Justice Dept. Raids Homes of File Swappers 1173
Cryofan writes "Reuters is reporting that the Justice Dept. has
raided the homes of 5 people in several states for trading music on p2p networks. The traders were, however, not arrested. 'P2P does not stand for 'permission to pilfer,' Ashcroft said. The Reuters story says that the 5 'were people operating hubs in a file-sharing network based on Direct Connect software,' and who had provided between 'one and 100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs.' 'They are clearly directing and operating an enterprise which countenances illegal activity and makes as a condition of membership the willingness to make available material to be stolen,' said Ashcroft."
Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:3, Insightful)
Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
40 petabytes? (Score:2, Insightful)
Inept Legal Advisors? (Score:1, Insightful)
Does this available material, have some non-availability clause attatched? Or maybe I'm confusing the whole infant grammar thing here.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:1, Insightful)
The real agenda is clamping down on the rights of the individual whilst letting companies get away with murder (literally so in some cases). You see, individuals don't make huge campaign donations, or pay multi-million dollar salaries with generous stock options and pension benefits. Companies do.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporatism is slowly taking over the USA. I just hope we still have time to stop its onslaught.
Re:Terminology (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know how big of an enclosure you'd need to house even ONE PENTABYTE of storage, but considering that it's 1000 times a TERABYTE, and I've got
I can't believe nobody over there is clueful enough to have corrected PB to TB.. I -might- believe 40TB. Maybe.. Probably not...
Re:Terminology (Score:5, Insightful)
"Initial reports filed by the state claimed that the defendents were each serving 40 pentabytes of pirated content for illegal download. After being raided, seized computers were shown to only have several hundred gigabytes of storage. The capacity of the computers siezed was more than 1 million times less than that claimed by the state. The state used clearly false information to procure the warrents for the search... how can we trust any of the information gathered by the state when such a fundamental error occured in their investigation..."
lol (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it stands for Peer To Peer, which is unrelated to piracy.
I dunno, but that quote sounded like Ashcroft was thinking P2P = Piracy To People or something like that.
Be smart at least (Score:3, Insightful)
10 million songs, 60k in movies, what did they think would happen they would be vaulted to underground geek martyrdom?
this is a case being careful what you wish for. (Score:5, Insightful)
Starting way back when the record companies were giving grief to the original Napster, many Slashdotters and like-minded folks were questioning the record company's authority to involve themselves in such matters, and said that if Napster was breaking the law, then the feds should get involved.
And then they did.
When harrassment of the P2P companies by both the government and private enterprises became more commonplace, many Slashdotters and like-minded folks said that the P2P companies weren't responsible for the actions of their users, and that the record companies should go after the users themselves.
And then they did.
When the record companies started suing the "whales" of the P2P world (those who were sharing sufficient amount of content to nudge into the territory of criminal, rather than civil law), many Slashdotters and like-minded folks claimed that if it really was criminal territory, then the record companies should stop picking on the pirates, and let the government handle it.
And now the government is doing just that.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:2, Insightful)
And made no arrests.
I don't recall the gov't being able to do that before 9/11... so... I'm sure it is related somehow.
No, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Get heart surgery done.
and 2. Pick up laundry.
I tend to prioritize the first one.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:1, Insightful)
I call BULLSHIT here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhm okay math time....
1 Petabyte = 1024 Terabtyes
1 Terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes
So 40 Petabytes = 41,923,040 GB
41,923,040 GB / 300 GB per drive (generous assumption) = 139,744 drives per node!
5 nodes means 558,976 drives in use in total. Half a million 300 GB IDE drives?
I can think of a few places with petabyte arrays, this is not one of them I think.
Some simple math. This is assuming these people paid for the hardware and didn't just hijack a few 18-wheeler shipments from Maxtor.
139,744 300GB HDs * $157.5 (Knock 30% off for a volume discount from lowest price online of $225) = $22,009,680 in sunk capital in drives alone per node!
Or in total this means $110,048,400 spent on just HARD DRIVES ALONE. This doesnt even begin to include costs for enclosures or anything else.
So who the fuck are these "people"? These numbers are ether TOTALLY WRONG AND FASLEIFIED or they busted some kind of massively well funded organization?
(And no, I haven't even read the article yet but if those numbers are wha they said I stand by this)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not enforcing laws causes all sorts of problems.
Re:A distressing development (Score:5, Insightful)
"This is an extremely disturbing development, seeing as these folks are not guilty of a crime, merely a civil offense."
I'm not sure where you got the idea that this is a civil case. If you'd like to learn more about criminal violations of copyright law, here's the relevant section [copyright.gov].
This war will be fought with new ideas, not ignorance. Being the squillionth Slashdotter to parrot the old "civil, not criminal" meme will not help things. If you truly believe that artists have too many rights and it's high time to put them in their place, the first thing to do is to understand how the law works, so you can work to change it.
Dont they have better things to do? (Score:3, Insightful)
How about like protecting us from being blown up by the next wave of attacks....?
Where has their priorities gone? This is insane
Re:Terminology (Score:2, Insightful)
Free Rein To Thieves?? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't care what you may believe ought to happen, explain to me why you think people who steal things ought not to be punished?
Steal the technology... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, so these 5 people each hosted around "40 petabytes of data, the equivalent of 60,000 movies or 10.5 million songs" each, and made them readily available internationally via the Internet. Maybe these records companies and movie studios, with their vast resources, could learn a thing or two about delivering content.
Seriously, a bunch of amateurs can make 10.5 million songs available but the **AA's can't ??? Maybe the RIAA should steal the technology and user base and call it even.
Re:so if they werent charged (Score:1, Insightful)
That said, while I'm sure these people are glad that they aren't to be prosecuted, raiding people's homes when you aren't intending to bring charges seems totally inappropriate.
If you use investigative means as the punishment, such that the punishment (a raid) takes place without a trial then you've done an end run around the whole court system.
Strange wording (Score:5, Insightful)
Material to be "stolen", eh? Nobody's stealing stuff from me if I offer it up online for them to take. Makes as much sense as "Officer, my house was burgled after I swung open the door and yelled 'please burgle my house'". It's only indirect theft from the record companies as well. If I broke into someone's flat and pinched all their CDs, I wouldn't be stealing from the record company, I'd be stealing from whoever I just robbed. I wouldn't be making any money from the action either, so it's not like the record company is watching money that should go to them go somewhere else, all they're watching is money not go anywhere at all, and they don't like that.
Music has to come from somewhere. Currently it's coming out of record companies, who are consistently saying "how the hell do we create an audio track that people can listen to without being able to copy it". This is a pipedream. If you can listen to it and it's on a shiney disc, it MUST go through a DAC at some stage, and that's where your entry point as a copier is. Even with a decent analog system you can make a perfectly fine copy just off the line out.
If you download a copy of something, rest assured that at least someone somewhere must have bought it. Perhaps now the best thing for the record companies to do is auction off one single original copy of an album with bidding starting at six million dollars, wait for a community of fans to get the funds together and buy it, then watch it spread across the net, safe in the knowledge that they got a guaranteed six million dollars from an album before anyone had even heard it.
Re:No, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Get heart surgery done.
and 2. Pick up laundry.
I tend to prioritize the first one.
OK then, think of it this way: you have a team of 5 heart surgeons and 3 housekeepers. Do you put all 8 of them in the operating theater for your heart surgery, or do you have the 3 housekeeper do something useful (e.g. pick up laundry) rather than standing around in scrubs jostling the anesthesiologist? The DOJ has a lot of people that do a lot of things. If anything, I say we fire the "IP theft goon squad" rather than send them after "terrorists".
Fakers, please kill yourselves right now. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Look up "Steve Jackson games" on the 'net sometime..
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:3, Insightful)
Classic quote (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Ashcroft really expect me to believe there are 60,000 distinct movies on that network? Netflix only has 25,000 movies. I suspect they counted the number of COPIES of movies in the whole network. Ashcroft loves to mislead people, doesn't he? Why does he feel the need to inflate the numbers if his goal were upholding the law? Who signs his paycheck, anyway?
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Insightful)
10.5 million songs
Let's see:
10.5 million songs
~40 years of reasonable recorded audio
Some simple math:
10,500,000 / 40 = 262,500 songs every year...
Hmmm:
262,500 / 12 = 21,875 songs every month...
Sounds like a hell of a stretch to me, especially considering that music wasn't as easy to record back in the 60s and 70s as it is today.
The biggest music libraries that I've seen contain less than 1 million songs. I'm not sure where another 9.5 million could come from (unless Al Queida provided them).
Re:DoJ: Preserving the Status Quo or Your Money Ba (Score:3, Insightful)
you still are taking away the right of the distributor to choose how its work can be disseminated through public channels.
And if I don't believe they should have absolute control of this?
[Intellectual property] is a necessary law
Again, I don't agree with this; it's only necessary for those who want to squeeze money from ideas or art.
I also don't think you can compare laws which are designed to prevent physical injury with those which are designed to allow monopolies.
Petabyte/Terabyte Mixup (Score:4, Insightful)
The ratio of video to audio size seems about right: 1 movie = 175 songs. So that would be about right for 700 MB Divx movies and 4 MB mp3s.
However, based on those rates the number of movies or songs they list would only add up to 40 TB.
Looks like somebody got mixed up between petabyte and terabyte.
News sources should really have some people to double check their math before publishing an article.
Re:Dont they have better things to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmmm.....
[...](2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000[...]What, exactly, IS the retail value of a single track off of a commercial CD, I wonder? Or the retail value of a DVD Movie separated from the add-on content (which is often mentioned as a reason to buy a commercial DVD over a poorer-quality illegally-copied version), and/or a DVD or recorded-in-a-movie-theater-by-videocamera movie which has substantially lower quality video and sound than the commercial version would?
It sounds like this network, presuming most or all of the files on it WERE illegal copyright infringements rather than public-domain material or material which the sharers actually had permission to copy - probably a fair assumption - well exceeded the $1000 limit in any case. I just have this sneaky suspicion that, as usual, a single track from a CD is being counted as the full retail value of a whole CD (and therefore each individual track from that CD is being counted as a WHOLE CD...) to pump up the purported value "lost" by publishing corporations...("petabytes" of "stolen" copies! Including 1,976 copies of the same Metallica song, 978 copies of the same Britney Spears track, and 178,493 copies of the "Dance, Monkeyboy" Steve Ballmer video....?)
Shouldn't this also imply that someone sneaking a camera into a theater and putting the recording on the 'net has cost studios LESS (~$8.00US or so at current movie theater rates - the "retail value" of viewing the movie at the theater) than copying a a DVD of a decade-old movie ($15-$30US at current rates for the DVD...)?
DOJ press release ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Today's enforcement action is the latest step in our ongoing effort to combat piracy occurring on the Internet," said Christopher A. Wray, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division. "This is the first federal law enforcement action against criminal copyright infringement using peer-to-peer networks and shows that we are committed to combating piracy, regardless of the medium used to commit these illegal acts."
"Today we are sending a clear message that federal law enforcement takes piracy seriously," said U.S. Attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein. "It is illegal to trade in copyright-protected materials on the Internet. This is theft, plain and simple. If you are engaged in this behavior, you are on notice that you are not as anonymous as you may think."
Is copyright 'enforcement' a civil matter or not? I don't get the whole 'arbitrary enforcement' thing the DOJ is doing.
No arrests - just confiscating your stuff.
Vote.
Re:I fought the law and the... (Score:1, Insightful)
Information wants to be free
Ever notice how that doesn't quite apply to things like the ip's of really good sites, or pw's to major ftps? Guess some information wants to be freer than other information.
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Insightful)
Any p2p net out there would be really, really proud to have that kind of hardware to share. Obviously, Ashcroft inflated the hell out of the numbers as per usual and things the people are too friggin' dumb to notice.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is they become law because companies and organisations with far bigger pockets than the average individual exert undue influence on those that actually legislate within our societies. In effect, through things like campaign contributions and lobbying they buy power.
You don't think that Microsoft's political donations and lobbying played a part in it only getting a slap on the wrist from the DOJ's antitrust lawsuits? You don't think that chemical companies not having to pay for the messes that they make because Newt Gingrich killed the Superfund counts? You don't think the handcuffs placed on the FDA's inspectors when investigating food contamination, which effectively make them powerless to protect consumers from unscrupulous manufacturers, counts either?
It's not in the US's interest to have monopolies abusing their positions in key industries. Or to have no effective safeguards to stop companies from polluting the environment without either effective penalty at the time or having to foot the bill to later clean up the mess. Or to allow contaminated food to reach the plates of average Americans.
Yet these things happen, and they happen even more frequently nowadays because the people who call the shots are effectively in bed with those doing the damage.
The foxes are guarding the coop. That's great if you're a fox, not so great if you're a chicken.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:4, Insightful)
Until then, I hope that damage is done to their livelyhood.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:1, Insightful)
Tell that to the families of the dead.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:2, Insightful)
But you DON'T HAVE THE RIGHT TO TAKE IT.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah! So there!
That's why when an individual or small company calls the FBI, the FBI always requires damages of at least $5000 before they'll even consider investigating.
Yeah, that's why prosecutors have no discretion about what charges they dismiss and which they prosecute -- and they never decide to "make an example" of a defendant, or give a sweet plea bargain to a connected defendent, or dig up all sorts of unrelated charges in order to get any conviction after their original charges fall through.
Yeah! So there!
So you're saying that when Ashcroft came on board as Attorney General, it wasn't his choice to de-emphasize anti-terrorism enforcement so as to concentrate on cracking down on porn and Tommy Chong? Huh, because he touted those decisions at the time as reasons his Fundamentalist base should be happy about the Bush administration.
Yeah! So there!
Hey, tell me, on Big Rock Candy Mountain where you live, how many licorice dollars did your condo cost, 'cause if Bush wins in November, I gotta move there, ok?
Re:Terminology (Score:3, Insightful)
He wouldn't even watch it.
Three years ago, he had 1.5 terabytes shared. I don't imagine that it's that hard to get up to 3 or 4 terabytes a person. Now, you'd need 10,000 people doing that. Yes, that's a lot. Perhaps they meant 4 petabytes combined, which I actually would NOT doubt at all. 5 hubs, that's 8 petabytes per hub. 2,000 people sharing 4 terabytes.. Still quite high, but some will share more, some less. Mandatory minimum of 1-100 gigs.. if you say the min is 100 gigs, and the program automatically re-shares whatever you download, that'll get up there very quickly.
I've only skimmed the article, nothing said where these people were. But it really wouldn't surprise me. (I know the DC hub at RIT would allow RIT people on, and people from a few other I2 institutions nearby. I didn't go to RIT, and I didn't go to those other institutions, but I wouldn't doubt if they were well over 10PB.)
Re:A show of force... (Score:1, Insightful)
Assuming the price for a song is approximately a dollar, and $2,500 has to be shared for it to become criminal, that's automatically about 2,500 songs that must be shared. If each song is 5 megabytes on average, we're talking 12.5 gigabytes that are shared to get raided. That's a lot, and these guys were well over that amount.
The RIAA sues people in mass. And the RIAA claims the people they sue on average share 1,000 songs. We are talking about people who were far more egregious offenders than what the RIAA is going after.
When it comes to file swapping, I'd almost rather deal with the feds than deal with the RIAA. First of all, there are stricter regulations involving a criminal case and what can and can't be done. The processes of discovery and depositions in a civil case are regulated rather loosely and give the RIAA an immense amount of power. The RIAA and the feds have different goals. The RIAA seeks to intimidate and scare, whereas the feds seek to convict criminals of their crimes. The RIAA wishes to stay out of court and uses scare tactics to prevent cases from going to trial. While the feds may offer a plea bargain to reduce congestion in the courts, they are certainly not trying to keep cases from going to trial to protect their methods from judicial scrutiny.
And remember, the feds aren't going to try to scare you out of going to court. They wouldn't file charges if they didn't believe they could get a conviction, as opposed to the RIAA's tactics. And if you can't afford a lawyer, the government must provide one.
The RIAA aren't exactly going after the little fish in the pond, but the feds are going after far bigger fish than the RIAA is.
You are now free to remove your tinfoil hat.
Re:Direct Connect (Score:3, Insightful)
the hub operators wouldn't have needed to have any warez on their own computers even.. the hub is just a server that relays information about who's online.
directconnect is basically like irc, only with stuff to make file transfers happen more easily, from person to person. it's fairly simple concept & execution how it's done.
so.. are efnet irc operators the next to be hit?
How the hell is that? (Score:1, Insightful)
Macy's makes available material to be stolen all the time. So does my grocery store. If I put a pile of CDs on the street with a FREE sign on them on them, you take them, you are not stealing. Not by any stretch of the imagination, even Ashcroft's imagination! Even if I rip all the tracks and put them on Kazaa, YOU are not stealing. You are taking something I am giving away.
The contortions of logic that these idiots go through to apply law to things they don't begin to understand is amusing. The fact that they believe what they are saying makes sense is scary.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Stealing a milkshake and copying a digital file are not, I repeat not, the same thing.
Perhaps a better example would be the person charging you $10 for the recipe of a milkshake and you took a picture of that recipe and shared it with your friends.
Some 12 year old kid downloading music from the internet is not the same as the 12 year old kid creeping merchandise from Tower Records. There is a potential sale lost in the first case, and actual damages to Tower Recs, the distributor, the manager, etc. in the second.
I repeat, fundamentally not the same. How did this ignorant and blithe comment get modded as insightful? More **AA patsies in the mod system, I guess.
One would hope, on /. of all places, that this fundamental difference would be observed. Call it copyright infringement, but do not call it "theft," "piracy," or any other action which it is unequivocally not. There is a difference, and that difference matters. Both may be illegal, but one is a very fundamentally different beast than the other and they should be referred to and dealt with in different ways. Having the penalty for downloading (or uploading, or providing, whatever) digital files shouldn't have the same penalty (actually, much worse) than jacking merch in the store.
Re:Free Rein To Thieves?? (Score:5, Insightful)
We are talking about copyright infringement. This is clearly bad, but when somebody infringes on your copyright by downloading music, you haven't lost money, you just haven't made it.
When someone walks into a record store and steals a few albums they have actually caused a loss to the record store.
A rather serious difference..
Re:Classic quote (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, what he said is that there were 40 petabytes, the equivalent of 60,000 movies or10.5 million songs. Could be 39.95pb of pr0n, and only
Who signs his paycheck, anyway?
Are you a U.S. taxpayer? If you are, then you sign it.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:1, Insightful)
Your Arguement? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, says who... you? The law? I'd guess your arguement as to why copyright infrindgement is immoral really should be longer than a single sentence to be compelling.
Let's not forget that copyright property is a state-sponsored temporary monopoly which creates a scarcity which does not correspond to any state in reality. No such scarcity exists or would exist except as created by law. If these idea monopolists get to uppity, as I see they have been doing, it is then time to change the law.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:2, Insightful)
The recipe of a milkshake? I don't think so. Your analogy would be correct if you were talking about providing guitar lessons so you could make music like Metallica. Downloading an exact (please, let's not quibble on lossy compression), usable, identical version of something that you would otherwise have to pay for is stealing. You can't eat the recipe for a milkshake. You -can- listen to an illegally downloaded song precisely the same as if you bought it.
Your suggestion is ludicrous in the extreme.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:1, Insightful)
But you DON'T HAVE THE RIGHT TO TAKE IT.
Over 2 billion people in Asia are thinking differently right now. Shaking a piece of paper at them with a US law written on it seems to make little difference.
Saying its wrong and Ashcroft arresting 5 people accomplishes very little in a growing global marketplace and internet.
Re:Terminology (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DOJ press release ??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Any vote against Bush/for Kerry on this issue is consequently pointless.
Re:Terminology (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Terminology (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not. Stealing is taking something away (ie: so they no longer have it) from another party without right or permission.
It has nothing to do with having something in your posession. By your logic people who receive gifts are stealing and people who steal something and then give it away are not stealing.
Word games like this are going to do nothing but make your average joe look at your side of the argument as bizarre extremism.
It's not a word game at all. It's as simple, clear and obvious a distinction as the difference between manslaughter and murder - and most people don't have any trouble with those. The only people who seem to have difficulty seeing the difference are media company executives, their bought politicians and people who have been too brainwashed by advertising campaigns to actually think about it.
Re:Your Arguement? (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe if you saw the field from the other side of the fence, you might find more cadence in his argument. But if you think "oh this law helps out large corporations who MUST be monopolys and MUST be rich and therefore I am justified in doing WHATEVER I want..." you're obviously not involved with any smaller creative activities. My buddy runs a tiny little graphic design shop, and has had clients refuse to pay for what things actually cost to work on them. My buddy's response is to kindly inform them that until he transfers the copyright of the logo to them, using it is illegal and the damages are far greater than what he's asking. Generally, this gets the checkbooks open.
Anyhow, I don't see where this artificial argument about scarcity comes from in reference to music. There are many, many different artists and many, many different labels. CD prices range from $5 to $20. If you aren't willing to pay $20, you can get a CD from somebody else. In other markets, this is quite common. Don't want to pay $7 for a six pack of Heineken? A sixer of Bud is only $4. This is not evidence that Heineken has state-sponsored temporary monopoly that creates a scarcity which does not correspond to any state in reality and the recipe for Heineken should be given to many small companies who could then directly compete on a beer that tastes exactly like Heineken. If that's how you think economies should work, your commie ass should go back to Adam Smith and square one. If you have a fixed demand, you create just enough supply to match the price that maximizes profits. This isn't artifical scarcity. It's good planning.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's my point exactly. When laws are past that serve the best interests of the select few that hold the pursestrings rather than the majority that don't then you don't have real democracy at all.
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Insightful)
And did they pay this much attention to Enron and Tyco and obviously other large scale crimes?..
Whats with the political sex appeal and fear mongering of kids swapping stolen entertainment?
Call the local cops and treat it like any other petty crime...
Re:I call BULLSHIT here... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think, as some people have already said, that Ashcroft's PR people got a little confused between Petabytes and Terabytes.
Re:Does it matter? No. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's fucking file sharing. Anyone who is seriously passionate about this and seriously thinks all the money spent on this is worth it has a serious problem with perspective.
Re:DOJ press release ??? (Score:3, Insightful)
The same Democratic party that is supported by a large percentage of the main figures in the entertaiment realm? (Baldwin/Streisand/Goldberg/Moore...)
On this issue, the Dems are between a rock and a hard place. Pander to a large segment of their voter base, the media people, who decidedly do NOT want random, anonymous, free transfer of their product, or pander to a different large segment of their voter base, younger people who DO want it exactly like that.
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Insightful)
The classic "one-track organization" fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
1.) Laws are meant to be enforced. They were enforcing the law. If a law will not be enforced, why have the law?
2.) The argument assumes organizations are one-track minds that only operate on one task at a time. This is like saying "with all the desktop work that needs to be done, do we really need Linux kernel hackers writing more drivers for arcane hardware?" The illogic in the statement is obvious. Simply because a piracy raid took place does not mean 100% of all money and 100% of all resources were utilized in the execution of this one, single raid. The argument is a convenient dismission meant to distract the issue from the event that took place to some imagined flaw in the process of the organization--thereby shifting the label of wrongdoer from the guilty pirates to the guilty law enforcers.
Note that this flawed argument is also often used against Microsoft. "With all the security flaws out there, it's good to know they were working hard on a new version of Encarta!" The statement ignores that Microsoft is a multi-tiered organization made of several dozens of software groups.
3.) It's a distraction from the fact that what the people were doing was illegal and inethical. The law caught up with them.
Re:The next time my house gets burgled... (Score:2, Insightful)
Your post unfortunately also misuses the term theft, thus further confusing the term. While we as the public certainly ought to eventually reappropriate works after a reasonable period of time, the constant legal loopholing and campaigning by corps to prevent their copyrighted materials from lapsing into the public domain does not constitute theft. There is nothing physical being taken from its original owner, for two reasons: one, copyrighted works aren't tangible objects, and two, we didn't own them originally.
Now, despite the fact that I'm being anal retentive about the term "theft", I agree with your point. We (the people) agreed contractually (copyright law) to give a creator of a work a temporary monopoly on his or her created resource, in exchange for the understanding that after a reasonable time has passed, it would enter the public domain.
This artificial limitation exists solely because in a "Free" (in the libertarian sense) society, there would be no such protection, and any author of a work would be unable to publish his or her work without someone copying it. We give up our right to copy for a temporary period of time to encourage artists to publish. It's as simple as that.
Essentially, the political lobbying done by Disney and Co is an erosion of our rights; we gave up those negative rights to allow Disney to make money on Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willy for a temporary period, and now Disney wants us to give up our rights for an even longer period of time so they can make even more money.
I don't know about you, but that rankles me.
But it still isn't theft.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:3, Insightful)
While I agree that the extensions from the Berne convention on are utterly stupid, I do think it's quite reasonable to grant a copyright for the life of the author. For corporate works, maybe 50 years.
Thus I have even no ethical, moral problem with companies trying to enforce copyrights within such terms. As that almost certainly constitutes almost everything that's pirated, I can't blame them.
Close... (Score:1, Insightful)
Democracy by the people is the best system, but once you call a corporation a person, the whole system is perverted dorwards bloat and profit at the expense of democracy.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:3, Insightful)
His logic:
Ie: Stealing is defined as having something in your possession that you have not "legitimately paid for".
Therefore, according to this logic:
A person who steals something and then gets rid of it (however they want to - use your imagination) has not stolen because they no longer have the thing in their possession.
Since a person who receives a gift has something in their possession they received without "legitimately paying for", they have stolen.
It's not my fault if someone makes a stupid assertion in the process of trying to equate two completely different things.
"Stealing" has nothing to do with having something "in your posession" and nothing to do with "not paying". Stealing is depriving someone else of their property without their consent.
Re:Your Arguement? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lines like that annoy me. Even though it does me no physical or financial harm, I'd still like you to never post tripe like that again.
Please explain how then continuing against my wishes is not immoral.
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, no, not in the slightest - on the condition that it's just like transferring anything else over P2P and it's copied rather than movied to your account - I get to keep my original copy (i.e. my money)
I'd have a problem if you actually took my money away from me - that would be theft, after all.
I'm sorry, were you trying to make a point about "transferring==theft"?
Re:Your Arguement? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not even remotely. Try making a copy of a plot of land..... Not all resources can be copied at near-zero cost.
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:2, Insightful)
Civil Disobedience (Score:5, Insightful)
I see nothing morally relativist about asking for an arguement, a justification, as to why someone can morally prohibit another person, via the government, from thinking certain ideas or viewing certain materials (copyrighted materials of course).
Moral relativists do not need or ask for justification since they use their own belief system to self justify their behavior, in case you were ignorant about the term in question.
"As a US citizen, you have the right to disagree with laws and lobby for their repeal. You do not have to right to break them."
And if a law is immoral, you happily continue to obey? All law is are promulgated rules passed by the sovereign. If the sovereign, say a dictator or perhaps even a legislature as the case maybe, passed a law requiring that a group of individuals be inslaved, have their property taken away, and or put into camps you'd obey that law?
"You decided that because everyone in Europe drives on the left side of the street, people in this country should also"
Is the problem of driving on the left or on the right side of the road really an immoral law? If you think so it'll be a laugh for you to come up with that line of reasoning.
On the other hand the fact that governments seem to be jailing and bankrupting people in order to protect idea monopolist's profits and in spite of 300 year old copyright law that does not work in the digital age seems to be the type of law people should be objecting to and resisting.
Re:The classic "one-track organization" fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Civil Disobedience (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually you can and should ignore the law if you disagree with it. There are plenty of outdated laws that people ignore. The reason they become outdated in the first place is that people ignore them. Laws only have a chance to get overturned by the court system when they are broken in the first place. So it becomes a duty to ignore the laws you disagree with, the US is built upon people ignoring laws that they think are wrong. The difference between the US and some previous countries is that the court system does have the ability to invalidate a law that has been broken, but *ONLY* if it has been broken. So what you call "anarchy" is actually checks and balances.
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Civil Disobedience (Score:1, Insightful)
Hint: I think you need to look up civil disobedience [wikipedia.org].
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:2, Insightful)
Imagine if you have $100,000 in your account. And everybody in the US made a "copy" of that. All of a sudden, that amount of money would be worthless, wouldn't it?
Not sure how that applies to file sharing, but you really *should* mind if people "copy" your money.
Re:Your Arguement? (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly.
It's a stupid law, but it's the law, so obedience and enforcement go along with it.
For much of the public this is a real yawner, as in, how exactly do these fileswappers hurt me?
Answer: They don't, any more than Joe Average buying a hooker, smoking dope in the privacy of his own home, or driving 4 mph over the speed limit on a deserted road hurts you.
I'll obey stupid laws, but having them on the books decreases my respect for the law in general.
The actual costs of copying and distribution having dropped so much, the market is crying out for copyright holders to drop their prices accordingly. Having lived for so long on selling $16 CDs, they just don't want to let go of the old business model.