Feds probing P2P... (1 Viewer)

[Bruce_S]

Big brother is upon us more than ever!! I found this article very interesting... WOuld like to hear about yoru thoughts are about it?

The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that it has launched a federal criminal probe of piracy on a peer-to-peer network.


http://news.com.com/Justice+Dept.+pr...?tag=nefd.lede

Plus, is this legal?

 

[Chris]

First, yes, they do have the right.
Second, the target is primarily aimed at BitTorrent networks which have been high traffic for full ISOs and other programs. This situation became under more scrutiny when several banks called into question the fact that some were advertising "fake" credit card creation software and address hacker software. At that point, it became a monetary policy issue.

And yep, under those kind of guidelines, they'll be able to do it.. and more then that, they've done it before.. in 2001, the US busted one of the largest kiddie-porn trafficking networks from USENet. In 2003, they busted up a network of people trafficking virus creation software.

 

[Glenn Overholt]

If I have this correct, they can do it because if you and I hooked up on a peer to peer, our connection would have to travel through other peoples lines, which would make it like public transportion of copyrighted property without permission.

That is odd though, because that wasn't what I heard this morning. (It might have been yesterday morning). Anyway, I heard that over a hundred spam origination sites had been shut down. Naturally, I got an even higher volume of spam that morning...makes sense to me.

Yeah, I'm surprised that they haven't gone after the movie downloaders months ago. I think it would be better served if they found the uploaders, but they probably are all MPAA members. Can you see the headlines if they busted a famous actor?

Glenn

 

[SethH]

The main networks they hit yesterday require all users to share a minimum of 100GB of data, so everyone they busted were uploaders. I agree with you, but if it's too difficult to find the uploaders, then the best way to get rid of them is to remove the demand for their service, i.e. the downloaders.