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Justice Dept. Raids Homes of File Swappers
Cryofan writes "Reuters is reporting that the Justice Dept. has
raided the homes of 5 people in several states for trading music on p2p networks. The traders were, however, not arrested. 'P2P does not stand for 'permission to pilfer,' Ashcroft said. The Reuters story says that the 5 'were people operating hubs in a file-sharing network based on Direct Connect software,' and who had provided between 'one and 100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs.' 'They are clearly directing and operating an enterprise which countenances illegal activity and makes as a condition of membership the willingness to make available material to be stolen,' said Ashcroft."
Each of the five hubs contained 40 petabytes of data, the equivalent of 60,000 movies or 10.5 million songs, Ashcroft said.
Umm... Pentabytes? Come on.. who has a friggin PENTABYTE??
So quit your job, pack your bags, and move on out to snow country!
I thought it meant pleased 2 plunder!
Each of the five hubs contained 40 petabytes of data, the equivalent of 60,000 movies or 10.5 million songs, Ashcroft said.
In order to join the network, members had to promise to provide between one and 100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs, Ashcroft said.
200 petabytes of songs and movies! Pretty amazing.
I wonder if the RIAA will ask the feds to turn over all of the involved parties and I wonder if the feds would do it if asked.
Or maybe they are too busy since they just sued a bunch more customers....
The Recording Industry Association of America on Wednesday announced it had sued another 744 individuals and refiled suits against 152 others who had ignored or declined offers to settle.
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
... like go after terrorists?
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
100 GB won't even get you into MY hubs
This is going to lessen the amount of files I can download now. Fuckers.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
More likely to be warez or movies than someone with a quarter million mp3s.
how is 100 gigabytes of music 250,000 songs?
Wow, actually it sounds like they are starting to target the correct people. Good.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Isn't that enough to hold damn near the entirety of songs/movies ever made?
You know how it goes.
Long story short, so long as the letter of the law has you down, the best route is to change the letter of the law. Whilst minor fixes here and there can suffice in the short run, I've long wondered if there are any moral/philosophical arguments against copyright (communist "Property is theft" notwithstanding) as a whole. Lately, the practical nature of it as a boon for innovation has been falling short and shown to be a bane in certain instances, but there really ought to be a general argument against the entire concept.
I'm just too lazy to develop one.
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
"P2P does not stand for permission to pilfer."
Very catchy.
To be honest, I'm surprised it's taken this long for something like this to happen.
100 GB, huh? Sounds pretty good. Link?
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
"to make available material to be stolen"
Does this available material, have some non-availability clause attatched? Or maybe I'm confusing the whole infant grammar thing here.
Isn't that what happens to people who wear fur?
"You know Myra, some people might think you're cute. But me, I think you're one very large baked potato."
People like to look at movies, music, software as simply a string of ones and zeros, but ultimately, someone had to spend a lot of time to produce them.
Now if only those P2P traders spent their time making love to their dog they would be too busy to take someone else's work.
enforcement arm of the RIAA, MPAA, and whomever else has the cash to bully people around.
under what penalty of law? last i heard copying things (download) never got anyone in trouble... now sharing on the other hand, is still a civil matter. (but selling is an FBI matter).
Direct Connect, for the three or four of you that don't already know, doesn't work like Napster or KaZaA. The hubs are sometimes public, but in these cases admission to the hub required you to share your own collection for free as well. So the hub owners are not only sharing music with a select membership, they require their members to share large amounts of music as well.
They were copying, trading, and encouraging others to do the same in large quantities. I don't like seeing people's hard drives raided for any reason, but it's pretty clear these five folks didn't have a leg to stand on.
Washington Post link, free reg. req.
ur supposed to just leech off other peoples servers, dont host in the US!
The RIAA obviously took it seriously when pople said that they would go underground after they started to sue the Kazaa crowd. This is a show of force when they can bring in the feds to help in their cause. Now that the feds are in on the big ones, how long until they start to move on the little guys?
Stay tuned for new sig...
I have serious trouble filling a 10th of an iPod with music I can stand.
Its seriously sad that these people are just massing huge collections of crap to trade simply for the purpose of being "in the club" what a waste.
It if were all porn that would be unerstandable, but just music and movies? Come on people.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
I'm so relieved that even though I live in an era with constant threats such as domestic terrorism, senatorial flight risks, the patriot act, the induce act, and non-Christian "citizens" running amok, that Pope Ashcroft can see through the unholy mess and guide our nation in the direction it needs. "Need not you worry", he said to his congregation of corporate leaders and wealthy elite, "For I, a federal chair, shall perform all of your duties in this civil matter." Praise Jesus that in these treacherous times a man of a singular holy vision shall unite American corporations with its 228 year old government to make the most self-righteous, most capitalistic, most federally pervasive and invasive political embodiment in all of recorded human history.
For more interesting reading on Ashcroft and his fight for the status-quo and his battles against individuality, please visit the following links:
BBC Profile
Rotten.com
Eldred v. Ashcroft
Extreme Ashcroft
Ashcroft's Detention Camps
Some guys blog
What a way with words he has! Between that and 'Let the Eagle Soar', I say we have a strong candidate for the next national poet!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Doh! I use and love DC, but every hub I'm on is private.. run by friends or run from a machine overseas. No password.. no access. [jack black]See.. It's fuckin' simple![/jack black]
What is your penile percentile?
'P2P does not stand for 'permission to pilfer,' Ashcroft said
:-P
No, it stands for Peer To Peer, which is unrelated to piracy.
I dunno, but that quote sounded like Ashcroft was thinking P2P = Piracy To People or something like that.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
When your running a P2P music sharing greater than that of iTunes and you think no one is going to come knocking?
10 million songs, 60k in movies, what did they think would happen they would be vaulted to underground geek martyrdom?
Times like these are when running a diskless server really pays off. Sure, you're limited in the amount of storage that can be made available over p2p, but when they seize your server, there's no evidence whatsoever.
Just imagine the news story for that one: "Teenage File Trader's Computer Seized by FBI, Exercise in Futility"
Starting way back when the record companies were giving grief to the original Napster, many Slashdotters and like-minded folks were questioning the record company's authority to involve themselves in such matters, and said that if Napster was breaking the law, then the feds should get involved.
And then they did.
When harrassment of the P2P companies by both the government and private enterprises became more commonplace, many Slashdotters and like-minded folks said that the P2P companies weren't responsible for the actions of their users, and that the record companies should go after the users themselves.
And then they did.
When the record companies started suing the "whales" of the P2P world (those who were sharing sufficient amount of content to nudge into the territory of criminal, rather than civil law), many Slashdotters and like-minded folks claimed that if it really was criminal territory, then the record companies should stop picking on the pirates, and let the government handle it.
And now the government is doing just that.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Thanks for turning me on to this one! Remember, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Incase the justice department doesn't know, the internet is worldwide. Sure you shut down a few of the big pirates in the US, they can't do much about those servers overseas. Other than temporarily causing a little drop in pirate traffic (and punishing 5 people), at the end of the day, does it really matter?
How much you want to bet Ashcroft is sitting in a corner somewhere giggling to himself
'permission to pilfer'
I bet he thinks he's so clever. However I find this story a little strange, the article claims that the five hubs each contained 40 petabytes (7200 Libraries of Congress) which at my count is about 160,000 250GB hard drives. That's ~$26m worth of hard drives per hub. The article is written in such a way to suggest these five hubs were run by people in their basements while the supposed retail value of their setups is anything but basementable.
I guess this shouldn't be surprising though. It is a well known fact al-Qaeda is trying to topple the American government by supporting music piracy over the internet. The RIAA member companies are practically bankrupt from their tremendous losses due to piracy. They're such excellent role models for young people, persevering in the face of such insurmountable odds. The movie industry is soon to be entirely out of business from online trading of hits like Gigli. I feel really bad for those gaffers that only make $250,000 a year that can barely make ends meet because someone downloaded a movie.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
This is an extremely disturbing development, seeing as these folks are not guilty of a crime, merely a civil offense. An egregious and large-scale civil offense, to be sure, but a civil offense nonetheless. Which is why there were no arrests. So why is the Justice Department involved?
Oh that's right...I forgot. Herr Reichsmarshall Ashcroft IS the law.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
It's the difference between busting a pot smoker and someone who traficks millions of dollars worth of the stuff. I can say that I have bought all my music online, legally, (well, at allofmp3, which is legal is Russia). I have only downloaded one song in the past few months, because it wasn't on their archives. I will also buy CDs, because some bands/people make it worthwhile. The truth is that these "hubs *were* taking money from the artists, at a fairly high rate (my entire music collection, at 192 bitrate, is only 570MB). 100GB is a bit excessive, and that does take money from people who deserve it.
If I have a to do list of:
1. Get heart surgery done.
and 2. Pick up laundry.
I tend to prioritize the first one.
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That schmuck Ashcroft reminds me of that android that short-circuited in the middle of the movie Heavy Metal. I hope some alines would come down and haul his ass back to the repair shop.
In fact, I have millions of them! Pentabyte = 5 bytes, right?
PENTAbyte? What is that, like, five bytes?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Perhaps the Department of "Justice" should be renamed the Department of Legal Affairs.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I'm not sure what to think about these raids. For those of you who don't know what direct connect is, it's not like KaZaA.
The client connects to a server (there are many), and then can share files and chat with people on that server. The server does not actually have any files; they come from the clients.
In essence, each server acts like a mini-KaZaA, and judging from the recent Grokster rulings, would mean that they aren't liable for anything. So, basically it means this is just more FUD coming from Ashcroft.
Although the operators weren't arrested, they probably won't see their equipment back for a long time. I guess that is the Justice Dept.'s way of dishing out justice when the law doesn't fit whoever is paying them off's will.
Only in USA. :-)
I have a lot of trouble agreeing with anything he does because I dislike him.
Seems that Reno was good at that all the while ignoring the laws in place.
/. that you got modded as such.
Read the story before you pontificate. Your so damn offtopic it only proves the idiocy of
AC just because I can.
Not just one, but 5 places with 40 PETABYTES, EACH?!?!
Uhm okay math time....
1 Petabyte = 1024 Terabtyes
1 Terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes
So 40 Petabytes = 41,923,040 GB
41,923,040 GB / 300 GB per drive (generous assumption) = 139,744 drives per node!
5 nodes means 558,976 drives in use in total. Half a million 300 GB IDE drives?
I can think of a few places with petabyte arrays, this is not one of them I think.
Some simple math. This is assuming these people paid for the hardware and didn't just hijack a few 18-wheeler shipments from Maxtor.
139,744 300GB HDs * $157.5 (Knock 30% off for a volume discount from lowest price online of $225) = $22,009,680 in sunk capital in drives alone per node!
Or in total this means $110,048,400 spent on just HARD DRIVES ALONE. This doesnt even begin to include costs for enclosures or anything else.
So who the fuck are these "people"? These numbers are ether TOTALLY WRONG AND FASLEIFIED or they busted some kind of massively well funded organization?
(And no, I haven't even read the article yet but if those numbers are wha they said I stand by this)
can someone find a second source for this? I find it hard to believe (although not too difficult to swallow) A press conference about it? come on..
a billion to go. opps 1.1 billion, uh, no that is 1.2 billion, nuts.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Since when is violating the law entirely a civil matter?
You are totally right; this is a civil matter and when corporations get Uncle Sam or Padre Benito to watch the fort, bad things happen.
Like fascism.
When brings me to the most salient point of this document about fascism in World War II and what it consisted of, in so far as this dicussion is concerned:
"9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of "have-not" citizens."
...don't break the law. There is little legal happening on Direct Connect hubs, as opposed (for example) to BitTorrent) so I would suggest not operating one unless you want to be at least investigated. It sounds like these hubs were pretty large-scale copyright infringement racket. This wasn't someone e-mailing a ripped MP3 to a friend; this frankly sounds like organized crime to me.
Hey Ashcroft, WHERE'S OSAMA?
--
make install -not war
Techno/house/trance baby!
hereing that congress very quietly made file sharing a federal offense. I googled a little but I'm still not sure. The lack of arrests is probably to avoid the bad PR. Sending 5 poor dumb shmucks to an already overcrowded federal prison (probably letting a few murders and rapists out to make room) would not go over well even with people as stupid as Americans. Rest assured though, whatever the law says now, if Ashcroft wanted these people in prison, that's where they'd be.
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Doesn't the justice department have more important things to do then worry about some stupid copyright infringement, which is a f-ing CIVIL manner anyway?
How about like protecting us from being blown up by the next wave of attacks....?
Where has their priorities gone? This is insane
---- Booth was a patriot ----
if technology companies will begin to work against the likes of the RIAA/MPIA due to falling sales as a result of all these threats of being utterly destroyed because of having MP3's on their system.. With all the press going on about how the latest virus is 0wning X amount of PC's and having explained how these infected boxes are sometimes used as remote storage... I mean I wonder how many potential purchasers have been put off because of this fear? And at $250,000 as the top billed fine possible, I wonder how many families will be utterly destroyed because their teenage son or daughter insisted on having Kazaa or some other p2p program that their parents didn't understand going....
regards, the_leander
Most people won't be able to hear the difference between a gazillion bits per second and 128 kbps.
And ... if you use ogg instead, you can get the same quality at around 1/2 a gazillion bits per second.
Ok guys lets see, we've got a methlab, 3 gangs, 2 car shops, a money printing racket oh and some kid named 1337m4st0r with 200,000 songs on kazaa, ok lets move it!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
The DOJ pretty much runs the whole federal show when it comes to prosecuting criminals. Unfortunately I see a lot of lame comments like "why don't they go after the terrorists instead of kids", (I suspect from the most vocal critics of the DOJ when they really do attempt to go after terrorists). The DOJ goes after all sorts of criminals, it's what they do, they're not going to stop prosecuting kidnappers, robbers or any other kind of criminal because there may be terrorists that also need prosecuting. We can't let the fact that there are suspected terrorists who need to be investigated force us to ignore other offences, there are folks who specialize in chasing terrorists and frankly there aren't enough terrorists on DOJ's turf to keep them busy. Heck they'd be investigating even more innocent folks if they devoted more resources to it, something that really gets the anti-DOJ crown in a tizzy.
These weren't kiddys, these were dedicated mass pirates with fat connections and petabytes of pirated material *peta*bytes, I mean geeze, that's a crap load of data. It's disingenuous and pretty depraved to suggest ignoring some law because you sypmathize with breaking it (on a much smaller scale) using terrorism as the excuse. This is on par with some of the lowest things Ashcroft et.al have been accused of.
How long do you think he spent in front of the mirror practicing that?
I should buy some cement.
... with those hardened criminals off the streets. No, wait, only their computers are off the streets.
Seriously, though, doesn't Ashcroft and company have more important things to do...
Does anyone know if this was done under any of the recent anti-terrorist laws? Patriot Act? etc?
>>...both administrations...
What??!
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I know it's been said before, but I feel realy crappy when our citizens get raided and China (the government) gets to pirate anything it wants. How do we reward a country that RIAA and MPAA should really go after (not to mention human rights issues) we give them the olympics. okay, sorry, back on the topic - this is bad, how long before any email with a copyrighted song, any newsgroup post with a copyrighted picture or anything else someone could dream of land normal people in jail. With flagrant abuses of the patriot act and federal wiretaps becoming an issue who knows what may happen. BTW - I though a song that is over 25 years old is public domain, why does Mikey Jackson own the rights to the beatles songs, they should be public domain.
Guys,
I dont' think you understand the way these hubs work. Basically, if you have a certain amount of data, you connect, and your data is added to a large pool of data (everyone's files). This means the owner of the hub doesn't host all the files, it's the users that are connecting to the hub that own the files (and as such, the hardware). It certainly is possible that several thousand users are connecting to the hub, and are sharing their files. This could easily add up to quite large numbers, without needing a million harddrives in one server/cluster.
A wee lesson, brought to you by.. me.
It wasn't really 40 petabytes but rather the equivalent of 40 petabytes.
There were actually only 100 gigabytes, but they were high speed gigabytes.
yes, 40 petabytes, or 160,000 250gb hds, in other words, as pen and teller say "BULLSHIT!"
his speach writers. I'm sure befret of them he's just as much an ass as Bush.
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So, you wanna give free rein to thieves while we're chasing terrorists?
I don't care what you may believe ought to happen, explain to me why you think people who steal things ought not to be punished?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Slowly? Didn't you get the memo? It became a fait accomplis in November 2000.
I just hope we still have time to stop its onslaught.
You'll need Flux Capacitor (c). On sale now at most ....
Ok, so these 5 people each hosted around "40 petabytes of data, the equivalent of 60,000 movies or 10.5 million songs" each, and made them readily available internationally via the Internet. Maybe these records companies and movie studios, with their vast resources, could learn a thing or two about delivering content.
Seriously, a bunch of amateurs can make 10.5 million songs available but the **AA's can't ??? Maybe the RIAA should steal the technology and user base and call it even.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
makes as a condition of membership the willingness to make available material to be stolen
Material to be "stolen", eh? Nobody's stealing stuff from me if I offer it up online for them to take. Makes as much sense as "Officer, my house was burgled after I swung open the door and yelled 'please burgle my house'". It's only indirect theft from the record companies as well. If I broke into someone's flat and pinched all their CDs, I wouldn't be stealing from the record company, I'd be stealing from whoever I just robbed. I wouldn't be making any money from the action either, so it's not like the record company is watching money that should go to them go somewhere else, all they're watching is money not go anywhere at all, and they don't like that.
Music has to come from somewhere. Currently it's coming out of record companies, who are consistently saying "how the hell do we create an audio track that people can listen to without being able to copy it". This is a pipedream. If you can listen to it and it's on a shiney disc, it MUST go through a DAC at some stage, and that's where your entry point as a copier is. Even with a decent analog system you can make a perfectly fine copy just off the line out.
If you download a copy of something, rest assured that at least someone somewhere must have bought it. Perhaps now the best thing for the record companies to do is auction off one single original copy of an album with bidding starting at six million dollars, wait for a community of fans to get the funds together and buy it, then watch it spread across the net, safe in the knowledge that they got a guaranteed six million dollars from an album before anyone had even heard it.
for whatever you'd downloaded. Beyond that, they could use server logs from the services you've been downloading from. Also, if you turn the computer off, you run the risk of being charged with evidence tampering. If you don't, they'll just hook up a ups and away they go. Somebody told me that's why Cray's are so expensive: they're diskless so you can't turn them off (without going through hell to bring them back up).
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They Raided Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Paris Hilton, and Donald Trump. Appearantly, they were using the hard-drives to only heat their homes when they realized they could store data on them. It wasn't mp3's, just backups of goat.cx.
This the pre-election push to show Ashcroft's kinder, gentler side.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I am so glad that you are taking time off your busy schedule of raping the public's personal freedoms to further the cause of rapacious corporate greed while 14% of the nation lives under the poverty line.
Yours Truly
The RIAA and the MPAA
Acutally the nifty little animation appears to be horribly out of date. The counter on their website actually indicates that there is 11792.07 TB available (when I checked it).
The DOJ deals with domestic "terrorists." The NSA are the ones that are supposed to go after foreign threats however recently the FBI has become involved.
A pentabyte is a byte of data that is in the pentagon. It is a special, super high security byte.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
All those faked shares make the propaganda that much better.
the police will do nothing, because I am not a wealthy man. This happened to my brother. His apartment was robbed. The criminal was caught only because the apartment manager inspected the crook's apartment and found some of my brother's music cassettes (his own recordings, he's a musician, so there really wasn't any doubt). The man responisble was arrested and promply released. He was still living next door when my brother moved out of those apartments. There's no room in America's prisons for people who victimize the poor.
My definition of "theft" is something physically taken. This is also yours, if you live in the United States and choose to be bound by our laws. For what I hope is the last time, copyright infringement is _not_ theft.
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Most people don't consider stealing cable as wrong, or speeding as wrong, or rolling stops, or any number of "nuisance" laws which could be ignored and most people wouldn't be harmed.
/. should be applauding the fact that the DoJ is going after some of the biggest traders around, instead of bitching that corporations are owning the Government.
However, in all those instances, including P2P piracy, there's a harm to someone indeed. Even if you're not physically taking something away, or you weren't going to buy the thing anyways, you still are taking away the right of the distributor to choose how its work can be disseminated through public channels.
Rolling stops cause problems if you don't really check for that cop car speeding toward the intersection, or the speed law if a dog darts across the road, or stealing cable when your bootleg cable scrambler causes problems on the lines.
Some laws are necessary, and just because most people don't want them around, is not a reason for them to be abolished. Copyright infringement is a necessary law, and for once
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
40 petabytes? Are we sure they didn't accidentally raid the Library of Congress?
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Terrorists
Pedophiles
and identity thieves
all of whom are known, reported and ready for the DOJ to grab, but are running wild and unchecked.
Why is that?
(I know why, but I'll let someone else say it.)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Come on, you know he means both presidents - you know, Bush and his chronies and the "Them" administration - the one that doesn't get elected - we just refer to "them" as "they" - as in "They killed the guy who runs his car on gas" and "They have a secret deal with our alien overlords" or "They shot Kennedy". C'mon, standard stuff, tinfoil hat 101.
ymmv
But where can the persecuted flee today?
An interesting problem; I can't think of an inhabitable place which isn't controlled by some government. Perhaps one solution would be for everyone to move to one particular region, then declare that region independent of the government. Though I have a feeling that would be quashed with obscene amounts of military force.
From my favorite clash song:
"When they break down your door,
how you gonna come,
with your hands on your head?
or on the trigger of your gun."
I mean common, we are americans aren't we? - well metaphorically with the guns, if you have a real gun then that might get you in more trouble.
Quite frankly, your analogy of warez kiddies and "the persecuted" is ridiculous, and imho shows what a useless and effete society we have become. When people get worked up to this kind of hysterical frenzy because people illegaly trading movies and mp3s are busted, something is seriously wrong.
but I'm sure Ashcroft can. So can chairman of the RIAA.
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File swappers -- even if guilty of infingement -- are NOT stealing. Period.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
We have spams of gigabytes of pirated software available, but the government does nothing about that. They even signed a bill that says that they CAN SPAM ads for the pirated software.
When they sell the pirated software, it is clear that they may be an actual loss -- as opposed to just sitting unused on hard drives.
Fight Spammers!
I have the laundry shop drop it off. It's their job anyway...
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lower the threat level to blue now?
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
You can see even in this article about Ashcroft raiding the homes of "thieves" that the media does not report fairly or truthfully. Anyone knows that copyright infringement is NOT THEFT. Yet the media reports it as such. That is because the media IS the CORPORATE media. And it should be obvious that any media reports on matters that affect corporate profits will indeed be slanted in the favor of corporate power.
Now, China is supposedly socialist (that is debateable as to whether it actually is), or at least there the government has the power to greatly control business transactions. Does that affect corporate power? You bet! So, do you think that maybe what you hear from the corporate media regarding China and other "socialist" countries is SLANTED and BIASED and UNTRUE?
The answer is that you or I CANNOT TRUST anything that corporate media says.
And I do not even watch teevee news myself unless it involves reportage of breaking news....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Maybe, I've seen suggestions that there was an ISP involved, however if it is bullshit, I'd be getting mighty sick of Ashcroft's exaggerations. His cyberterror bullshit over the Antartica hack was pretty annoying.
OTOH if you have a network of a few thousand people with an entry limit of 100GB and most weigh in at say 250-500GB or more then then the total capacity of the file sharing network could easily reach 40 petabytes. Exactly what was defined as a hub/node is unclear, it could have been akin to a supernode that made available a directory of a few thousand mapped systems. So a few supernodes and a directory of available files would make this plausible.
Sounds like they hit the supernodes in a grokster like network that had a file collection size threshold as a prerequisite for joining.
Now that I'm thinking along these lines it is worrying. DOJ has the capacity to go after the supernodes in grokster networks using electronic surveilance. Heck is looks like that's almost what they've done here.
>Each of the five hubs contained 40 petabytes of data, the equivalent of 60,000 movies or 10.5 million songs, Ashcroft said.
Does Ashcroft really expect me to believe there are 60,000 distinct movies on that network? Netflix only has 25,000 movies. I suspect they counted the number of COPIES of movies in the whole network. Ashcroft loves to mislead people, doesn't he? Why does he feel the need to inflate the numbers if his goal were upholding the law? Who signs his paycheck, anyway?
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
you still are taking away the right of the distributor to choose how its work can be disseminated through public channels.
And if I don't believe they should have absolute control of this?
[Intellectual property] is a necessary law
Again, I don't agree with this; it's only necessary for those who want to squeeze money from ideas or art.
I also don't think you can compare laws which are designed to prevent physical injury with those which are designed to allow monopolies.
There is something quite wrong about their figures.
The ratio of video to audio size seems about right: 1 movie = 175 songs. So that would be about right for 700 MB Divx movies and 4 MB mp3s.
However, based on those rates the number of movies or songs they list would only add up to 40 TB.
Looks like somebody got mixed up between petabyte and terabyte.
News sources should really have some people to double check their math before publishing an article.
I had some unexpected visitors...something about p2p or something...I told them I wasn't interested.
Buying drives would not be the only expensive part. If we assume each of your 100,000 or so drives consumes 5W, you are looking at half a megawatt of power consumption before you plug them into computers! At the bargain rate of $0.03/kWh this would cost you about $11,000 a month to run. That's not the kind of spare change most people have for their file shares. That cost would be joined by what it costs to run other hardware, bandwith, HVAC, and floor space.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Okay, so it's clear there's no way in hell that each of these guys had millions of dollars worth of data storage. So the sods at the DoJ have got to be talking about the total amount of data shared on the hub.
This being the case, Grokster pretty much sums it up. What exactly TF did they get raided for again? Does someone need to call the ACLU?
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
I downloaded a copy of his rendition of "When Eagles Soar" - and I NEVER downloaded another song again!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"Today's enforcement action is the latest step in our ongoing effort to combat piracy occurring on the Internet," said Christopher A. Wray, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division. "This is the first federal law enforcement action against criminal copyright infringement using peer-to-peer networks and shows that we are committed to combating piracy, regardless of the medium used to commit these illegal acts."
"Today we are sending a clear message that federal law enforcement takes piracy seriously," said U.S. Attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein. "It is illegal to trade in copyright-protected materials on the Internet. This is theft, plain and simple. If you are engaged in this behavior, you are on notice that you are not as anonymous as you may think."
Is copyright 'enforcement' a civil matter or not? I don't get the whole 'arbitrary enforcement' thing the DOJ is doing.
No arrests - just confiscating your stuff.
Vote.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Which hubs were targetted in this operation? Does anyone know?
Yeah, like Ted Kennedy!
Do you really think these clowns are going to get this right? What evidence do they have? How did they get it?
I'd rather they put the effort into shutting down the local crank factory, cocaine and heroine importation or the thriving slave/prostitution markets in Mexico which export to the US. The world is filled with many more horrible things than music sharing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That we should call each file type by it's size.
So a file that was 1 MB would be a megafile, 1 GB would be a gigafile, 1 TB would be a terafile, and of course, 1 PB would be a petafile.
Oh well, too bad.
This deserves a +5, Insightful
42,949,672,960 megabytes / 60,000 movies = 715,827.883 megabytes per movie, or 699.050667 gigabytes per movie.
All math for this comment was done using the all-powerful web interface to the god Google using its conversion feature, i.e., "40 petabytes in gigabytes" don't believe me? try it for yourself
This digital revolution that you want won't happen until geeks like us take charge and run for Congress or something. I'm not sure how many people have read the constitution that you want amended, but you don't have to a lawyer or even a politian to become a Senator. You just have to be American, 30 years old, and an inhabitant of your chosen state...
I mean, if an action movie star can become Govenor of California... I'm positive that with enough will power, a computer scientist could become a senator. All it would take is for a few of us to get in there to change the world.
I would do it, but unfortunately, you guys are going to have to wait another 10 years before I'm old enough. By that time it might be too late. It's up to the 30 something geeks to run right now. By god, I'd vote an IT guy into office before I would vote in a politician, any day.
Just my opinion.
What about Wyoming? Do you realize that if every single user on slashdot moved to Wyoming and formed a voting bloc, we'd control the state!
Keep all the file sharing on an intrastate network, legally purchase material to be copied from out of state, and tell those Feds to stay the hell out!
Now, if only we could agree on what our voting bloc should vote for...
All of a sudden I have this image of a "Bootlegger Jesus" figurine...
I'm obviously too tainted by evil and corruption to get into heaven now, short of wiping all the tainted memories from my brain...
(Is that why so many stories of the sternest Born-Again(tm) Christians seem to go along the lines of "I fried my brains with drugs and alcohol and pornography featuring dead gay baby farm-animals, and then one day as I lay near-dead in a pool of various fluids from my own body, Jesus appeared to me and Saved me."? Maybe that's what it takes to wipe the Evil Thoughts out of one's brain?...)
(Yes, the latter was a JOKE, not a genuine insult to Christians, or even just Born-Again Christians. In poor taste, maybe, but a joke nonetheless...)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Let's all throw in and buy an oil drilling platform, park it in international waters, form our own national government there, and stash all our data there. If we still have any money left a few communications satellites could allow us to access the data. Screw the U.S. I am moving to another freakin' country.... Maybe we could colonize the ocean? We GOTTA do something..
It is a civil issue, regardless of what some insane law says.
Just because its in a law doesn't mean its right.
This is what I speak to, its NOT a criminal issue, its a civil issue.
Its is misuse of federal funds. And they should all be tossed out of office.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Does it really matter? Even if they only had one file, they are still lowly theives.
er, they are lowly thieves too.
There are many other crimes that might fall under the blanket terms: larceny, burlary, or unlawful posession, for example.
Of course, 'theft' of a term paper, plagerism, is also a copyright infringmenet but rarely called that. The accusation would be "He stole my paper."
On a similar vein, 'theft' of an idea, which can include things like patent infringment, alsu use the words 'stole' and 'theft', as in, "He stole my idea."
Other crimes that could be called 'theft' might be extortion (He stole my money) or fraud (He stole my identity).
THEFT itself isn't a crime under that name, in the US.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
This Has happened before. When that story broke it was carried by the likes of MTV and USA Today, but not slashdot. According to the later reportsthe students were ever charged with any crimes. Aprently this is how they've decided to deal with direct connect hubs. I bet neo-modus doesn't want news of this to get out.
There was an article recently on slashdot about this: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/08/131 1241&tid=198
They claim that raiding hard drives is not going to get you results. I guess the police did not RTFA.
Federal policing resources are stretched thin enough as it is with the caseloads they have. It would be far better to society if the DOJ actually spent its resources and valuable time actually investigating and going after things of importance to protecting society instead of silly issues in copyright violations.
So yeah, lets ask the question. How much time was taken away from the investigation of terrorism to make "examples" out of a few file sharers?
First of all, the DOJ just doesn't have the resources to go after the little guys. While the law might permit them to go after some of the smaller guys, they're not doing so. The people that got raided, five of them, were well in excess of the value of what has to be shared for it to become a criminal matter.
Assuming the price for a song is approximately a dollar, and $2,500 has to be shared for it to become criminal, that's automatically about 2,500 songs that must be shared. If each song is 5 megabytes on average, we're talking 12.5 gigabytes that are shared to get raided. That's a lot, and these guys were well over that amount.
The RIAA sues people in mass. And the RIAA claims the people they sue on average share 1,000 songs. We are talking about people who were far more egregious offenders than what the RIAA is going after.
When it comes to file swapping, I'd almost rather deal with the feds than deal with the RIAA. First of all, there are stricter regulations involving a criminal case and what can and can't be done. The processes of discovery and depositions in a civil case are regulated rather loosely and give the RIAA an immense amount of power. The RIAA and the feds have different goals. The RIAA seeks to intimidate and scare, whereas the feds seek to convict criminals of their crimes. The RIAA wishes to stay out of court and uses scare tactics to prevent cases from going to trial. While the feds may offer a plea bargain to reduce congestion in the courts, they are certainly not trying to keep cases from going to trial to protect their methods from judicial scrutiny.
And remember, the feds aren't going to try to scare you out of going to court. They wouldn't file charges if they didn't believe they could get a conviction, as opposed to the RIAA's tactics. And if you can't afford a lawyer, the government must provide one.
The RIAA aren't exactly going after the little fish in the pond, but the feds are going after far bigger fish than the RIAA is.
You are now free to remove your tinfoil hat.
Win those youth votes! Impeccable timing!
surely 40 petabytes was a type-o( by a factor of 10)
i'm reasonably confident they *meant* 40 TB per node.
I certainly wanted you to know that I haven't forgotten about the Ashcroft-loads of money you've tossed my way - and went ahead and started seizing property (4th Amendment? ROLFLOLFL).
This should allow me to get Ridge to raise the terror alert - maybe even postpone the elections this year. (Fingers Crossed!! :)
Thanks again for sending all those unsold copies of my album to the libraries - it was the only way they'd take it. (We won't let that settlement nonsense happen again:)
Your friend in Money, Power and Crazy Bitches,
John Ashcroft
This exaggeration is common when the cops bust the drug rings. Why is it so surprising? Whether it's street-value or bytes, the sensationalism is used to wow the public.
>> >>...both administrations...
>> What??!
Well, Ashcroft isn't president (he's part of the Bush administration), and Kerry doesn't have a campaign, but I'm not really thrilled with voting for either Kerry or Bush.
But then again, the quizzes at www.issues2000.org didn't match me up real well with *any* candidate.
"Ashcroft warned that those who copy music, movies and software over P2P networks without permission could face jail time."
I warn those that would raid my house; I have a 9mm in my desk and I work from home.
How do you make "available material to be stolen" ?
Macy's makes available material to be stolen all the time. So does my grocery store. If I put a pile of CDs on the street with a FREE sign on them on them, you take them, you are not stealing. Not by any stretch of the imagination, even Ashcroft's imagination! Even if I rip all the tracks and put them on Kazaa, YOU are not stealing. You are taking something I am giving away.
The contortions of logic that these idiots go through to apply law to things they don't begin to understand is amusing. The fact that they believe what they are saying makes sense is scary.
Now I'm not one to preach about the evils of software/music/movie sharing, but anyway:
But this whole thing is starting to look more and more like the enforcement of prohibition back in the roaring twenties, or like the religious persecution that started the American colonies.
In those cases, the people who drank or practiced something other than the state religion weren't harming others. In the case of copyright infringement, someone is being harmed -- property in the form of lost revenues is being stolen from its owners.
Yes, there are fuzzy borders around what constitutes actual property and whatnot. Still, it does harm. In that respect the crackdown on software/music/movie sharing is not like religious persecution or prohibition -- those people of olden days were only hurting themselves.
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
Your post is a classic case of begging the question. It presupposes that some time was taken away from anti-terrorism activities when that is not established and highly unlikely given the demarcation and budgeting of such things. It also ignores tha law of diminishing returns when it comes to anti-terrorism spending. With cases bordering on entrapment of dumb Imams I seriously doubt the DOJ could find something productive to do. You also imply that no time should be devoded to clearly criminal activity, effectively negating the law, simply because is suits your politics in this instance. You could pick any example of law breaking and cite anti-terrorism as a more worthy calling. It's a riddiculous world view that if taken seriously would leave us doing nothing else.
Hmmm... but let's look at the purpose of those laws. Speeding, for example. Sure, it's possible to be going fast enough so that you could (e.g.) hit a dog without being able to avoid him. Does that mean that we should never, ever, ever allow an automobile to exceed 15 MPH?
Of course not. I'm sure you already see the fallacy inherent in your comparison: situationally appropriate regulations. I think people who drive 40 MPH on campus, especially on the first day of fall classes, ought to be JAILED right then - for driving too fast. I think people who drive 40 MPH on the interstate, especially in the left lane, ought to be cited and heavily fined - for driving too slowly. If your dog jumps out in front of a car on the interstate, it's the dog's fault (or the owner's) when he dies and causes a 50-car pileup, not the driver's, regardless of whether that driver was speeding.
Many speed limits (soapbox ON) are set for reasons which are NOT safety-oriented, but revenue-oriented. Many a small town in Florida, e.g., pays for all civic functions, nice patrol cruisers, etc., by operating speed traps. Those are laws, but it's the enaction and enforcement of those laws which hurts people.
I don't know why people wouldn't think stealing cable was wrong. I think those who do it know it's wrong, but do it anyway.
Rolling stops are traffic infractions. No one's house gets raided for that.
Let me make one last point, one which you may not like: if most people in the U.S. don't want a given law around, then that law SHOULD be abolished. That's how democracy works. Distilled to its most basic, democracy is a process whereby the majority takes things away from the minority. If the people who want to keep their constitutionally-protected rights are the minority, the majority WILL take them away. If the minority are the corporations who have spent the last several decades screwing musicians (RIAA), the majority WILL disseminate their product electronically. And sooner or later, if democracy works as it is intended, the laws preventing that will be repealed. Is that morally right or wrong? That's a different question indeed. Our government is not about legislating morality, it's about legislating what the majority WANT.
Of course, I could be wrong. Again.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
A vote for Bush is a vote for Ashcroft, and a vote for a third party protest candidate, however conscientious, is a vote for Bush. While failing to prevent terrorism despite a gross erosion (i.e. Ashcroft wiping his ass with) the Constitution, now he seems to have the resources to bust teenage kids sharing music.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Erhm, I could've sworn the DMCA added some new *criminal* copyright infringement offenses, and that they're not just the anti-circumvention bits.
Of course, IANAL, so...
Ashcroft: "Look at what a great job I'm doing!"
RIAA & MPAA: "Look at how much piracy is costing us - you'll have to buy new DRMed copies of everything"
It'll probably be 5 years before any of them see any of their equipment that was seized. The government is notoriously slow in returning "evidence".
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
It's an election year.
Ashcroft wants to keep his job.
Hyped up misinfo like this is good PR for a politician, and better PR when considered from the standpoint of a news editor who needs to ensure exposure.
--
I'll let you draw your own conclusions about any relationships between those three facts. Hint: "We're doing something about (insert crime here)" is *always* good copy and rarely double-checked for factual content.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Whoops, nevermind.
Once upon a time, conditions like these would start mass emigrations. When the world was still largely unexplored, people packed up, moved out, and started their own countries.
But where can the persecuted flee today?
Remember, it is Congress who has the authority to set copyright law, not the **AAs. And, just as in your example of prohibition, when enough people get pissed the laws will be changed when those that are pissing them off are voted out of office.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
"But you DON'T HAVE THE RIGHT TO TAKE IT."
Really, says who... you? The law? I'd guess your arguement as to why copyright infrindgement is immoral really should be longer than a single sentence to be compelling.
Let's not forget that copyright property is a state-sponsored temporary monopoly which creates a scarcity which does not correspond to any state in reality. No such scarcity exists or would exist except as created by law. If these idea monopolists get to uppity, as I see they have been doing, it is then time to change the law.
3dinfo@maficstudios.com
"Permission To Pilfer"
Wow...bet he stayed up all night thinking of that one...
.-..-.-..-.-..-.-..-.-..-.-..-.-..-.-..- Linux is like a wigwam, no windows, no gates and an Apache inside.
The population of the U.S. is about 300 million, that of the internet worldwide perhaps 81 million.By one estimate 19% of americans with internet access use the P2P networks. Definitive P2P Piracy Figures for Year 2003. The problem is that file sharing demographic may be overwhelmingly skewed to wards the young and politically inactive, adolescently rebellious or simply opportunistic, secure in the knowledge they are judgment proof, but in the end not fundamentally committed to your cause.
Between 'one and 100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs.'
They use the word material instead of songs. So in actual fact they dont have 250,000 songs, they probably just have 100~ movies.
I wonder what sounds better to the media - 100 movies or 'the equivalent of 250,000 songs'.
...and btw, fuck you John Ashcroft.
i was going to crack a similar one but i won't make myself redundant..
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
No. One petabyte = 10^15 bytes. 1MB = 10^6 bytes 4000MB = 40 * 10^6 * 10^ 3 = 4 * 10 ^ 10 10.5M songs = 10.5 * 10^6 = 1.05 * 10^7 40 * 10^15 (40PB) = 4 * 10 ^ 16 bytes (40 * 10^16)bytes / (1.05 * 10^7)songs ~ 4 x 10^(16-7) bytes/song = 4 x 10 ^ 9 = 4 megabytes per song
No.
One petabyte = 10^15 bytes.
1MB = 10^6 bytes 4000MB = 40 * 10^6 * 10^ 3 = 4 * 10 ^ 10
10.5M songs = 10.5 * 10^6 = 1.05 * 10^7
40 * 10^15 (40PB) = 4 * 10 ^ 16 bytes
(40 * 10^16)bytes / (1.05 * 10^7)songs ~ 4 x 10^(16-7) bytes/song = 4 x 10 ^ 9 = 4 megabytes per song
"THE INFORMATION is what is being offered for sale"
Information for sale, sounds abserd like trying to sell me formulas, ideas, perhaps even air?
The only possible way someone could sell information is by creating false scarcity for it though various laws. These laws are anachronisms, they do not work unless a sizeable, perhaps the majority, of people are jailed. Time for the majority to speak up and have the law changed to severly reduce its length or perhaps and expand fair use rights.
One idea is that perhaps copyright should be only an exclusive right to *commerically* use the information, with personal use for any reason being allowed.
3dinfo@maficstudios.com
I don't deserve to be alive. I say that 1MB = 10^6 at the beginning of my post. However, at the end, I essentially claim that 1MB = 10^9.
*Crawls into a deep, dark corner and cries*
No, this bullshit was enabled by all the civil rights grabs for the war on drugs, particularly the neutering of the 4th Amendment. As with PATRIOT, Echelon, INDUCE, CAPPS II in the here and now, my warnings were ignored in the 1980's and 1990's -- Cassandra
That's too high by a factor of 1,000, which means that our attorney general is confused about the difference between peta- and tera-
Must be. Each hub having 40 petabytes with users sharing up to 100 GB means that there are at least 400,000 users in each hub. I don't think that works with DirectConnect. 400 users is more likely, though. I haven't seen hubs with more than 1,000 users.
In the country where you live, if I had a shotgun with a disclaimer on it saying that I'm not responsible for the bullets because they are provided by someone else, could I get away with murder?
Probably not. Here "hub owners" equals "bullet salesmen" and "uploaders" equals "killers". So, the hub owner is not comparable to the killer.
I agree, though, that disclaimers can't help you get away with everything. It is very unlikely that the owner of a hub with several TB of shared data is totally unaware of the kind of data being offered.
SAN storage is at $2,500 a TB? Please show me a SAN storage system for that price.
Or are you just talking about the hard drives?
If that's the case, then you should increase your cost estimate.
What we are talking about here is the culture of our society. Currently it is controlled be greedy corporations who commit illegal acts to keep gouging higher prices out of consumers. It's not a f*ing milkshake, it is what separates us from animals. It is needed by society, just like art and literature. If the record companies are pricing people out of being able to afford the media of their own culture, then that is a crime against humanity. The means exist for almost no cost electronic distribution, but are ignored, or misused to generate even more profit. Stop making excuses for what is obviously wrong.
we should be bashing these guys, because it's them who give a bad name to perfectly legit p2p.
I have no doubt that the pope is the antichrist. Remember, however, that millions of Christians have died, been tortered, and put in prison for saying so.
Currently, the Roman Catholic church has raped umpenth children in this country with thousands of peodophile priests, and they did it as part of a criminal conspiracy that moved priests around, gave them sanctuary, issued passports to them to leave the country when needed. The pope even issued an order that priests should be tried in church courts instead of government courts. Lawyers for the Roman Catholic church also wanted all evidence that the church had of pedophile crimes to be moved to their embassy, because they have diplomatic immunity to protect that information from being seized because the vatican is recognized as its own country, all two miles or so of it.
Question: Why isn't Ashcroft investigation the largest pedophile scandal in history? The answer to that question is what is wrong.
fukin stop buyin their garbage people! then they wont have the money to sue you!
sincewhen did our justice department become the neighborhood watch? Nice of our government to work for private intrests.
Most of the other large P2P programs rely on large centralized servers, which gives the RIAA, MPAA, and law enforcement agencies an easy target. Direct Connect, as mentioned by numerous other posters, is just a client/hub software package that lets anyone set up their own server for others to connect to. Think one giant MMORPG server operated by a game developer versus a few hundred small Quake servers operated by anyone with a spare box and a decent connection. If you take down the MMORPG server, nobody can play anymore (unless you join an unreliable hacked private server, but that's not the point). But if id software gets firebombed, people can still create and join Quake servers for as long as they want. Same deal if NeoModus gets shut down, especially since the most popular client for the Direct Connect protocol is 3rd party open-source. And there's plenty of open-source hub programs for it too. Even if the DoJ managed to get rid of every hub in the United States, that would eliminate only 20-30% of the network because most hubs are operated out of Europe (mostly Norway and Sweden). I'm not sure what seizing those computers really accomplishes though, other than taking hubs offline. A hub is just a router lets one person connect to the other. The hub never touches or sees any of the files that go between the users. Once you unplug it, it contains 0 petabytes of data.
In order to join the network, members had to promise to provide between one and 100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs, Ashcroft said.
Also, I'd like to point out that this is a logical step to take if you want to make a Peer 2 Peer network instead of a Peer 2 Leech network.
Ok, they protect copyright holders, I'll swallow that. So tell me when was the last time they did go after a GPL violator, someone who didn't give credit for the BSD code he used. Heck someone OTHER then people pissing off BSA, RIAA, MPAA and similar copyright cartels?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Ok, I've waited long enough. Here is my suggestion.
People are used to being entertained for free. For example flip on the radio out pops music, didnt cost me a dime. TV, same thing. Who pays for this?
Advertisers!
Companies, get a clue. Buy some songs, add a 5 second clip and release it to the public.
Sure a lot of people would strip the add but most probably would'nt especially if it made it legal and was kept short.
Like "Garth Brooks singing I've got friends in low places brought to you by the law firm of..." well you get the idea.
"Or maybe they are too busy since they just sued a bunch more customers...."
[Definition: Customer.]
"2. One who regularly or repeatedly makes purchases of a trader; a purchaser; a buyer."
You guys have some funny ideas of what constitutes a "customer". Can't wait to hear your definition of a "freeloader".
I never understood how they could let the post office get away with fostering illegal activity. The parallels to file sharing seem obvious. So why not shutdown the post, dammit?
Come on.. who has a friggin PENTABYTE??
I don't know how much that is, but I bet that's a whole lot of Libraries of Congress...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Duh! Why have someone do a super professional flash if your stealing stuff? Is it any wonder why they got busted? Please...
s ha re.html
http://www.udgnet.com
has 100K+ posts, 7k+ registered users and 0 smarts!
NYT to publish the web address tomorrow.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/technology/26
Well, I guess there is no coincidence that http://www.suprnova.org is unreachable.
Stealing cable is actually stealing because of the fact that the signal strength degrades which costs the company money that is putting it out.
Speeding is not wrong if you are not being reckless. Who gets hurt if you go 50 in a 35 with no one else around you? If people pull out in front of you suddenly, that's their fault.
If you go through a stop sign without stopping and it is reckless and you would not be able to see if there were another car, that is a problem. If, however, you just slow down instead of stopping but were able to be secure in the fact that no one is coming, who cares?
There is no right to choose how something you create is sold. If you are going to allow this, you should allow me to make a brand of condoms, and make it illegal to sell it to black people. Or, if I make a cd, I should be allowed to say how I want it sold. If you are taking nothing away from me and I do not own the physical item, you can do whatever you want with it unless the American people grant a privilege otherwise.
Rolling stops are no different in that case from someone going through a stop that is somewhat blind. I for one will not bend over for government to take advantage of me. The job of government is to work around the sovereign people to make it seem that they are not there. Not to force people to work around them.
You could hit the dog anyhow, your speed does not matter. If you are going slowly, you will hit the dog if you brake and it keeps going. If you are going over the speed limit you will go past the dog before you even see it. You can't say that putting a speed limit and having fines for it when you are not endangering anyone that isn't doing something else that is against your laws is effective.
Yes, some laws are needed. No, if people hate them and they don't protect anyone compared to their harm, they should be removed.
Copy"right" is someone's inherent right to copy something they have created. It is your property, you can do what you like with it. Telling someone else they can't copy something is granted by the people to others so that they will hopefully create more and provide it to the people. What is commonly known as copyright is not a right, it is a priviledge. If the American people want to be rid of it, they can and should be rid of it. To say otherwise will take a lot of explaining on your part.
This wasn't much of a troll since there was no point to any of it, but hey, it was a nice try I guess. To sum everything up, your points were not valid and your summation had no backing. This idea of copyright should be gone and dead. It is not a right. It can be taken away. It's an imaginary thing. You do not own that property anymore. No one loses anything when someone makes a copy. This is just like the war on drugs.
That's scary.
I'm seeding about 9GB of non-commercial, freely-distributed game mods to Gnutella (custom user-made maps for UT2004, Doom3, etc).
Every time I see one of these reports I get nervous thinking that they'll come busting my door down on the mistaken idea that because of the bandwidth I'm using that I must be swapping illegal content.
Of course, I have nothing to worry about, but the abuse of power is disgusting and there are much more important things in our country that need attending to.
It's not a stretch if you factor in every Puff Daddy remix of good classic songs. That's like oh...100 a day I believe.
They still think this will do something...amazing.
Adware supported P2P has already shown it can survive, how much longer till part of the profit from it is used to drop the servers in Malaysia or another country that will gladly tell Aschcroft where he can stick it? For that matter, the setup of any servers in places like Russia to coordinate and distribute the pieces would put a kink in their oh so proud moment. Can you be busted if you never share the *FULL* product but only pieces of it at a time? No central repository, just a constant stream you tap into like BitTorrent and select the package you wish to assemble in reward for letting your bandwidth be used. Now take that model and apply it to WiFi and watch sharing spread like AIDS in Africa. Where there is a will there is a way, why not try catching real criminals (Murders, rapists, terrorists, crack dealers etc.) or better yet, try paying attention and taking terrorist threats and plots seriously Herr Ashcroft. Streaming files you don't share but can download...they stay in the stream passed around in pieces...yearly subscription...additions added to the servers in Anti-US countries...almost a business model if I figure out a reason to sue somebody and patent the obvious.
Polease RIAA/MPAA.
Apparently the AG is also confused about the difference between a criminal and civil offense. Copyright infringement is not a crime, it's a civil offense punishable by being sued not jail time.
evil is as evil does
"Yeah, because people who use filesharing networks to try out stuff or find new interests *never* buy anything. ^^)"
Oldest excuse in the book. There's ways to find new "interests" legally. Try pulling the other finger.
Don't use Direct Connect.
Use MUTE, or something more secure, instead.
The Supreme Court just ruled that Peer to peer filesharing is a legal activity. From a Canadian perspective it seems like an outrageous invasion of privacy. Big brother is watching ... 1984 has arrived!
Yeah. With all the hard drug dealers, murderers, hard property thieves, rapists, carjackers, and smugglers in the world, I really want my tax dollars going towards raiding some nerds house.
It's fucking file sharing. Anyone who is seriously passionate about this and seriously thinks all the money spent on this is worth it has a serious problem with perspective.
It's been a long time.
Considering that most of the Music Companies are run by Jewish Powermen it is kind of Ironic that they are resorting to the same tactics that scared their parents.
No this is no slap to the Jewish Community its just the tactics are Scary
I prefer to parrot RMS, laws should follow morals not the other way around. The threshold of criminality has sunk lower without regard to public opinion of the matter. That so many knowledgable people here can be mistaken is evidence the law is out of wack, not of general ignorance.
The most important thing is that this is a fight for, not against the artist. It was particularly fitting and satisfying to see this ruling today, especially when you read the 1945 songbook by the author. There can be no question that Woody would not have liked his own work being owned forever by "music monopolists", "big money boys", sissys and others.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
How did they get caught?
Nark? Open to public? Patriot Act? Carnivore?
It's theft. Real people work real hours creating the intellectual property that these "nerds" are swiping. Just because it's easy doens't make it right. Yeah, murdering and raping are certainly greater crimes and deserve proportional funding. But that doesn't mean we stop putting the cuffs on simple shoplifters. And where is "all the money" that you being spent that you are referring to? Simply noting the IPs of these petty thieves and putting them in front of judge Wopner should be enough to make them pee their slashdoting panties.
I don't know about you, but I'm eagerly awaiting the next Slashdot post about the X-Prize, that's for sure.
wrong.
> "to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent
> to keep or make use of wrongfully." To appropriate without
> right with intent to make use of wrongfully. That sounds
> EXACTLY like copyright infringement. And since "theft" is "the
> act of stealing," it certainly does apply here.
1)
The electrons I receive when I download something over the little wire in the back of my computer... paid for when I send my checks to the power and phone company.
2)
The electrons which make up said bits when they're stored in RAM... ditto.
3)
The little pieces of silicon and aluminum that hold those electrons... paid for when I bought my RAM, motherboard, ethernet card, patch cable and etc.
4)
The little domains of magnetic oxides onto which those bits are encoded for long-term storage when I'm not using them... paid for when I bought my hard drive.
Nope.... There's nothing in my possession, no matter what I may or may not have downloaded, that's not bought and paid for. No theft here.
The reference was to the radio stations which, oddly enough, spend most of their time promoting major record label. *cough, kickback cough*
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Excerpted from http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/506.html
Note that "financial gain" can include receiving other copyrighted works in return.
Is there a method to serve files that is encrypted, splits the files and serves them to only those above a certain trust level?
Mixmaster meets p2p?
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
" The only sane solution is to change the meaning of byte to 10 bits (8 significant bits and 2 'leap' bits). ie: 1 K = 10000 bits (80% of which is significant)"
Sane?!~ That's insane! That's a horrible idea! Have you ever written a computer program? How about "the only solution is to get [a] descent operating system[s] that works flawlessly and is scalable from the desktop-using-grandma to the multi-million-node network and an endless stream of applications that will cater to our every need and then some, and reduce poverty while we are at it."
Final Solutions never are.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
OK genius explain why do I get fined $250 for not wearing my seat belt? A) if I die, people make money B) if I die my family makes money. Explain that C) It doesn't hurt anyone but me
What happens if my home is raided and my machine is taken. My machine would have to be unplugged. To start the machine back up, you have to provide several passwords to decrypt the hard disk. What happens then? Does the government go back to their offices and cry? Am I ordered by the court to provide potentially damaging information against myself?
Just Curious
Un-fucking-believable.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Shouldn't the justice department and being using all available resources on "the war on terror". It seems that Ashcrosft and Co. seem to spare no lack of resources or effort on tracking down file sharers utilizing questionable tools (like the patriot act) that stomp all over the constitution and bill of rights, while the best they can do in stopping terrorism consists of making "code orange" annoucements.
This is the same old argument that comes up, typically in piracy raid articles, where someone states "with all the $crime1 and $crime2 going on, I really want this happening!" Its faults are as follows:
1.) Laws are meant to be enforced. They were enforcing the law. If a law will not be enforced, why have the law?
2.) The argument assumes organizations are one-track minds that only operate on one task at a time. This is like saying "with all the desktop work that needs to be done, do we really need Linux kernel hackers writing more drivers for arcane hardware?" The illogic in the statement is obvious. Simply because a piracy raid took place does not mean 100% of all money and 100% of all resources were utilized in the execution of this one, single raid. The argument is a convenient dismission meant to distract the issue from the event that took place to some imagined flaw in the process of the organization--thereby shifting the label of wrongdoer from the guilty pirates to the guilty law enforcers.
Note that this flawed argument is also often used against Microsoft. "With all the security flaws out there, it's good to know they were working hard on a new version of Encarta!" The statement ignores that Microsoft is a multi-tiered organization made of several dozens of software groups.
3.) It's a distraction from the fact that what the people were doing was illegal and inethical. The law caught up with them.
After Ashcroft and Orin Hatch die we may begin to have elected leaders who were born when computers could fit in your pocket and understand what they can be used for.
He's saying it doesn't stand for "permission to pilfer." Seems he's saying its unrelated to piracy just like you are.
John Ashcroft, Attorney General, Department of Justice, discusses intellectual property theft over the internet.
8/25/2004: WASHINGTON, DC: 20 min.
rtsp://video.c-span.org/15days/e082504_doj.rm
That's what they get for sharing free copies of "Blessed Be That City".
Think about that for a minute, if you're even capable of that.
Reuters screwed up in quoting Ashcroft. The text of the speech says 40 terabytes.
t m
http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/speeches/2004/82504ag.h
But I doubt this will get modded up cause everyone here takes every opportunity to blast him cause he is a republican.
Did you by chance flunk out of law school?
Kilo has always meant 1000. Even with computers; most measurements involving computers have no special relationship to powers of two. Clock frequencies, data transmission rates, disk capacities, monitor scan frequencies, display resolution, power consumption, and so on are not by nature powers of two. Kilo means 1000, as it has for about a century.
Only address ranges fall naturely into powers of two. It was easy to misuse the powers of ten prefixes for powers of two with similar magnitude, as a verbal shortcut that everyone knew was sloppy, but convenient. But now an entire generation has grown up using ZDnet kilo instead of the offical kilo, mislead by sloppy writing into sloppy thinking.
Kilo, Mega, and Giga mean the same thing everywhere. Pretending that they mean powers of two for some measurements, and powers of ten for others, is just plain wrong. Memory capacity is a clear example of this, where RAM nearly always comes in powers of two, and disk drives nearly always are NOT powers of two. Describe RAM in GiB, and hard drives in GB, and there's no confusion. Describe RAM inaccurately in GB and hard drives accurately in GB, and you get thousands of idiots complaining about disk capacity. Use the proper prefixes, and there's no problem.
Sloppiness is deadly in writing code. You would think that people who earn their living with computers would understand the need for precision. Misusing power of ten prefixes for powers of two is the same thing as assuming that ints are interchangable with pointers. You might get away with it, but it will bite you in the ass someday. Professionals use precise descriptions, for both data types and units of measure.
consider this -- AFAIR, you can become a hub on Direct Connect without sharing as much as 1 file. Hubs are more like meeting place, where all searches are performed (or forwared to users) and it is sort of "index" for all shares that are connected to the hub.
how do they catch people who just download and dont share?
1) "some guy recorded a song" [created an idea / expression]
2) "requested that no one make a digital copy" [for what ever reason]
What right does this artist have to deny me, or anyone else, the right to use ideas and information? Do ideas and concepts belong to only those that create them?
This artist as well must have used concepts and ideas, words and language, which he himself did not make from scratch. As well, if this person did somehow have a claim on an idea forever, does that not deny the enevability that the same idea would be thought of by someone else eventually?
Copyright, as it now stands, is a hundred+ year old idea that is no longer useful or relevant in a digital age.
Maybe the hubs just fed out /dev/random and the feds confused the resulting output as Britney Spear's music....
---
Most laws are written by those who they would directly BENEFIT. Copyright, Drug Laws, etc. affect lots more people directly than they benefit.
Democracy by the people is the best system, but once you call a corporation a person, the whole system is perverted dorwards bloat and profit at the expense of democracy.
"I create things. I want a nice, firm delineation as to what control I have over those things."
Create things? We are talking about *ideas* here. You *think* ideas, if you are so inclined, you can speak sing or write about them.
You control your ideas in what way? "Freeze buddy, I told you my idea about making a blue skateboard and I've changed my mind, you have no right to think that idea" as you what, shoot him in the head?
"My buddy runs a tiny little graphic design shop, and has had clients refuse to pay"
You do realize there seems to be a large a difference between a breach of contract between a client who requested work done and did not pay, and someone else using your friend's ideas, expressions as they want? Someone looks at your friend's logo and it gives them an idea for... i dunno a cartoon character, your friend owns that person's ideas too? What does it mean to own an idea as well? You have it locked up some where?
"I don't see where this artificial argument about scarcity comes from in reference to music...CD prices range from $5 to $20"
To 'purchase' the content on these CDs would cost nearly nothing, as opposed to the figures you stated, if the work was in the public domain: i.e. / government did not enforce copyright / copyright allowed for personal non commerical use / or copyright did not exist in law. That is what is meant by 'scarcity', ideas are nearly free in nature yet with copyright their supply is restricted to those that can and are willing to pay.
Now that the courts have validated, at least for the time being, that peer-to-peer networks have significant non infringing uses then it will not be long before all P2P services employ encryption to foil the packet filtering/shapping systems and engage in circuitous routing of traffic to make it extremely difficult to determine the true source and destination of packets. Such a protocol might be vulnerable howerver to the classic "man in the middle" attack on cryptographic key exchange.
The real criminals are the people who have huge amounts of downloaded files and wont share them after they download them.
I think the plan is to kill P2P networks by encouraging more people to start downloading without sharing.
But where can the persecuted flee today?
I propose we all move to the nation of Sealand.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
You are referring to what is known as a semi-democractic system, like what most governments in the world have. America is a Republic, using democratic representation. This means that people do not directly influence what is going on in their country as they believe the people who represent them will do that correctly. What warps the American system these days is the fact that money makes the system go round.
Switzerland on the other hand is one of the only democracies on this planet. Now about the command what's best for the country. Sure that works in a real democracy, but not in representational governments. These days politicians have become professional politicians and do what is best for them to get reelected, which does not mean best for the country.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
RIAA (RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GREEDY BASTARDS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GREEDY BASTARDS.
Are you GREEDY ?
Are you a BASTARD ?
Are you a GREEDY BASTARD ?
If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then RIAA (RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join RIAA (RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time RIAA member.
RIAA (RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GREEDY BASTARD community with THOUSANDS of talentless members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of RIAA if you join today!
Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!
I have a friend Penter, he has a new pent named Fido. I enjoy pentting Fido, but sometimes I get penturbed at him when he eats pentifores.
Go to the library and borrow all those music CD for FREE. Yes, your local library has all the music CD that you can copy verbatim. Why download or swap over the net with those crapy bitrate! - Rip your own very own MP3!
;)
And everytime you borrow a CD from the library - give the RIAA a finger or two
(didn't find FreeDB's numbers right now):
CD's: 2,987,453
Songs: 38,231,416
In other words, even if that is 10,5 million unique songs (or at least unique versions, remixes, remasterings etc. will count towards this number), it is not even a third of CDDBs database.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...my ass. If you had enough GB to share, join one of their hubs. If you have a real share, you'll get a transfer to a "real" hub quite fast. This isn't exactly a secret society, it is more like a trivial screening to keep out the shitheads with spam messages, fake files, upload throttling and other crap.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And I'll bet you that asshole Ashcroft said, "one to one hundred... jiggabytes."
Fucker.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
prohibition? you are serious?
nobody is stopping kids making movies or music, or selling it for profit. Its the tsealing of other peoples work that is being cracked down on.
Good.
I make games for a living. If people dont buy them, I cant pay the rent. Maybe people like you think I should be forced to work for free?
In which case I'll go get a job in construction which actually pays money, and we can all make do without any new 'information that wanst to be free'.
You really think creators of movies,songs and games shouldnt be paid?
..."whales" becoming an endangered species. I'm certain the next development will be a system where content is well distributed. Ever see a flock of tiny fish chased by a major predator?
Taking out the hubs does nothing to stop all the people that made up those hubs. The demand is still there, the traders are still there. They will find a better way.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Or maybe they create digital content for a living and dont want to have to quit the job and go working in wall-mart because some thieving scriopt kiddies have basically wrecked their liveliehood.
Let me guess.... thats not you, so you dont care?
Dear Mr. Ashcroft!
GET A LIFE!
Only morons moderate based on a sig.
SHARED NOT STOLEN
Interestingly, there is such a place here in Australia. A community of people decided that they wish to be independant of Australia. I really have very little information, but I'm sure it won't be hard to dig up more. Last I heard, on the news, everything was going alright and the government wasn't hassling them.
Sounds like the way to go.
( Read More... | 666 of 898 comments )
Who gets hurt if you go 50 in a 35 with no one else around you? If people pull out in front of you suddenly, that's their fault.
Speed limits are based on the road and surrounding conditions, in order to provide a safe stopping distance should you need to stop suddenly.
In your example, if you're doing 50 in a 35 area and a kid runs out in front of you, damn right it's your fault. If you'd been going at the speed limit, you might've been able to stop in time, or at least the injuries caused would've been reduced.
To my mind speeding, especially in a bult-up area, is reckless (or at least negligent) driving. You're knowingly reducing your chances of successfully reacting to a problem, and therefore potentially putting others in danger, for purely selfish reasons.
No one loses anything when someone makes a copy.
Well, the person who originally created the work loses the opportunity to attempt to earn money from their labours. Musicians can tour and sell merchandise, and I guess at least some programmers can offer support services or do purely bespoke work, but what of authors? If books can be freely copied, what can authors do to earn (enough) money? Or do you suggest that the majority of "content" be produced by people in their spare time, or the extremely lucky few who are able to gain some form of patronage?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
...should be sent to a psychologist for obsessive compulsive disorder. It is not *hard* to get 3-4TB of hard disks and content, but it has no purpose. Even polls on really tech oriented sites show that the average HDD capacity there is no more than 3-500GB.
Particularly if you have the bandwidth required, there is no sense in "hogging" the content. You have near on-demand content anyway. 300GB or 3TB is irrelevant if can just download it when you please. I've had 700kB/s transfer speeds (yes, that's bytes) and it greatly reduces your need for a huge local "cache". Mostly you just keep enough around so you can get access to more, not because you need it yourself.
That is the scary future for RIAA etc. A world where bandwidth is in abundance (yes I know, hard to believe. It is like saying "enough CPU power" or "640kB is enough for everyone" ), and "major" consumers of piracy simply have higher turn-around - not more content, and "hoarders" serve little purpose...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I mean, IF GWB is voted out, Ashcroft goes too. What's Kerry's stance, and the stance of whoever he'd put in place of Ashy?
Anyone know? Seriously?
Religion is for people afraid of going to hell.
I would move elsewhere, but all the other countries are being bombed or sanctioned by the Arsenal for Democracy at the moment...
"There should be a -1 moral relativist option"
I see nothing morally relativist about asking for an arguement, a justification, as to why someone can morally prohibit another person, via the government, from thinking certain ideas or viewing certain materials (copyrighted materials of course).
Moral relativists do not need or ask for justification since they use their own belief system to self justify their behavior, in case you were ignorant about the term in question.
"As a US citizen, you have the right to disagree with laws and lobby for their repeal. You do not have to right to break them."
And if a law is immoral, you happily continue to obey? All law is are promulgated rules passed by the sovereign. If the sovereign, say a dictator or perhaps even a legislature as the case maybe, passed a law requiring that a group of individuals be inslaved, have their property taken away, and or put into camps you'd obey that law?
"You decided that because everyone in Europe drives on the left side of the street, people in this country should also"
Is the problem of driving on the left or on the right side of the road really an immoral law? If you think so it'll be a laugh for you to come up with that line of reasoning.
On the other hand the fact that governments seem to be jailing and bankrupting people in order to protect idea monopolist's profits and in spite of 300 year old copyright law that does not work in the digital age seems to be the type of law people should be objecting to and resisting.
3dinfo@maficstudios.com
Bin Laden is still at large. I guess it is easier to bust people leeching music than to find the fucktard that is out to destroy the worlds economy. Probably more congressional donations in it as well.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Right...except that you'd be wrong on both accounts. Digital content isn't hard to make these days, nor it it hard to profit from if you know how.
It's not the script kiddies who are wrecking the livelihood of artists, it's the recording industry who refuses to pay artists a living wage for producing a profitable album, and who are manufacturing "artists" like spears, who are well marketed, but don't nessessarily have any talent. Yes, there may be a problem in file sharing, but It's a problem for the recording industry, not for the artists. Their problem is that they work for shitty companies who will burn the candle at both ends and try to shit on their customers while shitting on their artists at the same time.
It's been a long time.
"I can't help noticing that one could formulate a similar argument about all property."
;) )
Is normal property scarse because of an act of government or because there really is only a finite amount of matter on the earth? I think its the latter ( a.k.a. the second one
I see it quite clearly, but perhaps I am wrong, is copyright something that exists in nature or is it an artifical act of government (in a book on a shelf of laws entitled the copyright act/bill).
You know, I was working for a company which made me work 16 hours straight one time on a 10 day run. I worked nearly 100 hours on that cheque, but they refused to pay me overtime until 95 hours.
When I see federal agents knocking down THEIR door, I might (but probably won't) care about the poor poor artists who are still creating profitable albums, but being shat on by the companies they work for.
For the record, I refuse to download OR buy music for that very reason, among others. I don't want to give my mindshare to such cretins.
It's been a long time.
Try: Mute, I2P, Freenet (it seems to be on life support, but the first two are working) etc.
I love how when people on Slashdot disagree with your assessment, you're a troll.
Without copyright, the GPL would be unenforceable. Without copyright, would anyone have invested all that money into making The Matrix, Doom, or even the Harry Potter series?
As much as people here don't care, or don't want the big bad corporations to get money from entertainment (yes, that's all this is, ENTERTAINMENT), if you don't want to pay for something the rights' owner wants you to pay for, don't enjoy it.
Copyright's a necessary evil that helps, and not everyone uses copyright to squeeze money out of the public. Strange that this is trolling on a site built off the hard work of those who protect their rights with copyright laws.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
At some point in time, this entire fucking generation they are "raiding" will come of age. The 12 year old school girls, and the 21 year old college kids. Some will be physicians. Others will be biologists and lawyers. A few will be electrical and computer engineers. And they will remember. And they will be voting.
And on top of that, they will be breeding, and teaching their children. Some will conform to your business model, but the vast majority hate your monkey-ass for seven eternities.
Wouldn't it just suck if consumers stopped boycotting companies, and started boycotting the INDIVIDUAL MANAGERS? You'd never be able to work at another company, again. Which would end this cycle of company hopping...
A fallible business model is one that doesn't survive in the marketplace, not one that is torn down by people breaking the law.
So what happens when an industry lobbies (successfully) to have that business model propped up by laws, in order to survive?
Overtime? Who gets overtime anymore? Exempt vs. non-exempt my friend... Sounds like you need a better collections strategy -- not help from the feds.
It's true the record companies may have strange profit sharing rules wrt their artists. But that has nothing to do with P2P'ers and the illegality of their activities.
See, See... I told you we need a "-1 Wrong" moderation!
The FBI reported that the most frequently swapped song on the network was a fairly unknown title "Let the eagle soar".
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
"because everyone in Europe drives on the left side of the street"
Not everyone in Europe drives on the left-hand side of the street. Only in the UK. It doesn't help your point when such ignorance is on display.
Sometimes people braver than you break laws and go to prison in order to protest them. Sometimes it's the only way to get the populace at large to realize how ridiculous the law is. This kind of protest can be noble and should not be dismissed in such a petty manner.
If they passed a law that said it was illegal to burn the flag, I would not burn a flag in protest, but I would respect those that did, and I would petition to have the law changed.
We should all switch to freenet (http://freenet.sourceforge.net), the more people are in, the faster. And is anonymous .
Yes.
4 * 10^9 bytes = 4 GIGABYTES per song.
Don't assume that I support RIAA or MPAA, I think they're all crooks. That doesn't mean I have to agree with people who say we should be chasing terrorists instead of shutting down prolific copyright abusers. They've taken a long time to go after copyright breakers but it's not unprecedented. Given that there's a value threshold for DOJ intervention how would you determine someone has tripped the value threshold in abusing a GPL copyright. Do you attach some huge number to the value of the code? It could be hundreds of millions of dollars and one shipment of one software binary could get you prosecuted under that interpretation for having an illegal valuable single copy of the code.
ashcroft is scary - he wants everyone to think and feel the way he does. he couldn't even beat a dead guy to re-elected - that is why is where he is today. can't wait till he retires and just gets out of politics.
Location: Gitmo
Federal Agent: Ok fileswapper! Are you ready to tell all or do I have to play more Britney Spears Albums?
Me: Ok...Ok... dont hurt me anymore! I admit I was sharing 100GB of movie files... but they were all Bush/Cheney Ads!
Federal Agent: Oh shit, there goes my job.
...executive branch enforces it, right?
Recorded Music Production:I nd=C2600&cycle=2004&recipdetail=A&sortorde r=U
http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.asp?
Movie Production:I nd=C2400&cycle=2004&recipdetail=A&sortorde r=U
http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.asp?
Quick answer for the lazy: John Kerry (D)
Next, sum up the numbers in the two tables by party and please note it is an order of magnitude difference.
Democrats: $2,975,145
Republicans: $243,400
(Numbers quoted are as of the date/time of this posting.)
Posts like yours are the reason Slashdot needs a -1, Wrong moderation. As probably 50 other people have already stated in other threads, the files weren't on the hub servers, they are just a middleman to enable individual users to trade files. You can run a hub (though about max 500 users) out of your basement on a home connection. That and it's actually terabytes, Ashcroft is just smoking crack.
My life's goal is to get a score of +3!
You are correct. Bad laws are overturned precisely because someone *broke* it then successfully challenged it.
I for one am glad that it is actually law enforcement enforcing the law instead of RIAA. It just seems to me that things that are illegal should be policed by police, and not by corporate lawyers.
... and arguing with you is like arguing with a retarded person. You ignore the points made and just reiterate your point-of-view without any proof or sound reasoning.
Why don't you think about that, that is, if you actually can form a critical thought in your tiny pea sized brain.
John Ashcroft calls enabling the distribution of a FACSIMILE of copyrighted material "theft".
However, apparently (mis)using the power of the state to confiscate a citizen's general purpose computer, and ALL the data stored therein, is OK.
Who's the thief?
Notice the use of "facsimile" above. I say this because I have yet to see exact copies of original works available on P2P networks. Everything I have seen is compressed from an original using a "lossy" algorithm. Full fidelity is not preserved.
JDR
Just because you say that there is an absolute moral right here that is being violated by people who make copies of stuff doesn't make it so. You've lost that argument. As a matter of fact, in the recent Grokster case that MGM tried to overturn the judge in that case said it best (and I defy you to come up with a sound argument against this): Go ahead and start spouting off about moral absolutes again, idiot. You don't have a clue about what you're arguing about.
"If you wrote music for a living and people were pirating your music, you wouldn't be upset that you were losing money?"
If i were writing music for a living, would I really expect the government to turn society into a police state just to protect potential profits I could make on a song? Answer: No.
"you are NOT entitled to own a copy for free if they aren't giving it away."
And i say you are NOT entitled to use force, yourself or via the government, to prevent people from thinking ideas or experiencing expressions copyrighted or not. If you think you are morally justified to use said force then I eagerly await your reply.
3dinfo@maficstudios.com
> Who gets overtime anymore?
Let's see... anyone not on salary that works for a company that appreciates their workers instead of herding them like data-entry cattle.
It's not as if these people would buy what they are stealing if they couldn't steal it. It's not physical property like a loaf of bread or a CD player so you can't compare it to stealing an object. If you could magically shut down all file sharing I don't think it would have much effect on the economy.
SELECT * FROM countries WHERE countries.starbucksCount = 0;
1MB = 10^6 bytes 4000MB = 40 * 10^6 * 10^ 3 = 4 * 10 ^ 10
Could be wrong, but in this line you're saying 4000=40*10^3
Think that should be 4*10^3.
In your later post you say that means 4GB per song. Since the factor's off by 10, I guess that means it's really 400MB per song.
But then again...
40 * 10^15 (40PB) = 4 * 10 ^ 16 bytes then becomes
(40 * 10^16)bytes
So I guess that all evens out back to 4GB
But then again, I'm a geer, so I can't do simple math without a calculator and could be way off!
Re:A busy day for the feds... (Score:5, Funny)
by Zareste (761710) on Wednesday August 25, @08:09PM (#10074037)
(http://www.zareste.com/)
our attorney general is confused about the difference between peta- and tera-
And also 'stealing' and 'transferring', 'interrogation' and 'torture', and 'his ass' from 'a hole in the ground'.
base-ment-able adj.
To be capable of holding, to have within, to hold
or keep within the limits of the lowest habitable
story of a building, usually below ground level.
(from basement and containable )
(coined circa 2004 )
(first known use : slashdot, a web site )
Quite frankly, your analogy of warez kiddies and "the persecuted" is ridiculous, and imho shows what a useless and effete society we have become. When people get worked up to this kind of hysterical frenzy because people illegaly trading movies and mp3s are busted, something is seriously wrong.
Then again, maybe the people getting hysterical are 13 years old.
Hrm. Yeah. I didn't notice that one. Wow. I'm never doing math when I'm tired again. ;)
Everytime these same DOJ guys bust someone with a kilo of marijuana, they always estimate the street price of that 2.2 pound brick at $2.5 million - in other words, what the guy could get if he sold it a joint at a time on the street corner for $10 or $20 a roach. These Feds can roll some really skinny joints of toothpick dimensions, eh?
They probably estimated the "street size" of this P2P collection the same way. There were X number of files there, and if everybody in the U.S. who has an Internet connection downloaded a copy for each and every family member... well, you get the idea.
The bigger the bust, the more funding they can ask for. And get.
The F.B.I. conducted a covert investigation by loading two computers with copyrighted material and joining the Underground Network, a move that let it identify five hub computers that coordinated the file sharing. An F.B.I. agent then downloaded 84 movies, 40 software programs, 13 games and 178 songs from the network.
The network operates a Web site - www.udgnet.com - that is registered to an address in San Antonio. A man who answered the telephone at the number associated with the domain, who declined to give his name, said the government's charges were baseless. The Underground Network, he said, is an online community that is used for social communication and to share tips. It is used by people involved in file sharing and others, he said, but the network itself is not involved in trading files.
From the above, it looks like some members AND the FBI uploaded files to a common space then the FBI blamed the network. The implications are that any network must monitor it's content and may be responsible for what people do there.
The potential for abuse is large. Imagine if I were able to walk into a building, do something wrong, and then use that as grounds to obtain warrent to search everyone in the building! I also wonder if it is possible to anonymously share any kind of material without being harassed. If you can't, then there is no anonymous speech on the internet and the internet is not free.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't think .gov should protect the wealthy copyright holders more than others. But I'm not a US resident, so what do I know about the world.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
The F.B.I. conducted a covert investigation by loading two computers with copyrighted material and joining the Underground Network, a move that let it identify five hub computers that coordinated the file sharing. An F.B.I. agent then downloaded 84 movies, 40 software programs, 13 games and 178 songs from the network.
The network operates a Web site - www.udgnet.com - that is registered to an address in San Antonio. A man who answered the telephone at the number associated with the domain, who declined to give his name, said the government's charges were baseless. The Underground Network, he said, is an online community that is used for social communication and to share tips. It is used by people involved in file sharing and others, he said, but the network itself is not involved in trading files.
From the above, it looks like some members AND the FBI uploaded files to a common space then the FBI blamed the network. The implications are that any network must monitor it's content and may be responsible for what people do there.
The potential for abuse is large. Imagine if I were able to walk into a building, do something wrong, and then use that as grounds to obtain warrent to search everyone in the building! I also wonder if it is possible to anonymously share any kind of material without being harassed. If you can't, then there is no anonymous speech on the internet and the internet is not free.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Your anology of copyright infringement to a law that is designed to protect public safety is little off.
Filesharing songs does not endanger public safety.
Regardless, you completely missed my point, which was the question of what happens to people who are mistakenly accussed of illegal file sharing and raided? Where is innocent until proven guilty? Even with speeding tickets you are allowed the opportunity to appear in court and plead your case.
Raiding homes because you're engaged in non-commercial copyright infringement (not re-selling) of popular music IS an abuse of power. There isn't a huge leap from the government raiding someone because of misinformation, FUD or RIAA pressure.
And stop speeding... people that race down my neighborhood roads at 40mph while I'm mowing my grass need to be chained and whipped, not just ticketed
You seem to have forgotten the harm it causes to corporate executives as well. Where's the love?
(No one seems to mention the corp. executives, could it be because they are simply parroting the crap the RIAA feeds them? Heavens no!)
Because it helps a politician's campaign when they say they helped pass laws that saved some number of lives.
"We have got to make Stan understand the importance of voting, because he'll definitely vote for our guy." - South Park
Such a silly argument: "I wouldn't have bought the car, so I stole it." Here's news for you: if you can 't afford it, you don't get it.
Don't like it? Get the laws changed -- there is a process for that you know. But that would require you to get up off of your thieving ass.
Personal insults? The parent poster was simply pointing out your faulty logic. And the only thing you've illustrated is that you don't know how to argue.
*shrug*
100 gb = 250,000 songs? so 100 mb = 250 songs, so 1 mg = 2.5 songs... so 1 song = 400kb? Even if the songs were all ultra-short punk tracks (lets say 2:30 each), that still seems like a really small file - would you even be able to tell that the sound file contained music by listening to it?
Sounds like he's just made up a big number to get the media's attention, but *surely* it couldn't have been that hard to make up a PLAUSIBLE number?
I know I'm going to be considered a troll for saying this, but I'm serious: Why do you Americans vote for people who appoint dodgy bastards like this guy to positions of authority? Sure, all politicians are likely to be corrupt to some extent, and those in our country (Australia) are no saints, but they don't seem to assume anywhere near the lack of intelligence on the behalf of the general public that yours do....so why do yours get away with this? For christsake, the justice department is meant to uphold the law and defend the people, not preside over witchhunts.
Plonk yourself, troll
I took my post to a bit of an extreme. I agree with the need for the creator of content to be able to put restrictions on its reproduction, however I completely disagree with the current system in place. If people wish to get rid of that system, it should be gotten rid of. Copyright as it stands is taken by the people as a right, when it is not. Having the word right in the word to refer to that part of law is confusing at best.
A post is a troll when it isn't based on logic and makes statements saying that things are uncontestable. I never said "copyright needs to be gotten rid of and that is 100% known and the way it is" as was done in the comment I responded to.
I agree I was a bit harsh, but it's upsetting to me that so many people see things as not being able to be changed or worked around.
That's scary.
To say that we need to limit highway driving speeds and also driving speeds on roads where there is nearly no chance of anything running out in front of you is what I was getting at, however did not state it very accurately.
Getting pulled over for going 50 on a country road at 2 in the morning when the speed limit is 35 is pointless in my opinion.
I meant the statement about losing something when a copy is made in a physical sense, but I'll address it in the sense that you took it. That post wasn't very well thought out, but that's what I get for being reactionary.
I believe that a business model should change with the technology. Law should not preserve an older business model. If law is doing that, the law is going in the wrong direction. Towards controlling the public.
What labors should be protected as needing an oppurtunity to earn money? That's a rather confusing statement, as you can still earn money even if something is freely available. There are many cases throughout history of that happening. Even now, even though it is not legal, you can obtain things for free. What has made people purchase cds and movies knowing that?
For musicians, performing music instead of selling copies of those performances is not a bad business model however it requires more effort on that individual's part. However, what other line of work lets you create something with a minimal of 20 hours of work after mastering the trade and then making possible millions? I think that business model should go the way technology and the people dictate, not the way the people who made that business model want it.
It's economics with the people who create software. Open source will damage that market. There will always be money in software creation though. I don't think there is a need for money to be made though when it comes to the creation of basic programs or something someone else will make for free. Having software freely copied won't be an issue, since there are other means of making it so that those copies will not function correctly that are in place. I have no problems with DRM when it comes to what is in place currently. I don't have to deal with it since I use none of it. That's another debate altogether though.
The authors who earn money on their books usually already have made a book that sold well. To break into the industry you need a book that sells well. With the ability to copy books at will, it hardly hurts anyone. Look at libraries for example. Have they destroyed the market for books?
My main point here though, is that an established author could make a deal with a book company to have that publisher be the official copy of the book. There are instances in history that I don't feel like taking the time to name, but if you are interested I would suggest looking at things with Tolkien and the publishing of his novels. There are other instances throughout history, but I'm getting tired of typing. Heh.
Selling the rights to sell the official next copy of the authors book before anyone else can even print it is worth a lot to a publisher. They pretty much already
That's scary.
The Nile is a river in Egypt.
Denial, or maybe just ignorance, is what b-baggins seems to be suffering from.
Hmmmm?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Do some digging. It's pretty well established, albeit murkily, that the US gubmint is quite happy to sell drugs when it needs to raise some quick, shady cash. And with the War on Drugs, prices are nicely inflated.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."