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.

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.

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.

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.