdot.

MPAA blaming BT for SW downloads is awesome. Great analogies in there.

Just mirror the information on your .org domain. Maybe that'll teach her. :)

I'd check out the book, "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig. The website for the book is http://free-culture.org/ but I know it is also on amazon and probably in the library. The book is published by Penguin Press but it is under the Creative Commons license, so if you go to the website you can actually download the entire book in .pdf format, or you can also go to http://www.legaltorrents.com to get an audio book version if you'd like. Each chapter was recorded by different supporters of the book, so it's not necessarily "professional" audio book quality, but it's good enough to listen to and the information is all intact of course. Finally, at the very least, I'd recommend checking out the flash presentation of "Free Culture" from a speech Lawrence Lessig gave on July 24, 2002, at the O.Reilly Open Source Conference. It's about 30 minutes long and while it talks most specifically about software patents, it relates to the copyright issues of file sharing as well. If you don't want to or don't have the time to check out the book - which I would strongly suggest you do - I would at least check this flash presentation out: http://lessig.org/freeculture/ And since you, of course, need to explain to people why the hell they should care about what Lawrence Lessig has to say about copyright, etc, here is a link to his bio page: http://www.lessig.org/bio/short/