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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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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