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RIAA, MPAA Instigate U.S. Naval Academy Raid
LaikaVirgin writes "After receiving a letter from 'four entertainment-based lobbying associations', the U.S. Naval Academy has seized nearly 100 midshipmen's computers that allegedly had pirated media. It's good to see that the armed forces know who's really in charge."
I really wonder how the academy was able to simple seize the computers. It said that the midshipmen were "given" a computer when the entered the academy, but paid back the value over time..... this would indicate that these computers were the property of the midshipmen. So unless they had a search warrant, how were they able to seize and search the computers?
Think about it; military schools are places where they punish you harshly for dumb shit, like not having the back of your belt buckle shined or having your underwear folded 4" across instead of 6". It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that breaking a real law in such an environment is going to be met with harsh consequences... no matter how dumb that law is.
Aside from the clear lack of logic in this statement, it is interesting to note that the RIAA has enough sense to not call it 'piracy' when they are talking to the Navy.
In reality, it's 'infringement of copyright' , not theft or piracy.
Sigh, let me take a page from my journal from this week. The **AA's influence on Universities is fucking sick. Pardon the language, I was absolutely angered.
God fucking damn it. So I was given a fairly simple assignment in my 160G Music Appriciation class. I have to listen to Verdi's Rigoletto and write some shit about it. Well, I fucking love Rigoletto but the only copy I have is at my mom's house on an LP.
So, I figure the internet will help me. So, I fireup ol kazaa lite. I do a search for Rigoletto and find exactly what I want. So, I start to download. I am getting literally HUNDREDS of BYTES per second. Mother FUCKER. So, I let kazaa do its magic and its downloading from 4 people and all at ass speeds. I message one of the people I am downloading from and he says he is on a company T1 line and has great speeds. So, I am being raped by my university.
Well, I call up the communications people. I tell them whats up and they say its illegal for me to download music from kazaa and that if I don't stop they will take away my connection. I told him the hell it is, Verdi's Rigoletto has been in the public domain for hundred + years and that is bullshit. He hung up on me after I said bullshit. I called back and got the same guy. I asked for his supervisor and the supervisor told me using kazaa was against campus policy. I asked him to point it out to me and he told me that I can not download copyrighted materials. I said fine, this is not a copyrighted material, so give me my bandwidth. He told me I was just SOL. They kept asking for my room # but I refused. The last thing I need is them trying to cut my fucking connection off.
God damn bastards.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I have legally bought every one of the full-length CD's, ripped at 196 kbps, sitting on my hard-drive. I'm at college and did not bring with me the physical compact disks on which I originally bought the content.
Am I a pirate? Is it up to me to prove that I'm not? ("Show me the original CDs" -- maybe when you replace scratched ones at production-cost...until then, why should I hang on to broken stuff?)
I dunno', maybe this digital-rights-management stuff isn't so bad -- it lets me prove that what's mine is mine.
Also, with DRM I can by doctrine of first-sale (which says that you can't impose limitations on what I do with a CD once I've bought it, including restrictions on who I resell the whole package to) says that I can buy someone's scratched CD "virtually" at half.com, and then, owning that CD, I have fair-use rights to the content on it.
Conversely, I can virtually sell the CD when I'm done listening to it. The Internet allows for instant transfer of virtual-property, so really there only need to be as many licenses floating around as concurrent listeners. It's like a superfast transfer of the physical compact disk -- if we had teleportation, and CD's that didn't scratch, we could have a communal pile of CD's, which you'd tele-take whenever you want to listen to them and tele-return whenever you're done. Only with "digital" rights and "virtual" property we do have teleportation of property. Interesting, interesting.
Therefore, in conclusion, DRM advocates -- BRING IT ON!!!
The sooner we have ubiquitous digital rights management, the sooner my audio software can play anything that exists in the world, by buying it at $4.04 when I begin to listen to it and selling it at $4.04 +/- 0.04 when I'm done.
I'm sure it would only take a few pennies per hour of listening to finance the logistics of such an operation.
So any reasons why this couldn't work?
In my plebe year at USNA 98-99, Napster was HUGE. Not only that, but exchange through the magic of the 'Network Neighborhood' made the accumulation of huge mp3 libraries trivial. Two problems: 1) Plebes arent allowed to listen to music, so we had to do it on the DL. 2) Our computers came with a 6GB HD and on the $50/month I was making, no upgrades. Since CDR was rarer back then, there were guys actually making money by burning CDs for $5 with either CD tracks or chock full of mp3.
Moral of the story: Don't think that the administration is only now learning of p2p and its questionable legality. It's been at USNA as it as been at every other college campus.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
>Legal definition of property [lectlaw.com]
Again, the non-physical definition refers to the actual right to call the item yours. ie: The right to put your name on a project. It is theft if I download an MP3 by the Beatles and rename it to say "By: shepd". However, I didn't see anything in there that says it's theft if I'm simply in posession of the unmodified MP3.
>Copyright myths dispelled [templetons.com]
Contains no references to "theft".
>The actual law [cornell.edu]
For the US. Outside, this is much more likely to be it. The original Berne convention mentions no references to theft. I don't know about this revision.
Anyways, the last few aren't exactly legal help sites, so I'll say this:
I think it still stands that downloading music from KaZaa is infact copyright violation, and not theft. But IANAL, so YMMV.
>You know what they say about people who represents themselves in a court of law?
An intelligent person? Too bad that technically most all courts in the US are now military courts (look for the gold-fringed flags), and in a military court you really do need help.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC