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?"

Comments

Don't they have something better to do?

[TyrranzzX]

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.

Re:Don't they have something better to do?

[Surak]

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini. (from Encyclopedia Italiana, Giovanni Gentile, editor).

Yup. you hit the nail right on the head.

And this is justified by saying that downloading music and movies online hurts the economy.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The amount of people who only download music and movies and don't buy them can't be very high. First off, only 50% of the households in the U.S. have computers in the first place. Secondly, it's hard to believe that all of those 50% use a file sharing system. After all, only, what? 10% or of those have broadband connections? I mean downloading the stuff over a 56K modem connection takes an excruciating amount of time. And what percentage of those don't buy music or movies and exclusively use stuff they got off the net? Personally, my purchase of movies and music has *increased*, not decreased since I got broadband and started using file sharing services.

And, why would the FBI investigate this stuff? Last I checked, copyright violation was a civil, not a criminal matter. Violation of copyright is not theft anyway. Check with the U.S. copyright office. They do not consider it theft.

Why do we need this government interference in our lives? Why should the RIAA and the MPAA dictate our lives? What happened to our constitutionally limited republic?

I'm sick of this. I'm about ready to move to some country that has smaller government and less governmental interference in my life. Anybody got any suggestions?

Re:A thought...

[Uber Banker]

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.

Bad FBI things only ever get publicised

[Richard_at_work]

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.

Don't you dare comment!

[GrouchoMarx]

If you're taking the time to write a comment on this story, DON'T. Instead, take that same amount of time to write a one page, reasoned, intelligent letter to your Senators (you have two, you know that?) telling them that you disapprove of this bill, telling them WHY (privacy violation, overextension of copyright, and so forth are good places to start), and encouraging them to work against it. Not tomorrow morning, RIGHT NOW. Get away from that Submit button and go write a letter to someone who could actually do something. Then send it snail mail to their LOCAL office (not DC office), or fax it. (Not email. Many offices don't pay attention to email, although some do.)

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!

Re:A thought...

[Tackhead]

> If the FBI won't bother going after someone who has just hijacked charter.com's DNS server entries and is running their own online bank password and credit card number sniffing web proxies, why would they spend a New York minute on a Kazaa user?

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).

Re:Corporatism

[I(rispee_I(reme]

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.