... is Homeland Security doing with this? Are P2P players now a terrorists?

Yes sure... it is more importent for the department of homeland security to be the MPAA puppets then actually going after terrorists?

The $26b/years movie industry need support to arrest kids swapping movies. While terroist, indenty theft, peodophile and malware writer (those who hurt the security and peoples of the USA) can continues whitout any fear, as the goverment agency in charge of aresting them is too "busy" saving Star Wars from the end of the evil pirates... (who don't hurt any one, except known criminal organisation such as the MPAA/RIAA).

10 years / 10.000 peers = about 1/3 of a day each in the slammer. Bring it on as they used to say.

"While terroist, indenty theft, peodophile and malware writer (those who hurt the security and peoples of the USA) can continues whitout any"

Your are misguided. The ones who hurt the security and people of the USA most are called "The (Unitary) Executive", "The (Right-Shifted) Supreme Court", and "The (Derelict) Two Houses of Congress".

Why do we not see sun microsystems inc. see raided by the marines over their alleged pirating of IP related to ZFS?

Where have you been for the last 10 years or so my friend? Didn't you know that downloading music and movies off the net for your own personal use funds terrorism across the globe.

/sarcasm off

"The Motion Picture Association of America also provided "substantial assistance" to the D-Elite investigation."

Understatement of the year.

Well .. there's a disturbing part in all this ..

How can websites have films before they are released ?

Cause they are leaked by the studio employees themselves !

Stop complaining , get a grip on your employees and if anything

take a beer , a valium and go to bed

Ric

ill be off for a few weeks .. this story is too much to handle.

I'm pretty sure the "conspiracy" aspect makes it a criminal matter (and a federal rap due to the web aspect - hence the involvement of the DOJ).

What I really don't understand is why the DHS would be involved (pretty sure copyright infringement is neither a terrorist activity nor a natural disaster). Guess they need to keep in practice since they haven't been able to find any real honest to goodness terrorrists (just a handful of loud mouthed malcontents).

Well, the big difference is the drug war implies a huge lot of real money that nobody really want to supress...

But else, as long as you have consumers, there will be providers.

As long as people have their reasons to not feel like thieves for downloading, they will download, and there will be uploaders.

Now, the day we could know for sure how much money is really lost for copyright owners (remove all the downloads that wouldn't have bring them any money anyway...), we might be surprized it's far less than the cost of the war against piracy, if you add up the lawyers, court and now jail costs...

And if the war is won by the copyright owners, the little more money they will make may be far less than the money lost by ISPs and hard drives makers, as well.

Bah, anyway it's just money going from pocket to pocket, you may change the pockets's address but the total money's flow pretty much stay the same...

You get less for murder.

Oh, wait; they just did. Damn fine use of my tax dollars too. I hope they keep supporting these major industries that supply so much value to the economy of the US and the munificent salaries to the overpaid drug-addled SOBs who run these businesses and their henchmen. oh wait, I just went off on a sarcastic run... My bad.

Too bad the stupid wankers haven't yet figured out how to attack real criminals like the ones running big business and banks and well...you get the picture. This is all part of the "war on terror" (TM)

...Revenge of the Sith

:)

so you create a botnet and steal credit card info along with changing information on peoples online accounts and get a max of 5 years, but you let someone download a pirated film and get 10 years

YEAH THAT MAKES SENSE

"(Star Wars II: Revenge of the Sith appears again and again on DOJ press release for Operation D-Elite as an example. Somebody is a George Lucas fan.)"

I h8 to be pedantic but it is Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith so ither the DOJ or you can not count

The only disturbing thing about all this is that nobody seems to care these people were openly and brazenly breaking the law. Oh, but of course, to all us white collars it's OK 'cos "nobody got hurt".

Mines the trench coat with the sledgehammer hidden inside - just off to smash a window to steal that nice plasma I had my eyes on ... hmmm, do you think I can carry that 50 incher?

Surely there is fundamental detail missing here... The crux is surely whether they were actually hosting copyright material, or just trackers that point to it. It is for this reason that prosecutors in the UK are struggling to pin anything on the administrator of the Oink private torrent site.

It would be interesting to know if the US legalities are the same, and whether they take a similar or different approach to dealing with this subtle technical point which is very powerful legally.

Kool...

"The only disturbing thing about all this is that nobody seems to care these people were openly and brazenly breaking the law. Oh, but of course, to all us white collars it's OK 'cos "nobody got hurt"."

witch law where they braking

they did not steal the movies somone at the film company did

they where not hosting the files(if they where they are idiots and deserve it)

all they did was frovide the trackers that is the equivlent of a market being procuated cos somone was selling conterfit dvds from a stall there

I don't decry this conviction too much, I'd say what they did goes beyond what most people consider acceptable. I'd take issue with the sentence however (and the fact that they shoehorned things so that they could bring them up on criminal charges). Not to mention that most of the investigative work was done by one of the parties involved and not the Police (again that does concern me because I'm not sure how diligently the data and evidence provided was taken at face value rather than double checked).

As people have pointed out above that kind of sentence is far more than fraudsters and other criminal enterprises can expect. The mean sentence for fraud in the US is 12 months, embezzlement, 10 months, bribery, 16 months, tax offenses, 17 months, antitrust fraud, 13 months (and money laundering 46 months). Of course this difference can be partially accounted by the fact that the figures given for the damage caused by filesharers is astronomical, somebody should work out at one point what percentage of GDP these industry groups claim have been wiped out by filesharing.

(sentencing data nicked from http://www.onlinelawyersource.com/criminal_law/white_collar/penalties.html who themselves don't quote the source of their numbers, hence might need to be taken with a pinch of salt)

Hey Anthony it's all about national agencies priorities: take 5 minutes to write down a list of your major (pun intended) societal fears, is 'kids spreading video for free' somewhere on the page ?

From the article:

"Dove helped supply pirated material to the website and recruited members who had high speed internet connections to join in uploading content."

That'll be what screwed him then and he'd be equally f***ed under most jurisdictions on that one.

He's bloody lucky that they didn't bother chucking in conspiracy (recruiting and working with others to commit an offence) and wire fraud (presumably not all the uploaders he recruited were in the same state). If they had, he'd be in the "and throw away the key" area of sentencing.

Got that off the mule a few months back, Thai version, called 'backstroke of the west' Now if that video alone isn't enough of a reason to embrace video and music piracy, I don't know what is...

To be fair, it does say "a maximum of ten years". Not once does it imply that the guy will get ten years in the big house.

I used to knock off lots of MP3s, games, Win apps, never did movies though, then I'd get six months down the line and spend a day cleaning out a load of old crap I never listened to, installed or even knew I had! It was like a drug, I would simply have to grab stuff for the sake of it, whether I wanted it not, the stuff had no value, I took it for granted. I would download tons of music, it got 3 mins listen in which to judge it, then on to the next one.

Eventually I moved off to Penguin land, so I stopped downloading Windows games and app software, I now scan places like MySpace, listen to demo CDs from magazines or artists websites.

I get genuinely free software, which has had a lot of hard work put into it, it's not perfect but me even using it, the developer feels that his hard work amounts to something. I now make genuine solid choices with my music and I find I appreciate the music more. I have nice cases and artwork and good sound quality from CD. I'm not coming over all pious and smug, but stepping back, throwing it all out and taking stock just worked for me.

I dunno what it's like in Septicville, but on this side of the pond "Conspiracy to scowl menacingly" could probably get you 10 years in the clink.

Please, read your post before hitting submit and use a spell checker.

Your thoughts may be insightful, provocative or hard hitting but poor spelling makes them look deranged.

Mine's the one with the dictionary in the pocket

Everyone is a terrorist. Even Mr. Bush (Well, by the definition of a terrorist, he is one.*) Everyone is a thief. The worst terrorist thrives are the ones who own computers!

Flame, because that's what will be coming out of the back end of my rocket to mars with a packet of asparagus seeds!

*terrorist - a radical who employs terror as a political weapon; usually organizes with other terrorists in small cells; often uses religion as a cover for terrorist activities

I'd well say he is a radical (his party doesn't agree with him) and he has a small 'cell' (no need to mention names here!) and is using it as a political weapon (remember kids, if you don't like what bush is doing, then the terrorists will come to get you in your sleep!)

...you don't need to download copyrighted content...

...you need to go home and rethink your life.

Mine's the brown robe with the speeder keys in the pocket.

When I was young artists spread the news using Radio 1, TOTP, and people copying tapes in the evening and sharing them with mates at School. The last of these was illegal, we all knew it was illegal but we still did it. Most if not all the bands I have in my current collection were probably initally listened to on a crappy quality copy on a C90 cassette. Obviously those 'originals' have long since been replaced by the higher quality vinyl and later on with CD and now mp3's ripped from those.

The difference as I see it with file sharing of mp3's or films is that it happens so massively and easily that fewer people bother to go and buy the original and when the original is an mp3 why would you. It has moved from being an acceptable (although much complained about) loss leader to simply being a loss of sales.

It baffles me that anyone tries to defend the downloading of these files as some kind of victimless crime. Of course there is a victim and mostly it will be the artist or more likely the mug who is prepared to go out and buy the original at a price that is perhaps higher than it might otherwise be.

Defending the idea that a listing site is not actually hurting anyone also seems strange. Sure they are not actually copying the files or distributing them themselves but they sure as hell are making it far easier for other people to do so. Would these people also condone a site that listed the people who have booked holidays through a travel agency along with their addresses and travel dates? I mean what legitimate purpose can you possibly put a file listing site to?

then keep changing the law until it is against the law.

If it's against the law, then read the law carefully and find another way of doing it.

Classic arms race.

People could always have pressed their own singles, LPs, CD's, DVD's but it was prohibitively difficult. The whole point of computer technology is the processing of information. The recording companies simply have to change their business model if they can't make money whilst pirates exist.

Also finding out how many of that, say, 100, would have downloaded it.

Just because 100 people downloaded a £10 film, doesn't mean they lost £1,000. How many do you think? I think 1% is pretty feasible.

Why can't they just target the obvious copy sellers, isn't that an easier conviction for them?

@bogsheet

This has been a point I have been making on this topic ever since I heard the RIAA was attacking P2P. Ultimately these sites are merely indexers no different from Google or Yahoo!. There are really only 3 parties guilty here in all of this: The uploaders (they are distributing the content it self), The Suppliers (they are physically stealing the content), and the downloaders themselves (they are knowingly downloading the content). I urge the courts to understand this. The big reason I see this as key is that if indexing sites such as the one mentioned here are prosecuted in this manor then we open the doors for our favorite search engines to be sued as well.

@ michael

These people were not breaking the law. Unless they too possessed Copyrighted material. These people merely recruited and setup an indexing site. I could then use the argument that Google in conjunction with Gmail is a powerful tool for copyright infringement and recruitment. I can easily search for Mp3 files on there and within a reasonable time frame (and many pr0n pop-ups later) acquire the song I was looking for. Then pass along links to friends and family via gtalk/ gmail.

Another point I feel requires rebuttle is portion where you make reference to a physical theft of property. It is an important part to distinguish Physical vs Virtual. If I physically steal an item I am directly causing loss to both retailer and supplier. If I am virtually stealing an item I am only causing POTENTIAL loss to supplier. Please note the caps portion potential. As we know the supply and demand curve in economics dictates that as price decreases demand increases. Well I would say there are few things in life cheaper than free. Thus the demand will be high. If a price tag were to be attached then the total demand would decrease. How much of a decrease...there in lies the real debate here.

Ok so a longer post than I wanted it to be but hopefully it was eventful.

I chose Paris because she has two things in common with Copyright laws. She and the copyright laws enjoy screwing people & they both fascinate me.

Do they have any idea how much it costs to keep a person in prison for 10 years? I'm not exactly sure (used to know but can't quite remember now) but it's a huge figure. What a great way to spend taxpayers money(!) Catching and imprisoning people that they couldn't care less about while terror/drug dealing/murder/rape etc etc etc continue unstopped.

What happened to the naming conventions of "Motion Picture Ass. of America". Are you feeling threatened??

Delete or Delight, this operation D-Elite?

And what were Homeland Security doing, protecting the economy? (by incarcerating a consumer who now becomes a burden to a society whose majority couldn't give a flying fsck that he was uploading a few naff movies)

ok I will repete my self

I am dslexic I find spelling very hard

there is no spell checker on this comment threed

the most woring thing is I do reread my comments they make sence to me

You are not the only dyslexic around and most of us cope without a problem.

May I suggest using Firefox and its dictionary plug in which underlines words it thinks are incorrect and gives suggestions on a right click.

Mine is the one with a pocket full of excuses.