Slashdot Mirror
Bill Would Let FBI Police File-Sharing
vnguyen6 writes "According to an article on MSNBC, a bill introduced in the Senate gives the FBI power to police file sharing. As if the FBI didn't have their own messes to clean up such as the handling of pre-911 intelligence, FBI agents turned spy (Robert Hanssen), the Los Alamos lab debacle, double agent Mrs. Katrina Leung, need I say more?"
What is music when you despise all sound?
If P2P threatens our economy as much as some people think, why shouldn't the FBI go after pirates and the like?
Sure that's all debatable, but local law enforcement isn't up to the task. It's a decentralized problem geographically, but from another perspective it's centralized on the net and attacking it might best be handled by a central, and technologically capable command. The FBI seems like the most logical choice.
Sure they have other fish to fry, but considering that most people I know, including those who can barely use a computer, are sharing software movies and music, perhaps government has to grow a little to keep this from becoming even worse as in some places like China and Russia.
And I agree, this is corperatism and it's absolute bullshit. I'm getting sick and tired of hearing about how goverment agency X attempts to enfoce the unenforcable with new and buggier technology, then proceeds to hange some poor guy or gal on the highest pole they can fine. Pretty soon time will be copyrighted and so will words.
This is a complete waste of our goverment which can be doing useful things such as tracking down pedophiles or hanging rapists assholes. Hell, if corperates had their way police would be giving out nothing but tickets, letting the real criminals go (becuase it costs money to put em' in jail)...I don't think most polcemen signed onto the force to go after the average joe who's sick of a media monopoly, I think they'd rather be cracking the skull a real criminal.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
I doubt the FBI have much of the resources - now. They could be conviently funded by the RIAA though and get resources directed to this.
So it comes down to a secretive police force investigating people on behalf of corporate funding rather than allowing these funds to be spent on murder, terrorism, rape or theft charges.
Shame on you.
I dont have the energy to read the article but how would FBI, The US Goverment and the US public feel about non-us goverments policing p2p-nets? Would they be outraged or welcome the "help"? The Internet is public domain, not US property.
I guess they won't touch average Joe Geek for file sharing, but if they see you are suspect, they may arrest you, just for this bogus reason that you shared your files and start some more serious investigation with you legally in jail.
In darkest times of communist terror in Poland, there was a common saying "Don't worry, they can find a paragraph for everyone". Seems this law is just one more of such paragraphs to "match everyone".
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I'm not questioning their right to prosecute people that distribute copyrighted material. My main problem with this law is: "That would probably authorize them to tell ISPs, âYou also need to give information on users to the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) whenever they ask.â(TM)â I just think there's a lot of room for abuse here...maybe I'm just paranoid.
-William Brendel
Back when america wasn't trying to become the most powerful fascist state in the world, copyright violation was only a civil offense, not criminal.
This seems like it's already in their domain. Don't they already have the authority to intercept and monitor electronic communications? Have jurisdiction over interstate transfers/transactions/deliveries? Can prosecute cases with more than $5,000 damage (which, thanks to inflated estimates, copyright infringement cases are)? And hey, it's a feature of most p2p apps that they essentially open up your computer for inspection for the potentially offending material, so it's not like they need to legislate around unreasonable search/seizure laws.
I really don't see what extra powers the FBI needs here.
Tweet, tweet.
I can just imagine 100 million people being arrested by the FBI due to copyright infringements...
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure copyright infringement is a civil crime and hence is not an arrestable offense. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
right? Whatever happened to the millions of cases the FBI solved, or prevented crimes, or caught murderers? You never hear about them, so you only get this picture of a bumbling group of people wearing FBI coats.
As far as I know, the FBI already investigates software piracy claims (at least in the sense of people making illegal copies available). However, they obviously have not completely stopped that (far from it really). They didn't even have a handle on it before the big P2P apps came along. Sure, it was probably never so easy as typing in "free microsoft windows" in a web search engine, but you could always find things if you knew where to look (IRC comes to mind in the days before more automated P2P). I'm skeptical that P2P enforcement would be any different. If anything, it would be harder to deal with, because of the distributed nature of lots of networks. This isn't just a matter of shutting down a warez FTP site.
Also important is that the FBI's enforcement capabilities end at US borders. Of course other governments could follow the US example and take similar steps with their law enforcement agencies. However, I just don't see countries like China or Russia really cracking down on P2P users, judging from their responses to software copyright infringement.
Maybe at first, a lot of people would get scared enough, stop using P2P, and things would go more underground. However, the available content would not drop off as dramatically, because there would still be lots of overseas nodes to draw files from.
Wholesale copying of the entirety of hundred or thousands of titles and making those copies available to an audience of strangers across the entire globe is not, and never has been, considered fair use.
If you copy your entire CD collection and serve it up to the world, that's infringement, not fair use.
The only thing that the great crowd of filesharing whiners is going to get for the rest of us is a bunch of costly and annoying technical copy prohibition schemes.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Well, the *first* problem (as I see it) is that this A LOT to police. To start with there are LOTS of people involved in P2P. Next, the FBI would need to determine to reasonable extent that the material is infringing. While a lot of things on Kazaa are illegal, not everything is.
As far as I know, the FBI already investigates software piracy claims (at least in the sense of people making illegal copies available). However, they obviously have not completely stopped that (far from it really). They didn't even have a handle on it before the big P2P apps came along. Sure, it was probably never so easy as typing in "free microsoft windows" in a web search engine, but you could always find things if you knew where to look (IRC comes to mind in the days before more automated P2P). I'm skeptical that P2P enforcement would be any different. If anything, it would be harder to deal with, because of the distributed nature of lots of networks. This isn't just a matter of shutting down a warez FTP site.
Also important is that the FBI's enforcement capabilities end at US borders. Of course other governments could follow the US example and take similar steps with their law enforcement agencies. However, I just don't see countries like China or Russia really cracking down on P2P users, judging from their responses to software copyright infringement.
Maybe at first, a lot of people would get scared enough, stop using P2P, and things would go more underground. However, the available content would not drop off as dramatically, because there would still be lots of overseas nodes to draw files from
I don't want to see any replies to this post. Get away from Slashdot and do something other than whine, or you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
Are you still here? Stop reading and start acting!
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
No i think they should start at the home - FBI stakeouts should raid teens who lend cd's to their friends. These crack-houses of teen music sharing need to be shut down. This sort of crime has been going on way longer than modern internet file sharing. Infact ever since consumer availiable music and video recordings were availiable people have been illigally "lending" eachother copies. This sort of crime has got to stop. Theres no easy way to police file trading without getting caught up in all sorts of messy 1st amendment, freedom of this and that laws so i think the FBI should concentraite on the more tangable, phyisical and "real" cd swapping going on. Thats just my opinion
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
This strikes me as a continuation of the cost-shifting that began when sufficient levels of copyright violation were made 'criminal'. The cost of prosecuting a civil case is borne by the plaintiff (i.e. the RIAA). The cost of prosecuting a criminal case is borne by the taxpayer. Hence the criminalisation of copyright violation caused the costs of prosecuting those violations to be shifted from the RIAA et al to the taxpayer.
This is the same type of thing. The RIAA et al faces fairly high costs in trying to deal with P2P networks. Putting the FBI in charge of policing P2P networks means the taxpayer will be funding those investigations instead of the RIAA.
Is this where our Tax Paying money is going? Is this why we have the FBI? Funny, I thought it was to keep murderers and rapists off the street, you know...DANGEROUS CRIMINALS. I didn't know that they were going to go after the millions of TEENAGERS who are downloading the latest song off the net.
I must give the RIAA credit though, they finally realized that they could not afford the bill to keep suing people with no money so they bri...er gave campaign contributions to some congressman to make the tax payers pay the bill. Something about the sleaziness of all this that you have to admire.
What will the FBI do though? The FBI likes to go after people with MONEY or is a high profile person. The majority of users donâ(TM)t fit either of those categories. The FBI will make a big show of going after people at first but one they find out the joys of WHACK-A-MOLE P2P they will only go after the big fish like the riaa is doing anyway.
I hope this bill donâ(TM)t pass but I am too pessimistic to believe otherwise
is eternal vigilance ...
... like invent a decentrallized p2p network and then trade files with each other.
....
The problem with Freedom is - you never know what people will actually do with it
Stay tuned - the war continues
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
I don't say anyone has the right to illegally download copyrighted material. In fact I try to discourage people from doing that as it hurts both legitimate file sharing and artists who want to cheaply publish to anyone interested, as well as open source software.
.
Those people will be targeted as well. Shooting a cannon against a mosquito. Or, if you like, from the POV of the offenders, mobilising the whole city police squad for getting someone who stole an apple
All the while real big crime, human abuse and terrorism (don't confuse that with proclaimed vision or opinion, people who steep so low are either desperate or for sale for anything or both) can flourish because the FBI has Stasi ambitions.
Now think about how money flows in spending and revenue. Upwards when, downwards when? Someone must benifit. Someone runs the show. There you have corporatism.
Hear hear!
I download plenty of things that I did not pay for, but I don't try to rationalize my actions with bullshit arguments about 'rights'. What I'm doing is illegal, and possibly immoral. When I speed, I don't get angry at the cop for pulling me over, I knew I was doing something illegal, did it anyway, and got caught.
I may feel that some of the specifics of the speeding laws are off-base, I may feel that some streets have the wrong minimum speeds, but that doesn't mean that I feel that we should tear the whole concept of speeding violations down. Just as I feel that lengths of copyrights, and who can own them and what can be done with them might be wrong, but I still see the good in them (protecting people who make their living by their ideas).
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
I went and saw Sade in concert only after hearing an mp3 of hers. My wife and I would NEVER have done that without first hearing her latest music. She's come very far since the eighties.
The corporate machine is not fascist, or totalitarian. It's greedy, is all. The dummies who want to kill p2p are just shooting themselves in the foot because they aren't smart enought to realize that it BOOSTS the ecconomy. Come on Harvard, where are the papers to back this up!?!
If McDonald's announced it were going to start selling BBQ pork chops, would you say "as if they didn't have their own messes...one time an employee spit in a burger...need I say more?"
If this was following a spate of food poisoning incidents from McDonalds' products on a serious scale then I think a lot of people would see a problem with them putting resources into a new product launch instead of sorting out their problems.
Ah, like the MA state law which makes it illegal to "misuse" the equipment in your vehicle, which cops use to stop you when there's something hanging from your rear-view mirror, if they don't like the looks of you? Then there's the popular-in-movies "[smack] Gee, your taillight is out..."
How about an even better one- speed limits. Everyone exceeds them at least a little bit, and the cops pretty much don't care except in two cases: a)when they don't like the looks of you and need an excuse to stop you and b)when they've got a quota of sorts to fill on tickets.
Please help metamoderate.
The discussion is not about whether copyrights are justified nor is it about whether or not it's okay to download music from FastTrack.
The discussion is about the FBI enforcing the *CIVIL* offense of copyright violation.
When corporations can buy enough influence to make their desires law, it's called "corporatism", or "facism".
Please try to stay on topic
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Despite the obvious flaws of the FBI, including the Hooverite legacy, let's keep in mind why the police (including the FBI) exist -- to enforce laws, instead of having a bunch of vigilantes enforce the laws in the particular manner they want. Quite frankly the FBI is much more appropriate in this way than all the various "let's deputize copyright holders and let them go out and enforce", including stuff like Palladium and the recent Hollings proposal. Far too many proposals lately have been effectively about creating a corporate police force.
There is no guarantee this law will stop criminal activity. However, "copyright holders" have a track record of using these types of laws to silence detractors and competitors. Just think of all the abuses of the DMCA. A guy was going to give a speech about how crappy ebook encription was, so the company had him arrested under the DMCA. Printer manufacturers use it to shut down competing ink cartridge manufacturers. Various cults and companies routinely use it to shut down naysayer websites. The list goes on and on.
In these cases, States + Corporations do equal fascism! More and more these days, the US Government together with large Corporations (not nessesarily US based) are acting like the old Soviet Union. Censorship (DMCA). Banning of devices which may override censorship (mandated DRM). Taking away individual's property rights (Selling something to a customer, then, after they pay, saying it's really leased, and you have to follow a very absurd and restrictive license agreement). In Soviet Russia, the government owns you. In Soviet US, the corporations own you.
Things like this are going to destroy what is left of the Internet. And piss off even more of their 'consumer base'.
After the commercialization pretty much destroyed what it stood for.
On a related note, when did it become the problem of the FBI to investigate CIVIL issues?
Oh wait, its all part of total control of information... nevermind. The whole thing just pisses me off.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Because the RIAA pays them to.
Hijack a million open proxies to fill your kids' inboxes with h0t w3t 5lutz wh0 w4nt 2 suk ur c0ck? No problem! (Hell, not even charter.com gives a fuck, and it's charter's clueless fuckwit customers whose open proxies are being abused to tell your kids about incest goat pr0n.)
But listen to Britney Spears without paying RIAA their cut? Yo, dude, that's a crime. FBI'll be on your ass like Hilary Rosen on a box of Krispy Kremes.
All I want is to live in a world where comments like this could be moderated (-1, Troll) instead of (+1, Informative).
The real reason will begin to emerge.......
People need to understand a few principles before rationally contemplating what is
happening to the transformation of the internet.
First, the U.S. Government is a corporate entity that is no different than the
corporations it protects. The government protects it's interest, which also happens to be
the commerce of the nation, which in turn happens to be the multi-facted head of the
corporate machine in the United States.
With that said it will give you a better view of what is GOING to happen to the internet
over the next couple of years in the wake of the âoefalse-flagâ operation called 9-11
(Yes, as shocking as it may be to some, 9-11 was a staged event. Do your homework
and the truth will hit you like a ten-pound sledgehammer in the head.).
Second, since the U.S. Government is directly tied to the big media machine's interest
it should come as no surprise that members of Congress are going to press for a
huge policing of the net. It will hinge upon the peer-to-peer networks and directly target
âoefile swappingâ. The RIAA and the MPAA will just love this type of enforcement because they cite these networks as the prime reason that their respective revenues have dropped over the past few years. They however, will ignore the fact that music content just plain sucks or that the ECONOMY is terrible and maybe people aren't buying their souless content because they need to eat and buy shoes. The main problem with this is that the onus of making the R and D necessary to protect the music and video industries
products as âoedigitialy safeâ, is NOT the public's concern and nor should it be. I simply
don't care how much it costs a multi-billion dollar media megahouse to develop a
system of preventing piracy. However, what I do take offense at is when these
same multi-billion dollar behemoths lobby Congress to write laws that WILL someday
affect your freedoms. This is not the same as understanding copyright law. That would
be a very welcome thing indeed. If the American public understood what the Constitution
laid out about copyright law and how it's been abused by the corporate machine, then
the laws would all be repealed in a heartbeat and new FAIR laws would replace them.
However, that would take throwing out the scam-artist politicians out of both
Houses of Congress first, which won't happen anytime soon.
Thirdly, the laws that are coming down the pike won't be limited to just MP3's and the
occasional MPEG movie. Eventually these rapers of free speech and dissemination
of information want to be able to target people being able to relay information that flies
in the face of the national policy. Any content that can be seen as copyrighted will be
âoeprotectedâ and thus be policed by the some federal agency. That means that eventually the system will be able to hold individuals accountable for trading important pieces of any copyrighted and written material. You see the point will be to halt the few exchange of ideas. The system wants total ignorance and a cover for the invisible veil of the inner
mechanisms in the corporate structure.
Unless the people who have helped to create the wonders of the internet and the freedoms
that it represents get onboard to protect it against abuse, then the last hope for a free vocal and democratic society in America is about to fall further down the rabbithole of fascism.
I don't understand why people don't phone, fax or write the people in Congress. They do hear us. However, they are often reluctant to do anything because they know that the populace rarely holds their feet to the fire over any issue. Only when the professional politicians are threatened, as in the case of re-election do they ask for your input. The ONLY remedy to our current problems threatening the very fabric of the democratic form of government in the United States, is a major third party presence in the Congress and White House, that can clean up the problems. That's the bottom line. More people active in politics and caring just a little bit more about who is in office than what J-Lo wears to the Oscars and things might change....until then we are sooooo
screwed.
I'm not delusional about the fact that I'm stealing.
Jesus Christ! It is NOT theft! It is copyright infringement! They are two very different things!
1. If the FBI started pulling over speeders and making them serve 5 year jail terms, you would presumably have to protest.
2. Speeding is a criminal act. File sharing is not. Copyright violation is a CIVIL matter.
-Graham
The FBI persuing the LAW, which coincendintly equates to persuing the interests of RIAA...
'tis no coincidence, my friend. Those laws were paid for by RIAA.
Why, exactly do you think that copyrights are *wrong*? I don't mean the specifics -- "xx years is too many, xx would be better", "xxx company abuses it" -- but why is the actual concept the use of an idea being controlled by the person who thought up the idea (and if anybody has a better def of copyright, feel free to tell me) not good?
I don't think they're wrong per se...
But. Think of it this way:
Say you have some land. I round up a posse and kick you off your land. Now you no longer have a place to live. I've taken something away from you.
Now say you sing a song. Then I round up a band and we sing the song. You still have the song. I have the song, too. I've taken nothing away from you.
See the difference?
There is a catch. Songwriting takes a certain amount of effort, and it is useful to me to encourage you to write more songs by giving you some sort of compensation for that effort. In fact, it's useful to society at large to encourage creative people to create. It enhances our lives and our culture when we are surrounded by songs and stories. And other forms of "intellectual property" -- medical and scientific ideas, specifically -- are more concretely useful.
Thus copyright. So that you can be compensated for your ideas, and thus be encouraged to come up with more of them. However...
It's important not to forget that all of this is little more than a gentleman's agreement: I give you control of your ideas so that you can make money, and this will supposedly encourage you to create more ideas to entertain and enlighten me. It's a matter of sheer practicality -- copyright is not a moral principle.
The problem of is that some people involved in the agreement have gotten greedy. Instead of requesting reasonable compensation, artists desire to be millionaires. Instead of running a reasonably sized business, the record companies, movie studios, and book publishers want to rake in billions each year.
That's nice for them. But I simply can't afford to contribute much to their fortunes. I have a couple of hundred of dollars of spare budget every month after paying the necessary bills. Part of this needs to go into a rainy day fund. Part of it is earmarked for nights out on the town with friends. I can buy a couple of DVDs and/or CDs and/or books per month with the remaining amount.
Or I can buy high-speed Internet access and download as much stuff as I want.
Which to choose? I'm afraid it's not that hard: High speed access, all the way. If the studios and artists want my money, they can offer their songs and stories at a more reasonable price. Otherwise, well, BitTorrent is my friend.
(Note: I've also purchased a subscription to emusic, because that is one of the few reasonably priced IP distributors out there, and downloading from them saves me from wasting time hunting stuff up on p2p software -- we need more services like it.)
~ PeteVG
Try this question: Is it possible to win a presidential election without corporate sponsorship? I think Bill Hicks said it best when he compared the Democrats and Republicans to a pair of puppets, sharing a puppeteer.
ummm
its not a bullshit argument. no, there may be no inherent RIGHT to the product. Likewise there is no inherent RIGHT to protection. The current protection system is corporateserving and corrupt. Illegal != immoral, as you alluded to.
When a cop pulls me over, I understand why they did. But I may not necessarily think what they did is moral. Insofar as it is their job, yes. But there are towns in my state who use traffic tickets as a sole source of profit. Roads are zoned for tickettaking. Roads that arent profitable are not enforced as much. I find this immoral and a waste of my tax money.
The system is fucked. Do you get uneccesarily mad at the messenger? No. But do you take it up the ass like you really deserved it? No. The line needs to be drawn somewhere.
Im curious though...how DO you rationalize your theft?
"When I speed, I don't get angry at the cop for pulling me over, I knew I was doing something illegal, did it anyway, and got caught."
When you get caught speeding, you don't have your car confiscated and auctioned off with the money going directly to the police department. You don't face prison sentences, especially not in political concentration camps in Cuba. (Cuba? How come I don't hear any outrage that the US has a concentration camp in Cuba, or ANY business there, inside the borders of our sworn enemy?)
No, when you get caught speeding, you get a ticket. You pay the ticket. Maybe your insurance goes up. That's all.
What we're looking at now is the War on Drugs strategy applied to the entertainment industry.
America's last export...
Abuse does not take away use.
-- Thomas Aquinas
since when does everyone think they have the "RIGHT" to download software that doesn't belong to them?
Since when does Congress think it has the right to make "intellectual property" rights virtually perpetual? We've been talking about fucked up political systems, but maybe we're just missing the forest for the trees. I can only hope that someday people will look back at this time and rightly deride the politicians of the last century for what they have done to our intellectual property system.
Whatever happened to the millions of cases the FBI solved, or prevented crimes, or caught murderers?
I deal with them all the time as a newsman. That is their friggin' job. They are the federal police and they catch criminals. They work on high profile cases. That is what they do. Slapping them on the back for a job well done? Then you really are going to wear your arm out slapping everyone else in America on the back as well for doing their job right, and keeping society running. I love those guys, but sucking up to their good points just slows down the process... besides it is a special person that can be in the FBI, they choose them for loyalty and determination.
If you want to thank anyone in law enforcement, thank the beat cops in major cities, they are the ones that have to shake the tree daily and find the street punks that are the most dangerous to the public at large. FBI can be patient and call in all the people they want, due to the nature of the criminals they are pursuing. Beat cops are the ones that most likely get shot. Some FBI agents I know have their gun in their desk. That is a big difference in law enforcement style.
Look, the FBI are good guys. But allowing them jurisdiction on a corporate and civil matter is preposterous. It is corporatism. It is where this country is going. Copyright infringement is not outright theft, but it is not allowable either. It is prosecutable, but the FBI sure as hell does not need to be involved in it. They have much bigger fish to fry these days than worrying about file sharing on the internet.