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Bill Would Let FBI Police File-Sharing

Posted by timothy on from the what-would-liddy-do dept.

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?"

14 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Corporatism by Ricin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's called corporatism and was very aptly described and put into context by Mussolini. No troll, no joke.

    1. Re:Corporatism by John+Biggabooty · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Copyright is a anachronism. File trading will soon put it in the dustbin of history where it belongs. An Idea, once expressed, belongs to us all. Those wishing to posess "intellectual property" need only to keep their thoughts in their heads.

      --
      That's Bigboo TAY! TAY!
    2. Re:Corporatism by fucksl4shd0t · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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?

      As a member of the faction of /. that thinks that IP as a government-sponsored institution should be abolished, I feel obligated to respond.

      Copyright isn't wrong, per se. It's flawed. It is based on the idea that any idea that can be had will only ever be had by one person, and then grants control of that idea to the one person that dreams it up for a limited period of time. While I don't think ideas should be controlled, let's take a look at whether or not the base idea is correct.

      First, the chances that someone will think up an idea never change. (Base assumption, the chances might actually change, depending on whether or not new ideas inspire the thought to be had or suppress the thought)

      More and more people in the world everyday means that there are more opportunities for someone to have a certain idea. Laws of statistics are built upon the foundation that coincidences can and do happen, every day in fact.

      Now, the longer a work is, the less likely someone else is to create that identical work. However, when we're talking about music, there's just not that many new ideas coming into play in music. There's your regular 4 chords in rock and roll, and there's hundreds of thousands of songs that all sound the same because they use the same progressions. There's a finite number of permutations of those chords, and a finite number of rhythms and phrases in which you can work those chords. It's no surprise, then, that people create songs that are infringing works. No, I can't substantiate this, other than with the George Harrison suit, and George Harrison wasn't particularly creative so it's likely he did rip off the song. :)

      Novels are a different story, simply because of what is actually copyrighted in a novel. It's the entire text of the book. It doesn't take very long before it becomes highly unlikely that someone else will write a duplicate of the work.

      In any case, there's more people on this planet every year, and more opportunities for a copyright to be infringed by a totally independent creative effort. How do you address this problem?

      Now, patents are different than copyrights, and I'm more opposed to patents than to copyright, because a patent really is giving complete control of an idea to one person for a period of time.

      In other words, if I, say, write a novel and publish it (which I hope to do some day), why shouldn't have some control of how it is sold, what is done with the story, and how profits are made off it?

      Several things, here. First, is the story the part of the book that's copyrighted? Or is it the entire work? Do you want complete control over the story? What happens when you write a book with a story that matches someone else's real life experiences, and they also write a book about it? What part of the work are you seeking control over? Is it the characters? Or is it the work as a whole?

      Nobody's trying to take away your right to try to make money any way you can, we're just trying to make it a more competitive market. That's all. :) Here's a question: if I go down to the bookstore and buy a copy of your book, what right do you have to tell me I can't make copies and pass them around to my friends and family? What right do you have to tell me what I can and can't do with the book I purchased? I say none at all, and if you want that right, don't sell it to me. What right do you have to tell me that I can't quote parts or all of the book in any fashion without your permission? I say that the only responsibility I have in that case is to cite the author and t

      --
      Like what I said? You might like my music
  2. A thought... by c0dedude · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, if this passes, the era of Kazaa et al. will end perminantly, as everyone will be too scared to get caught to share or download as the FBI WILL catch people for copyright violations. Fair use? Hah.

    --
    Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
    1. Re:A thought... by t_allardyce · · Score: 5, Interesting

      So it comes down to a secretive police force investigating people on behalf of corporate funding

      I thought thats exactly what America was about? You mean its not? Well i dont live there, but i just got the impression that politicians and government agencies were all "sponsored" by various corporations with their own agendas.

      rather than allowing these funds to be spent on murder, terrorism, rape or theft charges.

      Q: Who says music piracy is less important than murder? A: Well the RIAA ofcourse! - when your funded by sponsors, you do what they say.

      why do i always confuse IRA with RIAA??

      --
      This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
  3. Knee-jerk policing? by Mr+Smidge · · Score: 5, Interesting

    .. And I wonder what sophisticated monitoring techniques the FBI would use to filter out those individuals who grossly leech tons of files, and those who just happen to be sharing within their fair use rights among friends, and those who just happen to have a library of legally-obtained copyrighted files.

    Oh wait, that's not on their checklist now is it?

  4. Not their job... by wbren · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As the article pointed out, this isn't the FBI's job, and âoe[i]t gives them a chance to scare a lot of users into thinking the government is after them.â This should be handled through the courts, not the RIAABI--err--FBI... I can just imagine 100 million people being arrested by the FBI due to copyright infringements...

    --
    -William Brendel
  5. I'm as "guilty" as most... by SmirkingRevenge · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've bought maybe 3 CDs in the past few years and only directly from the artists (usually independantly made) here in Austin. I download music I'm interested in off of Kazaa/eMule and refuse to ever buy the CD if it's an RIAA company.

    That said, we _are_ guilty of copyright infringement, and the sharing networks could pretty easily lock out that material. As a software engineer I very much dislike seeing software pirated online and it'd be pretty hypocritical of me to support downloading music but wanting to punish/prevent software piracy.

    The point is, we're commiting a federal crime, which falls under FBI jurasdiction, it's pretty hard to contest this. Contest the laws, fine, but give me a good reason this doesn't fall under the FBI's umbrella.

  6. New Business Opportunity by bedouin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Coming soon: Off shore shell accounts with pre-installed CLI p2p clients.

  7. FBI no, anarchy yes by spazoid12 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "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?"

    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?"

    Or, maybe you saw a small bug in notepad.exe...quick! Condem all of Microsoft! (ok, maybe)

    But, aside from this file-sharing issue, it seems you have an FBI axe you'd like ground to the hilt. I'm sure the FBI is far from perfect. How do you propose it be fixed?

    Service Announcement: The text of this post that you've just read is copyright, me, and I have not given you permission to read it. You are in violation of my copyright and the FBI will be raiding you soon. Thank you.

  8. Re:As long as they do it legally by porkface · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hey, I'm just saying there is no room for any kind of sustainable commercial software industry in those countries because piracy goes unchecked. I'm not advocating the FBI stepping in and changing any rules about what you can or can't say or read.

    Sending the 0101010's of Microsoft Windows XP + serial to your buddy for him to use without paying is not covered by the first ammendment or any other law.

    Sure industries need to adapt, and the ones most under fire from piracy have shown a strong will against adapting to give consumers what they want. But a strong attempt at a boycott should have been tried before we turned to looting.

  9. $10,000 rule by fliplap · · Score: 3, Interesting

    While not an "offical" rule, it is generally regarded that the FBI will not pursue a case unless at _LEAST_ $10k in damages was done. For you normal people and small businesses, this means $10k in _actual_ damages. For example, I believe credit card numbers are given a weight and it takes so many of them to get the FBI to investigate a case of a cracker stealing them. For you little people this does not include the time you wasted dealing with this. However, if you were a big business then it of course does.

    As for this case, the $10k rule doesn't apply since this insane value (up to $250,000? iirc) has been placed on copyright violations. Perhaps if the FBI valued a "stolen" song on what it is actually worth we wouldn't have this problem.

    On top of the insane overvaluing of copyright violations there is the fact that the law doesn't state copyright violation as theft, they didn't actually lose anything. So lets assume that a 15 song CD costs $15 (not that this is accurate). Then a stolen song from the CD should be worth $1, oh for fun we'll say it was the one good song on the album and give it a $2 value. So it would take 5000 of the best songs on 5000 cds to make the FBI even look at the case under normal circumstances.

    Then one would think, wait, $10k worth of damages wasn't actually done. No one was actually deprived of anything besides what they thought they were due. So then we end up with another problem, how much are they actually worth? It gets very complicated and basiclly comes down to what we all knew all along, some is getting bought off.

  10. Far reaching consequences. by chris_7d0h · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This paves the way for some serious contemplation.

    Consider an earlier article published last week, where Sweden was about to enforce draconian IP laws and rights to enforce them. Those laws would lead to their police (and probably other obscure agencies) starting to patrol(1) a lot of Internet services such as p2p networks for example. How would this be received by other nations as there is not simple way of distinguishing a user's nationality from some IP address?
    Let's face it, going down the current path, the US isn't going to be the only country doing massive interception and analysis of communication on the Internet and when the politicians wake up and smell the coffee, this kind of mess will have spiraled far out of their control.

    Ponder this. Does anyone imagine a government capable of intercepting and filtering most communication to be standing on some kind of high moral and ethical ground where a reasoning like "The correct thing for us to do is to only police our own waters for domestic criminal activity" is going be the current agenda?

    No friggin way is my assessment.

    This is paving the way for a situation where espionage(2) is the trade of the day. In a few years when most states have caught up with any current technological forerunners there are, in my view, going to be only two choices. Either you encrypt all traffic(3), allowing you some kind of domestic protection, or you will have no protection at all.

    The future in my view looks rather bleak if certain politicians and their fellow lobbyists are going to have their way. As I see it, the first ones to realize this problem has been the same type of people making the technological measures allowing such potential abuse, tech-savy folks such as some members of this blog. Mr. and Mrs. Clueless will be the first ones lined up against the wall as they will be caught off guard, unaware of how technology works and how it can be abused and thus unable to protect themselves from the private agendas of those with monetary and political power.

    As a final Note. Most know that the last 9 in 99.999% availability figure is extremely expensive to obtain. Likewise, getting the last 9 when it comes to making people law-abiding(4) is going to be infinitely more expensive both from a monetary cost and most importantly, the cost of lost freedom...
    As many of us know, the only information system totally secure is a system without external interfaces. The only secure(5) or safe society is a society without a mind of it's own, without free thought.

    Which society do you wish the future to hold?


    1. Meaning intercepting and scanning.
    2. Of foreign power, corporate and any entity which the people with the means might be interested in for one reason or another.
    3. Since modules in a computer system co-exist and make use of each other more and more for various tasks, it's getting harder and harder to know what component is transmitting what information and thus the only way to feel some kind of security is to only allow encrypted traffic.
    4. Be it a valid law supported by the majority of the citizen or not.
    5. Also known as "safe" or "convenient" in some corporate lingo.

    --
    In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
  11. Taking the FBI private: the RIAA's own cops by Zhe+Mappel · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Sure, arguably the bulk of US law enforcement already serves the propertied classes, ever scurrying on missions to keep the privileged from the clutches of the unprivileged. Rarely is the reverse ever true. Just witness the Enron scandal: not even Fox-TV watching Americans are brainwashed enough to escape realizing what a swindle occurred there, but just watch as our corporate media report how "difficult" it is to police corporate crime because the issues are so "complicated" - true only insomuch as the criminal laws have been skewed to make such prosecutions unlikely, this for the benefit of so-called free enterprise.

    The current legislation proposes something very old-fashioned: the privatization, in a sense, of our law enforcement. Oh, the FBI would still be publicly funded, but essentially their mission would be reconstituted to make them the private police force of immensely wealthy copyright holders. We'd have a situation analogous in substance to 19th century America, with its strike-breaking private cops doing the bidding of their factory masters. Not only would the FBI be the servant of the music, movie and software companies, flattening any and all freedoms that thwart the perfect and unfettered progress of business (while also forging the kinds of interconnectedness that would make it politically and legally hard ever to police those industries).

    But more drastically, the FBI would become a tool used to correct a failure of the marketplace: it would become the bludgeon that stops the consumer revolt that is embodied in online file trading - expunging, through intrusion and harassment, any impulse but that of proper obedience. Is a generation of future American debtors missing the lesson of arbeit macht frei? Then the FBI will be called in to teach them the fundamentals!

    Mind, this is of a piece with Hatch's outburst last week about destroying downloaders' computers. Such is Washington's obsequiousness before the power it serves, and so deep runs its contempt for the freedoms of average citizens. (It's all fine and good to trot out your defense secretary to call freedom "messy" when it's overseas; but here, of course, here we send in the G-Men.) The Net has allowed the little person a measure of freedom not dreamt of in the corridors of our oligarchy. I don't expect our rulers to rest until they've brought this democratic, not to say anarchical, spirit to heel.