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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."
... like go after terrorists?
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
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?
"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.
This doesn't seem possible - that's what, 100,000 x 300GB hard drives? Are they really providing that much, or is this the total amount available on the entire network?
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Hey, am I the only one who saw that go by?
.. two full boxes here to hit a measley 900GB, .9 of a TB, or .0009 of a PENTABYTE.
I don't know how big of an enclosure you'd need to house even ONE PENTABYTE of storage, but considering that it's 1000 times a TERABYTE, and I've got
I can't believe nobody over there is clueful enough to have corrected PB to TB.. I -might- believe 40TB. Maybe.. Probably not...
So quit your job, pack your bags, and move on out to snow country!
All the easier to cast doubt during whatever trial occurs.
"Initial reports filed by the state claimed that the defendents were each serving 40 pentabytes of pirated content for illegal download. After being raided, seized computers were shown to only have several hundred gigabytes of storage. The capacity of the computers siezed was more than 1 million times less than that claimed by the state. The state used clearly false information to procure the warrents for the search... how can we trust any of the information gathered by the state when such a fundamental error occured in their investigation..."
'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?
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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)
"This is an extremely disturbing development, seeing as these folks are not guilty of a crime, merely a civil offense."
I'm not sure where you got the idea that this is a civil case. If you'd like to learn more about criminal violations of copyright law, here's the relevant section.
This war will be fought with new ideas, not ignorance. Being the squillionth Slashdotter to parrot the old "civil, not criminal" meme will not help things. If you truly believe that artists have too many rights and it's high time to put them in their place, the first thing to do is to understand how the law works, so you can work to change it.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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 ----
Could it be that they are referring to the total amount accessible from each hub? Since many computers can connect at a time you would need something like 400,000 computers sharing 100GB each to be connected to make the "hub" have 40PB?
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"
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
I believe copyright infringement can be a criminal as well as civil matter.
That said, while I'm sure these people are glad that they aren't to be prosecuted, raiding people's homes when you aren't intending to bring charges seems totally inappropriate.
If you use investigative means as the punishment, such that the punishment (a raid) takes place without a trial then you've done an end run around the whole court system.
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.
All those faked shares make the propaganda that much better.
Excellent. 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-
>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?
You're missing another important number:
10.5 million songs
Let's see:
10.5 million songs
~40 years of reasonable recorded audio
Some simple math:
10,500,000 / 40 = 262,500 songs every year...
Hmmm:
262,500 / 12 = 21,875 songs every month...
Sounds like a hell of a stretch to me, especially considering that music wasn't as easy to record back in the 60s and 70s as it is today.
The biggest music libraries that I've seen contain less than 1 million songs. I'm not sure where another 9.5 million could come from (unless Al Queida provided them).
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
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.
"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.
Information wants to be free
Ever notice how that doesn't quite apply to things like the ip's of really good sites, or pw's to major ftps? Guess some information wants to be freer than other information.
"This doesn't seem possible - that's what, 100,000 x 300GB hard drives? Are they really providing that much, or is this the total amount available on the entire network?"
Any p2p net out there would be really, really proud to have that kind of hardware to share. Obviously, Ashcroft inflated the hell out of the numbers as per usual and things the people are too friggin' dumb to notice.
These people were operating DC hubs, not sharing the 40PB themselves. If you know nothing about DC then at least learn this: It's used a LOT at colleges that have lots of rich computer-savvy people. I know several people sharing over a terabyte a piece. 40PB for each hub is quite a lot, but I've seen people share even more than a terabyte. A lot of the kids at these colleges (the person in the room next to me) would do nothing else but collect stuff to share to others.
He wouldn't even watch it.
Three years ago, he had 1.5 terabytes shared. I don't imagine that it's that hard to get up to 3 or 4 terabytes a person. Now, you'd need 10,000 people doing that. Yes, that's a lot. Perhaps they meant 4 petabytes combined, which I actually would NOT doubt at all. 5 hubs, that's 8 petabytes per hub. 2,000 people sharing 4 terabytes.. Still quite high, but some will share more, some less. Mandatory minimum of 1-100 gigs.. if you say the min is 100 gigs, and the program automatically re-shares whatever you download, that'll get up there very quickly.
I've only skimmed the article, nothing said where these people were. But it really wouldn't surprise me. (I know the DC hub at RIT would allow RIT people on, and people from a few other I2 institutions nearby. I didn't go to RIT, and I didn't go to those other institutions, but I wouldn't doubt if they were well over 10PB.)
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.
you know what's the catch?
the hub operators wouldn't have needed to have any warez on their own computers even.. the hub is just a server that relays information about who's online.
directconnect is basically like irc, only with stuff to make file transfers happen more easily, from person to person. it's fairly simple concept & execution how it's done.
so.. are efnet irc operators the next to be hit?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
"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
Pentabyte? Penta means 5, so I guess since I have 160 GB Hd space on my computer, I have 32 billion pentabytes of hard disk space.
Odds are that with all that space there's probably more than one copy of a given song available.
we must allso not forget that the direct connect hubs often set a limit on how low a share you can have before you enter. some people i know use special files that have messed up entrys so that they take up maybe 1 byte in the filesystem but report their size to be maybe 10GB or more. and you all know about the classical "my dick is bigger then your dick" contests. most likley the hubs didnt run a bot that scanned the share lists for bogus files.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
That very well could be. The 'signin' nature of it is just ripe for this sort of legal problem.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
I am still amazed that this even warranted federal attention. Last I checked, I thought the FBI was short on resources and had more terrorist leads to chase then they could shake a stick at...
And did they pay this much attention to Enron and Tyco and obviously other large scale crimes?..
Whats with the political sex appeal and fear mongering of kids swapping stolen entertainment?
Call the local cops and treat it like any other petty crime...
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.
I am not at all surprised that we trust Google more than the U.S. Government. When you ask Google a question, you generally get an accurate, consistent answer.
Albuquerque PC
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.
While I certainly agree with the spirit of your post, and am likewise rankled by the unfairness of it all, the point we're trying to make here is that theft has a very specific definition, and that copyright infringement does not apply, because nothing tangible is being physically taken.
Your post unfortunately also misuses the term theft, thus further confusing the term. While we as the public certainly ought to eventually reappropriate works after a reasonable period of time, the constant legal loopholing and campaigning by corps to prevent their copyrighted materials from lapsing into the public domain does not constitute theft. There is nothing physical being taken from its original owner, for two reasons: one, copyrighted works aren't tangible objects, and two, we didn't own them originally.
Now, despite the fact that I'm being anal retentive about the term "theft", I agree with your point. We (the people) agreed contractually (copyright law) to give a creator of a work a temporary monopoly on his or her created resource, in exchange for the understanding that after a reasonable time has passed, it would enter the public domain.
This artificial limitation exists solely because in a "Free" (in the libertarian sense) society, there would be no such protection, and any author of a work would be unable to publish his or her work without someone copying it. We give up our right to copy for a temporary period of time to encourage artists to publish. It's as simple as that.
Essentially, the political lobbying done by Disney and Co is an erosion of our rights; we gave up those negative rights to allow Disney to make money on Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willy for a temporary period, and now Disney wants us to give up our rights for an even longer period of time so they can make even more money.
I don't know about you, but that rankles me.
But it still isn't theft.
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, for one, wouldn't have thought burning of the Alexandria as a tragedy, if every scroll contined there had a few million, easily accesible copies lying around.
So you won't mind if I "transfer" funds from your bank account? Great!
Actually, no, not in the slightest - on the condition that it's just like transferring anything else over P2P and it's copied rather than movied to your account - I get to keep my original copy (i.e. my money)
I'd have a problem if you actually took my money away from me - that would be theft, after all.
I'm sorry, were you trying to make a point about "transferring==theft"?
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Well, by your logic, you'd think counterfeiting is okay too - after all, it's only copying.
John Kerry is a Joke!
"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
So... you're comparing Britney Spears and Gigli to documents about Medical science, astronomy and history ? Guess why people don't find it a tragedy...
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Not everyone in the justice department is focused on terrorism. That would be stupid. In so far as there may be a need for more resources in the terrorism department that doesn't mean that those fighting copyright infringement should be taken off their cases. And all the hyperventilating in the other comments aside (regarding the numbers of songs and petabytes of data and whatnot) it is clear these folks were acting as illegal distribution hubs for gigabytes of copyrighted. We should be applauding the justice department for their work here. It is better than the RIAA going after several hundred teens at a swing and it is better than efforts to outlaw p2p outright. As far as justice department efforts against copyright infringement go this is a very good one.
Well, in that case, wouldn't your money be worth less?
Imagine if you have $100,000 in your account. And everybody in the US made a "copy" of that. All of a sudden, that amount of money would be worthless, wouldn't it?
Not sure how that applies to file sharing, but you really *should* mind if people "copy" your money.
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty