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US Fed Gov. Says All Music Downloads Are Theft
BenEnglishAtHome writes "Nearly all US government employees and contractors are subject to
mandatory annual information security briefings. This year the official briefing flatly states that
all downloaded music is stolen. The occasionally breathless tone of the briefing and the various minor errors contained therein are funny but the real eye-opener is a 'secure the building' exercise where employees stumble across security problems and resolve them. According to the material, the correct response to an employee who is downloading music is to shout 'That's stealing!' No mention is made of more-free licenses, public domain works, or any other legitimate download. If this were a single agency or department that had made a mistake in their training material it might not be so shocking. But this is a government-wide training package that's being absorbed by hundreds of thousands of federal employees, both civilian and military. If you see a co-worker downloading music, they're stealing. Period. Who woulda thunk it? Somebody should mirror this. Who wants to bet that copies will become hard to find if clued-in technogeeks take notice and start making noise?" Warning: this site gives a whole new meaning to "Flash heavy."
Warning: this site gives a whole new meaning to "Flash heavy."
They have a non-flash site if you need to complete this training and receive your certificate and you can't have flash. Not sure how they are running the audio but that's available as well.
I gotta admit it's not as entertaining as the zoom down into the city flash animation when instead of that you get:
Screen 1 of 48. Screen title, Intro. A block in any city, U S A. The camera zooms into a bank A T M. The A T M screen reads, no funds available. The camera zooms into another A T M, and again, no funds are available. Cut to an office in a building. Camera zooms into computer screen on desk. C N N website is on screen, displaying news headlines that support audio. Camera zooms to P D A on desk. P D A displays news headlines that support audio. Camera zooms to fax machine. Document on machine displays news headlines that support audio.
Also, you might encounter some problems with words and acronyms that are pronounced like IA (Information Assurance)
Screen 4 of 48. Screen title, What is I Ay? Image of worker at desk with computer. The computer monitor displays a warning ...
My work here is dung.
When is the last time they were right about anything? .. .. ..
Can't think of one? Yea Me either.
Nuff said
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
If you're downloading music at work, it probably is stealing...
...of company time. And given that my taxes are paying these people's salaries (that is, you and I are "the company"), I'd really rather them not. Granted, I do wish that they would convey correct information, and I don't expect government workers to go zombie-like through the day without taking a break now and then, but still, I am glad that rampant goofing off in this particular manner is discouraged.
According to the material, the correct response to an employee who is downloading music is to shout 'That's stealing!'
WTF is this, Dora the Explorer? Swiper, no swipey! Nice job, lame ass contract media company who probably got paid $10 million to create the worst instructional videos ever.
Is there an easy way to quit using the government?
Anything you say will be held against you.
The government's bandwidth, paid for by we the people. Quit wastin gour tax dollars you thief.
Well, in at least the whole music/copyright discussion. Here's how. The position is obviously childishly absurd, even to the most brain-dead government worker. It negates itself quite effectively.
Unfortunately, it also negates the rest of itself as well, and I'd like to believe that there is something useful about it.
Oh, and don't be in a hurry to connect to a .mil site... (just sayin'...)
I remember when I recorded my band in the living room and copied the cd to my computer. When iTunes told me I didn't have the required rights to make a cd copy I quit using iTunes.
I've been using iTunes for at least six years and I've never had it tell me I didn't have permissions to burn music no matter WHERE it came from.
So what if the name of the song is "THAT'S STEALING!". Sales will skyrocket for that band.
And the RIAA bought congress critters for cheap!
Otherwise you'd see the gov't suing RIAA and friends for the payola-by-proxy currently going on.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
"Occasionally breathless tone" is an understatement. Take a look at some of the other training material. The whole site has a Reefer Madness tone, as if it was produced by the same person who directed anti-commie films in the 1950s. I wonder if government training material in general has been given the "War On [fill in the blank]" treatment.
If the summary is accurate, whoever wrote this needs an encounter with a clue-by-four. Let's not even bother with stuff like Creative Commons licenses or public domain recordings - just take the briefing at face value for a minute. All music is copyrighted; downloading copyrighted material is stealing; therefore, downloading music is stealing.
Do they also not realize that in every Berne signatory country, all "creative" written text (i.e. anything other than raw facts), drawings, and photographs are also automatically copyrighted? So, using that logic, downloading any text or images is stealing. Congratulations, you've just made the entire Internet illegal!
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I've worked in the defense industry, with a security clearance, for going on twenty years now, and you have to understand, this kind of stupidity is not at all unusual. On the military side, the security officers are usually MPs (or SPs, for the Air Force) who've been dragooned into doing information security. They aren't stupid (well, most of them aren't), but they also aren't trained for that kind of work--they're supposed to be cops. But "one size fits nobody," so they get assigned by their branch to information protection slots, receive a couple of weeks of Power Point slide training, and then they're placed over engineers and techs whose knowledge of the IT systems runs rings around them. As a result, their response to anything new is hard-wired: "no."
It's even worse on the civilian/contractor side. Security jobs don't pay well, and because you get what you pay for, the dregs of the organization tend to filter down to those positions. What's worse, once there, your average security guy/gal has power over smarter/more competent people for the first time in their careers, and a small but very present minority of them proceed to abuse that power and act arbitrarily, usually out of ignorance, but occasionally out of pure spite. This kind of mindless "training" presentation is what most of them do all day. As you can see, the results are less than impressive.
Copyright as envisioned by the authors of the US Constitution was written to law as the Copyright Act of 1790.
Under that act protection was 14 years with a 14 year extension available if the copyright holder was still alive and it was renewed.
So... that's what they meant by "for limited times". They wrote it down for us. Under that law all works prior to 1980 would be in the public domain as would many prior to 1994. Every time copyright has been extended those works that would be public domain have been stolen from each of us. THAT'S stealing.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
When I got to http://www.bong-ra.com/ I can download music for free from the artist. How would this be stealing? Unless they mean they might not get as many donation from music lobby groups unless they make the employees think downloading any music is stealing.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
When I was in the USAF, everyone in our squadron had to complete annual COMPUSEC training in order to retain their network account. Along with all of the other popular security myths, the training included a section where it instructed users to never, EVER install software from a file or disc that hadn't been approved by the network administrator. Now, this would make sense from a security point of view. We don't need bored airmen installing the Trojan Edition of Bejewelled on government computers. What killed me was that the ENTIRE justification for this rule was not to avoid a possible security issue, but rather that doing so might infringe on the software's copyright if a license to use it had not been properly purchased.
In other words, the U.S. military was more concerned about accidental piracy than actual computer security.
It should go without saying that there was never any mention of open source software, but I can sorta forgive them for that since this was a bit before open source became a common idea in I.T.
The flame of the article is based on the phrasing of the general question. If you click the "Learn More" link, it is clear that the warning is about downloading via P2P file sharing networks. The use of P2P networks is a violation of the DOD Information Systems network use. That's the thrust of the training.
It may not be clear from the phrasing in the question, but in the context (i.e., when administered to people who are constantly exposed to DOD Information Systems training and reminders), it will likely be understood by the reader. Chances are, there is likely a prohibition against personal software (including *legal* music downloads) too.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Taken completely out of context and brought to a heightened level of irrational literal interpretation, the summary is accurate. However...........
"According to the material, the correct response to an employee who is downloading music is to shout 'That's stealing!' The actual question in the slideshow/training abomination is along the lines of your fellow co-worker calls you over and says "look bra, I found a site with free music, lol im leet". There are 4 answers to choose from:
1. I'd rather download the music from home - -email me the link. (I would choose this, and tell my coworker that he could get in trouble doing this at work, anywhere from wasting company time, committing criminal acts at work (if it is actually some sort of pirate site, and lets be honest freely available music is mostly (but not entirely) not worth my time) or at worst inviting security problems into the workplace computer.
2. "Is it safe to download?" Umm, if you have to ask then you don't know already (or have a hunch at least) and are trusting some random Jim Bom on this.
3. "Since we're on our lunch hour, I see no harm. HEre's my thumb drie!" Obviously the wrong answer with the thumb drive part added in for extra obviousness
4. "That's stealing." Ok, so they simplified the answer from "that is probably stealing, who owns the distribution rights to these songs you are getting from this website? If the owners of the publishing rights do not consent to giving away these materials freely then a crime is being committed, otherwise it is ok to access this site but not from work, because of the above reasons".
I took this.....I dont know what you'd call it, class, course, button masher until I get to the print certificate screen, because it was required of me where I work. Most of the info for securing information systems in this presentation is solid and correct for the USER side of things, i.e. things the everday user of a computer on a network can and should do to minimize (not eliminate as that is not possible) security breaches at their particular Department of Defense associated workplace. Now excuse me, I need to go participate in the lynching of my co-worker that downloaded the newest whatever is popular pop song at work.
I'm not sure what operating system/distro you're using, so I'll include instructions for several.
Debian/Ubuntu:
apt-get sarcasm
Gentoo:
emerge sarcasm
Slackware:
tar -xvzf sarcasm.tar.gz
Windows:
Go to The Pirate Bay, search for 'sarcasm detector', and install it with the aid of the included keygen.
Be sure to run these with superuser/root/admin privileges. Good luck!
I read through the comments, but can't claim I read every one. But of those I read, I didn't see anyone who pointed out that the guy in the training is showing you a WEB SITE...
BUT all the answers are about the risks of P2P applications ?!?!?
If you are going to a WEB SITE to download music, isn't the P2P application your browser!?!?!
I work for DoD. I remember thinking about posting about this the first time I saw it, years ago. The truth is, nobody cares. Everyone where I work has headphones on and is listening to MP3s, either on their portable music players (not all are iPod . . . ) or on their computers. About the last damn thing we need our government security tax dollars being wasted on is a quixotic quest to rid all government assets of "stolen" music.
It does sicken me a bit to see such propaganda bandied about as official government policy, but I figure if you aren't smart enough to know the difference between downloading data you have rights to (by fair use or otherwise) and an honest to goodness security breach, you shouldn't hold a clearance.
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