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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?"
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.
Context:
Now that anyone I know can afford a book how will the church control information? Now that anyone I know can afford to copy a page from a book, how will publishers and printers stay in business?
Shit happens. It's not our government's job to protect us from knowledge and information... unlike in those "free" countries you mentioned.
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
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"
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
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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
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!?!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.