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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."
According to Sen. Hatch, they are going after terrorists (peer 2 peer users).
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
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"
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.
"Information wants to be free" and "monopolies are bad" would be those general arguments you're looking for, I think, along with "copyright was considered a necessary evil from the beginning* and now isn't even necessary."
*see the writings of Jefferson and Madison
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
File swappers -- even if guilty of infingement -- are NOT stealing. Period.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
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
News flash: you don't have to be convicted of a crime to have evidence seized. If someone steals your wallet and the cops catch the guy, guess what -- you don't get your wallet back! IT'S EVIDENCE. Once the court case is over and the appeals process has run its course, THEN you get your wallet back. DUH.
Actually under current law, upheld by the SCOTUS, the FBI and local law breakers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H enforcement can sieze property and declare it guilty of a conspiracy to commit a crime. Now you can always sue the government to get back the stuff they robbed you of, but it will cost you at least $20,000 to try. Only the most stubborn go through that hell. Sane people just say "to hell with the American fascist state" and continue their lives as if it were an act of nature that injured them.
The stories of those that fight back are heart breaking, professional photographers that have 20 years of negatives maliciously scratched beyond all recognition by the time they are returned. Men who have their hard won businesses destroyed and their unfortunate employees. Charities that lose all the funds intended for good work. They usually win their court cases eventually, but it is always a pyrrhic victory, years of their life are gone. The cost of fighting against an evil force with the almost unlimited purse of the American tax payer far outweighs the initial losses.
I wouldn't be so sure. The number of scrolls in The Library is estimated to have been somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000. Now let's make a very generous allocation of 5MB for each scroll. I've got a 700 page PDF on my desktop that's only 2.5 MB, so this is probably a bit high, but I'd rather guess too high than too low.
5MB for each scroll times 700,000 scrolls comes up to about 3.5 terabytes. 5 hubs that each contained 40 petabytes of data is 200 petabytes. 200 petabytes divided by 3.5 terabytes is 58514.
In terms of raw data, they destroyed more than fifty thousand Libraries of Alexandria.
Now admitidly, scrolls are a more efficient medium for conveying information than movies, and the information stored in The Library was far more important than what was probably stored in these hubs. Nevertheless, it makes our current culture seem hippocratic when you compare this sort of thing to the general opinion that the burning of The Library was a tragedy. Many of the manuscripts contained within The Library were aquired by means no more legitimate than today's file sharing; copying without permission.
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.
Yes, but these were just hubs. The actual data was still stored on the computers of the people sharing the files -- and they are ultimately the ones responsible for the data they're sharing. These individuals are essentially doing the same thing Napster did -- provide a conduit by which others can exchange data (legally or illegaly by their own choice) and then not policing it to ensure the content is kept legal (or perhaps even actively encouraging illegal content).
Does anyone else but me think that at MOST this should be a civil issue? Just becuase they've given people the means to violate copyright doesn't mean their as guilty as the people who do it. Last time I checked there was no such thing as "conspiracy to violate copyrights" charge. . .
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
Yeah, I mean, I gotta admit, I find it difficult to dredge up that much sympathy for people who knowingly and egregiously violate the law... I mean they're not running the underground railroad here, you known? But it's pretty damn dissapointing when your attorney general doesn't know the legal definition of theft.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries