Fed Raids Software Pirates in 27 Cities

akiaki007 was among many who wrote in to say: "Check out this article on the New York Times (free reg, blah blah) site. The Feds have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include MIT, UCLA, Purdue, Duke, UofO. Their main target was the group DrinkOrDie. 'This is a new frontier for crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide my burned Linux CD's. They might think it's some weird hacking tool."

Comments

Hmmm...

[EvlPenguin]

There's this Thinkgeek add on the top of my page now that reads something like: "CDs, great for ... pirated software (don't worry, we won't tell)." I always knew they were up to no good.

Expensive schools..

[Suppafly]

Luckily they are only cracking down on people at expensive schools.. Should be quite a while before they get to state schools in the cornfields of illinois..

More information is available at...

[David Ziegler]

MSNBC and Wired. Seems that no one was arrested (in the US, at least - 5 people were in England). One customs agent said each computer has an average of 1-2 terabytes of software (Wired article). Wow.

Re:More information is available at...

[edhall]

1-2 terabytes is the street value.

Ummm Enviromental?

[hooded1]

From the DoJ site:
"Bandwidth, through the joint efforts of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), the Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General (EPA-OIG), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), supervised by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Nevada, created a 'warez' site, controlled and monitored by the undercover operation, as a means of attracting predicated targets involved with the distribution of pirated software. "

I can see the FBI and the DoJ being involved in this operation, but why the hell was the enviromental protection agency have to do with this? The piracy of corprate software has nothing to do plants or air pollution.

I'm sure the EPA was actually secretly dissolved by the Bush administration and was replaced by a DoJ brute squad using the same name.
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Pirate Mentality

[Arandir]

I have a friend who is big time into piracy. Every time we get together he wants to give me some new game he ripped. Then he emails me 5Meg cracks to the rips. Constantly. He whines if I won't take them.

So I offered to burn him a copy of Slackware. "Why would I want it?" he said, "It's already free. Duh!"

Re:Thats not the point.

[Skyshadow]

Hey, I know you! You were the CEO at my old .com who kept telling us that profits didn't matter!