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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/
100 GB, huh? Sounds pretty good. Link?
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
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."
Well sure, let's just ignore all the kids downloading music for free and go after people out to kill us. Now who sounds absolutely ridiculous?
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).
Do you have only one thing on your to do list?
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
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.
The DOJ should saty out of what is clearly a civil matter. Now we have the government doing the bidding of the music and movie cartels.
Corporatism is slowly taking over the USA. I just hope we still have time to stop its onslaught.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
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..."
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.
Check earlier in the day and you'll find this lovely quote explaining everything, "...pentabytes are the new, arbitrary metric of the evil, satanic file-sharing people."
To be a little more technical, I think it's somewhere between a crap byte and a fuck byte, 500-1000 shit bytes, IIRC.
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
"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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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)
It's also worth noting that to catch these 5 in the act, the government would also have had to partake in illegal sharing, at least for a little while.
This is an established, legal method of law enforcement in the U.S., and is hardly noteworthy.
To catch drug dealers, the government buys drugs from them, while videotaping the transaction. This doesn't mean the government partakes in illegal drug dealing. It's a perfectly legal means of law enforcement.
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.
"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.
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
Look up "Steve Jackson games" on the 'net sometime..
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
You have no idea how undemocratic the even "democracies" are. Think. Most people you know oppose things like copyright extensions and the DCMA when it's explained to them, right? Yet how is it these things become law? If it's not the will of the people then it shouldn't be the law of the land, right?
The answer is they become law because companies and organisations with far bigger pockets than the average individual exert undue influence on those that actually legislate within our societies. In effect, through things like campaign contributions and lobbying they buy power.
You don't think that Microsoft's political donations and lobbying played a part in it only getting a slap on the wrist from the DOJ's antitrust lawsuits? You don't think that chemical companies not having to pay for the messes that they make because Newt Gingrich killed the Superfund counts? You don't think the handcuffs placed on the FDA's inspectors when investigating food contamination, which effectively make them powerless to protect consumers from unscrupulous manufacturers, counts either?
It's not in the US's interest to have monopolies abusing their positions in key industries. Or to have no effective safeguards to stop companies from polluting the environment without either effective penalty at the time or having to foot the bill to later clean up the mess. Or to allow contaminated food to reach the plates of average Americans.
Yet these things happen, and they happen even more frequently nowadays because the people who call the shots are effectively in bed with those doing the damage.
The foxes are guarding the coop. That's great if you're a fox, not so great if you're a chicken.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Unfortunately the DOJ doesn't have the option of picking and choosing which laws to enforce--and especially not according to YOUR whims.
Yeah! So there!
That's why when an individual or small company calls the FBI, the FBI always requires damages of at least $5000 before they'll even consider investigating.
Yeah, that's why prosecutors have no discretion about what charges they dismiss and which they prosecute -- and they never decide to "make an example" of a defendant, or give a sweet plea bargain to a connected defendent, or dig up all sorts of unrelated charges in order to get any conviction after their original charges fall through.
Yeah! So there!
So you're saying that when Ashcroft came on board as Attorney General, it wasn't his choice to de-emphasize anti-terrorism enforcement so as to concentrate on cracking down on porn and Tommy Chong? Huh, because he touted those decisions at the time as reasons his Fundamentalist base should be happy about the Bush administration.
Yeah! So there!
Hey, tell me, on Big Rock Candy Mountain where you live, how many licorice dollars did your condo cost, 'cause if Bush wins in November, I gotta move there, ok?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Stealing a milkshake and copying a digital file are not, I repeat not, the same thing.
Perhaps a better example would be the person charging you $10 for the recipe of a milkshake and you took a picture of that recipe and shared it with your friends.
Some 12 year old kid downloading music from the internet is not the same as the 12 year old kid creeping merchandise from Tower Records. There is a potential sale lost in the first case, and actual damages to Tower Recs, the distributor, the manager, etc. in the second.
I repeat, fundamentally not the same. How did this ignorant and blithe comment get modded as insightful? More **AA patsies in the mod system, I guess.
One would hope, on /. of all places, that this fundamental difference would be observed. Call it copyright infringement, but do not call it "theft," "piracy," or any other action which it is unequivocally not. There is a difference, and that difference matters. Both may be illegal, but one is a very fundamentally different beast than the other and they should be referred to and dealt with in different ways. Having the penalty for downloading (or uploading, or providing, whatever) digital files shouldn't have the same penalty (actually, much worse) than jacking merch in the store.
No, it's not. Stealing is taking something away (ie: so they no longer have it) from another party without right or permission.
It has nothing to do with having something in your posession. By your logic people who receive gifts are stealing and people who steal something and then give it away are not stealing.
Word games like this are going to do nothing but make your average joe look at your side of the argument as bizarre extremism.
It's not a word game at all. It's as simple, clear and obvious a distinction as the difference between manslaughter and murder - and most people don't have any trouble with those. The only people who seem to have difficulty seeing the difference are media company executives, their bought politicians and people who have been too brainwashed by advertising campaigns to actually think about it.
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.