FBI, DoJ Add 35 Positions For Intellectual Property Battle

coondoggie writes "The FBI and Department of Justice said they were going to go hard after intellectual property crimes this year and so far they seem to be keeping their word, as today the agencies appointed 15 new Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) positions and 20 FBI Special Agents dedicated to fighting domestic and international IP crimes. The 15 new AUSAs will work closely with the Criminal Division's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section to aggressively pursue high tech crime, including computer crime and intellectual property offenses. The new positions will be located in California, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Washington. The 20 FBI Special Agents will be deployed to specifically boost four geographic areas with intellectual property squads, and increase investigative capacity in other locations around the country where intellectual property crimes are of particular concern. The four squads will be located in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the District of Columbia."

Comments

The Downfall Caption Idea

[eldavojohn]

This news makes me want to use Handbrake to edit a few minutes from The Downfall where it shows Hitler planning his movements and attacks on a map and replace the captions with English describing 35 new positions in California, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington (while he's moving the markers across the maps of Europe).

Unfortunately that's no longer possible as Youtube/Google seems to have outlawed parodies and freedom of expression/dissent in favor of draconian law.

How appropriate.

Clarify

[Monkeedude1212]

20 FBI Special Agents dedicated to fighting domestic and international IP crimes.

So does that mean the FBI is going to be investigating US Citizens for IP of international origin, or somehow extending their Jurisdiction beyond the states?

Everyone knows the biggest file sharers in the world are Canadian.

The question is who they're going after.

[FooAtWFU]

Going after the big-time bootleggers churning out counterfeits and selling fake Photoshop and DVDs online = fine and good. Going after j. random filesharing = gaaak.

Re:I have to admit

[OrwellianLurker]

In most cases what they deem to be "Intellectual Property" certainly is a crime. I think tax money could be better spent fixing the system.

When it comes to kids sharing songs, that's civil, not criminal.

Playing devil's advocate for a second...

[ProdigyPuNk]

According to the article, these new squads are not just for tech-related IP issues, but also counterfeit medicine and electronics. FWIW, we do need someone to go after those making counterfeit medicine before it enters the US supply stream. Also according to the article, even the Department of Defense has had run-ins with fake electronics. That kind of thing could lead to serious consequences, and therefor must be taken seriously.

I wish that movies/music/software "sharing" was separated from movie/music/software counterfeiting and fake medicine and goods of course, but either way the American public needs to be protected from those threats.

Re:Playing devil's advocate for a second...

[laughingcoyote]

While what you say is true, there's a tremendous difference between making counterfeit medicine (which could easily injure or kill someone), making a counterfeit watch (which is defrauding the customer by making them think it's something it's not), and sharing an MP3. Ultimately, the law is going to need to realize these distinctions. I think our tax money would be much better spent on bringing copyright and patent laws in line with the digital age, rather than trying to bring the digital age in line with copyright and patent law that was never designed with it in mind.

Hey, I can dream, can't I? But look at the fights the lawsuits caused. If Joe/Jane Average actually starts getting arrested for MP3 sharing, I think we'll see hell raised on a scale that'll make that look tame. It's just a shame that it would probably take that to get people to care.

Re:Playing devil's advocate for a second...

[DurendalMac]

It's blatantly obvious that you've only read history. You have never studied history. There's a big difference between, "This is bad for you! Ban vices!" and "Shit, these guys are fraudulently selling fake medication under a forged brand name. Now Grandma's heart meds are just sugar pills!" Or perhaps, "FUCK, this military equipment that needs to meet exacting standards has the brand name on it, but the part is a forgery! So that's why our radar system went down!"

If you can't tell the difference then you are well beyond hope. It's the difference between protecting people from themselves and protecting people from FRAUD, even potentially lethal fraud. Even if you're getting down to bootlegged CDs or Photoshop...did those bootleggers do ANYTHING to earn that money aside from running off phony copies? No, they didn't, so why are they entitled to make money from outright fraud? File sharing is generally a non-profit enterprise. Bootlegging is not. Nobody is making money by seeding that album. There's a big difference. Stop your kneejerking for two seconds and actually take a look at the issue.

Re:Playing devil's advocate for a second...

[Darkness404]

I wish that movies/music/software "sharing" was separated from movie/music/software counterfeiting and fake medicine and goods of course, but either way the American public needs to be protected from those threats.

They used to be. It used to be that the entire point of a trademark is to make sure customers got what they ordered. And such things make sense and are -beneficial- to customers. Imagine the confusion if we had 5 different products known as the "Nintendo Wii" and a parent heard their kid wanting a Nintendo Wii so they go in and ask for a Nintendo Wii and they get http://technabob.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/miwi_wii_knock_off.jpg instead. With trademarks if it says Nintendo Wii it (should) be a Nintendo Wii.

Patents also used to be beneficial to the public. It used to be that guilds would control trade and monopolize the market effectively with "trade secrets" that would stay in the guild. Patents helped change this because the guild would disclose information while granted a temporary monopoly to use it (after all, someone who left one shop could have taken the trade secret to another and it would have been legal) and the public would get valuable information. Unfortunately, we've gone beyond that to theoretical, common-knowledge patents that prevent work-arounds. It used to be that if Joe Inc. had a patent on, say, a black and white CRT monitor, you could create a color CRT monitor and compete with Joe Inc. However, now, Joe Inc. would hold a patent on the ability to make CRT displays work, thus cutting out access to any work-arounds.

Copyright was also seen as a compromise, especially when it was sane. The author would be compensated for his work, the public wasn't offended (after all, no one was stopping hand-written copies, it was only if you owned a printing press that it mattered) and it gave the work to the public in a timely manner. However, ironically the company who depends the most on the public domain (Disney) has lobbied for effectively infinite copyright that harms the artist and the public.

Counterfeit goods should not be judged on IP issues (after all, if there was an iPhone clone that -really was- just like an iPhone no one is being harmed it simply increases competition for Apple) but rather for fraud. Quite honestly, I'd like to see a few of the Chinese knockoff phones and MP3 players appear in stores for disposable, feature-filled items.

Re:Playing devil's advocate for a second...

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Patents also used to be beneficial to the public. It used to be that guilds would control trade and monopolize the market effectively with "trade secrets" that would stay in the guild. Patents helped change this because the guild would disclose information while granted a temporary monopoly to use it [...]

The technology for reverse engineering stuff has also moved on greatly since the Middle Ages. It's very hard to keep something a trade secret if you don't physically control it. Which means that as soon as you release a drug, software, or a technical gizmo, someone will start working on reverse engineering it. This is an argument against patents on these things because if they can be easily reverse engineered then there's no public benefit to granting a patent on it.

Rich.

Wow, this scene is a prediction

[stimpleton]

This 1 minute scene from the British comedy, The IT Crowd.

Relevantly, the assasin at the end is an FBI agent. FBI as copyright police

I point of thought, he is on foreign soil enforcing US DMCA. As a side note the makers of this series have strong opinions in this area.

Publishing interests have wanted this for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

Back once upon a time, copyright infringement was a civil matter, not a criminal matter. Problem was (from the corporations' viewpoint), that meant they had to pay for lots of lawyers and lawsuits against individual file sharers. So they lobbied to make copyright infringement, at least in certain forms, into a criminal matter. That meant that the corporations were off the hook as far as paying for enforcement, now that burden would fall on the taxpayers. The Feds liked it too, as they now had another reason to legally spy on the populous, plus they could ask for bigger budgets to support all this spying and prosecution. As far as the corporations and government are concerned, criminalizing file sharing is a win/win. The only looser is the citizen.

Read the article but we know what it is about

[erroneus]

They went into great detail in the article discussing counterfeit goods of all sorts that threaten health and safety and then merged and drifted over to counterfeit computer software that threatens stability and privacy. (That's malware, not infringed copyrighted software... malware like Sony's rootkit) And of course it's really all about **AA interests in digital media mentioned in the article as "digital products." Accurately, they state that there is no government agency that is tracking copyright infringement or the extent of it.

The article goes to great lengths to fill the details with things other than "digital product" infringement... things that have been historically handled by these same people who tracked down and nailed groups who created and sold counterfeit Cisco network equipment. This stuff has been dealt with and managed without adding 35 new positions. So clearly these new positions are intended to deal with a newer agenda rather than an older one.

I would like for the article to be true in the sense that I would love to see a crack down on sales of counterfeit medicines and other physical goods. Sadly, I don't think this is going to be the case. The spam and scam will continue as it always has while the real crackdown will be felt by individuals at home engaged in file sharing.

Re:I have to admit

[biryokumaru]

I believe Nerdfest was arguing that the continuation of copyright in perpetuity ought to be considered a criminal infringement of the rights of society at large, and that intellectual property laws should be rewritten to prevent the present situation from being possible, wherein art is institutionalized and can never become part of the public domain.

At least, that's an estimated translation in layman's term. His thick legalese can certainly be hard to digest.

Re:From a historical perspective

[Securityemo]

But unlike hacking, file sharing is mainstream; this is why it persists. I'm too young to have been a part of that scene, but from my digging I know that the "hackers" never went away; only the "open underground" disappeared. Discussing illegal computer breaching on open forums today is an unimaginable taboo, at least if you live in a western country.

Re:Won't somebody please think of the children?

[hoggoth]

*bullshit*

Citation needed.

There's a child molester in every chat room.
There's a terrorist in every van.
Smoking a joint leads to crime, violence, and insanity.
Copying a music file cripples our economy.

Oh, and drinking alcohol doesn't hurt you.
Eating cheap processed chemicals doesn't hurt you.
Polluting our air and water is worth it.
Our climate is fine.

What do all these statements have in common?
They are making some entrenched interest a lot of money.

One more war...

[CondeZer0]

The War on File Sharing is the new War on Drugs.

The approach being taken is quite similar: manipulated and fabricated studies and evidence, draconian international treaties to make sure no country is allowed to implement sane policies, suspension of basic civil liberties in the name of the war, etc.

Because jails are not full enough with non-violent 'criminals' already, maybe the US is trying to raise the incarceration rate to over 90%?

Re:One more war...

[drinkypoo]

The War on File Sharing is the new War on Drugs.

If we can get rid of the old War on [some] Drugs, it's a fantastic trade. All I have to do is give up big media? Sold!

Youtube is not a public service

[rsborg]

Unfortunately that's no longer possible as Youtube/Google seems to have outlawed parodies and freedom of expression/dissent in favor of draconian law. Unfortunately that's no longer possible as Youtube/Google seems to have outlawed parodies and freedom of expression/dissent in favor of draconian law.

Google is a private entity, unless you think that they are somehow owned/run by the government... and thus do not have to allow *anything* on their site. It may not follow their "do not evil" mantra, but it's well within their rights, and it's now being "outlawed".

Re:Won't somebody please think of the children?

[Ethanol-fueled]

Maybe we should think about education or REAL healthcare solutions before we go all suburban housewife and dedicate outrageous resources to statistically insignificant and excessively emotional crime.

You saw the big circus over Chelsea King in San diego. Two cute girls dead and the whole fucking city shows up for a candlelight(soon to become torchlight) vigil. It was so disgusting, even the victims' family remarked that it turned their horrible loss into a insulting and condescending feeding frenzy of two-minute-haters pretending to feel their pain. From that article:

It's very emotional," said Maurice DuBois who has been briefing search teams and offering support to the King family. "It brings us right back to the first week Amber went missing, all the chaos and fear.

Yeah, duh. Emotional, but not at all logical to exploit abuse or loss for political gain and dedicate exorbitant resources, especially during a budget crisis, to statistically insignificant crimes. Piracy and CP will be convenient reasons to screw everybody over as long as enough tools(suburban housewives etc.) can be manipulated emotionally by shit-mouthed political climbers.

Let the governmant pay the bill for enforcement.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice job buy the media lobbyists. Get you and I to pay for the enforcement of their civil cases. IP issues are still a civil matter correct? Who is getting the fine money?

When my actual physical property is stolen, I am stuck with the very limited resources of the local overworked police force that pretty much does nothing but file a report for me to give to my insurance company. Even if they catch the perp, it is still a civil matter for me to get the value of my lost goods back. The media companies gets entire teams of federal officials at my expense to track down when their property is "stolen".

Re:I have to admit

[frank_adrian314159]

I think tax money could be better spent fixing the system.

I think that campaign contribution money has "fixed the system" quite well up to this point. I'm not sure I could stand any more "fixing".

The agenda to kill copyrights and patents

[h00manist]

how much IP can you fit it 625GB?? . A LOT more than $50.... They can hire all the cops and snoops they want, these guys are getting nowhere. The agenda to kill off copyright law is, unfortunately for these guys, clearly set and fully adhered to by everyone -- ignore it. It's a perfect strategy, as it simply lets the law stand, but makes it irrelevant. It's a perfect mass movement joining millions and millions of dedicated people, with almost no coordination needed. The copyright war isn't over yet, but the battles ahead are mere formalities, it's hopeless.