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."
p2p (Score:3, Funny)
A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Informative)
Each of the five hubs contained 40 petabytes of data, the equivalent of 60,000 movies or 10.5 million songs, Ashcroft said.
In order to join the network, members had to promise to provide between one and 100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs, Ashcroft said.
200 petabytes of songs and movies! Pretty amazing.
I wonder if the RIAA will ask the feds to turn over all of the involved parties and I wonder if the feds would do it if asked.
Or maybe they are too busy since they just sued a bunch more customers....
The Recording Industry Association of America on Wednesday announced it had sued another 744 individuals and refiled suits against 152 others who had ignored or declined offers to settle.
Cheers,
Erick
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Informative)
The website [neo-modus.com] says the whole network contains about 1 petabyte of data.
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Informative)
If 100 GB is 250,000 songs, then each song file is about 400k. But if 40 petabytes is the equivalent of 10.5 million songs, then each song file must be about 4000 MB.
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Funny)
And also 'stealing' and 'transferring', 'interrogation' and 'torture', and 'his ass' from 'a hole in the ground'.
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, I mean, I gotta admit, I find it difficult to dredge up that much sympathy for people who knowingly and egregiously violate the law... I mean they're not running the underground railroad here, you known? But it's pretty damn dissapointing when your attorney general doesn't know the legal definition of theft.
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:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Informative)
I have never seen any hub have a petrabyte of data, most of them have 5-500 terabytes.
It also should be said, that most of the data is not unique, many users may have a copy of the same file or similar file. Of course the media spin is to make it look like its more than it really is.
It looks like they only went after the people who ran some of the hubs, not the users thenselves.
In response to one of the other comments, There are many hubs that are not on neomodulas list, in fact the ones on thier list tend to be really small, mostly only a couple hundred users. Other hubs accessible via dc++ have several thousand users.
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).
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:A busy day for the feds... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, I see Ashcroft is using the world famous iPod scale of data density, which will some day eclipse the byte as the standard metric measurement of all data lengths and capacities.
"Hey ted, I'm going to attach pictures of the baby to this email."
"How big are the files?"
"1.25 songs."
"That's a no go, man. My mail server only allows up to
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:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone else but me think that at MOST this should be a civil issue? Just becuase they've given people the means to violate copyright doesn't mean their as guilty as the people who do it. Last time I checked there was no such thing as "conspiracy to violate copyrights" charge. . .
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't be so sure. The number of scrolls in The Library is estimated to have been somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000. Now let's make a very generous allocation of 5MB for each scroll. I've got a 700 page PDF on my desktop that's only 2.5 MB, so this is probably a bit high, but I'd rather guess too high than too low.
5MB for each scroll times 700,000 scrolls comes up to about 3.5 terabytes. 5 hubs that each contained 40 petabytes of data is 200 petabytes. 200 petabytes divided by 3.5 terabytes is 58514.
In terms of raw data, they destroyed more than fifty thousand Libraries of Alexandria.
Now admitidly, scrolls are a more efficient medium for conveying information than movies, and the information stored in The Library was far more important than what was probably stored in these hubs. Nevertheless, it makes our current culture seem hippocratic when you compare this sort of thing to the general opinion that the burning of The Library was a tragedy. Many of the manuscripts contained within The Library were aquired by means no more legitimate than today's file sharing; copying without permission.
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:4, Funny)
"You're all a bunch of doctors!"
Oh, perhaps you meant hypocritical? ;-)
Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:3, Funny)
Not now, we are only on YELLOW [dhs.gov] Alert.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:4, Insightful)
Until then, I hope that damage is done to their livelyhood.
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.
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: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:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:4, 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:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Get heart surgery done.
and 2. Pick up laundry.
I tend to prioritize the first one.
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".
The next time my house gets burgled... (Score:5, Interesting)
My definition of "theft" is something physically taken. This is also yours, if you live in the United States and choose to be bound by our laws. For what I hope is the last time, copyright infringement is _not_ theft.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not enforcing laws causes all sorts of problems.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:5, Funny)
And as soon as you get your transmitter set up again in another safe location, you'll transmit proof that the World Trade center attack was actually coordinated by George Bush, which is why all Republicans and religious conservatives didn't show up for work that day.
After that, you'll show us how this election is really just another smoke screen because Bush long ago made himself king and will ignore whatever election results there are. It was a deal he brokered with the Supreme court in a back room while the Republican congress ran interference for him by forcing Bill Clinton to have oral sex with their top Republican operative, Monica Lewinsky.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:5, Funny)
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:5, Insightful)
Look up "Steve Jackson games" on the 'net sometime..
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually under current law, upheld by the SCOTUS, the FBI and local law breakers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H enforcement can sieze property and declare it guilty of a conspiracy to commit a crime. Now you can always sue the government to get back the stuff they robbed you of, but it will cost you at least $20,000 to try. Only the most stubborn go through that hell. Sane people just say "to hell with the American fascist state" and continue their lives as if it were an act of nature that injured them.
The stories of those that fight back are heart breaking, professional photographers that have 20 years of negatives maliciously scratched beyond all recognition by the time they are returned. Men who have their hard won businesses destroyed and their unfortunate employees. Charities that lose all the funds intended for good work. They usually win their court cases eventually, but it is always a pyrrhic victory, years of their life are gone. The cost of fighting against an evil force with the almost unlimited purse of the American tax payer far outweighs the initial losses.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, just check out:
http://www.fear.org/ [fear.org]
especially:
http://www.fear.org/victim.html [fear.org]
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: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..
Good! (Score:4, 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:Good! (Score:5, Informative)
"The DOJ should saty out of what is clearly a civil matter."
Copyright violation becomes a criminal matter once the value crosses a fairly low threshold. This has been the case for several years now. Here's the section of US copyright law [copyright.gov] that covers criminal offenses.
Direct Connect (Score:5, Funny)
Petabytes? (Score:5, Funny)
so if they werent charged (Score:5, Informative)
under what penalty of law? last i heard copying things (download) never got anyone in trouble... now sharing on the other hand, is still a civil matter. (but selling is an FBI matter).
Re:so if they werent charged (Score:5, Informative)
The NET Act was passed in 1997 to criminalize warez trading. I do not think that the act distinguishes between software and other copyrighted materials like movies and music. Sixty people have be convicted under the NET Act, with 20 sentenced to jail.
See Warez Trading and Criminal Copyright Infringement [awprofessional.com] for the details.
Worth noting.... (Score:5, Informative)
They were copying, trading, and encouraging others to do the same in large quantities. I don't like seeing people's hard drives raided for any reason, but it's pretty clear these five folks didn't have a leg to stand on.
Re:Worth noting.... (Score:5, Informative)
This is an established, legal method of law enforcement in the U.S., and is hardly noteworthy.
To catch drug dealers, the government buys drugs from them, while videotaping the transaction. This doesn't mean the government partakes in illegal drug dealing. It's a perfectly legal means of law enforcement.
Press conference tomorrow... (Score:5, Informative)
A show of force... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do people have soo much music? (Score:5, Funny)
Its seriously sad that these people are just massing huge collections of crap to trade simply for the purpose of being "in the club" what a waste.
It if were all porn that would be unerstandable, but just music and movies? Come on people.
Good ol' Ashcroft! (Score:5, Funny)
What a way with words he has! Between that and 'Let the Eagle Soar', I say we have a strong candidate for the next national poet!
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?
Diskless Servers (Score:4, Interesting)
Just imagine the news story for that one: "Teenage File Trader's Computer Seized by FBI, Exercise in Futility"
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.
JUSTIN BAILEY (Score:5, Interesting)
I bet he thinks he's so clever. However I find this story a little strange, the article claims that the five hubs each contained 40 petabytes (7200 Libraries of Congress) which at my count is about 160,000 250GB hard drives. That's ~$26m worth of hard drives per hub. The article is written in such a way to suggest these five hubs were run by people in their basements while the supposed retail value of their setups is anything but basementable.
I guess this shouldn't be surprising though. It is a well known fact al-Qaeda is trying to topple the American government by supporting music piracy over the internet. The RIAA member companies are practically bankrupt from their tremendous losses due to piracy. They're such excellent role models for young people, persevering in the face of such insurmountable odds. The movie industry is soon to be entirely out of business from online trading of hits like Gigli. I feel really bad for those gaffers that only make $250,000 a year that can barely make ends meet because someone downloaded a movie.
A distressing development (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh that's right...I forgot. Herr Reichsmarshall Ashcroft IS the law.
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
More FUD (Score:5, Informative)
The client connects to a server (there are many), and then can share files and chat with people on that server. The server does not actually have any files; they come from the clients.
In essence, each server acts like a mini-KaZaA, and judging from the recent Grokster rulings, would mean that they aren't liable for anything. So, basically it means this is just more FUD coming from Ashcroft.
Although the operators weren't arrested, they probably won't see their equipment back for a long time. I guess that is the Justice Dept.'s way of dishing out justice when the law doesn't fit whoever is paying them off's will.
Not in several states.. (Score:3, Funny)
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:I call BULLSHIT here... (Score:4, Informative)
There are lots of hubs around the country hosted by people at colleges with fast connections. Those that host them think their hubs are secure since they can limit hub access to only others having on-campus IP addresses.
I really would not be suprised if the five raids targeted people hosting university specific hubs.
How these hubs work (Score:5, Informative)
I dont' think you understand the way these hubs work. Basically, if you have a certain amount of data, you connect, and your data is added to a large pool of data (everyone's files). This means the owner of the hub doesn't host all the files, it's the users that are connecting to the hub that own the files (and as such, the hardware). It certainly is possible that several thousand users are connecting to the hub, and are sharing their files. This could easily add up to quite large numbers, without needing a million harddrives in one server/cluster.
A wee lesson, brought to you by.. me.
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.
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.
Dear John (Score:5, Funny)
Yours Truly
The RIAA and the MPAA
Permission to Pilfer (Score:4, Interesting)
File swappers -- even if guilty of infingement -- are NOT stealing. Period.
Can we... (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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:DOJ press release ??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Any vote against Bush/for Kerry on this issue is consequently pointless.
WTF, Those are some high quality movies (Score:5, Interesting)
42,949,672,960 megabytes / 60,000 movies = 715,827.883 megabytes per movie, or 699.050667 gigabytes per movie.
All math for this comment was done using the all-powerful web interface to the god Google using its conversion feature, i.e., "40 petabytes in gigabytes" don't believe me? try it for yourself [google.com]
How does this impact legitmate uses of P2P... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm seeding about 9GB of non-commercial, freely-distributed game mods to Gnutella (custom user-made maps for UT2004, Doom3, etc).
Every time I see one of these reports I get nervous thinking that they'll come busting my door down on the mistaken idea that because of the bandwidth I'm using that I must be swapping illegal content.
Of course, I have nothing to worry about, but the abuse of power is disgusting and there are much more important things in our country that need attending to.
Re:Terminology (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, the irony.
Re:Terminology (Score:5, Funny)
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..."
Re:Terminology (Score:4, Informative)
Especially so because there is no such SI prefix. It is "petabyte".
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.
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 classic "one-track organization" fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Terminology (Score:3, Informative)
er... no-one? unless you have?
If you're looking for a petabyte, it's 1000 terabytes (or possibly 1024, depending who you ask).
But you're right, that is some real hardware. I can't see any private individuals having that much at this point. At a minimum, that kind of storage is going to be costing in the region of $100,000 dollars.
Re:Terminology (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Terminology (Score:5, Funny)
To be a little more technical, I think it's somewhere between a crap byte and a fuck byte, 500-1000 shit bytes, IIRC.
I do! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Terminology (Score:5, Informative)
It is Petabyte and the 'pb' somebody further on uses would be a "pico bit", i.e. 1/1000000000000 of a bit.
Here is a reference for those without clue about SI prefixes: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html [nist.gov]
Just because the media has no clue is no excuse to do it wrong.
Re:Terminology (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I fought the law and the... (Score:5, Interesting)
*see the writings of Jefferson and Madison
Re:Dont they have better things to do? (Score:5, Informative)
"which is a f-ing CIVIL manner anyway?"
Sheesh. This is the fifth or sixth comment I've seen here from somebody insisting that this falls under civil law. Is this one of those Slashdot memes?
I feel like I'm just banging my head against a wall here, but here's where you can read up on what constitutes a criminal offense in copyright law [copyright.gov].
Please help me spread the word. To fight the law, you must first understand it.
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...)?