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."

Comments

Music?

[T-Kir]

Maybe they we're bugged 'cos of all the illegal copies of "In The Navy" by YMCA ;)

Re:Music?

[Jucius Maximus]

""`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.""

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.

Re:Music?

[Mike Schiraldi]

It's not piracy because they're not raping and murdering on the high seas.

It's not theft because there's no missing property.

It is copyright infringement. But some would argue it falls under fair use.

Re:Music?

[Mike Schiraldi]

As soon as someone downloads music that they would have otherwise purchased, there is a theft of the money that would have been paid.

I was going to go see a movie. A friend told me it sucked. I didn't go see it. Was that theft? Meets your definition.

How about if i was going to buy a book, and a friend stopped me on the way to the bookstore to tell me that they already owned the book and could borrow it from them? Again meets your definition.

How?

[marshac]

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?

Arrr!

[duckpoopy]

I always knew the Navy was full of pirates.

Having gone to a military academy...

[aluminumcube]

I can't imagine being dumb enough to use a school issued computer, on a school run network to do anything even remotly wrong. That would be in defiance of the #1 rule any military academy cadet should know, the very rule to end all rules: Don't Get Caught.

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.

The Future of Warfare

[Nastard]

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..."

Re:The Future of Warfare

[fungus]

Halliburton Air Farce? "This news report on Iraq is brought to you by... Shell! Shell, for a clean and affordable energy source."

The RIAA and MPAA

[I_redwolf]

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.

Industry finally sees the light...

[djmurdoch]

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 :-).

Code of Honor

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Re:Code of Honor

[Dolly_Llama]

It's nice to think that the mystique of the service academies still lives.

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.

The DoD recent;y barred Powerpoint

[gelfling]

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.

This is more serious than you think...

[DavidBrown]

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

RIAA: Big brother of the Artist

[Gyorg_Lavode]

Remember, only the RIAA is allowed to steal from needy artists. May God help anyone else who tries.

My **AA fights...

[rosewood]

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.

Damned if you do

[overshoot]

This was so amazingly un-smart for everyone involved that I'm utterly stunned.

• 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.

Burdon of proof?

[3-State Bit]

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 Bush wasting all that money?

[NewtonsLaw]

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?

No Veterans in the /. community?

[Old.UNIX.Nut]

For those of you who have NEVER served in the Military I will clue you in.

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

Re:No Veterans in the /. community?

[joshki]

nope. sorry.
cite all the cases you want, it doesn't change the fact that the UCMJ is not really subject to the constitution. Certain articles of the bill of rights are in the UCMJ, such as the right against self-incrimination at a court-martial.
The problem is that you fail to understand the distinction between a court-martial and an article 15 hearing, which is what these young dumb-asses are going face. Article 15 hearings are not federal court cases, and as such are not subject to the constitution. The only thing that is limited is the punishment that can be handed down -- i.e. your CO can't sentence you to keel-hauling or flogging with a cat-o-nine-tails anymore. He can, however, summarily dismiss you from the military -- which is just as bad as far as these people are concerned. There are no rules -- if you try to request legal representation you will be pushed to rescind that request, as it will only make your punishment worse.

I know -- I've been to an article 15 hearing (coloquially known as Captain's Mast in the Navy). You are guilty from the moment charges are filed -- nothing you say or do will change the outcome. Everything from that point on is based on trying to minimize the punishment you get for whatever you were accused of, guilty or not.

Re:No Veterans in the /. community?

[Froomkin]

I'm afraid that you are wrong as a matter of law: If you are denied due process rights at an Army art. 15 hearing -- e.g. ordered to incriminate yourself -- you have a federal case, and you'll win. What you don't understand is that the "process that is due" is much reduced in the military; which is probably as it should be. Nevertheless, it remains that case that the constitution applies at all times; it just happens that in the circumstances you mention the Constitution doesn't do much for you in a routine case; indeed you may not even have a right to go to court at all to correct routine error. In part this is because the courts have held that art. 15 punishements are "administrative" and not "criminal" in nature. Middendorf v. Henry, 425 U.S. at 31; Dumas v. U. S. 620 F.2d 247 (Ct.Cl. 1980).

What the Constitution does is protect you against non-routine mistreatment: For example, suppose your CO orders you to convert to {fill in religion}, or penalizes you extra for a failure to pray. That's a First Amendment violation, and would be illegal even if military regulations permitted it (I'm sure they don't). Have a look at Weiss v. U.S.. The theory (right or wrong) is that if you wanted the additional constituitional protections that attach even to criminal prosecutions in military trials, you should have exercised your right to reject the art. 15 and demand a full court martial [a right that AFAIK exists for all military personnel except those serving on board ships at sea]. Yes, I understand that in practice the punishments get worse if you are seen to be wasting more people's time.

As for the defendant's perception that all he has left to bargain for is the level of punishment, this isn't actually so different from the civilian system: prosecutors have so many more things they might do than they have time for, they tend to charge the ones they think are most guilty or serious. Unless you have something exculpatory the police missed, you're reduced to plea bargaining: which is just another form of "trying to minimize the punishment you get for whatever you were accused of, guilty or not."

Note, however, that if you are caught red-handed it's ok to punish you more for failing to confess. That's done in the civilian courts (both by higher charges, since you didn't plea bargain, and by higher sentencing for 'failure to take responsibility'). I don't necessarily agree with that, but that's the law, and I can't see why it couldn't be done in the military.

Now you are going to tell me that any idiot who thinks he can win such a federal case and have a military career afterwards has no sense. That's probably true, but that goes to the tendency of all organizations to retaliate against whistle-blowers, not what the rules say.

Here's a (farily) simple rule: The US Constitution applies to everything the US government does, not just court cases. It applies to all three branches of government including the executive (which includes the military). But "due process" is not a one size fits all standard. Rather, it's the start of an inquiry, 'What process is due under these circumstances?'

PS. I'm not a veteran. I'm a law professor.

You will not OWN it.

[Kjella]

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

Re:Music?-Accountability?

[shepd]

>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.