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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.
How much does it cost to hire FBI for an afternoon of breaking down doors? Will it cost me extra to have them draw their weapons in a "low ready position" while doing it?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
This is something that has bothered me for quite sometime. If the CD was purchased and then shared. How is the sharer committing copyright infringement. The property is there, and there is NO money changing hands. Perhaps I just need a swift kick to understand.
I don't recall reading anything in the article that stated the FBI was looking for pirated music and movies. That was all pure speculation. The FBI refused to comment. Perhaps the FBI was investigating the school using illegal copies of XP in the labs?
Disclaimer: I do not support copyright infringement. Nor should anyone who wants to see things like the GPL actually be enforced. But given our supposed National Security situation I'm a little disturbed that the Feds are devoting this much in the way of resources to something that's really inconsequential in terms of protecting American lives and livelihood.
Why couldn't they wait till the weekend, or at least after hours, instead of disrupting children's school day?
It wouldn't be nearly as good a scare tactic.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Exactly. Whether you agree with the what the FBI did here or not (I don't necessarily), the school district should not have been allowing this to go on at all. Their job is to teach our kids the legal system, not how to circumvent it. If schools were being responsible and taking care of copyright infringement taking place on their campuses themselves they could avoid this.
Evidently someone in the Deer Valley school district must be running a file sharing supernode with lots of recent stuff
Check out Eff's site for guidelines on how to keep the RIAA sniffers at bay. And use common sense! If you are sharing the Usher, "Confessions" album, the current Billboard #1 selling album, you are directly competing with record stores and radio stations. You should get shut down IMO. However, sharing ISOs to FreeBSD is a Good Thing. (You could probably, illegally, share the Perry Como Christmas album and not get noticed....IANAL)
Have you Meta Moderated t
Ten years ago USA were symbol of freedom for us. Five years ago I wanted to get US visa and job.
Now I see that your country becomes a police state at dangerous speed. My life began in Soviet Union (not in Soviet Russia, I was born in Soviet Latvia). We couldn't even imagine anything like KGB raiding our schools!
Actually that has been done to. A few months back I read an article where Homeland Security was linking Piracy to organized crime and the funding of terrorist actions. What I don't understand is this: People download music so they don't have to pay for it. Either because they can't afford it, don't think the CD will be worth $16, or just flat don't want to pay if they can get it for free. So, if people are pirating to get the materal for free how do terrorists or organized crime gain any money from this? I think it's stupid and the FBI should have better things to do then get on their knees and 'serve' the RIAA.
Are we talking about sharing the purchased CD, or about sharing a copy of the purchased CD?
You can share a CD you own.
You can share an analog copy of a CD you own, but only with "friends", and you can't do it for commercial gain.
You can't make a digital copy of a CD and share it without seriously risking infringment.
Under this reading, sharing an MP3 ripped from a CD with friends is fine, as long as it is an analogue of the original. If an exact duplicte of it turns up anywhere else, you're toast.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
The price per item is not an appropriate measure of the loss. You also have to consider whether the people copying would have bought the item if they had been unable to copy it. That reduces the loss significantly.
Another reason: software companies actually care about public relations. RIAA and MPAA do not. They can have a monopoly on "Madonna" but you can't have a complete monopoly on "word processing." Even though Microsoft effectively does have a monopoly, there are equivalent alternatives. OpenOffice and Word Perfect are alternatives to MSWord. Cyndi Lauper is not an alternative to Madonna... she is a completely different singer.
If I understand US fair use rights correctly, I can legally buy a CD, rip the data to MP3/OGG or whatever and store them on my hard drive for personal use. If so, then by the RIAAs logic I become a criminal the instant I share that folder on the Internet. 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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
...consisting of multiple infringement reports, else I can't figure why the FBI would be wasting their time.
:)
It's probable that a number of computers on the school's network were compromised and are running 'host' servers via IRC, BitTorrent, etc.
It's much more common these days to get slammed for uploading files, instead of just downloading and possessing "copyright infringing material" unless there's intent to distribute.
I haven't started searching yet, but I'm curious to see if any IPs in the school districts' ranges show up.
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It's actually kinda simple. They got us used to not having constitutional rights about 40 years ago through the DEA and drug wars, as well as criminalizing drugs so that now they can have control over the media through "copyright raids". Indeed, sharing data on how to hack stuff or songs with political motives such as Violent Work of Art are far worse than pot in their eyes, because it threatens them far more than, say, some moron who gets high all the time.
It's a system of intimidation is what it is. They are poorly justifying having a bunch of armed cops come in and mentally rape a few hundred people through brandishing badges, guns, nightsticks and having em' look through their belongings. Not to mention what the kids are being taught; that some authority can come in at any time and search you however they want.
Now, if you want to know what's actually scary about this one, is the fact that there's now a federal task force for copyright infringement. No longer is it just the copyright holders that defend their works, but now it's the goverment who goes in and busts up "operations". And if they can search an entire school district on that little amount of evidence, I wonder if they could get a warrent against a ISP serving a town and just go from door to door searching houses. Call me crazy, but before we were joking about the thought police, now we've got em'.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
> country raided schools and other targets in
> a national crackdown on pirated music CDs and movies.
Dutch news site NU.NL reports that the FIOD-ECD (Economic Crime Unit of the Dutch IRS) raided twenty locations on Wednesday, mostly campus locations in Groningen, Utrecht, etc in search of illegal software. This was done at the request of United States Customs Service (emphasis mine).
Dutch news sites often confuse one Federal service with another. Could this be related to the raids in Arizona and the "national crackdown"?
That was a horrible analogy.
It is as ridiculous as trying to use 9 women to have a full pregnancy in one month.
Some things must be done in serial, yet some things can indeed be worked parallel. There are many, many problems in Arizona(I'm a resident) that can definetly be helped simply by the re-allocation of law enforcement resources.
Arizona has serious immigration and a drug trafficking problems. Some parts of Phoenix, Tuscon, Mesa, and others cities could be cleaned up with the help of the FBI.
There will always be problems with crime, but busting kids for file sharing should be considered low on the priority scale.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
.. school hosted dump sites, ftps, or xdcc bots. Good colleges/universities tend to have decent internet connections (*really* decent connections), so kids leave their computers on sharing literally terabytes of files. When the government sees this much illegal data streaming out a school connection, it's a pretty big deal. I, for one, am glad this happened. Maybe with lower internet costs next year, my tuition will be affordable.
Ever wonder how history might be different if "Napster" had instead been named something like "The Sharing Library of the Internet"?
I think that people would have a far different reaction to a "library" being shut down than a "peer-to-peer startup company". People understand that libraries are supposed to share information - that's what they do. And generally people don't have a problem with that. It's when buzzwords like "P2P" and "piracy" become involved that people have a problem with file sharing.
Note to self: if ever making P2P applications, call them Library-something-or-other.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/27/13 29248&mode=thread&tid=99
The FBI raided about 13 homes and took 23 PCs and modems but I don't think there was ever any arrests or indititments. The FBI had said the amounts exceeded $25,000 stolen but it never was pursued further.
A quote from a comment on that story, "At this stage they say they have not charged anyone with anything, but confiscated systems for evidence. My bet is that the systems will be returned and charges never filed. This is more of a scare tactic."
Might this be a similar situation; have a big profile raid and then do nothing else?
You have this exactly backwards. The uploader is the one distributing copies of the media. A copy is made at the uploaders end and is sent down the wire to the downloader. The downloader is merely receiving the copy, he did not create the copy (and couldn't since he doesn't have the original). It makes absolutely no difference if the downloader "initiated the request." So far I have been unable to locate the section of copyright law which forbids receiving copyrighted material, although copying and distribution is quite clearly prohibited. This may be part on the reason no downloaders of copyrighted works have ever been sued. Does anyone know the specific part of law that prohibits downloading?
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
But don't you feel all warm inside when you see your tax money well spent on protecting rich people's money?
Instead of investigating how companies like Ticketmaster rape millions of American wallets each day, lets focus on copyright infringement so that the 10-20 top execs in the movie and music biz don't see their personal income drop from $30M/yr to $28M/yr.
Lets raid schools.
I'm not saying copyright infringement is right, but there are so many other fucked up things in this country that affect more than 20 people. It makes me fuckin sick.
And I don't want to hear about the starving artists and movie stars. MTV Cribs won't have a shortage of people to profile anytime soon. If there was a magic bullet to completely stop all forms of piracy tomorrow, do you honestly believe prices would come down? No fuckin way! Instead, those execs would pocket it all and blame the high prices for CDs on something else.
When will the masses be protected from the few wealthy elite? Never.
BTW, what ever happened to the Ticketmaster congressional investigations?
People who say "money does not buy happiness" are just people without money trying to make themselves feel better.
The downloader is merely receiving the copy, he did not create the copy (and couldn't since he doesn't have the original).
This is incorrect. He is making a copy. At the very least, he is having his computer write a copy into RAM or onto a disk according to what's coming down over the network. That's enough to count, given the MAI precedent.
The Napster case was pretty clear about all this.
-- 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.
That has been tried; a student was suspected of reading administrative e-mails and even changing his grades, and was banned from computer access. The next day, his parents and a lawyer talked to the superintendent, and informed him that they would sue the district if he was not allowed back on the computers (since it was going to be detrimental to his grades.) This prompted the lawsuit-paranoid superintendent to tell me and my immediate boss "Put him back on." There is much to be said about standing up for student rights and also the relative severity of a student lawsuit or an RIAA lawsuit...but this is education, and things do not make much sense.
I agree that this more than likely doesn't have anything to do with piracy. The FBI isn't stating it's reasons and they have a court sealed warrant.
I'm going to go further and say I believe this doesn't have anything to do with piracy at all. Terrorist information search?
If this is really about piracy, international warez0r group or not, I will be severely pissed. This would be proof of Americans pissing away MY freedom with their digital acts and new constituted laws of "future proof protection".
If their catching spammers though...I'm all for loss of freedom! er...
No agreement you sign can force you to give up your constitutional rights. We have the federal government for that.
It would be interesting if their administration adopted a non-logging policy similar to some of the privacy-oriented ISPs available today.
Would the school district be held accountable for the assumed guilt of the infringement, or would it still fall to the people that did it, even though the FBI wouldn't be able to pinpoint them? After all, the school district did have the user agreements, regardless of whether or not they logged all the traffic.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
That's a good point I'd overlooked. The copy of the data is indeed made on the host's PC, loaded into IP packets and sent on its merry way... Hmm. So, if I were to share a huge volume of copyrighted media but never actually had anyone download any of it, I wonder what the RIAA's take on that would be? The law prohibits making a copy, so if one of these cases actually made it to trial, presumably the RIAA would have to prove not only that the music was available, but was actually downloaded too.
Does anyone know the specific part of law that prohibits downloading?
Well, "downloading" is a little specific; I'd say "receiving" is more likely, if it's in there at all. I'd guess it would be have to be handled like receiving physical stolen goods; you'd have to prove that the recipient knew it was stolen and then accepted it anyway. I don't think the RIAA's lawyers would find this too difficult given all the press about P2P, so the only reason I can imagine they haven't tried using this law is because there isn't one (yet).
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I'm concerned that a whole generation of jackassess
is being created. Absolutely nothing is being done
to encourage the virtues of charity, goodwill toward
others. All the things that make up a nice human
being that you would want living next to you are be
choked out of existance by the usual gamut of laws,
jackbooted thugs, incessant commercialism. It is
sorrowful. Weep for heartless creeps that are being
produced.
from Broadband's followup :
[this sig has been trunca
Did you get your pot-smoking buddies to mod you up, because that's one of the few things that might explain Score:4, Insightful.
"Why aren't there software-piracy raids?"
There are, but unless the media is invited along, they are not widely reported.
"I mean I understand about the RIAA having huge lobbying power and all, but if you do the math, you'll no doubt find that there is more money lost to software piracy every year than there is to MP3-trading."
Yes, they're both bad, but it's obvious that law enforcement is heeding the advice of Slashdot posters and placing a higher emphasis on more serious crime. You can't please everybody.
"A song has been valued at 99 cents recently, but a Windows license is typically 300 dollars, and I'm sure there are millions of pirated copies of Windows out there."
Are you Canadian or something, because that's the only way I can see a Windows license costing more than $300. As for millions of pirated copies of Windows, uhhhhhhhh, so what? Do you think it would be cost effective for law enforcement to raid every home with an illegal copy of Windows in their place? I don't.
"Why aren't there more software-audits?"
There are literally MILLIONS of software audits taking place annually by businesses, software vendors, the IRS and the BSA, but you're not going to know anything about it because it's not sexy Slashdot news.
"Why are governments placing a disproportionate amount of emphasis on something like music-piracy?"
You already answered that above - $$ and lobbying. Additionally, if you depend on Slashdot for your perception of government and law enforcement, you're blatantly missing about 90% of all the other stuff that goes on which is given a higher priority. Believe it or not, your local precinct aren't all sitting on their asses waiting for YOU to download an MP3 so that they can jump on you.
Well, so far it would seem that the RIAA doesn't have much confidence in your theory.
Hardly; they argued it successfully when bringing down Napster.
They go after uploaders, not downloaders.
Yes. It's a tactical decision -- given that even RIAA has limited resources available, they're going after the head of the snake first. Originally they went after the P2P services themselves since that had the promise of stopping users from infringing. It worked somewhat, but has since stalled. So now they're going after uploaders, since one uploader is likely to feed numerous leeching downloaders. Take out the uploader, and the downloaders will find it increasingly hard to infringe without throwing themselves in harm's way. Eventually they'll probably go after downloaders too -- but not yet.
It's just more effective to proceed as they have been, insofar as anything they do seems to have any effect. Downloaders are small fry, but they're still in danger.
-- 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.
Video rippers will appear to complement the current generation
of audio rippers.
And Tivo is a what?
AIK
Fair use was deliberately written to be vague so that each case can be analyzed. There are no absolutes. But... with enough money, I suppose there are no absolutes in law at all.
I'd also like to point out to your parent that Fair use was created during the Analog days. The NET ACT and DMCA are both additions that have been made to ruin Fair use for digital copies.
For instance, the NET ACT could be invoked against you when you "give a copy to a friend" even when no money is exchanged. Why? Because they redefined what "monetary gain" stands for. Expecting something back in return (like trading) now falls under monetary gain.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
that it's none of their fucking business what I download or why I do it.
Actually... if it's software that I sell for a living, it *is* my business (in multiple senses of the word) when you download my software and use it for free. But you are right, I wouldn't care *why* you did it because the end result is the same regardless of your rationalizations to ease your conscience.
"You can share a CD you own."
That much I understand. If I have a CD, I can loan it to a friend. If he makes a copy of it, he's in violation of the law, but that's largely irrelevant to the act of me loaning him my CD.
"You can share an analog copy of a CD you own, but only with "friends", and you can't do it for commercial gain. You can't make a digital copy of a CD and share it without seriously risking infringment."
This is where I get lost. Can somebody please point me to the section of US copyright law which spells this out? I understand the part of the law about libraries and similar institutions being allowed to make copies for archival purposes, but I can't find anything that relates one way or another to making copies and giving them to friends.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
forget the fact that the schools are underfunded, over populated. And now will be facing legal charges, and loose resources they had to acquire through other venues because they cant afford to buy them in the first place. How about the governemnt use its resources to go after companies instead of schools. WE have our priorities all wrong in this country. I remember last year there was a vote in my state to use money for schools or prisons, guess which one won?
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
You fucking people and your fucking self-deception. MUSIC is a product, not the CD on which it is distributed. A MOVIE is a product, not the reel from which it is projected. SOFTWARE/CODE is a product, not the disc from which it is installed.
/rant
/first time I've understood why some posts become so emotional... sorry. I'm not as infuriated as I sound.
These things are priveleges, not rights; you do not have a right to hear music, as much as you may like to think otherwise. You're not helping the artist fight some grave injustice when you bypass the RIAA and "duplicate" music through various sources; you are fucking stealing. If this is what you want to do, fine; call yourself a theif and be done with it, but don't try to talk about how you're "sticking it to the man" and your favorite bands "aren't making any money anyway"; your favorite bands made a concious decision to sign with "the man" and they're certainly not making any more money when you STEAL their music.
I am a musician. I will never sign with an RIAA member label (if it was ever offered), because I believe my music should be freely distributed. But I don't speak for the thousands of other artists out there, nor would I ever want someone else making that decision for me.
Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff tha-- MICRO$OFT IS THE DEVIL!!1
Schools (students and teachers alike) are suppose to be exempt from copyrights (provided that they don't sell works). This is the whole reason why they are allowed to use the xerox machine and the reason why they are not suppose to be charged for royalties on music they may play during nap time or during their music classes.
This reinforces just how low the RIAA would go to make their money. I'm pretty sure the artists themselves would've let this one go. For godsakes, they are kids...IN SCHOOL! At least it wasn't in California, where education is crap as it is.
"In the past year, the recording industry has gone after people, including children, for illegally downloading music from the Internet. Earlier this month, the Recording Industry Association of America subpoenaed the University of Arizona to provide the personal information of four students accused of illegally downloading music from university computers."
Three reporters worked on this story and evidently none of them understand the facts.
No one has been subpoenaed anywhere for downloading music.
Students need to learn that when they hit industry, sharing credentials just isn't acceptable.
Yeah, sure - Tell that to every admin who has pulled his hair out trying to keep a machine up and running, when a few dozen users all have the root password. And sure, you can tell me "That shouldn't happen", but put bluntly, it does.
As kids, they share "credentials" out of either fear, the desire to look cool, to get something in exchange, or perhaps just out of niceness (Most of us learn to share from a young age, in direct contradiction to the RIAA's message).
As adults, we share to spread accountability. I know of more than one situation where some higher-up finds a few gigs of MP3s on a development server, all owned by a non-user account, and the sheer number of people who could have done it kept anyone from losing their job (of course, we all know that in such situations, everyone contributed and had access to that music).
So what do these kids need to learn? The right reasons to share credentials, and how to minimize traceability. Which I believe they do learn - School provides a fairly safe environment in which to try out various accountability-avoidance strategies, figure out which ones work, and (usually) suffer only token punishments when they screw up.
"This Gestapo crap should not be tolerated."
I agree. There are so many holes with this process, I don't even know where to begin. As an admin of a school system, I am stunned that the feds would even consider going over a supers head and not let them know what was happening. If they are trying to make an example, they really picked the wrong target. A school district is a like a mini city, and it is utterly ignorant of the feds to think they can take their internet/email away and not have an impact on the functioning of the district. The days of losing email access for a day or two in schools is long over. They now run mission critical apps just like everyone else. Imagine if it was payroll day? Most payrolls are electronically submitted to the paying bank. There are several accounts in a district that get updated like this. Due to all the COPA who knows what-the-law-is-named-now crap to protect kids online, just about every school in the country runs a filter or they will lose e-rate money, and as is indicated in the article, the do block downloading sites as best they can. (just another reason why federally forcing schools to run filters doesn't work, because they don't always work right, as indicated). Everyone has a logon so it can be traced? Bah! Not in an open lab. Our own downloading has slowed to a trickle, but it hasn't stopped. Everyone uses home directories, they can't access the C: drive, so we periodically search the server drives for *.mp3, or *.exe, etc. We catch a few that way, and things get deleted. As far as organized crime is concerned, the only way that would play in is if one of their servers was hacked, they didn't know it, and someone out there was streaming music/movies from their server (and stealing their bandwidth to boot) without their knowledge. That is no reason to bust in to a school like they are the bad guys. That actually happened to me once, someone had posted 10+ movies to our ftp site overnight, I hadn't put the MS lockdown tools on yet. But it was found in a couple of days and the movies were deleted. That doesn't make us bad guys, just another business getting caught in the same traps as everyone else out there, correcting it and moving on.
I can't believe they didn't even send a letter with any chance of making right before pulling a 'raid'. In most cases the ISP is the one who sends a letter to suspected pirater, giving them a chance amend. There once was a time when you were innocent until proven guilty, just another reason how the DMCA fails this country so miserably. (off note, we should all remember this one during the next round of DMCA comments in 2+ years)
I can imagine how scared the kids might have been because of it, esp on the heels of the Columbine anniversary. FBI agents just standing around their buildings, gaurding doors and not talking to anyone??? Someone out there blew it politically when they tried to make an example of a school district.
Actually you are missing the point with the easier!=illegal statement. IANAL, but I do understand that laws are created to be used to control actions and not necessarily to conform to strict moral and theological rules. Therefore, when something that the government does not want done becomes easier/more profitable greater restrictions and penalties are required to exact the same balance that existed before this change occured.
My SO is a library director at a public lib with a rather large and popular CD and growing DVD collection. I keep urging her to loan out COPIES of CDs/DVDs and to keep the originals in a back room library. That way, when they are scratched or not returned, they could just burn a new copy. She is concerned that it would be a copyright violation. Seems clearly a case of fair use to me, but the RIAA has everyone shaking in their boots with their nonsense. Anybody care to help me out with this argument?