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US Copyright Group — Lawsuits, DDoS, and Bomb Threats
Andorin writes "The US law firm of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver, otherwise known as the US Copyright Group, filed suit at the end of August against another 2,177 individuals for allegedly downloading and sharing the slasher film Cornered! (In total the USCG has now filed suit against over 16,200 individuals.) In retaliation, Operation Payback, the Anonymous-led project responsible for DDoSing websites of the RIAA and MPAA, targeted the US Copyright Group's website with a DDoS, temporarily bringing it down for a few hours. The group behind the attacks say they'll continue 'until they stop being angry.' Additionally, the local police department evacuated the office of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver after a bomb threat was emailed to the firm. The building was searched, but no bomb was found."
I'm not justifying the actions of those who made the bomb threat or who are behind the DDoS attacks, but if US Copyright Group is going to act like a bully they are going to experience some backlash in a variety of forms. They think they can do as they wish just because they're lawyers, etc, but they're discovering that the public doesn't like a bully, plain and simple.
This only happened after Aiplex Software was contracted to DDoS attack file sharing web sites:
http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/an-interview-with-anonymous/
When the government doesn't protect individuals, the companies harassing them are supposed to face public backslash proportional to the damage they cause. IE: When they harass thousands and ruin hundreds of lives for profit, they can and should be willing to expect pretty much anything. That's what happens when government doesn't do what it is supposed to: A small step towards anarchy.
That all aside, I don't expect that Anonymous will ever do anything serious as they are mostly doing things for personal amusement.
When faced with a fundamentally unjust society people will increasingly turn to alternate means to redress legitimate grievances. This is why civil liberties matter and why due process, equal justice, proportionate punishment, and presumption of innocence rather than presumption of guilt are essential, and yet all of these core principles are under open attack in the United States today.
"I wouldn't be surprised if individuals who work for these firms will start to be publically identified and their private lives targetted."
That's exactly what needs to happen, copyright and corporations have shown themselves to want nothing more then a monopoly, and turn customers and citizens of the world into serfs where the rent everything in perpetuity. WHere ownership rights on the customer end are being rescinded and quite frankly copyright will always be abused it goes against our rights to own what we purchase outright and modify it as we see fit.
I will never understand why westerners are so supportive of corporatist removal of our rights to own outright and modify our stuff as customers and human beings. We've seen how free market ideology works in the real world where there are no scruples and money makes the rules and if you don't have money your voice doesn't matter. We're already in an era of corporate dictatorship of policy to such an insidious degree.
Why exactly would you want more of it? Right now the economy, government and law is so twisted by the structures of power that be, we need constant resistance and less ideological infighting of right vs left, left and right simply doesn't matter, these are distractions from the main issues - the removal of our liberties and rights as human beings view the market mechanism. We're seeing how money and markets can be transform a society into a society of serfs, any system can be gamed, transformed and abused, how so many people can't see this is disturbing.
That smart-ass bomb threat going to get them classified as a "terrorist group." Then you can bet every agency will want "in" on the action; busting a bunch of (misguided) geeks is a lot safer than going after heavily armed drug dealers and much easier than tracking down serial killers.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
In a world where votes are counted in dollars changing laws is no longer up to the people.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Sometimes a fed up community just goes extralegal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
You say it like it's a bad thing. It's the only way the lawyers will put any thought into what they're doing. Those folks(the lawyers in this case) are out to ruin lives. Those guys pay firms to DDos you, hack you, stalk you, put malware on your computer, and finally litigate you to death, just for uploading a few songs. Do you think the Jammie Thomas case, even the more lenient judgement, is justice?
If anything, it sounds like Anonymous is trying to beat the thugs at their own game. Let's hope that they succeed.
How most people can't see this is quite a mystery unless you are willing to entertain the idea that people are not naturally this blind and must be trained to be this way. Then you realize this is the main reason for having a government-run public school system. The mystery then disappears but a sense of relief is not forthcoming, because it took a few generations to make things this way and may well take a few generations to begin to undo the damage.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Recently a lawyer in the UK was also targeted by the 4chan group.
What's notable is that he was in the same business as the law firm in this article - sending out compliance letters for alleged copyright infringement. As this article notes, lately the UK lawyer had only been getting business from porn movie producers; all his mainstream clients had stopped hiring him because they no longer saw a net benefit in suing their fans.
This might explain why the law firm was threatening people over a c-movie: the 'real' movie studios in the US might no longer want to work with people like them.
The law firm he ended up with was ACS Law, run by middle-aged lawyer Andrew Crossley. ACS Law had, after a process of attrition, become one of the only UK firms to engage in such work. Unfortunately for Crossley, mainstream film studios had decided that suing file-sharers brought little apart from negative publicity, and so Crossley was left defending a heap of pornography, some video games, and a few musical tracks.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Nuh-uh.
Pranks, yeah. Making their lives miserable through perfectly legal means, yeah, I can smile at it (e.g. when Mr. Ralsky got a taste of his own spammy medicine a few years back... those were good times).
OTOH, breaking the law is only good for those willing to challenge an unjust law. Notice that the US Civil Rights Movement didn't resort to breaking other laws to make a point - they only broke the unjust ones. Most importantly, they were willing to take the punishment for it, in order to point out to the world at large just how unjust those laws were. That's the whole point of civil disobedience.
While, yeah, I have zero love for a law firm that engages in the RIAA/MPAA's tactics, the best way to make one's point is to do so w/o breaking other, more important laws.
What this would accomplish (at least if done large-scale or over time) is to provide fodder to make existing laws even more draconian, and to allow government(s) to step in and regulate the Internet even more, which none of us want.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Why -1 Troll?
It's begging the question. The question is phrased to make you accept, as a fact, without presenting evidence, that there are 'many abortion clinics known for doing illegal late-term abortions'. So long as there's an overriding argument that violence can be justifed if it's in self defense or support of the law, then the Troll AC is claiming that violence CAN sometimes be appropriate, AND he's advancing a claim that the abortion clinics are doing something that does make it appropriate. He uses the word "many" to imply that the actions are so common the legal system must be ignoring a violation of the law deliberately, and "known", without specifying if it's 'known' to a legal standard, or just 'known' by somebody having started a rumor without any evidence.
Abortion is also a much bigger hot-button issue than the RIAA. The chance of rational discourse drops when Abortion is brought up, and on Slashdot, the chance of people managing to discuss a local hot topic such as the RIAA was already low. (Hell, the way Slashdot is these days, the chance of rationality is too low even without it being a sensitive topic).
Who is John Cabal?
Then why weren't any of the "threats" ever followed up by the local cops or FBI?
No, McBride was just attempting to paint anyone who opposed him as criminally violent.
With the resources of SCO at his disposal, they should have been able to identify ONE person who made a threat via email and parade that person in front of the media.
Instead, there is nothing.
They just failed to find a copy of the bomb^Wmovie that they accused people of downloading. This bomb (title: "Cornered!") was a direct-to-dvd turkey that was already shown on TV in Hungary. It's not nearly as highly rated as the 1945 film Cornered.
Then you realize this is the main reason for having a government-run public school system.
Sometimes I wonder how this trash gets modded up. Pretty much all modern countries have public schools because otherwise kids wouldn't get any school at all. See the whole third world as an example, lack of education is a huge blocker for prosperity. The reason we have teacher's degrees and curriculum is because otherwise we'd have no quality control and no assurances that kids would get out of school knowing even the minimum about the world they ought to. Why is creationism so prevalent in the US as opposed to everywhere else? Because you can pull your kids out of school and teach them whatever you like. And not how reproduction works and what a condom is for. Can homeschooling or private schools be better than public schools? Yes. Can they be worse? Absolutely. At a minimum, you have to deal with a lot of other kids that aren't like you and don't think like you. By far the most narrow-minded and with the most twisted world views I've met have been American and home schooled. Granted, so have some of the brightest but it seems to bring out both kinds of extremes.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"If you act like a terrorist or terrorist organization then you should be treated as one. "
Ok, then let's apply that logic. Arrest the RIAA and MPAA. After all, they exist to terrorize everyone from grandmothers to independent artists. I say that threatening hundreds of thousands of people with loss of their livelihood is more terrorism than any bomb threat.
But keep your double standard. We need them for "society" to work.
"PAY UP BASTARD 5000 DOLLARS OR WE'S GONNA DRAG YOUR ASS TO COURT." - that's the essence of what RIAA/MPAA s mailing to millions of people. Yes I consider that use of terror.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall