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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."
Maybe they we're bugged 'cos of all the illegal copies of "In The Navy" by YMCA ;)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
The Navy would be raiding RIAA computer ;).
Go ahead, I'll take the karma hit!
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
My buddy who just went to college was so psyched and then they locked the whole network down. No p2p or hosting of anysort... He can't even connect to my web server because it runs on port 81.
so much for looking forward to college. All because of these bastard RIAA heads.
_________ Help me get a PSP!
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?
I always knew the Navy was full of pirates.
word.
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.
How long before we start to see corporate sponsership of our armed forces? Ideas like "Apple Navy", "AOL/Time-Warner Air Force" and "Dell Army" are becoming less outlandish.
On the plus side, the marketing would be interesting.
"...and the F-16 was all like beepbeepbeep..."
Just put an end to their whole propoganda "we are going to get everyone and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law" shit. If there is one thing on earth you don't fuck with its people with the power to make it very difficult for you to operate. The US Naval Academy (as well as other military institutions) has stronger ties to business, schools and government than the RIAA/MPAA/etc/etc could ever dream of. These are the people that have strong influential power when it comes to basically anything regarding basically anything. Not only that but these institutions harbor great ill-will to anyone threatening the "future of our country" over something they'll see as extremely "trivial".
Also, once you piss one military institution off unless it's a battle between divisions (army vs navy etc) then none of them like you. I can already see alot of top brass talking about these Lobbying institutions especially since Thanksgiving is coming up. The word will spread and friends of friends, families who have made service life a career will hear about this. It will spread to public servants etc and this one action seriously just damaged any pull the RIAA/MPAA/NMPA and the Songwriters Guild had with government. Especially considering the state of affairs on the table now. Not only that but the owners of the equipment that was seized will truly remember this especially if they get article 15's as well as not knowing if you're fucking with the next (insert influential power here) or if one of those young men/women has a father/mother/aunt/uncle who happens to be a congressman or senator or what have you.
Some of the recording industry's biggest stars, such as Madonna, Mick Jagger and Eminem, have joined coalitions to combat the wholesale theft of music. The industry claims this threatens the livelihood of everyone from artists, songwriters and manufacturers to sound engineers and record-store owners and clerks.
:-).
Finally the industry realizes that these thuggish tactics are going to hurt their sales
The military academies have a very strict code of honor. For a midshipman to be caught with something like pirated music would probably result in summary dismissal from the academy.
Evidence presented by the RIAA that midshipmen were engaging in illegal activites like this would really cause the administration of Annapolis to investigate quite carefully, and be VERY upset if this sort of thing was going on.
I feel sorry for these people - if they are caught with pirated music, their careers at the Naval academy are done.
Some of the recording industry's biggest stars, such as Madonna, Mick Jagger and Eminem, have joined coalitions to combat the wholesale theft of music. The industry claims this threatens the livelihood of everyone from artists, songwriters and manufacturers to sound engineers and record-store owners and clerks.
I feel for these people, I really do. I say we set up a Paypal account to help keep Mick, Madonna and Marshall (emineminem?) fed and clothed. Oh sure, take me to task on this but honestly, shouldn't the RIAA present better examples than pampared, multimillionaire recording artists to make their case. I mean c'mon, Mick Jagger could never sell another record in his life and still live like a king, same with Madonna. This RIAA FUD is preposterous. These people can afford to buy their records, I can't and neither can a lot of people I know, that's just the sad reality of things right now. So I'm a thief, well I guess that's just a matter of perspective isn't it?
In the Pentagon, it became so common for the chart jockies to put together such enormous PPTs that brought down the internal networks at the Pentagon just shipping the PPTs around to the audience that the Brass had to ban/restrict its use. It was common for even the most ordinary presentation to contain movies, sounds sub programs, shooting stars.... Presentations typically ran to the multi-hundred megabytes.
I guess what I'm getting at is the DoD has a culture of extreme presentation and content bloat for no good reason. Seems to me that the upper management tacitly approves of massive media collection and sharing.
Forget all of the debate here on /. about whether or not copying copyrighted material is theft. For these 100 midshipmen, the real question is whether or not the Naval Academy will consider their acts as "theft" and charge them with violating the Honor Concept.
Naval Academy Midshipmen serve under an Honor Concept, which states:
"A midshipman does not lie, cheat, or steal."
Penalties for violating the Honor Concept include: reprimand, being sent to the fleet for a year (and maybe being allowed to come back), and getting thrown out of the Naval Academy.
Hopefully, the Honor Board won't get involved and these midshipmen will be subjected to only administrative discipline (loss of weekend liberty for a period of time, etc.).
You can count on one thing though - Everyone at the Naval Academy will get lectured on how they can't illegally duplicate copywritten material, and the next midshipmen who get caught won't get off so easily.
IAAUSNAG - I am a United States Naval Academy Graduate
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
Remember, only the RIAA is allowed to steal from needy artists. May God help anyone else who tries.
I do security
I mean honestly, they were using what is essentially a government network even if it was their own machine. The midshipmen were stupid. I am surprised that their superiors did not catch it before the RIAA did.
Gorkman
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!
- As others have noted, the middies had to have been smoking something to put anything on P2P from the Academy.
- The Academy just qualified for the Pearl Harbor Memorial Security Award by actually having an wide-open network.
- The Content Cartel just caused an entire year's worth of middies to get flushed down the tubes. People Who Count won't forget what this particular witch-hunt cost.
In the long run, this cost the Cartel so much good-will that it will take freaking million$ in bribes^Wcampaign contributions to repair the damage.Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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?
Why is President Bush wasting all that money trying to track down and eliminate Bin Laden when he could simply report him to the RIAA for breaching their copyright.
Clearly the RIAA has far more power at its disposal than the US military and although Bin Laden has managed to evade the united power of the armed services, he wouldn't stand a chance against the recording industry.
Better still -- tell Hillary that Saddam has a huge collection of MP3s and boy-band CDs copied onto CDR. No need for a UN mandate, she'd be in and clean him out in no time!
But what I *really* want to see is the RIAA conduct a raid on the IRS computers to look for copyright breaches.
Now that would be great -- a real clash of the titans eh?
The sad thing is that it's the every-day Joe who's paying for all these power-plays -- either through our CD purchases or our taxes.
Couldn't they find something better to do with all this money?
1) Soldiers fall under the UCMJ not the Constitution when it comes to legal rights.
2) These Naval Academy students face being bounced out of there for violating the "code of conduct".
3) Ragging on /. will NOT change the fact that the RIAA has the "current" law on their side.
If you don't like the law, then become politically active and lobby for change instead of wining that you think it is wrong.
"All battles are fought by scared men who'd rather be somewhere else." John Wayne
Not that it's any surprise around here, but this statement is a flat out lie. It would be one thing if the recording industry was engaging in a constructive debate somewhere, or at least sticking to facts, but instead they've chosen to deceive and lie to protect their way of doing business. Why can't our government recognize this and stop catering to this corruption? (I have a few ideas, but that's another story.)
This is very different from "walking into the campus bookstore and in a clandestine manner walking out with a textbook without paying for it." For one thing, it's not very clandestine - or at least there's no specific effort to make it such. Secondly there is no tangible good being "walked out" with. A closer analogy would be walking into a campus bookstore (better yet, a friend's house), and reading a textbook without paying for it. But, of course, that wouldn't serve their interests. Obviously this isn't a clear-cut issue, but lying to the public to get their way is just disgusting, and displays a remarkable lack of integrity, IMO.
So, I think we can now safely conclude that the RIAA has an operation mounted inside the NAVY, how else do they know which computers to point out (I assume the NAVY has a little firewall, or are academy systems directly connected ?)
MP3 Search Engine
I'm almost about to consider it a troll, but I'd rather believe you've listened to a little bit too much newspeak.
DRM may prove who owns what, but it will not matter. You will no longer "buy" or own any CD or DVD you have, despite owning the media it's on. It will simply be licenced, under the licence "negotiated" between the CD/DVD and your trusted computer. Most likely you'll get a EULA-clickthrough the first time you put it in your computer, if at all. It's not like you accept or decline the region restrictions on your DVDs either.
And you can no longer ignore it, legal or illegal EULA, as your DRM hardware will enforce it on you with no way of circumventing it without committing a federal crime under the DMCA.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Geez....when I was in the Army (saw Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Egypt, etc) when I got to Kosovo in 2000 I found one of the computers in my area had over 10 gigs of MP3s on it!
I defy ANYONE to go to ANY military base and NOT find at least 10 or machines with tons of MP3s on them.
Oh, yeah, and when they do, I want them to PROVE that they were "illegally downloaded".
You see, Uncle Sam is blocking p2p software AT THE BLOODY ROUTERS! YOU CAN'T USE FILE SHARING PROGRAMS AT ALL ON THE MILNET ANYMORE! And MP3s are put on the websense "kill list" so you can't even download them from the web either! They even blocked a anti-terrorism brief from us because the company that made it put it in MP3 format which we couldn't get through websense. Had to go through an unauthorized PROXY server to get it.
Go figure. After the Kosovo 2000 debacle with the MP3s, Uncle Sam is starting to block that crap. At least at the Army level. Air Force and Navy are a whole different kettle of fish.
I even RUN some of the networks the Army in Germany uses, and I can't get past it. The contractors that put the blocks in were pretty damn good at what they do.
I mean, the vast majority of people, anyway. I doubt I could find one person's computer on a collage campus that didn't have pirated content.
The trick would be finding people who are distributing huge amounts of the stuff. In fact, I'm not even sure it's technically illegal to have pirated content.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"`Theft' is a harsh word, but that it is, pure and simple," the letter stated. "... It is no different from walking into the campus bookstore and in a clandestine manner walking out with a textbook without paying for it."
Because I was thinking it was more like walking into the campus bookstore, reading a book, and leaving, maybe ocassionally coming back to re-read parts of it. I didn't realize that everytime I listen to a song on the Internet, that song disappears from existence.. no wonder music today sucks so bad.. I've been removing all the good stuff... damnit, how could I have been so stupid!
You know what they say about people who represents themselves in a court of law? Glad I'm not you guys.
Legal definition of property
Copyright myths dispelled
The actual law
Fair use & copyright resourse at stanford
More resourses pro & con
Intellectual property
I know people don't want to read and understand the above, but they certainly want to voice their opinion of the way it should be when the law comes after them. A little late IMHO.
This does the heart good to read all this stuff again. Hello to you fellow grads!
When I was a midshipman, I ran an online web site that wasn't particularly favorable to USNA. It took the Commandant a year to figure out it was me, but when he did, I was threatened with a Court Martial if I didn't hand the site over to him so that it could become a legimate "Log" again.
The reason it was against the rules for me to create such a site was that I was using the USNA network inappropriately. This of course, is a very broad rule and open to interpretation by the Commandant, and he interpreted in a way not favorable to my cause.
Also having been one of the two midshipmen responsible for the computer systems and their various uses, did not help my argument.
In any event, part of my job was to monitor the networks for mp3's and such, and we had to "crack down" a few times. It was always a slap on the wrist, especially when it was a group of midshipmen.
If I had to guess, the Academy leadership wants to stop this activity once and for all, and this is a good way to make the mids scared of being kicked out.
I was scared enough to give them back The Log, two days before graduation, when they gave me the choice.
-Salty Sam '01
IIRC the below site should still have the rules for the USNA network.
MISLO Web Site
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
>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