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Operation Fastlink Cracks Down on Warez
An anonymous reader writes "Beginning yesterday morning, law enforcement from 10 countries and the United States conducted over 120 searches worldwide to dismantle some of the most well-known and prolific online piracy organizations.
Among the groups targeted by Operation Fastlink are well-known organizations such as Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, Class and Project X, all of which specialized in pirating computer games, and music release groups such as APC. The enforcement action announced today is expected to dismantle many of these international warez syndicates and significantly impact the illicit operations of others."
We don't have the right to distributed pirated works online. How does this story fit in this category?
About raiding an Arizona school?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
You mean I can no longer spend 5 days downloading a poorly cracked game that I can't play online? That's a real shame.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
its nice that you make the government out to be the bad guys here, but I'm a game developer and I'd really like to stay in business thank you. With piracy so rampant, game developers NEVER see royalties and its harder and harder to scrape togeother enough cash to make a good game nowadays. Its up to you. Buy games and support the govenment in actions like this and have a healthy game biz, or pirate away and watch all the best developers go under.
Wow, whether it is people selling pipes that might be used to smoke marijuana, or kiddiez running "FTP my w4r3z!!!!" sites, Ashcroft won't back down from a hard fight.
Ashcroft doesn't dance, smoke or drink. I think he has too much time on his hands.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Calling someone with a four digit Slashdot ID new.
we have to start using VPNs, boys!
Christ most of those warez servers are slow enough as is...
It could take HOURS for new groups to deal with the hole created by the loss of these groups. The humanity.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
the secret is to make a slit in the bubble with a sharp blade..
My OpenBSD boxes scream with a cheap (~$89 IIRC) Soekris cryptographic accelerator. The CPU barely gets used while the HiFn chip on the card does all the bullwork.
Near line speed crypto. Ahhhh..
CD key for WAREZ monkeys
http://www.narvakitchens.com/quake3cdkey.jpg
Whatever you say, this is "big" .nl boys though they were safe from the law, but looks like the US has done a bit of leaning..
Seriously "big"
Every single major "elite" warez site in the netherlands is gone.
FairLighT are gone, for those of you who don't know FairLighT ( FLT ) they're one of the two main game releasing warez groups. People within the scene are scared, this is a bad day for warez.
Also, this is the US Governments doing, up untill today the
For pointing out that there's a huge overseas mp3 server illegally serving 12.8 gigs of mp3's in Iraq that Ashcroft should take down immediately - probably run by Evil Doers!
You have to wonder if the civilian contractors they're using to hunt these people down have community mp3 servers at work. If so, what do they listen to? Wagner?
The BBS(Cyberspace BBS) I frequented here in the Grand Rapids area has always been (and still is) very careful about only allowing shareware and freeware software into the file libraries people can download from.
The original owner's wife's ex-husband called the FBI and told them Cyber had pirated software and child pornography available for download. So the FBI raided. AFAIK, they didn't damage anything, and left once it was demonstrated that the file libraries were clean.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
While I do partake in less then legal software at times and benefit from such groups as those being cracked down upon, even I must admit that the government isn't overstepping its bounds or bowing to thier "corporate masters." Whether they are a "syndicate" or not, these online groups are violating the law and have no right to do so. Software and recording companies do put a lot of work into thier product and do have the right to charge whatever they want for them. If you do not like it, I see that you have the following options:
1)Don't buy it. If nobody buys a product at a given price, the company will lower it or go out of business.
2)Create your own competing product at a price you deam resonable.
3)Vote to remove the legal protections that you bash the government for enforcing as is thier duty.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
The difference between you and a corporation is that your sole purpose is not to make money. A corporation exists only to make money. If they give away free medicine to kids, it's to improve their image so they can make money. If killing 8,000 people in Bhopal will make them money, you better hope you don't live in Bhopal. Making money is the purpose of a corporation.
I think that part of what's needling you is that corporations are being granted some of the rights that individuals enjoy, yet they exist only to make money are not subject to the same constraints that individuals are. You can't throw a corporation in jail for murdering someone. You can throw the CEO in jail if he screws up badly enough, but it's a little tougher when you remember that corporations were created for the sole purpose of distancing corporate decision makers from the consequences of their actions. Also, a distributed decision-making process and distributed accountability reduces each individual employee's share of the guilt to the kind of manageable level that allows for some really spectacularly bad shit to happen.
A lot of people who otherwise believe in laissez faire and the free-market are troubled by the zaibatsu-style mega corporations because they have grown large enough and influential enough to circumvent many of the normal free-market checks and balances.
The Dalai Llama
... I am not an economist, but watching increasingly smaller numbers of people control increasingly larger numbers of increasingly limited shared resources is making me increasingly worried...
My sig could be your sig!
" The feds are just taking care of their corporate masters, that's all.
::rolls eyes:: "
You mean, serving the citizens of their countries, who are trying to make money by selling software? You mean, enforcing the law?
How dare they! It would make much more sense for them to start working for the software pirates.
I believe that the parent thinks there are higher priority criminals to hunt than a few losers who pirate mediocre games. Victimless crimes and white collar crimes should never take precidence and resources from the prosecution of violent crimes.
It should be a matter of triage, first make society safe, then worry about maintaing private industry's profit margins against the gangs of computer toting outlaw teenagers.
However, the victims of muggings, spousal abuse, drug related violence and gangsta drive-by shootings do not make the hefty campaign contributions, nor do they have the ability to make press and TV conferences. They are just the average tax-payers - you know - the ones the Law Enforcement Officers swore to serve, protect, and defend.
10 year old geek (probably YOU):
Mom, can I have $120,000 so I can
learn autocad and 3d studio and
visual basic and oracle and....?
Mom: No that's too expensive dear
How long before we can afford it?
Mom: after we win the lottery maybe.
Firefox &
If the US government were actually serving its citizens, instead of messing around with kids who pirate video games, they would punish convicted monopolists instead of letting them go free*. The point is that the government doesnt decide who to go after based on things like real damage or danger - they base decisions based on where the money is. In this case, the money is in the software companies so law enforcement works for them right now, not the average american citizen, who will not see any real benefit from busting video game pirates.
Before you reply or moderate, ask yourself a few questions. Who benefits from busting Video Game pirates? If you think American citizens will, do you think they will benefit from cheaper game prices? Or maybe we'll get better games now that the pirates are all shut down? Or do you really think that as corporate profits go up, wages will, too, and that everyone benefits from helping the corporation? (in reality, the only people who benefit are the shareholders, who pay the lobbyists to wine & dine the legislators)
*Consider this: is there a way that Microsoft could be punished that would reduce computer prices and maybe even stimulate the computer industry, and the software industry as well? I think someone could probably come up with such a solution, and that it would be a far more effective use of gov't time & money than chasing warez kiddies.
You:
A.) Participate in piracy, so this pisses you off.
B.) Have a beef against Ashcroft, so it just ruffles your panties to see him cracking down on illegal software piracy.
There is absolutely, 100% nothing wrong with the government cracking down on this. Slashdot wants to pretend it's some sort of miniscule, "gray area" problem, but it's millions of users all trading warez and making it harder to sell software.
Why the hell do you think PC sales are so low, and so game companies are turning to consoles? Don't give me the "games were better in the olden days" spin, because we've got everything from Far Cry to Invisible War to SimCity 4 to Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 to...you get the picture.
"Copyright Enforcement Militia"...this is such propaganda bullshit that I can't believe--no wait, I CAN believe it got modded up. A post bitching about the emotive use of the word "syndicate" yet emotively using "militia." Nice!
Let's all pirate the fuck out of Doom 3, shall we? I'm sure John Carmack won't mind. Will he?
The big record companies and our own legislature have pirated our rights to free speech. I'll concede that it's worth compromising free speech by granting exclusive copy rights to writers/performers so that there will be an incentive for people to create. But those rights should only be short term. The founding fathers stated something like 14 years with a one-time 14 year extension. Things happen *much* faster now, so those terms should be shorter, not longer.
When they stop infringing my rights, I'll start caring about theirs.
What do you mean? An African or European box?
(Sorry, could't resist responding to the cadence of your question!)
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
Since we're reappropriating terms with long-standing meaning and context, why not warp the biggest and baddest one of them all, and just call it "content murder".
Theft requires the loss of a physical object (implies a degree of uniqueness and singularity for that object) from its owner, and piracy is essentially armed robbery on the high seas. Both involve physically depriving someone of physical things. Software (and music) is not physical. The media they are on is physical.
Next thing you know, Microsoft will start calling the adoption and existance of open source software "theft" (i.e., installing OpenOffice), because it deprives them otherwise of a sale of Microsoft Office, they'll start trying to harrass and make difficult those who use open-source versions of software products that they make (OpenOffice, Dia, Linux) in many ways (such as only allowing "licensees" to develop converters for their file formats, and any OSS app that can read a Word document must be violating IP restrictions SOMEwhere).
I feel sorry for the artists, but they've been taken for a ride by the radio-music industry for a long time. They just sound like prostitutes defending their pimps most of the time anymore to me.
The only thing being lost immediately is a potential sale (yet, oddly enough, there is not a complete relationship between the copying and loss of sale. There are probably more than a few Delphi developers, for example, who cannot shell out $3000 for Delphi8 Architect, yet they can get the evaluation CD from Borland and find a keygen for it. It may be just enough for them to use it to develop a project or two that they can sell, and then buy the full version. It is hard to learn and develop a program in something like Delphi in only 30 days...)
The funny thing is, that at least in Microsoft's case, they turned a blind eye to it for so long in order to grow their marketshare and develop MS Office addiction that only now are they trying to clamp down on essentially casual copying, because they cannot go after those who do it on an industrial scale (Ukraine, Russia, SE Asia, etc).
Oh well.
While I'm mostly in agreement with your points, I'd like to try and hone your argument a bit more.
Number 3: Piracy is driven by overpriced CD's
The RIAA lost a judgement because they colluded to artificially inflate the price of CD's. At one point, CD's were extremely cheap. I remember buying CD's for an average price of 10.49 or 9.99 Canadian, about 6 bucks US at the time. That price in Canada has now climbed up to an average of 18.00 (almost DOUBLE).
Guess what: I buy the same number of CD's now in a year as I used to buy in a month Becuase
1. I'm buying DVD's (over 150 now)
2. I'm buying diapers for my baby (not in my 20's anymore)
3. I've replaced all my vinyl and cassettes.
4. The number of artists creating music that I enjoy has decreased significantly.
I am the RIAA's worst nightmare, because I prove that they distort the facts to suit their purpose. I don't download MP3's but my CD buying habits have decreased by 80% annually. They lose probably 1000 a year because of me...
There are thousands more like me. I just think it's a bit ridiculous that the governments of the world have swallowed the content industries argument so wholly. We are going to lose control of our open systems and hardware becausse of what is basically a lie, that mp3 sharing is the downfall of the record industry.
I see I've gotten offtopic here, so I'll get back into it. As I mentioned before, I think you're pretty much bang on in your post. I just think number 3 might be stricken out of it to make it that much more effective.
Okay, that's an amusing list of arguments, many of which are actually made by some of the kids online. I get the feeling that your intention is to suggest that these are the only arguments for widespread distribution (a straw man argument), but *shrug*, maybe I'm just misinterpreting. However, one of the arguments you're mocking isn't quite as obviously wrong as you suggest.
I've never heard of a parking infringement, but I suppose. I do hear "illegally parked" or "parking violation" (which was what my last parking ticket read). Those are perfectly reasonable terms, after all, one is illegally parked and one has violated parking laws. I'm perfectly fine with copyright violation or illegal copying. Both are accurate descriptions of the crime. Copyright infringment is arguably more accurate (since you're infringing on exclusivity granted to someone else), but violation or illegal is certainly nice and accurate.
Piracy, on the other hand, isn't terribly accurate. Piracy's has multiple definitions and those different definitions are governed by different laws and punishments. Many people (myself included) feel that we need to reconsider our intellectual property laws, that perhaps they've become unbalanced and no longer serve the common good. It's important to have accurate language in such a discussion; colorful terms and phrases like piracy cloud the issue. Those people and businesses interested in maximizing the power of copyright deliberately chose words like piracy and theft because they know they have emotion impact, it's easier to get people to agree with ideas like "theft is wrong" without having them consider the details of what they are agreeing too. If they used words and phrases like illegal copying they know that some people will step back and ask, "why is the illegal? What is the real harm?" This sort of misdirection is unnecessary. I certainly believe that copyright law is a good thing. I would be against abolishing copyright law or eliminating enforcement. However I arrived at those conclusions through reason and the facts, not through emotional arguments and colorful phrases. Shoplifting a CD is a very different action from downloading an illegal copy online, trying to confuse the two is a false analogy. If copyright really is right why not defend it without descending into logical fallacies?
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(3) I believe that piracy is driven by "overpriced CDs" even though CDs have dropped in price over the years.
They have? That's news to me. When I got my first CD player in 1985, the average price of a new CD in a record store was $12. In 2004, the average price of a new CD in a record store is $18. Now, granted there are bargain-basement $5.99 CDs these days, as well as sale-priced new releases at the $12 or $13 price point, but as a whole, CDs aren't cheaper today than they were nearly 20 years ago.
Does that excuse "piracy," or "theft" or whatever you want to call it? No, it doesn't, but let's ratchet down the level of nonsense in the rhetoric used here. "Stealing" isn't the right word for making an unauthorized copy of something. The original still exists and can be sold to someone, and "piracy" is a loaded word with completely inappropriate connotations. How about we just call it "unauthorized copying" or "copyright dilution"?
I've always had a problem with software and entertainment industry estimates of losses due to unauthorized copying. First, they assume that every copy illegally-made represents a lost sale, which is nonsense. If a 15-year-old kid has 8,000 songs on his hard drive, there's no chance in hell that he would have bought those 8,000 songs if he hadn't had access to them for free. He might have spent anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of thousand bucks on music, but there's no chance he'd have bought 600 CDs worth of music at $15-$18 a crack ($9,000-$11,000).
And here's another thing: Twenty years ago, my friends and I taped songs off of FM radio and played them in our walkmans. Or we'd dupe our LPs onto tape and trade copies with each other. I easily had access to ten times as much music as I could afford to buy, but in spite of record industry whining, I bought *more* music because of that practice, not less.
One study stated that that kids and adults alike who used the original Napster were more likely to buy music than people who didn't. Numerous studies have shown that there's zero correlation between "piracy" and the decline of sales for the music industry. Is it any surprise to people that the last year of sales increases for the music industry was the last year that the original Napster was in operation?
This is not an apologia for listening to music without paying for any of it. It's simply a realistic look at what's really going on. The record industry has its head up its ass and always has. Suing and prosecuting your customers is bad for business.
Software "piracy" is different, but not *that* different. Much of the software industry used to accept that "piracy" was just another form of marketing. Microsoft has always given lip service to stamping out "piracy," but until they had established a monopoly, they did virtually nothing to prevent it before the fact because they knew it was easier to convert a "pirate" into a paying customer than it was to get a skeptic to buy from you in the first place. Most people these days will automatically use MS products, so now Microsoft puts copy-protection technology in its products to force people to pay up-front.
Is making an unauthorized copy of music or software theft? According to the law, it is. However, there needs to be a middle ground between the "information wants to be free" left and the Ashcroft search-and-seizure right.
Most people would gladly reward artists and programmers for their work. That's how shareware works, and it made Phil Katz a substantial amount of money before his death. So how about we find new ways to reward creators of content, instead of finding new ways to criminalize what people have done for decades?
Don't misunderstand me. There are true criminals out there who are selling counterfeit or other illegally-copied versions of products (such as music and sof
Since we're reappropriating terms with long-standing meaning and context, why not warp the biggest and baddest one of them all, and just call it "content murder".
"Intellectual Genocide"
P2P IS THE ARTIST HOLOCAUST!
You have some good points, but some things should be clarified..
3.) Most CD's are quite overpriced and the public now realizes this. Allow me to plug Mangatune.com Reasonable price, actually supports the musicians. (:
4.) Copyright duration is way to long and it is having a dramatic effect upon society
5.) Legitimately free music/whatever as advertising is nevertheless a valid business model to gain popularity.
6.) Artists are, in fact, getting ripped off due to the perceived need to cut a record deal to "get known." They would be much better off thinking like entrepeneurs.
7.) "Giving stuff away on the Internet" is not a business model, but it can be part of one if done correctly. Look at Homestar Runner as example: free cartoons that got so popular that the authors now make a living selling plush dolls, t-shirts, and bumper stickers. It would never have succeeded as a pay-for-content site because it has to compete with Cartoon Network, the Simpsons, and the like..
8.) Not everyone is looking for a free ride. The fact that people are more than willing to pay for concert tickets but many now hesistate to buy CDs says more about the market than morals. People are simply putting far less value in recorded music.
9.) In a purely capitalist, laisez faire economic system, there is no such thing as copyright. It's not an assumption or requirement. That's not to say that it's always bad, but rather that there are plenty of natural ways to make money that do not involve artificial government institutions. Open Source has already succeeded in this field; independent music/film is still on its way.
10.) For the majority of human history, it was a right. Copyright is a modern experiment. It may or may not last long term. My guess is that a fairer balance will be struck.
11.) What signifies greed is the motivation, not that they are exercising their legal rights. Numerous studies have shown that P2P and other bootlegging has a minimal effect on profits, while significantly expanding the spread of content. It is more likely that the 'cracking down' is more out of fear that they are losing control of the traditional distribution channels.
One of the unfortunate things that has happened to the OSS movement is that a lot of the loudmouth advocates for it don't understand what it's really about.
Absolutely. In my definition, Open Source is about meeting software needs in the most efficient way possible. That does not always mean a free ride. Open Source is about turning an artificial "manufacturing" market into a labor market, the latter of which allows full, unrestricted motion of the "invisible hand of the market." Capitalism works best with many buyers, many sellers, and minimal cost of entry. That is what Open Source enables.
They view it primarily as a means to get free stuff, and then they turn their eyes from the free stuff to the non-free stuff and think to themselves "maybe I'm entitled to get that one for free too"
While I agree that many mistakenly see OSS as "free lunch," I don't see your secondary point in any true OSS advocates.
Allright.
Fairlight has been around since C=64 days.
The earliest Class release I can recall is Quake (it even had it's own installer with chip-tunes built in).
Is UCF dead too? how about RiSCiSO?
The crap thing really is going to be that all good the no-cd cracks/patches will be gone.
I still buy games from the store. And to be honest, I always install the game, then go searching for a patch/cracktool so I can put my originals back in the box, and on the shelf.
I paid for Windows XP Professional, but got a keygen anyway so i'd still have my original box/key packed away safely. Call me wierd.
If you lose your Everquest registration key, is EA going to give you a replacement so you can install? hell no, you've got to go buy a new copy, or download a keygen...
I actively search the $10 and under bins at Best Buy/Brandsmart for games that I wanted to play but just felt they cost to much. Case in Point --> Enter the Matrix.
I bought ETM the day it came out. (The same day Reloaded came out in the Theatres). It cost me $50. 2 weeks later it was down to $39.99. 2 *MONTHS* later and it's a fucking $20 game!