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

Oh? So then they finished the terrorist problem?

[JoeShmoe]

In other words, this effort that went into this coordinated 27-city raid (which took probably tens of thousands of manhours to prepare and execture) could not have been spent elsewhere?

Because I thought we were still at war with terrorism. I thought we were still living with the constant threat of terrorism. Every one of these FBI agents chasing down CD images is one less agent knocking on doors, interviewing potential suspects.

I swear, if there are any attacks or terrorist incidents tomorrow, or the next week, or hell, any time the first question I'll be writing my congressman will be "Where was the FBI?"

I almost hope something does happen. What's it going to take for the FBI to learn their FIRST AND PRIMARY responsability is to safeguard the lives of American citizens...NOT the PROFITS of American corporations.

- JoeShmoe

.

Warez.

[mindstrm]

Firstly.. my take on warez.....
here's the thing.

First.. these groups get busted. Okay. Well.. they *are* knowingly spreading massive amounts of copyrighted material, which IS illegal... sure.. we all do it.. but they can't say 'Oh gee, I didn't know'.

Second.. it IS rediculous to claim 'billions' in losses because of them. I've seen my fair share of warez groups.. they hoard software so they can be bigger & better than the next guy. Almost nothing actually gets USED by anyone, even those downloading it.

And of all the pirated software I've seen used by most people.. only a fraction actually comes from the warez scene.. lots are just directly burned CDs.

Warez kiddies hoard software like other kids hoard baseball cards, or pokemon, or whatever the new craze is. It's about who can hoard more.. it's not even about theft.

Part of Life

[Renraku]

Get over it, Feds. Software piracy is a part of life. When you try to sell something that has no material component other than a CD which can pretty much be replicated at will, for outrageous prices and with EULA's so tight they make our balls ache, there's going to be piracy. Blame companies like Microsoft for setting their own prices. $300 for a piece of buggy, crashy software that we HAVE to buy to play many games, or use many popular aps is insane. Live on, pirates.

Whatever...

[Brendan Byrd]

I'm not surprised by the responses we're seeing here. I just think it illustrates the unfortunate situation that a valuable concept like public domain or open source software has to be overly infested with thieves who believe that stealing software or pirating movies in the theaters "doesn't hurt anybody".

The problem is when they call it "pirating", as if they are some oversea rag-tag group that takes things away from other people. It's not taking away; it's making a copy. Most anti-pirate sources try to claim that every single copy is directly affected by the sales of the product. In fact, most pirates are just people who can't afford to buy the damn game anyway.

Say that when it's your own livelihood that's being stolen.

Please...I'd love for a product of mine to get pirated all over the place. Just look at id Software and Doom. More pirates = more popularity.

If you really want a comparison of numbers, try comparing the online games with serial numbers (which is a pretty effective anti-piracy agent right now) to the games without serial numbers. More or less, it's the same numbers.

Warez stretches my company budget further.

[RogrWilco]

I somewhat agree with the you on the sentiment shown here. The introduction of high speed internet at home has really increased the waez scene. I've diluded myself into believing that I warez responsibly, and I believe that it has allowed me to support decent products. I work for a small, but highly technical company with a $250,000 IT budget. That may seem like an awful lot of money, but half of that goes to liscencing fees.
With half of my budget eaten up by software liscences, I simply don't have enough money to buy garbage software, and the demo's released by the companies are generally lacking. The last full product I bought without testing it fully was MS Project. One department direly needed it to work, and needed it yesterday. So I bought ten copies, installed it, then listened to the complaints of how it was a giant waste of time, it didn't work as easy as they wanted, or didn't do what they expected. Since that fateful day I am really picky about the products which I choose to purchase or upgrade. I download the full version off of morpheus at home, play around with it, and if it's a good product, I buy it. And yes, every copy is liscenced.
This way, I am rewarding the companies which release a good product, shunning the companies who release software with features nobody will use and expect you to upgrade, and am no longer spending my budget needlessly. I suggest everyone else do the same.

I guess somehow I'm missing the point here.

[tuxlove]

What's all this griping about? Why does everyone seem so seriously angry that a bigtime pirate organization got nailed for stealing software & movies in gross quantities? If it was your software they were ripping off, you'd probably be singing a different tune (and no, I'm not referring to free software).

These weren't Joe Home User making copies of a buddy's software for personal use. These were dudes copying thousands of software and movie titles and distributing them. And it's not all Big Corporations that get nailed by these guys. I know a guy who writes shareware for a living, and mostly does okay. But fully 80% of the customer support requests he gets are from users with cracked copies of his software. What, should he just give away his work and live in an alley, all in the name of free beer? Or should he give it away and support himself by working for M$ or some other company? He almost has to anyway to support himself as it is.

I have another friend that makes a fairly popular shareware app. The only difference between the "registered" and "unregistered" versions of his software is that the registered version says "registered" in the "about" window. That's it. It's essentially freeware with a request for money to support his efforts. And still the crackers produce cracked versions of his software within hours of a new release. That, in my mind, perfectly well illustrates the mentality of the typical cracker. There's no great social or political statement being made by them. It's all a matter of machismo, pumping up their ego by breaking software and showing the world how big their penises are.

In any case, the assertion that the Feds are doing this to protect M$ is asinine. Sure, M$ was one of the victims here, but I'd hazard a guess that all those ripped off movies were not produced by M$. Nor were the majority of the software titles either.

Maybe we need a new business paradigm for software or other digital wares, I agree. I don't think wholesale piracy is the way to go about making it happen, however. Besides the faulty ethics, it hurts the little guy more than the big evil guy.

Re:Thats not the point.

[D Anderson n'Swaart]

• Therefore programmers make as much as artists, garbage collectors, ditch diggers, etc? No, of course not. Programmers can make tons of money for not so much work simply because the product they produce is worth a lot of money.

Slightly off-topic now, but I'm curious. Who decides that a long series of ones and zeros is worth so much more than the service of a garbage collector or artist? Generally, it seems that the more abstract the work you do, the higher you can expect to be paid if you're good at it (take something like a banker--he deals with nothing but an abstract concept called "money").

On the other hand, people who provide a vital service like garbage collection get paid peanuts. If we compared how our lives would be without artists (probably a bit more boring, but quite livable), as compared to how they'd be without someone picking up our garbage (not so nice at all, methinks) one gets the distinct impression that garbage collectors should be the more highly-paid of the two examples I used.

Just for interest's stake, I'm an artist and a writer, so I have no reason to say this other than my own belief that the values society places on certain things are fundamentally twisted.

$1 billion in lost profits is a little high...

[da cog]

I do not play computer games that often because I generally have more interesting ways to pass the time.

When I get a copy of a game from my friends, it's because, quite frankly, I'm not impressed enough with it to buy it on my own. In fact, more often then not I'm just installing it so we can all play it at a LAN Party. When the party is over, I never touch it again.

The companies have lost NO money from me. If my friends hadn't had the game, I just wouldn't have played the game. I DEFINATELY wouldn't have spent any money on it. This "$1 billion" or whatever they're claiming to be their lost sales may be greatly inflated for the simple reason that many (maybe even most) of the people who copied these games wouldn't have spent money on them anyways. (Or at least, they wouldn't have paid the shelf price for it--maybe they would have bought them if they cost less.)

Now, don't get me wrong: I DO spend money on computer games, and I've bought about 90% of the games that I've actually played for more than just a couple hours of "dabbling" (for the last 10% I had physically borrowed the CDs). My tastes generally go towards games with novel ideas such as Afterlife and Strife, which are usually conveniently lying in the $15 bin since nobody else likes them. :-) I get MUCH more satisfaction from these games then I do from Quake 3 at $30-40 or so.

Copying a game, to me, is akin to "borrowing" a book from a friend, minus the physical inconvenience of having to physically give it back to him. He tells me its interesting, so I try it out for a bit. If I really like it enough, I might even spend some money on it. (Like I have on many books that I own.)

In fact, "borrowing" this game while allowing my friend to keep the original (i.e. copying it) should even theoretically be legal in this scenerio: Assume for a moment that only one of us is actually playing it at a given time. What's the difference between us swapping it back and forth and us maintaining two copies of it then? None--if you believe that people have a right to transfer their license to play the software to others. It's just that the transfer of the license in this case does not require an actual "physical" transfer of the software.

Yeah, yeah, I know you're all going to reply and tell me that some programmer out there is starving because I didn't give him any money for his game. That's just not true. If he's starving, it's because his game simply wasn't worth spending any money on--at least, to me.

Oh, and if he were to stop making games because he couldn't make a living off of them, I wouldn't feel agony over it. I'd just shrug my shoulders and find something better to do. Again, it's not as if I spend that much of my life playing games anyways.

Now, having said that...

Puts on flame gear and runs away from angry horde of starving programmers.

The feds almost pirated a company out of business.

[GMontag]

Someone called into the G. Gordon Liddy show about this the other day, but forgot the details.

I remember the incident in the late 80's or early 90's a software company sold a copy or two of some sort of management software to the feds. DOJ I believe.

The agency then copied and copied, sold copies to other agencies and other folks, etc.

FINALLY, years later, after the firm was out of business or nearly bankrupt, they were heard in court but I believe the case was settled before a judgement was made.

Living our Lives requires selective enforcement

[FreeUser]

Look, just because you don't like a law doesn't mean you won't face the consequences if you break it. That's what civil disobedience is all about, taking absurd responsibility for an unjust law. What these idiots were doing was breaking the law hoping to never face the consequences.

Well, not to defend the warez dudez, for they were (and probably still are) idiots, but you should be very careful what you wish for. There are so many laws on the books these days at so many levels of government restricting and legislating virtually every aspect of our lives that each of us, just about every day we get out of bed, is breaking a number of laws just by living out our daily lives. Without ever meaning to, and certainly without malice.

What allows us to live out our daily lives? The fact that these laws are (almost) never enforced, at least until some local police officer or official develops a personal vindetta against you ... at which point you may well find yourself serving hard time for living in the same apartment as your lover (this happened in Texas a few years ago, brought to you compliments of a local DA of the religiously right persuasion and a century old state law no one remembered remaining on the books), or doing some other innocuous thing (like singing a copyrighted song in public, say in a bar with your drunken friends) which common sense would tell you would never be illegal, but our lawmakers and/or their corporate paymasters say otherwise.

So the argument that enforcing unjust and absurd laws, which many of us feel copyright in the digital age to be, is a screwed up priority in light of current, more pressing events, isn't so misguided, particularly given that our very ability to conduct our normal, everyday lives depends in no small part on the selective enforcement of a plethora of existing laws anyway.