Fed Raids Software Pirates in 27 Cities 1172
akiaki007 was among many who wrote in to say: "Check out this article on the New York Times (free reg, blah blah) site. The Feds have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include MIT, UCLA, Purdue, Duke, UofO. Their main target was the group DrinkOrDie. 'This is a new frontier for crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide my burned Linux CD's. They might think it's some weird hacking tool."
Oh? So then they finished the terrorist problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because I thought we were still at war with terrorism. I thought we were still living with the constant threat of terrorism. Every one of these FBI agents chasing down CD images is one less agent knocking on doors, interviewing potential suspects.
I swear, if there are any attacks or terrorist incidents tomorrow, or the next week, or hell, any time the first question I'll be writing my congressman will be "Where was the FBI?"
I almost hope something does happen. What's it going to take for the FBI to learn their FIRST AND PRIMARY responsability is to safeguard the lives of American citizens...NOT the PROFITS of American corporations.
- JoeShmoe
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Re:Just how far we've fallen... (Score:3, Interesting)
*blink*
Uh, they do, dude. That's the difference between the cops and the BSA, namely you can tell the BSA goons to go fuck themselves.
Meantime, as you correctly point out, piracy is no longer needed to make your computer useful anyways.
(And for those of you wearing tinfoil hats, they're not coming after Joe Slashdotter for being the end-user of downloaded warez and mp3z, they're going after the d00dz who acquire the 0-day warez in the first place.)
Re:What some people won't do (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey, I am not saying that I have no copied programs in the past, hell probably just about 100% of people have. What I am saying is that it isn't right. Fucking programmers work their asses off writing code for people to use. They make their living off of this crap and people are stealing it.
I am not defending MS, in fact I only run Win98 on a laptop so that my GF can use a computer to do work while she is over here... I own that copy (it came w/the laptop). I don't use Windows products b/c I don't like their methods or their stability.
I am defending those people that are having their hardwork and money stolen and distributed...
Just b/c a good majority of the people here do not like MS doesn't mean that we should get pissed off when people are caught stealing programs. You should be pissed off that a good majority of people that read this site are in the same boat. Writing code that is bettering some part of the industry and that people are out there stealing the hardwork.
Get over yourselves. Piracy is illegal and tough if you get caught.
Programmers arnet billionares (Score:1, Interesting)
Programmers wont be bilionares even if their software makes billions. This isnt about programmers and hard work, its about CEO bill gates not having enough money for his new mansion
Warez. (Score:5, Interesting)
here's the thing.
First.. these groups get busted. Okay. Well.. they *are* knowingly spreading massive amounts of copyrighted material, which IS illegal... sure.. we all do it.. but they can't say 'Oh gee, I didn't know'.
Second.. it IS rediculous to claim 'billions' in losses because of them. I've seen my fair share of warez groups.. they hoard software so they can be bigger & better than the next guy. Almost nothing actually gets USED by anyone, even those downloading it.
And of all the pirated software I've seen used by most people.. only a fraction actually comes from the warez scene.. lots are just directly burned CDs.
Warez kiddies hoard software like other kids hoard baseball cards, or pokemon, or whatever the new craze is. It's about who can hoard more.. it's not even about theft.
Such a sad day... (Score:1, Interesting)
Good luck to the group, try to keep it going for the little people out there.
Before anyone flames for the supporting of piracy, ask yourself this... if I could download a trial of a program and decide that I need it, would I buy it? My answer is yes, however there is so much crap and badly-designed software out there that it's damn near impossible to find something good. I for one support the software that I find as useful if I can afford it (note: will not pay $600 for Photoshop when GiMP is right there with it).
Part of Life (Score:5, Interesting)
Any company that actualy died due to piracy? (Score:2, Interesting)
This is not trolling, I'm honestly interested in seeing any evidence to back up these oft-repeated assertions.
Re:Thats not the point. (Score:2, Interesting)
If we don't continually buy more software...the programmers eventually lose their jobs. Their salaries aren't affected sure, but, hey if they don't have a job, what does it matter?
Whatever... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is when they call it "pirating", as if they are some oversea rag-tag group that takes things away from other people. It's not taking away; it's making a copy. Most anti-pirate sources try to claim that every single copy is directly affected by the sales of the product. In fact, most pirates are just people who can't afford to buy the damn game anyway.
Say that when it's your own livelihood that's being stolen.
Please...I'd love for a product of mine to get pirated all over the place. Just look at id Software and Doom. More pirates = more popularity.
If you really want a comparison of numbers, try comparing the online games with serial numbers (which is a pretty effective anti-piracy agent right now) to the games without serial numbers. More or less, it's the same numbers.
EPA? (Score:2, Interesting)
Operation Bandwidth: ... On December 11, 2001, the longest-running of the undercover operations culminated ... This undercover operation, code-named 'Bandwidth,' was a two-year covert investigation established as a joint investigative effort to gather evidence to support identification and prosecution of entities and individuals involved with illegal access to computer systems and the piracy of proprietary software utilizing 'warez' storage sites on the Internet. ...
Bandwidth, through the joint efforts of the ...
Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General (EPA-OIG)
I just want to know why the EPA's money and time is being misused.
WHO are they? (Score:2, Interesting)
So those are the kind of people the US wants to put in prison! And they're saying it is to protect "American leadership in computers and software".
It sounds like these CS and IT professionals and students are just trying to challenge themselves (according to the article). I'm sorry, but locking up exceptional individuals is no way to preserve the US's leadership in technology.
Re:Piracy is good. (Score:2, Interesting)
Just like I should be allowed to take your GPL code, modify it as I see fit, and only distribute the binaries. I mean, what does it matter what license it is under?
Re:Oh? So then they finished the terrorist problem (Score:1, Interesting)
Seriously though, if you want to apply any "we're in it for the oil" conspiracy therories, think about the fact we haven't done anything since we helped repel the Soviets from there and allowed it to get as bad as it did.
Warez stretches my company budget further. (Score:5, Interesting)
With half of my budget eaten up by software liscences, I simply don't have enough money to buy garbage software, and the demo's released by the companies are generally lacking. The last full product I bought without testing it fully was MS Project. One department direly needed it to work, and needed it yesterday. So I bought ten copies, installed it, then listened to the complaints of how it was a giant waste of time, it didn't work as easy as they wanted, or didn't do what they expected. Since that fateful day I am really picky about the products which I choose to purchase or upgrade. I download the full version off of morpheus at home, play around with it, and if it's a good product, I buy it. And yes, every copy is liscenced.
This way, I am rewarding the companies which release a good product, shunning the companies who release software with features nobody will use and expect you to upgrade, and am no longer spending my budget needlessly. I suggest everyone else do the same.
Re:MIT is a haven for piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd love to hear what your "good deal of experience with MIT" is. And it's not "looking the other way", it's "not looking at all". It's not a freedom of speech thing, it's more a privacy thing.
And why the hell would MIT, or any school (that's not ultra-religious/conservative) care what people name their machines?...christ...what are they going to do, look at what everyone has all their machine's aliased to and then police such based on some arbitrary set of rules? Um, no.
Re:Thats not the point. (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes Microsoft is an evil corporation with an evil Chief Software Architect... (I think that's what he's calling himself these days)
However the reason why programmers do not make the money you think they deserve is, comes down to a sole reason. We live in a society built on Capitalism. A society that when certain risk is applied, great returns can be recieved, just as well as failure shown by losses. (And any other color in between that spectrum.)
The reason why Microsoft had this great success (or still having) is due to the fact that people fronted money into the company and it payed out in those great returns. (i.e. Secretaries taking Stock options instead of bonuses, people investing in the Stock Market, etc... Boy what I'd do with a time machine) Those are people taking risk, or gambling with there own money. Workers (programmers) on the other hand, do not share that same risk. If they lose their job, true they do not get that paycheck anymore, but nothing else is lost other than those future wages. (which they can get back by getting another job) Taking Stock options on the other hand is a risk that they might lose, or pay off in the end.
True, Microsoft is an evil corporation, I don't like them either (Personal preference) but bashing them because a couple people are richer than others (i.e. Gates) is extremely Marxist. Bash them because they release unfinished buggy products and make you pay for updates.
If programmers want to make more money, think about starting taking a risk yourself and maybe it will pay off.
I'll just be quiet now and return to working at my underpaid job and complain about Gates ruling the world.
You point out something interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Suppose these raids continue, and each newspaper or magazine article continues to make similar quotes about "free software" being a problem, being an issue, being ILLEGAL...
Ordinary people read these articles, and begin to equate "free software" = ILLEGAL.
Therein lies the problem, because if "free software" = ILLEGAL, then doesn't it follow that "Free Software" = ILLEGAL as well (in the mind of the common man)? That is a scary, but interesting thought to contemplate, that of the manipulation of the masses through words, by the BSA (which may or may not be a front organization for Microsoft - anybody got data to back that assertation up?), with the goal to ultimately cause Linux and other Free Software to be viewed as illegal, with the intention of destroying the movement.
Or maybe I am just overly paranoid, hmm...?
Re:Federal piracy and entrapment (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure there's a fine line between generating awareness amongst criminals and talking them into criminal behavior. If you really must know the intricacies of the law regarding police sting operations, I suppose you'll have to ask a lawyer. All I myself know for certain is the catch phrase "creating an opportunity does not constitute entrapment". At a guess, as long as the trolling for criminals technique does not involve personalizing the opportunity for the criminal, it will not satisfy the basis for entrapment. For that matter, brace yourself: the very notion of entrapment has weakened considerably over the years. For the most part, the People, the courts, and the justice system support sting operations.
C//
Re:Linux CD problems not far fetched. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Responses here not surprising, unfortunately (Score:1, Interesting)
Look, even though it's not true, there's a public perception that open source linux lovers pirate software and other media (illegal--yes illegal-- copies of media; where the person making the copy does not own a legal copy of the source.)
Simply calling anyone who points this out a "troll" and silencing their view merely lends credence (but not clearwater, and certainly not a revival) to the misperceptions about linux.
I guess somehow I'm missing the point here. (Score:5, Interesting)
These weren't Joe Home User making copies of a buddy's software for personal use. These were dudes copying thousands of software and movie titles and distributing them. And it's not all Big Corporations that get nailed by these guys. I know a guy who writes shareware for a living, and mostly does okay. But fully 80% of the customer support requests he gets are from users with cracked copies of his software. What, should he just give away his work and live in an alley, all in the name of free beer? Or should he give it away and support himself by working for M$ or some other company? He almost has to anyway to support himself as it is.
I have another friend that makes a fairly popular shareware app. The only difference between the "registered" and "unregistered" versions of his software is that the registered version says "registered" in the "about" window. That's it. It's essentially freeware with a request for money to support his efforts. And still the crackers produce cracked versions of his software within hours of a new release. That, in my mind, perfectly well illustrates the mentality of the typical cracker. There's no great social or political statement being made by them. It's all a matter of machismo, pumping up their ego by breaking software and showing the world how big their penises are.
In any case, the assertion that the Feds are doing this to protect M$ is asinine. Sure, M$ was one of the victims here, but I'd hazard a guess that all those ripped off movies were not produced by M$. Nor were the majority of the software titles either.
Maybe we need a new business paradigm for software or other digital wares, I agree. I don't think wholesale piracy is the way to go about making it happen, however. Besides the faulty ethics, it hurts the little guy more than the big evil guy.
Re:Note the campus raid component. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, for what it's worth, drug bust numbers are nearly as inaccurate as software losses. The problem is that drug prices are caculated at street value, but the people they're busting, at least if they have any serious amount, aren't selling on the street. For instance if a drug trafficer gets caught with one million pills of ecstasy at the border they'll claim it's a 20 million or 30 million dollar bust when in actually that person would be lucky to get $1 per pill at those volumes. They imply that the one being busted would be making these obscene profits when in actuality their profit margins, while better than most legit practices, are still very thin by comparison.
But yeah, at least in the case of drugs somebody would actually pay it, somewhere down the line for at least a good chunk of the haul. The BSA, on the other hand, have always been full of shit. Hell, I wrote a fairly lenghty essay on that very topic in 1996 and even then it was old news. What surprised me the most about this story was that the group DOD is still around today! What's next, busting Razor 1911?
- j
Re:Warez. (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of software developers, either have used or tried warez at one point or know someone who has. I've heard about some software developers having relationships with warez groups and even requesting them not to release the cracks right away. So this raid is not on behalf of all software developers.
Its definetly a waste of money and resources, but you know why this happened, its all to show off power. The FBI wants to show off that its doing something, the software associations like IDSA show off that they are doing something, so they can get more software developers to join. Its all end of the year, posturing. Aschroft has to scare away some of it.
Re:Thats not the point. (Score:5, Interesting)
Slightly off-topic now, but I'm curious. Who decides that a long series of ones and zeros is worth so much more than the service of a garbage collector or artist? Generally, it seems that the more abstract the work you do, the higher you can expect to be paid if you're good at it (take something like a banker--he deals with nothing but an abstract concept called "money").
On the other hand, people who provide a vital service like garbage collection get paid peanuts. If we compared how our lives would be without artists (probably a bit more boring, but quite livable), as compared to how they'd be without someone picking up our garbage (not so nice at all, methinks) one gets the distinct impression that garbage collectors should be the more highly-paid of the two examples I used.
Just for interest's stake, I'm an artist and a writer, so I have no reason to say this other than my own belief that the values society places on certain things are fundamentally twisted.
How to Prevent This (Score:2, Interesting)
Protection.. (Score:2, Interesting)
It was what, a few years ago, some feds raided another pirate group, much smaller scale, 5 siezures I think. One of the 5 had time to sledge-hammer his CD rack and hard drives. He got away scott free if memory serves.
Something along these lines isn't hard to set up. Ok, a big hammer might not be the way to go if feds come barging in, but you could easily set up some sort of more practical means of destruction. An electromegnet around your hard drives is a no brainer. flip a switch and they're clean as a whistle. Some sort of incendiary cage around your physical media shouldn't be too hard to set up. Heck, it could be as easy as sprinkling gas and lighting a match or I'm sure someone could set up an entire torching system.
Remember that movie Conspiracy Theory? The conspiracy nut hit's a switch when "They" finally come to get him and his apartment goes up in smoke. Seems like a good idea to me. A couple of well placed charges or canisters of fuel connected all connected to a big red button with "EMERGENCY" written on it and you're good to go. Cops or federal agents come knocking or break down your door, you hit your big red button and they can confiscate the rubble and fragged hd.
Seems like a good deal to me. I mean seriously, do your Divx movies, or copies of Playboy Pinball, or your own personal music store, or whatever the hell you want to collect really mean that much to you that you'd rather go to jail?
IANAL
$1 billion in lost profits is a little high... (Score:4, Interesting)
When I get a copy of a game from my friends, it's because, quite frankly, I'm not impressed enough with it to buy it on my own. In fact, more often then not I'm just installing it so we can all play it at a LAN Party. When the party is over, I never touch it again.
The companies have lost NO money from me. If my friends hadn't had the game, I just wouldn't have played the game. I DEFINATELY wouldn't have spent any money on it. This "$1 billion" or whatever they're claiming to be their lost sales may be greatly inflated for the simple reason that many (maybe even most) of the people who copied these games wouldn't have spent money on them anyways. (Or at least, they wouldn't have paid the shelf price for it--maybe they would have bought them if they cost less.)
Now, don't get me wrong: I DO spend money on computer games, and I've bought about 90% of the games that I've actually played for more than just a couple hours of "dabbling" (for the last 10% I had physically borrowed the CDs). My tastes generally go towards games with novel ideas such as Afterlife and Strife, which are usually conveniently lying in the $15 bin since nobody else likes them. :-) I get MUCH more satisfaction from these games then I do from Quake 3 at $30-40 or so.
Copying a game, to me, is akin to "borrowing" a book from a friend, minus the physical inconvenience of having to physically give it back to him. He tells me its interesting, so I try it out for a bit. If I really like it enough, I might even spend some money on it. (Like I have on many books that I own.)
In fact, "borrowing" this game while allowing my friend to keep the original (i.e. copying it) should even theoretically be legal in this scenerio: Assume for a moment that only one of us is actually playing it at a given time. What's the difference between us swapping it back and forth and us maintaining two copies of it then? None--if you believe that people have a right to transfer their license to play the software to others. It's just that the transfer of the license in this case does not require an actual "physical" transfer of the software.
Yeah, yeah, I know you're all going to reply and tell me that some programmer out there is starving because I didn't give him any money for his game. That's just not true. If he's starving, it's because his game simply wasn't worth spending any money on--at least, to me.
Oh, and if he were to stop making games because he couldn't make a living off of them, I wouldn't feel agony over it. I'd just shrug my shoulders and find something better to do. Again, it's not as if I spend that much of my life playing games anyways.
Now, having said that...
Puts on flame gear and runs away from angry horde of starving programmers.
I was busted. (Score:1, Interesting)
It was regarding my collection of 300-400 DivX dvdrip movies.. They had FTP logs, asked me where most of it was..
They took 3 of my machines - my windows box, my linux fileserver, and my laptop, which I managed to get back at 6am as I needed it for work. They also took a collection of around 40 old HDDs, I keep around for occasional use, or ripping the earth magnets out of. Most were SCSI - SCA even, would be funny to see what they try and do with them..
They are imaging the drives and sending off copies to the US - where it will be sifted through for the next 6 months.. I was told it would be about that long until I will hear news about me being prosecuted.
I had my interview - lasted around 2 hours, and then had a informal chat to them regarding what was going on, the scene etc, as they were just ordinary cops, not specialists in computers.
I think they thought I was a lot bigger player than I am - I just download it, I dont sell it, distribute it, crack or release it - just burn it for my own archives. Hopefully that fact should keep me out of jail.
My friend in Sydney also got done - he had an FBI agent though at his raid - they imported one especially for this..
Ahh well have to see how things go..
I guess the FBI gave up on the terrorists? (Score:3, Interesting)
Take care of the pirates after our REAL threats are neutralized. Is it just me, or is a group of 15-20 year old guys that pirate M$ Word less of a threat than an Osama Bin Laden follower with 5 bars of C4 strapped to his waste?
Virginia Tech is M$ (Score:2, Interesting)
Frankly, I strongly prefer CMU [cmu.edu]. CMU's approach is that you can use whatever you want to as long as you get the work done. They try not to use things like
BTW, if you're thinking about college and like ECE or CS, go to CMU. Seriously. Most colleges are pretty much MS camps...CMU had a bunch of CS faculty hired away a few years ago by MS and is still pissed off about it. As a result, the college is fairly anti-MS. There's an even breakdown in Macs/Win/Solaris boxes in campus clusters, possibly somewhat in favor of Solaris (and a few Linux clusters) because of all the engineering types. Recently, MS wanted to give a
In a game theory class I have, the professor distributed documents as Word files. I thought about asking him to change, then just shrugged and fired up AbiWord. The next day in class, the professor said "due to popular demand, future documents will be distributed as
In a day when many colleges have a computer science curriculum that pretty much amounts to job training in Visual Basic and Visual C++, it's a nice change.
Anyway, if you don't want to put up with Windows, Windows, Windows, MS, blah, blah, blah all the way through college and want some cool professors, keep CMU in mind.
Cool UNIX CMU stuff includes Festival [cmu.edu], *the* UNIX speech synth program, [cmu.edu]
Coda and AFS, the only good distributed filing systems out there (unless you count InterMezzo, also a CMU project)...it goes on and on and on. CERT has a home at CMU. The guy that was one of the designers of grep's algorithms will lecture to you on it, right after you hear about SML from the guy that was one of its creators. If you like CS research on distributed stuff, computer vision, AI, graphics, you name it, it's probably here.
-- A happy student
Re:Any company that actualy died due to piracy? (Score:2, Interesting)
Looking Glass was put out of business by Eidos its parent company due to debt from advertising and overspending on Diakatana. (ex Thief and Thief II cost a combined total of under $4 million, Diakatana cost over $30 million and sold all of 2 copies one to Romero and one to his mom.)
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/20/da
Origin was purchased for a nice hefty sum by Electronic Arts.
Microprose was bought by Infocom.
Sir-Tech just released Wizardry 8, they cant help it if they are slow.
Cavedog is still around, they stopped wasting time on Amen but are working on a new Total Annihilation game.
Interplay is still around but most of its money problems of late are due to political squables internally (ex Black Isle vs Interplay).
Educational Perspective? (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't ignore the fact that many of these apps cost so much money they make it near impossible for anyone to just "learn the tool." Once they've pirated a copy, they aren't using it to make money, they're learning it so they can get jobs. When they get those jobs, they bring the product to company they work for, and those companies purchase the product and pay up tons of $$ in licensing fees.
Was that pirated copy worth it to the company? Damn right it was.
Was that pirated copy worth it to O'Reily and WROX Press? Damn right it was.
I wonder how many game 3D designers went out and bought Alias or Maya just to see if they had the knack for it? I can't see any of them forking over a few grand just to see, "What does it look like?" That would be a big, resounding, "No."
Sometimes a short-term loss can mean big bucks in the long run.
How to end piracy once and for all (Score:2, Interesting)
delete [] piracy;
Naw, that's way too simple. Better way?
[beating a dead horse]
Know what's enclosed in the back of every $34.95 "Linux for Idiots" book? A complete, fully functional distro of Red Hat Linux. I'm pretty sure the "For Idiots" company pays a tithe to Red Hat, don't they?
If M$ "gave away" their most basic product, the OS itself, in the form of a flashy "Learn how to use Windows XP!" manual with the full program enclosed, and charge no more than the price of a "For Idiots" book, then people will say "Why would I want to pirate XP when I can get it for free in the back of this book?" and cheerfully pay for it. Then sell a home/small business version of Office XP in the form of another flashy book. They needn't even open-source their software. Then they can charge the normal price for all the programming environments, games, customer service, etc.
But it seems that Linux companies are the only ones to figure out how to make a profit off of "free" software this way.
[/beating a dead horse]
The Oh Shit! filesystem (TM) (Score:3, Interesting)
The OSFS (Oh Shit! File System) (TM)
The next step in preventing data recovery is the Oh Shit! filesystem. This is a CFS used solely for the storage of 'temporary data', where the key is randomly generated at boot time. If the system is shutdown, crashes, or loses power, all data is lost... irrecovably.
For the really paranoid, I've got friends working on the encryption of off-core memory, so the key only ever exists inside the CPU and on-chip cache.
As to why people don't torch their warez collection when the Feds are kicking in the door, perhaps because that is a criminal act in of itself :-)
Look at this.. (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/#graphs [internettr...report.com]
Look at the first graph. Internet traffic has dropped over 50% since the raids.
Re:Warez. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a joke. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure glad the US government is sinking undoubtedly billions in to this.. (I'm exagerating? Perhaps, but isn't this exactly what the government is doing when they inflate the "BILLIONS OF DOLLARS PROBABLY LOST"?) Nobody killed anyone in the name of piracy. No nations were brought to the ground by this. No corporations have gone bankrupt. NOTHING HAS HAPPENED.
Yet, the governments of the world insist on fighting this element that doesn't kill anyone and doesn't make anyone starve out on the street and this is something that probably NEVER will end.
From the government standpoint, this can't look much better for them. They get to tell you who the bad guy is and what wrong things they're doing, AND they get to say "LOOK! We caught them too!". They also get paid, they get to keep all the hardware they've confinsacted (whether it was involved in "wrong doing" or not), and it looks like they've gotten off their lazy asses and done something.
The FBI and other federal agents are the one's stealing, they've stolen hardware and alot of it. They've stolen taxpayer money wasting time on this instead of going after drug dealers and murderers. They've also stolen many people's time.
The authorities are no different than some other people that recently "struck" on a Tuesday as well. If you get what I mean.
Atari ST (Score:1, Interesting)
If you can find any old Antic magazines (an Atari enthusiast magazine) you can find many editorials pleading with the readers to stop with the rampant pirating.
Re:A couple quick things... (Score:3, Interesting)
But it's not as if they had $100M and then someone came along and TOOK that money. That's my point.
A point of syntax and semantics, perhaps, but an important point none-the-less, IMHO...
The feds almost pirated a company out of business. (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember the incident in the late 80's or early 90's a software company sold a copy or two of some sort of management software to the feds. DOJ I believe.
The agency then copied and copied, sold copies to other agencies and other folks, etc.
FINALLY, years later, after the firm was out of business or nearly bankrupt, they were heard in court but I believe the case was settled before a judgement was made.
Living our Lives requires selective enforcement (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, not to defend the warez dudez, for they were (and probably still are) idiots, but you should be very careful what you wish for. There are so many laws on the books these days at so many levels of government restricting and legislating virtually every aspect of our lives that each of us, just about every day we get out of bed, is breaking a number of laws just by living out our daily lives. Without ever meaning to, and certainly without malice.
What allows us to live out our daily lives? The fact that these laws are (almost) never enforced, at least until some local police officer or official develops a personal vindetta against you
So the argument that enforcing unjust and absurd laws, which many of us feel copyright in the digital age to be, is a screwed up priority in light of current, more pressing events, isn't so misguided, particularly given that our very ability to conduct our normal, everyday lives depends in no small part on the selective enforcement of a plethora of existing laws anyway.
Paper? (Score:3, Interesting)
What if the cart of paper happens to be uncut hundred dollar bills worth 20 million dollars?
It isn't so much that the treasury department misses the few thousand dollars it cost to buy the paper and print the bills. The economy wouldn't suffer because there's an extra 20 million in cash floating around. But the thieves still made off with 20 million dollars in cash. You can sit around talking about how the economy doesn't suffer, and how the treasury department didn't suffer, but there's no doubt that the culprits have 20 million extra dollars.
It's kind of the same thing. There is a way of saying "look, microsoft didn't lose any money." But, there's also a way of saying "look, these people have in their posession 20 million dollars worth of software they shouldn't." It doesn't really matter to me whether or not microsoft actually suffered. It is enough that they could potentially suffer. Laws were broken, the pirates have software they did not obtain legally, and they were so proficient and brazen that the FBI actually paid attention to them.
You are right about the microsoft thing being crap, however. :)
I know how to stop piracy. (Score:3, Interesting)
And that a lot of it is done by college students?
People that, by and large, like to play with things, but don't have much money?
No college student or tinkerer is going to drop $2500 on a software package that he/she is only going to play with.
Many companies offer "educational" licenses, but usually the discounts are only a couple hundred bucks off the retail, so legal software is still out of reach of most people, not to mention the discount is only applicable to students.
My solution?
Non-commercial use licenses.
Sell licenses that basically just offsets the cost of the media, with the restriction that the software can't be used for commercial purposes.
Corporations (the main market for high-end software) still pay full price, but students and tinkerers get the software for virtually nothing.
The software companies lose nothing (since people that can't afford the software at retail prices won't buy it anyways) and create a huge base of (mostly young) people that will potentially become commercial customers in the future.
Enforce non-commercial use the same way we enforce educational use now, with EULAs and, when necessary, feds.
Yes, there will be cheaters, but there are cheaters now, and I don't see the software industry suffering.
The way I see it, everyone wins.
Big companies pay big money, kids making weird flash movies in their parents' basement, don't.
C-X C-S