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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.
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/
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).
Peta, not Penta.
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.
Come on.. who has a friggin PENTABYTE
er... no-one? unless you have?
If you're looking for a petabyte, it's 1000 terabytes (or possibly 1024, depending who you ask).
But you're right, that is some real hardware. I can't see any private individuals having that much at this point. At a minimum, that kind of storage is going to be costing in the region of $100,000 dollars.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Now wait a second. Look at THIS, the Internet Archive's 'PETABOX'.
They found 200 of these?? Who's got their terminology wrong.
So quit your job, pack your bags, and move on out to snow country!
Last time I priced it SAN storage was about $2,500 a TB so that makes 1PetaByte 1024*$2,500 or about 2.56 MILLION bucks. Not to mention the floorspace and the power bill for the A/C and the drives. Those guys must have been some fatcat file swappers. There are large companies that don't have that much storage!
"The DOJ should saty out of what is clearly a civil matter."
Copyright violation becomes a criminal matter once the value crosses a fairly low threshold. This has been the case for several years now. Here's the section of US copyright law that covers criminal offenses.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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.
Copyright infringement that is either for financial gain or in excess of $1000 in a 180 day period moves from a civil realm to a federal crime. 17 U.S.C. 506
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's peTa, not peNTa!!!
It goes like this: kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa.
"which is a f-ing CIVIL manner anyway?"
Sheesh. This is the fifth or sixth comment I've seen here from somebody insisting that this falls under civil law. Is this one of those Slashdot memes?
I feel like I'm just banging my head against a wall here, but here's where you can read up on what constitutes a criminal offense in copyright law.
Please help me spread the word. To fight the law, you must first understand it.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What they mean is 5 hubs, each with 40 petabytes of content available, probably shared between a few thousand members. If you're not sure how direct connect works, look here .
There are lots of hubs around the country hosted by people at colleges with fast connections. Those that host them think their hubs are secure since they can limit hub access to only others having on-campus IP addresses.
I really would not be suprised if the five raids targeted people hosting university specific hubs.
Not just to bad guys. Civil forfeiture laws are basically letters of marque, that let your local cops take your money and property, and make *you* prove your innocence to get them back.
Do a google search for "forfeiture abuse".
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Easy to achieve if you look at shared storage. 10 users with 10mb = 100mb of shared storage.
Sharereactor (may you rest in peace) had how many 1000pb of 'shared resources' in their network?
That number of the website was amazing
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
I'm sure that they don't arrest A SINGLE TERRORIST, A SINGLE PEDOPHILE, A SINGLE IDENTITY THIEF while they target piracy.
Terrorism arrest, Last week
Pedophile arrest, Two Tuesdays ago
Identity theft arrest, Posted 12 hours ago
Running wild and unchecked, indeed. Just because they don't post stories about terrorism arrests, pedophile arrests, and identity theft arrests on Slashdot doesn't mean they aren't going on.
In short: you are ignorant.
evil adrian
Your comment might be construed as saying "Ashcroft may be a bad guy, but he's not Catholic", implying that being Catholic would make him somehow worse.
Was that your intention?
No, it wasn't his intention, it was because the great-grandparent referred to the Witch-Finder General as "Pope Ashcroft".
You didn't read closely enough, and the grandparent, failing to understand that "Pope" was a metaphorical allusion to theocracy and not a factual statement about Ashcroft's religion (Ashcroft is Pentecostal) was trying to "correct" the great-grandparent poster.
Now both you and the grandparent poster take deep breaths.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Untits, people, units!
It is Petabyte and the 'pb' somebody further on uses would be a "pico bit", i.e. 1/1000000000000 of a bit.
Here is a reference for those without clue about SI prefixes: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html
Just because the media has no clue is no excuse to do it wrong.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Considering the "pentabyte" thing, I wouldn't be suprised if this was just an iditot reporter who doesn't have a techy bone in his body.
Especially so because there is no such SI prefix. It is "petabyte".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Actually, many jurisdictions, under the leadership of the model penal code, have eliminated the separate offenses of lacreny, embezzlement, theft by fraud, unlawful posession, etc. and incorporated them all into an offense called... wait for it... theft.
In fact, the MPC even has a section explicitly stating that all the crimes are now called theft. It probably reads word for word (this is from the PA statutes, much of which is word for word identical to the MPC):
"Conduct denominated theft in this chapter constitutes a single offense. An accusation of theft may be supported by evidence that it was committed in any manner that would be theft under this chapter, notwithstanding the specification of a different manner in the complaint or indictment, subject only to the power of the court to ensure fair trial by granting a continuance or other appropriate relief where the conduct of the defense would be prejudiced by lack of fair notice or by surprise."
The DC (neo-modus)P2P network currently shares around 1 perabyte of data...
http://neo-modus.com/
still not sure where this pentabyte thing came from though...
(but I also did not RTFA)
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
Sure, just check out:
http://www.fear.org/
especially:
http://www.fear.org/victim.html
Let's see... they went in to someone's home and took their stuff.
And made no arrests.
I don't recall the gov't being able to do that before 9/11... so... I'm sure it is related somehow.
It's called a search warrant. It may give them the right to sieze all sorts of crap. Sometimes, they even write really bad ones and the government gets in trouble (see Steve Jackson Games vs. the US Secret Service, which is still an important case concerning the seizure of electronic materials, even if some of the courts holdings in it have been weakened in more recent decisions).
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
Uh, duh. Most of the laws we have are created with input from those they would most directly affect. Would you want it any other way -- having laws about agriculture written by IT professionals or laws to protect copyrights written by schoolteachers? Of course, this means that a lot of the laws are self serving.
If you don't like that government is being run by corporations, you have an option: start a political watchdog group, get funding, inform voters and congressmen about what's really going on in the world. Lobbiests serve two purposes: swaying and informing. If all Congressman Spiff hears is how great it would be to extend copyrights to 70 years, what do you think he's gonna vote for?
Democracy's not perfect, but it is the best system ever invented for doing what's best for the country as a whole rather then what's best for a handful of politicians. But there's a secret to democracy: we're all foxes in the chicken coop, if we ACT like foxes. If you act like a chicken, expect to get eaten buddy.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
You are adding an N to a word that does not have one. Petabyte is correct. It has nothing to do with the Pentium or anything Pent
Actually, widespread copyright infringement IS a crime if the value is about $3000 (this certainly applies) and you can display an intent to profit. In some software piracy cases I've seen, the exchange of software was considered an intent to profit. Essentially, the trade of pirated software was its own profit, and I've experienced exactly that...you used to get one sought after game or program and leverage that to get whatever else you needed.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Well, I guess there is no coincidence that http://www.suprnova.org is unreachable.
Oh yeah? Maybe you need to revisit your basic english.
Now, let's go back and revisit your other ludicrous statements.
So what you're saying is that infringing copyright is the same thing as taking an old woman's pension funds? That's the RIAA's job. Or like shooting a man in the neck? If you're not saying those things, don't use such examples. They are deliberately designed to incense. Or in other words, you are guilty of trolling in the first degree.
But what we haven't established is that it is wrong, and there are plenty of laws that punish people for things that are not wrong, like marijuana use.
So let's cover this from the top. Digital property IS different, it is covered by different laws so clearly the government recognizes the difference, and copying is NOT theft, because as your own definition of stealing shows, at least when you understand the meaning of a simple word like take (which seems to have eluded you, but that's public education in America) it is a wholly different thing.
Copyright is an artificial construct which we created to motivate people to create. Now, however, it is being used for all sorts of stupid purposes and the duration of copyright has been extended beyond all reason. Clearly, the system is broken. I'm not sure that habitually violating copyright is the solution, but the current state of copyright law is ridiculous.
Copyright protection is entirely about money. It was created to give people financial incentive to create original works. If there is no money involved, I personally feel that it's pretty clear that there's nothing wrong with it. Before copyright was created, it was not only accepted but also standard practice to pass knowledge and information from person to person as a means of carrying on the knowledge.
So one more time, digital property IS different. The law recognizes it, and most people recognize it. Even the RIAA recognizes it, and they deliberately encourage the use of misleading language because the fact is inconvenient for them. You should strive to recognize it as well, because it is different in many obvious ways. Copyright infringement is not theft because it does not deprive anyone of anything. It does have the potential to devalue a work, but it has never been shown that it does and furthermore it has often been shown that in some cases it adds value to a work by increasing its exposure.
Your argument is full of broken rhetoric. Please come up with a new one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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 is probably why the article says "petabytes"!