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'Operation Site Down' Closes 8 Warez Servers
JerkyBoy writes "The Entertainment Software Association today hailed efforts on the part of 'U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice's Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section, U.S. Attorneys' offices nationwide, and participating foreign law enforcement officials' in the shutting down of at least 8 warez servers that specialized in the distribution of pirated games. With the code-name "Operation Site Down," close to 100 searches were conducted globally (U.S., Canada, Israel, France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, and Australia) within a 24-hour period, resulting in the identification of 120 individuals who are likely to be pursued by the U.S. Department of Justice."
It still doesnt matter. Everyone is still going to do it. Like shutting down napster... like that was going to change anything! Someone just developed a method to get round the law.
I'm sure they're just saving the good ones for operations that people will actually care about...
The thing that worries me isn't that the warez sites are being closed down, but who's closing them down.
Notice that the article pretty much says that the US took the lead. Now, I wonder why they might be doing that? How much money does the government receive from various association? Hmm, I think a lot.
Now said associations are pressing their rent-a-congressmen into action against people in foreign countries.
I wonder when we'll start having people sent here to stand trial for something that wasn't really even a crime there? Better yet, when will we be able to take their belongings and their families belongings when they end up in a form-letter-lawsuit from one of said associations?
The US is now a bunch of jack-booted thugs leaning against a wall in an alley behind some massive corporate entity. Cigarettes rolled up in its sleeve just waiting for one of the suits to come and ask for a favor.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
So us tax payers have helped catch 120 dangerous criminals in a global anti criminal investigation that most likely cost hundreds of thousands if not millions to organise and see through , and will cost countless millions more in prosecution hearings . . .
The vast majority of these individuals were most likely not even profiting off of this (if any , the details are not that clear)
The world is now a safer place , we can rest easy in our beds as EAs multi billion dollar profits don't take an insignificant dent from these hooligans
One for justice , one for liberty
Um sarcasm aside , 12 sites and 120 people is not even a tiny dent , 12 new sites will spring up today , and 12 tomorrow whilst hundreds of thousands if not millions of others download warez.
Hit the route of the problem , over pricing and then you may get somewhere.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Actually the oposite is true. Large scale production software has such ridiculously high profit margins, that bootlegging actually greatly reduces the cost to the end user be forcing the companies to compete with the bootleggers.
Examples can be found in the music industry (lowering of prices) , and in software (Microsoft introducing budget versions to compete with bootleggers).
Basically, if you reduce bootlegging, software will go up in price as competition reduces. Its basic economics really.
Really, people need to start calling out the Software companies for insulting everyones intelligence with the whole "piracy increases prices". Whats sad is even governments repeat it, even while knowing full well that it actually benifits the consumer.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
hey, DOJ, now that you've completed a international campaign to bring down some 7337 w4r3z d00d5 how about catching that guy....oh what was his name?....the man with the beard that was hiding in the cave....you know the tall guy who wanted to kill all Americans...oh yeah, Osama Bin Laden, why don't stop wasting resources on low level crap and catch someone that the whole nation wants caught?!?!
-- translates to --
The US Department of Justice is the U.S. law enforcement agency dedicated to serving the business and public affairs needs of the companies
'Nuff said.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
That's all they got? 120 people across all those nations? Those kind of figures won't even slow warez down. When I was in school there were probably ten people in my IT classes that were heavily into warez. That was in class, in one school, in one state of Australia. And yet across nearly a dozen nations they bagged only 120? Calling this a major victory is like saying World War Two was won by wiping out one squad of SS troops. They got a long way to go before they even start making waves, particular with the good old fashioned way of exchanging CDs amongst peers which is particularly hard to stop.
How is the USDOJ going to persue people in other countries?
/. No judge will even consider wasting his time entertaining extradition orders. I'd be surprised to see more than 2 or 3 convictions at the end of the whole affair. Are these even criminal charges? They should not be in any cililised country.
They're not. It's just another example of the usual presumptuous USA centered, and dare I say deliberately inflamatory remarks that accompany stories more and more often on
Ouside America we have better things to do with our law enforcement than chase warez kiddies. Stunts like this are just PR for Hollywood , Business Software Alliance and the usual crooks. It's stupidly named operation that was a monumental squandering of public resources on a private problem. These people remind me of overzealous 6th formers at the debating society. Get a perspective please! Par for the course in the 'war on reason'.
A message to these boneheads. Stop wasting the peoples money on a battle you can never hope to win.
Phishing hurts individuals.
Warez hurts corporations.
Okay so oversimplified maybe, but obviously many banks and other phishing targets are not putting as much pressure (AKA "donations") on the government as big brand game companies.
East Coast Brewers
Why are they supposed to be funny? Why are there prison rape jokes? Is it supposed to be creative? What goes through the heads of these people? "Hmm, I'm a fool let me think of a prison rape joke". Write to your G damn senator instead.
.. why doesnt anyone give a shit?
... but there is no way MOST people deserve it. Imagine if someone who did heinous acts with your loved ones gets to go to prison and "have fun". There is no way most VICTIMS of prison violence would inflict it's cruelty on anyone. On the other hand, the perpetrators .. they will benefit from it .. and enjoy their prison stay. When you consider that the justice system is screwed up and has very little safeguard to protect an innocent person of being convicted of crimes.
.. society will be no better (although that matters little .. considering we'd be doomed to hell for allowing such cruelty to be perpetrated to the undeserving).
.. What about our domestic prisons? That's the root cause.
If everyone knows prison rape is happening
Maybe there are some monsters who "deserve" the treatment
The founding fathers of this nation ensured that America would not become a cruel and evil state by writing it into the constitution that people be spared cruel and unusual punishment. Anyone who has even the slightest faith in God (creationists), or knowledge of history (evolutionists), should realize that cruelty will not and has never helped the survival of any state.
Most people sent to prison, such as theives are sent for reform not to extract vengeance upon them. When they come out
Have we become evil?
There are people who bitch about Gitmo
Did it ever appear to the WAREZ idiots that if they did not pirate things like Photoshop that Adobe MAY be able to charge less money?
I don't buy this excuse anymore, look at the price of console games, where casual copy (or casual piracy if you want call it like this, but there in no slaughter, no vessels, no murders and no parrots)... i was saying, casual copy is completely out of question but still the price tag of console games is not low, at least i don't consider 60 dollars for a game a low price...
How can they justify charging someone when the "crime" was committed in a jurisdiction where it is legal?
Even though I have benefitted from warez myself and think they are one of the main reasons why big software still thinks about how high they price certain software, I do want to say: Good Riddens.
Good Riddens, because software piracy is as a whole supporting large crime organisations world wide. Don't believe me? Well in a previous job I had colleagues making an extra couple of hundred a month selling warez compilations (Twilight?). Word was that the group they came from was running trucks with a complete cd production factory in the back of a truck somewhere in Eastern Europe. Same goes for all the pirated stuff you find all over Asia, Latin America and Africa. Now those are not legitimate businessmen doing legitimate business. So the money ends up in the hands of mobs, who use it for other crimes.
Now the arrest of these morons (probably students) won't make a real dent in the problem and won't lead to a full sollution, but if the justice department doesn't do anything, it will continue to grow unchecked. The more it is criminalized, the less people will get on board with Warez groups and the more the justice departmen will be able to treat it like real organized crime.
(There goes my karma)
Use Adsense for Charity
Does this remind anyone else of the raids on speakeasies in the twenties? These "get tough" tactics are likely to be as effective in stopping file sharing as Prohibition was in stopping drinking. When laws exist that make the majority of the population criminals, and I've seen estimates that more people download copyrighted files in the US alone than voted in the last Presidential election, then it is time to try the lawmakers...not the people.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Actually, I believe that shutting down napster did have an effect. There was a good long period of time where Napster was the utopia of music. It was like the world's largest music store, and best of all, everything was freely available at the click of a mouse.
Almost everyone I knew had used napster at one time or another to download a song, and there were many people who'd amassed hard drives full of copyrighted music. Because napster was so easy to use, it had almost become a cultural thing and I think a lot of people skimmed by the fact that what they were doing was illegal. These people then started to hear reports in the news about how the RIAA was going after people, and maybe that gave a few of them pause, but file trading didn't really abate that much.
I think it wasn't until Napster shut down that it finally clicked for a lot of people out there. They finally realized that it was illegal, and in spite of any moral ambiguities about stealing from wealthy corporations, it was something that was going to be prosecuted as a crime.
There may be just as much piracy now as there was in the day of napster, but I think the majority of the casual users that tried napster then are not participating now over PtP networks anymore.
iTunes has made it just as easy to get a song or album, and they've made it just as easy to pay for it, providing a viable and legitimate alternative to piracy. The Yahoo music and "napster to go" offerings further increase the options for legitimate and easy digital music offerings.
If napster hadn't been shut down, I don't think the casual users out there would have gotten the wakeup call they did. Furthermore, if napster hadn't been such a success, I don't think software companies out there would have bothered to develop legal digital music sales solutions to the degree we see today.
It's a bit odd, but I think the legal music trade industry of today owes a lot to the illegal music trade of napster.
:::: the insomniac's digest
I'm sorry you made the assumption that I was even referring to warez (applications or games). I think these punks deserve what they get. There's a big difference between giving thousands of nameless, faceless strangers access to mass quantities of copyright protected works and ripping your own CDs to mp3, or, dare I say, having a few of your real friends check out one of those mp3s. Gasp! That's right. I shared an mp3 with two of my very best friends! HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION AWAIT!
Grandparent was obviously making a blanket statement that essentially said "if you ever make a copy of anything, for any reason, you're a pirate". Sorry, but I don't fucking buy it. Does it directly relate to this particular story? No. It does, however, relate indirectly, for as these software companies push on Congress to protect their "intellectual property", fears of DMCA-esque laws abound - only this time, with mandatory useage of DRM - all the way to the soundcard and the speaker. I'm sorry, but if I want to make a mix CD, or, more likely, an mp3 CD for my car stereo, then I'm going to. I don't think I'm being completely unreasonable here. But, according to grandparent's trite generalization, I am.
They shut down some sites to the (supposed) benefit of a handful of corporate entities. How about doing something useful, like aggressively shutting down phishing sites. You know, where criminals are trying to steal thousands of dollars from as many victims as possible? I know, I know, stopping kiddies from playing games that they couldn't have bought otherwise is important, and you politicians have to try and keep some of the lobbying pressure off of you from Copyright Barons. However if you want to help the population - you know, the actual people that elected you, not the corporate entities that now get to steer you - try concentrating on phishing, spam and worms. Oh, and figuring out a way to make Microsoft bear some actual liability for the multitude of security problems they have introduced which has affected millions of people a hundred times over would be a step in the right direction too.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Because endless anal rape is a fitting punishment for violating copyright on computer games.
Nice sense of scale.
"Piracy costs the entertainment software industry billions of dollars each year, harming businesses and their employees who work on the development and distribution of game products, "
Oh cry me a river.
That's only the case if you assume that every copy=one real customer lost. Back when I was into the warez scene, I had intalled and deleted hundreds of games/utils/applications. Some within minutes after muttering "this is bogus".
If someone had totalled up the number of applications, utils, and games, there is no way I could have even afforded 10 percent of that. (I actually did buy what I liked, but to put me on the figurative hook for half-hour glances at packages, well, that's dumb).
I assume that my experience is not unique.
All that is totally ignoring the _fact_ that various companies who shall remain nameless depended on warez to gain marketshare *cough* autocad *cough* Windows.
Thank Gh0d for Open Source. Everything is legit now, and kicking back some cash gives a warm fuzzy feeling, rather than the feeling of being ripped off. It's been that way for almost a decade now, and I like it.
--
BMO
An interesting take, but I don't see any logic to support it, and I doubt you have even the most basic grasp of any flavor of economics. Software companies are competing with other software companies, not with pirates. You have absolutely no idea what the profit margins are on any "large scale production software" so please save the bullshit and stop implying any knowledge of the subject.
e s/docs/consultoras/riaa/2002/riaa_CDValueStudy2002 .pdf That while there has been a modest price rise, relative to inflation, CD prices (as expected) have dropped. Now, lets take into the direct result of MP3 sharing, which is legal services such as itunes and emusic, and we see music now dropping dramatically in price. I can get a subscription to emusic and for $19.99 I get 90 MP3 downloads, all quite legal. (Not sure iTunes prices, they aint here in australia yet. I gather there a bit more expensive).
Ok. ra ra rara. Bunch of ad hominen. I did a a bit of it in my minor, I do infact have an idea what I'm on about.
So lets explain this a bit further. Music Companies *DO* infact compete with Software Bootleggers due to the fact a consumer (which classical economics presumes to be rational and therefore likely to optimise choices to maximise bang for buck) can chose between the "authorised" product or the "unauthorised" product. The two directly compete. Due to an increased supply of the product relative to a more stable demand (not *everyone* needs a cad program), the crossover point between the suply curve and the demand curve settles at a cheaper point and prices lower.
CD prices may not be a brilliant example , but lets even assume that, we see here http://banners.noticiasdot.com/termometro/boletin
The Price fixing and the like has little to do with economics and everything to do with industry corruption. Thats why price fixing is considered pernicious, because it *distorts* the market away from consumer interests. Yes Bootlegging distorts the market, but it does so by pushing prices down.
Adam Smiths invisible hand rarely fails.
And yes, I am aware that the lower price offerings are partly to stem open source adoption. But Microsoft has also been adamant that its also motivated by high levels of Bootlegging in developing countries, including in government and industry (areas fairly compliant in the first world).
Finally, I'll refer you to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html.
Bootlegging is the more acurate term as oposed to piracy, because bootlegging refers to the manafacture of illicit goods (traditionally liquor) whereas Piracy tended to involve theft.
As have been pointed out by many , Bootlegging music and software can not be objectively called "Theft" because theft by its definition is an act of taking something that is yours and making it mine without your permission. If I take my CD of , say, Frank Zappa, or whatever, and copy it to my friend, nobody lost anything, but someone gained something. The music publisher still has precisely the same stock level and capital reserves. I still have my CD, but a friend now has a new copy of Hot rats to listen to.
The arguement that bootlegging is theft, *relies* on the arguement that unauthorised competition could be theft. And if you accept that arguement , then you have to accept that bootlegging is competition and thus under classical economics benificial to the consumer and I would suggest it could be also applied to Open Source. Infact that is precisely the scam the Software industry is trying to pull with patent laws where intellectual property (devised originally to protect small publishers from having books copied by large monopolists) is abstracted further into the idea of software itself.
I much prefer Stallmans idea of not calling it piracy , but rather "sharing with a friend".
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Just my 2 cents...I probably don't know what I'm talking about but whatever...
;). Instead what they will do, is make a different version, stripped down and with less features (ADOBE PHOTOSHOP and then you have ADOBE ELEMENTS) and sell it to the more price conscious consumer. So now they are catering to both markets (increase market not cut prices lol) :P
:P
Regarding : only 8 sites were shut down but
thousands will spring up
This is not napster, where thousands COULD spring up as replacements, these were I'm guessing TOP sites. Where minimum requirements were lots of HD space (in the Terrabytes), and a fat pipe T3 and OC3's. So thousands of replacement sites will not just spring up and NO the release groups will not have your cablemodem site you run out of your house as a HQ.
Regarding : Extradition
President Bush has probably tied this to the fight against terrorism. Note this is probably Bush's logic (Piracy directly or indirectly brings in funds through the it's sales to buy arms. The warez groups are not terrorists but by putting this stuff out, even for fun makes it available for terrorists to sell. The other countries will probably comply to extradite because hey it's the fight against terrorism "YOU are EITHER WITH US OR AGAINST US".
remember that line? hah!
Regarding : Software prices are expensive as they are because of the pirates, and ADOBE would probably charge less money if it wasn't for them.
I'm sorry, but come on, ADOBE is a public company responsible for it's shareholders to MAXIMIZE profits, increase earnings and silly stuff like that
Price cutting is not a marketing strategy when you have a VIRTUAL MONOPOLY...they did just buy up MACROMEDIA...so much for competition eh
Prices go down because of competition example : AMD vs INTEL
Regarding : That's all they got? 120 people across all those nations? Those kind of figures won't even slow warez down.
It won't slow it down? The last release (Game) not (APP) or (MOVIE) was July 2nd, today's post is July 11th...that's 9 days without a game relase, where on AVERAGE releases were released every couple of days. This could be just a quiet down/cooling off period but that remains to be seen.
Regarding : A whole 8 warez servers? NOW which of the other 1.6 million will I choose from?!
8 top sites, there are not that many top sites, and you probably were never on one of them, this is not a slight in any way towards you...and even on the top sites not everyone in a release group had access to them. Say 10 release groups had access to 1 top site, that site will take only a handful of members from that group to allow on. Groups were competing with other groups to get onto sites. The 1.6 million sites (bottom of the chain) you refer to will RECYCLE what has currently been released and probably not supply something NEW.
Games and Apps releases are not like MP3s where you can just buy for 15$ at the store press a button to rip it, and trade with your buddies.
Games and Apps releases are not like DVDrips where you can buy them for 15$ or rent them for 5$ press a button to rip them and trade with your buddies.
Games are 50'sh bux each, which require security removal which I take it is not easily done with a press of a button. Apps are 50-10,000$ which require security removal as well. So not only do you need initial funds to acquire the release you'll need some techinical skills to remove the protection.
Final thoughts...finally
Most of these groups did it for fun, With President Bush passing that new law where it makes it much more of an offence to trade and stuff (10 years?) it is no longer FUN...
Since President Bush is on his crusade as is, he ought to look at SPAM. The profits of that crap HAS to be funding terrorist groups!!!! haha...
...bombs exploded all over London.
Do you think maybe our tax dollars are being wasted? Maybe instead of cracking down on petty 'thefts' where its highly questionable whether they result in truly measurable losses or rather increase sales in the long run, they should...I don't know...crack down on mass murderers with bombs??
Ha Ha. Why is rape always considered funny when talking about criminals? Are they not people with rights like everyone else NOT to get raped? It seems to me like an anti-male thing. Its funny when men are raped. Its funny when they get kicked in the nuts in some mindless US sitcom. Actually, no. Its not funny. Try cracking a joke about women being raped. Or a woman being kicked in her genitals (which most would see as sexual assault). You'll be lynched, and righly so. So why the double standard?
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
Not that I personally give much of a hoot about corporate profits I don't. I don't subscribe to the piracy == lost sales argument either. In fact, like many others I believe piracy is great asset to many software companies, after all 100% free distribution plus you still get your 'honest' customers to pay for the stuff, sounds like having your cake and eating it to me.
However, and I know I may get flamed here, but if Open source equivalents were as slick and as easy to use as their propreitary counterparts not only may it held curb piracy (if that is an important aim, which I'm not convinced it is) but it would probably be a massive blow to these companies who are crying about piracy and endorsing these token arrests.
Opensource has already won on the server and development front. Good inroads on the graphics/desktop/workstation front with Gimp, Blender, Open Office etc. But come up with killer looking apps that are as a good or better than Photoshop, Maya etc. and the effects could be enormous.
It's not justification, and it's not theft.
feh. stuff.
I think the prison-rape humor springs from a feeling that the U.S. prison system doesn't punish criminals enough. There is a sense that the prisoners are getting 3 meals a day, exercise time, free education frequently, etc. and are not really being punished beyond their separation from friends and family. The thought then goes that anything unfortunate that happens to them in prison is "just desserts."
It's flawed, obviously, and nobody is seriously going to say that rape is a good thing; but I think that's probably where it springs from.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
You show a fundamental lack of understanding of how a modern society and modern justice works. In addition to that, your somewhat weird idea that revenge equals justice is harmful to a society as a whole.
I won't go into the first argument about rights which humans inherently have, and about how the state, who has a monopoly on force, needs to be very careful about how he uses said force. However, I will quickly say something about the second argument, namely that revenge is bad for society as a whole.
We can probably all agree that not all crimes should be punished with the death penalty. We can probably also agree that keeping people in prison indefinitely is neither desirable nor practicable due to the costs it creates. This leads to one conclusion: People who go to prison will sooner or later come out of it again.
I think we can also agree that the goal should be a society where as little crime as possible should be committed.
People who went to prison committed a crime. Since we want to have as little crime as possible, it seems a good idea to make as sure as possible that they won't commit another crime. How do you achieve that? There are several options, depending on why they committed the crime in the first place. Maybe they had no job and ended up dealing drugs to make money. Maybe they have mental issues and are just violent. If you want them to not repeat their mistakes, help them find a job. Give them an eductaion. Help them get over their mental problems. Force them to see a shrink. Maybe you disagree with this ideas, but I'm sure you can think of others.
One thing is for sure: If you put them into a violent prison with gangs and rape, they'll come out worse than they went in, and that can't be good for society.
You can't ignore one to fight the other. Where do you draw the line? Parking violations? Shoplifting?
I didn't realize the FBI was in the habit of writing parking tickets.