Comment The point is intimidation, not enforcement (Score 1) 318
SR users are not being busted now, so much because they broke the law when they did.
They are being arrested in order to scare the people who might otherwise set up the next SR equivalent site.
The pigs can not usually arrest more than a maximum of 5% of any given group; whether it be filesharing, drugs, or whatever else. The reason why is simple logistics; there are literally millions of people motivated to break the law, for every one person there is motivated to enforce it.
So they're not trying to arrest everyone who does it. What they're trying to do, is arrest a sufficiently large number, that the majority who they can not arrest, are sufficiently scared, that they cease engaging in the behaviour in question. Publically at least, that worked wonders with file sharing; eMule died practically overnight, once Razorback, one of the main servers in the eDonkey network was raided. It was only a single server, yet it was a sufficiently well-known one, that it sent everyone into a panic, so they all started uninstalling eMule and no longer using it. That is exactly what the pigs want.
The moral of the story is not to be afraid. Do not selfishly hold the attitude that you should stop, because even though they can barely enforce the law itself, you might be one of the 1-5% who gets hit by the poison ball. The fact of the matter is, that the more people break the law, the safer everyone breaking it is; not less. If less people are infringing, that means that the percentage of the total group that the pigs can arrest, goes up. That in turn means that if you are one of the people who is still infringing, when most other people have stopped, you are now more likely to get busted than you were before.
So people need to make more Silk Road clones. There also need to be more clones of the Pirate Bay. We need so many people copying files, and buying and selling drugs, that the authorities end up being completely overwhelmed.