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.

Comments

FLT

[patte]

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:

http://undying.by.ru/flt.JPG
http://mjrider.student.utwente.nl/gallery/politie
http://www.swecheck.net/bust/index1.html

Re:Copyright, Organized Crime and Schools?

[slackerboy]

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.

Re:Hehe

[BJZQ8]

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.

Re:IP theft

[cpt kangarooski]

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?

Re:IP theft

[gobbo]

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.

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? :-P