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FBI Raids Arizona School District Over Copyright Infringement
markclong writes "Federal agents in Phoenix and elsewhere in the country raided schools and other targets in a national crackdown on pirated music CDs and movies. The schools lost Internet access including emails to and from elsewhere on the Internet." Despite the assertions in the article, Google doesn't currently pick up any indications of a national school sweep.
All users signed an agreement, and they have to log on first. Their every move is trackable. It's the same system we use here at this school.
I don't recall reading anything in the article that stated the FBI was looking for pirated music and movies.
I thought the same thing at first, until I reread it and came across this:
They couldn't give details about the case (like who they were investigating, what type of infringement they were looking for, how they found out it was at the school, etc.) It does seem, though, that they indicated a very generic high-level reason. It's like they say "we're doing a murder investigation" but they can't say who the victim or suspect are, how they died, etc.
At least, that's the best I could figure out.
This is probably the US part of the big raid in Europe where some Fairlight sites went down.. rumors have said that sites in both .nl och .us got busted.
Some pictures from Utwente Campus:
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http://mjrider.student.utwente.nl/gallery/politie
http://www.swecheck.net/bust/index1.html
From the article: "Last year, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing on the link between international copyright piracy and organized crime, and the FBI has said that there is strong evidence that organized-crime groups have moved into intellectual-property crime, using the profit to pay for other activities."
It doesn't say anything in there specifically about MP3s. I think the link discussed at those hearings probably had to do with the massive quantities of bootleg CDs/DVDs/software that can be bought on the street in a lot of countries. Linking that sort of thing with MP3 file-sharing is a tenuous connection at best.
Things to do today: See list of things to do yesterday
If the CD was purchased and then shared. How is the sharer committing copyright infringement.
Is a copy being made without the copyright holder's permission? If it doesn't fall under fair use, then it's copyright infringement. It doesn't matter if you make any money from it. It's like saying "hey, if you weren't paid to kick that guy's head in then, it's not assault".
I'm the admin in a school district...and we went to a generic login for that very reason; the fact that, without cameras and DNA samples, you can never tell if someone logging in is really them. (Here comes the analogy that will be counter-analogied and counter-counter analogied to death) I mean, if someone steals a fence post from your front yard and beats someone to death with it, could you be held liable for kiling that person? Passwords and usernames are very freely shared amongst students, and no amount of goading or agreement-signing will change that. The only ultimate cure is teacher supervision...but then again, we're too busy fiddling with standardized tests and leaving no child behind to do that.
The parent deserved being modded down. He was not 100% right. He was 20% right at most. He referred to duplication as "taking" and "theft".
If so, then by the RIAAs logic I become a criminal the instant I share that folder on the Internet.
Exactly. As soon as you make it available to others, you are responsible for the copies that leave your machine. You have no right to make available copies to people, since you don't have the right to redistribute the recordings. The RIAA is not wrong here. Foolish in their methods, yes, but not wrong.
But if we extend that line of reasoning, why not prosecute a library for copyright infringement? After all, they are willfully leaving all those books lying around where any number of Joes could come in and photocopy them.
And here's where the slashbots get it wrong time and time again. Sitting at a Xerox machine and copying a book, page for page, is wholly infeasable. Hopping on P2P and grabbing an entire album in sufficiently-close-to-CD-quality format is.
The scale of the violation is much higher when you're snagging entire albums/games/movies free online than when you go to a library and photocopy yourself a few pages out of a couple books (which is a perfect example of Fair Use.) I'd say the closest you get with books, is bookwarez.
I, and anyone else that's been in a public (this probably applies to private schools too) know how easy it is to get ahold of someone else's login information. Trivial. And since most teachers aren't too well trained, technology-wise, it's usually not too hard to get a teacher's password either. In some school, there aren't even restrictions on your network access, you just have to know where to look. Long story short, a person could easily log on as A, download and put them in a private folder of person B, and no one would know who did it.
From the official press report (Dutch), there were raids in eight countries, and they were acting on information from the US DOJ, Criminal Division, Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section.
In fact copying music is entirely legal anyway.
This is incorrect. In fact, as a rule, reproducing a copyrighted work unauthorizedly is infringing. There are various exceptions to this, but that's a far cry from being 'entirely legal.'
We have always been alowed to record a friends CD or tape, the radio, TV shows, movies we rent, etc, etc, etc.
Also incorrect. The AHRA is permissive of certain sorts of copying, but is pretty new, and isn't really that expansive. Most copying around here probably isn't AHRA compliant. And there's no blanket exceptions generally that match what you're talking about. The closest you could get would be fair use, but fair use does not permit blanket statements to be made -- each fair use must be justifed anew based on the circumstances that surround it; making a copy of a show on tv for time shifting might have much better chances of success in a fair use argument than copying a rented movie.
Truthfully the only crime (legally) with copying music is not the downloading but the sharing.
Incorrect, and three for three. Downloading copyrighted music unauthorizedly is illegal as it infringes on the copyright holder's exclusive right to reproduce the work. Sharing it is also illegal, since the copyright holder also has an exclusive right to distribute the work.
Man, doesn't anyone read 17 USC 106 anymore?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Making a physical copy of a venerable media qualifies as fair use. Making an MP3 of a small portion of a song to use as an example of that song is also fair use (in the more traditional sense). In fact, making a cassette tape of a CD and giving it to someone you know (without money exchaning hands) is also fair use.
However, putting a copyright work in a location where absolutely everyone can copy it is not fair use.
I still don't see how P2P sharing in schools is linked to organized crime, as the article suggests.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Two words: Free culture. Both the book and the idea. Give it a read. http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/
I'm of a mind to give them a piece of my mind, but I seem to have lost my mind.
Since when did upholding the copyright law become "screwing over your children"?
I think about December of 2003, when numerous Australian schools, at the behest of the Australian version of the RIAA, advised parents not to video tape their children's Christmas musicals -- and in some cases having guards confiscate parents' cameras --, because the parents might film their children singing copyrighted songs, thus violating the rights of the copyright owners.
Yep. You and your kids don't have a right to keep a memento of their first Christmas pageant, because that might violate a corporation's exclusive right to an arrangement of a traditional Christmas song.
Your personal memories of your kids don't count; corporate profits do.
At that point, I think that many are getting screwed for a small plutocracy.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I would note that in the last two examples, if you were caught, you would be charged with trespassing (or something similiar), not copyright infringement.
The media (including this article) are always lazy when they say "FBI Raids so-and-so who were downloading illegal mp3s".
This is a misnomer, and digging deeper, ALL the lawsuits, settlements, fines, jail time involve the illegal distribution of said mp3's. Not the downloading of.
Although the USA does not have such a distinct admission that download is "OK" (like Canada) every lawsuit so far has dealt with distribution. The next part I can only guess: But I think that is because they don't want to fight that in court just yet (and maybe lose).
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
The grandparent poster may in fact be American, but may have omitted their country of origin in a lapsed moment of Canadian chauvinism (perish the thought!). There are lots of canucks (proportionally) on this site, after all.
:-P
In Canada it is, in fact, legal and ethically acceptable to download a tune you'd like to hear or borrow a friend's CD and put some tracks on a tape for the car. Legally, as encoded in our copyright laws, and ethically, as culture has a communal element, like it or not. Besides, any time I or my friends shared music with each other (going back to 8-tracks, eh), it resulted in further sales for the artist, since we were engaging in grassroots marketing. Win win.
Now there's a further element: I paid for personal use copying, through levies included in the recording media price when I purchased it. I guess that makes it both ethical and moral, too.
The grandparent's assertion that it is illegal to share is even ambiguous in Canada, and they're still hashing it out: the latest decision is that P2P sharing a la Gnutella is a bit like having a photocopier in a library.
Too bad about that Land of the Free thing, eh?
Damn those pesky terrorists
So, I guess you are correct. Which is only sightly amazing here on slashdot, where it seems that half of the grammar corrections are themselves wrong.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.
--
Bold emphasis added.
The only question is the meaning of the word, noncommercial.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
You forgot one:
(15) I'm still waiting for the recording industry to prove that file sharing is harming their business.
As soon as they prove harm to their bottom line, I'll take a much more dismal view of song-swapping.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
There is no constitutional/US code details to fair use and copyright coverage or duration. The Fair Use provisions are as detailed as they get.
That doesn't stop certain groups from coming up with insanely detailed rules (interlibrary loan guidelines, for example, involve things like the lesser of one chapter or 10% of a written work if requested less than 5 times a year unless the work is over 5 years old etc. etc.) that have no real legal foundation.
Understand the distinction between copy and analogue. An analogue is what you get when you make an analog copy of an audio recording. It's not an exact duplicate. The presumption is that some "quality" is lost in the process. An n-th generation duplicate would become unplayable. A copy is identical to the original.
The actions are not the same.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
'Operation Fastlink' Is The Largest Global Enforcement Action
Ever Undertaken Against Online Piracy
Key bits:
"Over 120 total searches have been executed in the past 24 hours in 27 states and in 10 foreign countries. Foreign searches were conducted in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden as well as Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Operation Fastlink is the largest multi-national law enforcement effort ever directed at online piracy."
"Among the groups targeted by Fastlink are well-known organizations such as Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, Class and Project X"
I doubt it has anything to do with P2P, most of "sites" reside in universities/schools/dorms.