Convicted by the Movie Cops 454
Reckless Visionary writes "Salon has a great article about what it's like to get on the MPAA's bad side. It's a first hand account of what happens when you are accused of violating the DMCA and commentary on the "guilty until proven innocent" nature of today's copyright laws." Pirate movies. Lose access. You are guilty. And this guy was on vacation when it happened, so there's no need for accountability. Hope you don't depend on your net access.
Innocent until proven Uncooperative (Score:5, Funny)
The thing is, he didn't have anything to hide in the first place, and he was still accused.
I used to think that there was nothing wrong with the "if you're really innocent, you would have no problem with this" attitude. But now I see that it's a rather clever way to get people to give up their rights.
By that logic, since I'm really innocent, I should have no problem with letting the Goverment (or Time Warner) look at all the files on my hard drive whenever they want to. I do have a problem with that, not because I pirate music, but because I just don't want them in my hard drive, and I shouldn't have to cooperate with them if I don't want to. (Remember... I haven't even been charged in a court yet, and they're cutting off my access!)
I also have a problem with the "proprietary" techniques that are used to find copyright violators. How can you determine the difference between an illegal copy of "Titanic" and a two-hour streaming file of my dog on her floating raft in my pool named "Titanic"? The answer is that one has better acting, and the other has a bigger boat, but I can't believe that an algorithm can tell the difference between the two when they're all just bits anyway.
How would you feel if the cop pulled you over and said "You broke the law back there, but we can't tell you how we caught you because that's proprietary."? This is no different.
Re:Quick (legal) question... (Score:5, Funny)
On slashdot?
lol!
Insider info (Score:2, Funny)
127.0.0.1
methods (Score:4, Funny)
When I asked exactly how they find an instance of piracy (for instance, what search parameters they use), Nigam told me the methods were proprietary information.
Heh, judging from the results they must be using MS Access to keep their records! Nice work. Just a few minutes ago, I was talking to a looser who likes to traffic in warez and movies. While bragging of getting "Spy Kids" two weeks before opening, he was no more worried about getting caught than my grandmother. GET A CLUE, MPAA!
GET A LIFE, PEOPLE! Run your own ftp/http site and provide original content. Get movies from a theater, if you must, or rent them. Geazer! A whole week of bandwith consumption for something dumb like "Spy Kids"? And that crap is competing with me for Slashdot? GRRRR! You don't need this garbage, and it's providers are powerless when you quit demanding it. Sigh of relief.
I wonder what kind of cyber brains are looking for child porn. Loosing email is one thing, having your house raided and all your stuff broken/confiscated is another.
Re:Quick (legal) question... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Innocent until proven Uncooperative (Score:4, Funny)
"if my article had a moral, it should be that piracy is illegal",
he meant to say
"if my article had a moral, it should be that privacy is illegal"
Practical joke (Score:3, Funny)
Corporate SWAT (Score:2, Funny)
Corporate-sponsored, miltary-style copyright squads. Copyright-sponsored SWAT teams, licensed by Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, MPAA, RIAA (under whatever "license" they choose to deem official) running military-style ops to knock out egregious P2P "nodes".
Running an especially active P2P node?
Come 3AM in the morning, expect a white van to pull up outside your house/condo/apartment, filled to the brim with a covert tactical squad in full body armor and carrying fully-automatic weapons, two hundred pound door "key" to knock down those pesky screen doors.
Search warrants? Not a chance. None of this is supported by state, local or even federal law enforcement.
These renegade ops are private. Who has time for a search warrant? Or for due process? What matters here is that the RIAA and MPAA get their results.
You wanna know who these guys are that have their gun barrels pointed at your head? Your girlfriend's head?
Don't mean nothing when one guy has a steel toed boot across the back of your head and is pressing your cheek against the bathroom floor. One weapon is at the back of your head, the other's at the back of your girlfriend's head.
And your dog -- he's already knocked out cold, thanks to the little "dog sleeping darts" these guys carry. Rottweiller? German Shepard? Doesn't make a difference. First thing these guys do is look for the dogs. One dart, and the dog's out cold, lying with his tongue flopped out his mouth in the middle of your living room floor.
Meanwhile, all you see is odd flashes of light coming from all over your house. You can make out maybe five, six guys running around, screaming at the top of their lungs. But you can't tell for sure because everytime you sorta look around, the guy makes sure your forehead hits the floor with a thwap.
Two of your teeth are already on the floor, and you can feel one loose in the back of your mouth. You can't tell if all the blood is coming from your mouth or your split lip.
Your girlfriend is saying something -- yelling -- and these guys from behind their black goggles keep telling her to shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. She doesn't. And then you see one guy take some duct tape and put it over her mouth. She's still yelling something, but it's not as loud.
That's when you start hearing the crashes and thumps in the bedroom above you. What are they knocking down -- the shelves? Overturning the beds? Throwing the monitor down on the floor?
Couple seconds later, one guy comes down with your Dell Athlon box. Not the monitor, not the printer, just the white box with the keyboard cable hanging from it. The ethernet cable is still attached and he's dragging your Linksys hub -- bump, bump, bump -- down the stairs. He hustles out the front door. The guy above you gives you one more whack with his boot, then says, "Clear!" to someone.
Suddenly all these guys start saying "Clear" to one another. You hear everybody run out the front door, down your porch, and the sound of tires squealing off.
Meanwhile, you wait. You're not sure what to do. Your girlfriend is dragging her cheek against the kitchen floor to get the tape off her mouth.
And you -- your lips and gums hurt like a sonofabitch. They tied your hands with those plastic twisti-cuffs but you've got one hand free. You touch your mouth -- your front teeth are gone. The blood from your mouth smells metallic. And you're not even sure what happened.
Whatever it was, it took all of 2, maybe 3 minutes.
And you have no idea who it was. For days, you try and figure it out. Cops show up, they're stymied.
Was it a robbery?
Well, no.
These guys -- they were dressed in body armor?
Yeah. Like SWAT.
SWAT? The cops laugh. No, there's no SWAT here, son. Say, do you use drugs? Even smoked a little? Maybe it's some drug deal gone bad? One of your drug buddies come to get more of what you sold him?
No. No it wasn't that.
But the cops are suspicious. Say, maybe you'd like to come down with us? Answer a few questions?
You say, well, no, I'd rather not.
But they insist.
While you're waiting in the back of the cruiser you hear the cops laughing: SWAT, yeah. Sure. What's this guy smoking?
Some weird shit, that's for sure.
They laugh some more.
And that's that.
The Real Issue... (Score:2, Funny)
The difference is between two schools of thought: those who believe we now live in an information age , and those who believe we live in an information economy
You see, the first group believes that in today's society, information must be free to flow, and the economy has progressed to a service-based economy, and you should pay for things like materials, labor, and service. The other group believes that the economy should be information-based, and in addition to all the other things, you should pay for the information itself. And sadly, this second group views technology as a threat to their way of life and business, and will do whatever they can to protect what they view as theirs. Unfortunately, tragically, people such as the fellow in this article get caught in the crossfire.
Technology, most notably computers and the Internet, has changed the way of life in today's society. It remains to be seen what we are headed for: information as a way of life, or information as a way of business.