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."
wth? (Score:2, Interesting)
I fought the law and the... (Score:2, Interesting)
Long story short, so long as the letter of the law has you down, the best route is to change the letter of the law. Whilst minor fixes here and there can suffice in the short run, I've long wondered if there are any moral/philosophical arguments against copyright (communist "Property is theft" notwithstanding) as a whole. Lately, the practical nature of it as a boon for innovation has been falling short and shown to be a bane in certain instances, but there really ought to be a general argument against the entire concept.
I'm just too lazy to develop one.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:5, Interesting)
A show of force... (Score:3, Interesting)
Diskless Servers (Score:4, Interesting)
Just imagine the news story for that one: "Teenage File Trader's Computer Seized by FBI, Exercise in Futility"
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:I fought the law and the... (Score:5, Interesting)
*see the writings of Jefferson and Madison
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:so if they werent charged (Score:1, Interesting)
Since it was an essentially private hub, did they infiltrate it to establish that file sharing was going on? (That would mean sharing >1GB of stuff themselves!)
What I'd like to know is whether the feds can search company/educational subnets without a warrant. Now that would be scary.
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:2, Interesting)
priorities (Score:3, Interesting)
china? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Permission to Pilfer (Score:4, Interesting)
File swappers -- even if guilty of infingement -- are NOT stealing. Period.
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]
Re:Strange wording (Score:2, Interesting)
I think what scares the hell out of the movie and recording industries is that this would take them out of the catbird seat. It would no longer be necessary to pay for large chunks of the current apparatus for making movies, recording albums, and distributing content, and that makes a lot of executive types sweat bullets. The recording and movie industry as we know it would most likely shrivel up and float away on the wind. There's really no reason why artists cannot be supported directly by the public, and probably better supported than they currently are by a lot of media companies.
The democratization of these industries is coming, whether the media companies like it or not... the handwriting is on the wall, whether or not they choose to look at it.
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:A busy day for the feds... (Score:2, Interesting)
11792.07 TB = 11.5156934 petabytes
So yeah, the DOJ is lying, but hey - look on the bright side, it's not as much as we thought ^_^
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:3, Interesting)
Then why are "they" trying to make it illegal for me to use the information in a legal manner? Such as outlawing the tools necessary to exercise my fair use of the information?
Why are "they" not providing low-cost replacements/upgrades? I buy a game and updates come out, I get them for free. There were lots of software that was available in multiple media forms in the same box (or free with coupon) for those that needed floppies instead of CDs. When is the last time you bought a song that was on both tape and CD for your convenience?
They want the best of both worlds. They pretend they are selling IP only when that is most beneficial to them. They pretend that they are selling physical disks when that is most beneficial to them. They pretend they are selling licenses when that is most beneficial to them. But it is impossible (and illegal) for that to be the case.
Of course, it is also not "theft" because the copyright holder is not deprived of anything. Yes, that is arguing semantics. The definition of symantics is the meaning of words. You are using the word in a manner inconsistent with its actual meaning. Correction your incorrect usage is symantics by default. Just as if I said the sky is red and you corrected me and said it was blue. That is also a matter of symantics. I used the word incorrectly.
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.
a way out of this mess (Score:2, Interesting)
People are used to being entertained for free. For example flip on the radio out pops music, didnt cost me a dime. TV, same thing. Who pays for this?
Advertisers!
Companies, get a clue. Buy some songs, add a 5 second clip and release it to the public.
Sure a lot of people would strip the add but most probably would'nt especially if it made it legal and was kept short.
Like "Garth Brooks singing I've got friends in low places brought to you by the law firm of..." well you get the idea.
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: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:Terminology (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Your Arguement? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do... (Score:3, Interesting)
A democracy, like Switzerland! Not a representational government.
"underground"... (Score:3, Interesting)
Kjella
Re:Steal the technology... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:2, Interesting)
Agreed. Noone should be inflicting that much Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys on the world. And heaven help us if someone had Gigli up on the network!
Crimes I'll concede and not argue with- what they were doing is currently illegal. But against humanity? Unless you're defining "humanity == RIAA/MPAA Profits", I'd say, 'Nope.'
Re:No--with formatting (Score:2, Interesting)
Could be wrong, but in this line you're saying 4000=40*10^3
Think that should be 4*10^3.
In your later post you say that means 4GB per song. Since the factor's off by 10, I guess that means it's really 400MB per song.
But then again...
40 * 10^15 (40PB) = 4 * 10 ^ 16 bytes then becomes
(40 * 10^16)bytes
So I guess that all evens out back to 4GB
But then again, I'm a geer, so I can't do simple math without a calculator and could be way off!