FBI, DoJ Add 35 Positions For Intellectual Property Battle 140
coondoggie writes "The FBI and Department of Justice said they were going to go hard after intellectual property crimes this year and so far they seem to be keeping their word, as today the agencies appointed 15 new Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) positions and 20 FBI Special Agents dedicated to fighting domestic and international IP crimes. The 15 new AUSAs will work closely with the Criminal Division's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section to aggressively pursue high tech crime, including computer crime and intellectual property offenses. The new positions will be located in California, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Washington. The 20 FBI Special Agents will be deployed to specifically boost four geographic areas with intellectual property squads, and increase investigative capacity in other locations around the country where intellectual property crimes are of particular concern. The four squads will be located in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the District of Columbia."
The Downfall Caption Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately that's no longer possible [slashdot.org] as Youtube/Google seems to have outlawed parodies and freedom of expression/dissent in favor of draconian law.
How appropriate.
The question is who they're going after. (Score:5, Insightful)
Playing devil's advocate for a second... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish that movies/music/software "sharing" was separated from movie/music/software counterfeiting and fake medicine and goods of course, but either way the American public needs to be protected from those threats.
Publishing interests have wanted this for a while. (Score:5, Insightful)
Back once upon a time, copyright infringement was a civil matter, not a criminal matter. Problem was (from the corporations' viewpoint), that meant they had to pay for lots of lawyers and lawsuits against individual file sharers. So they lobbied to make copyright infringement, at least in certain forms, into a criminal matter. That meant that the corporations were off the hook as far as paying for enforcement, now that burden would fall on the taxpayers. The Feds liked it too, as they now had another reason to legally spy on the populous, plus they could ask for bigger budgets to support all this spying and prosecution. As far as the corporations and government are concerned, criminalizing file sharing is a win/win. The only looser is the citizen.
Read the article but we know what it is about (Score:3, Insightful)
They went into great detail in the article discussing counterfeit goods of all sorts that threaten health and safety and then merged and drifted over to counterfeit computer software that threatens stability and privacy. (That's malware, not infringed copyrighted software... malware like Sony's rootkit) And of course it's really all about **AA interests in digital media mentioned in the article as "digital products." Accurately, they state that there is no government agency that is tracking copyright infringement or the extent of it.
The article goes to great lengths to fill the details with things other than "digital product" infringement... things that have been historically handled by these same people who tracked down and nailed groups who created and sold counterfeit Cisco network equipment. This stuff has been dealt with and managed without adding 35 new positions. So clearly these new positions are intended to deal with a newer agenda rather than an older one.
I would like for the article to be true in the sense that I would love to see a crack down on sales of counterfeit medicines and other physical goods. Sadly, I don't think this is going to be the case. The spam and scam will continue as it always has while the real crackdown will be felt by individuals at home engaged in file sharing.
Re:Playing devil's advocate for a second... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't tell the difference then you are well beyond hope. It's the difference between protecting people from themselves and protecting people from FRAUD, even potentially lethal fraud. Even if you're getting down to bootlegged CDs or Photoshop...did those bootleggers do ANYTHING to earn that money aside from running off phony copies? No, they didn't, so why are they entitled to make money from outright fraud? File sharing is generally a non-profit enterprise. Bootlegging is not. Nobody is making money by seeding that album. There's a big difference. Stop your kneejerking for two seconds and actually take a look at the issue.
Re:From a historical perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Won't somebody please think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
*bullshit*
Citation needed.
There's a child molester in every chat room.
There's a terrorist in every van.
Smoking a joint leads to crime, violence, and insanity.
Copying a music file cripples our economy.
Oh, and drinking alcohol doesn't hurt you.
Eating cheap processed chemicals doesn't hurt you.
Polluting our air and water is worth it.
Our climate is fine.
What do all these statements have in common?
They are making some entrenched interest a lot of money.
One more war... (Score:5, Insightful)
The War on File Sharing is the new War on Drugs.
The approach being taken is quite similar: manipulated and fabricated studies and evidence, draconian international treaties to make sure no country is allowed to implement sane policies, suspension of basic civil liberties in the name of the war, etc.
Because jails are not full enough with non-violent 'criminals' already, maybe the US is trying to raise the incarceration rate to over 90%?
Youtube is not a public service (Score:3, Insightful)
Google is a private entity, unless you think that they are somehow owned/run by the government... and thus do not have to allow *anything* on their site. It may not follow their "do not evil" mantra, but it's well within their rights, and it's now being "outlawed".
Re:Won't somebody please think of the children? (Score:2, Insightful)
You saw the big circus over Chelsea King [go.com] in San diego. Two cute girls dead and the whole fucking city shows up for a candlelight(soon to become torchlight) vigil. It was so disgusting, even the victims' family remarked that it turned their horrible loss into a insulting and condescending feeding frenzy of two-minute-haters pretending to feel their pain. From that article:
Yeah, duh. Emotional, but not at all logical to exploit abuse or loss for political gain and dedicate exorbitant resources, especially during a budget crisis, to statistically insignificant crimes. Piracy and CP will be convenient reasons to screw everybody over as long as enough tools(suburban housewives etc.) can be manipulated emotionally by shit-mouthed political climbers.
Re:From a historical perspective (Score:1, Insightful)
A matter of perspective indeed. There are more hackers (in the take-over-other-systems sense) today than there were in the 90s and they control more systems too. There's a story right now about getting private information out of the cellphone networks. There are millions of botnet drones which work harder for hackers than for their legitimate owners. People still hack, people still social-engineer. There are just fewer "stars" because hacking is so much more widespread and there's little left of the illusion that computers are all advanced technology which hardly ever fails. When we see news of another major hack, we shrug and move on. It's expected.
Re:One more war... (Score:3, Insightful)
The War on File Sharing is the new War on Drugs.
If we can get rid of the old War on [some] Drugs, it's a fantastic trade. All I have to do is give up big media? Sold!
Re:I have to admit (Score:3, Insightful)
I think tax money could be better spent fixing the system.
I think that campaign contribution money has "fixed the system" quite well up to this point. I'm not sure I could stand any more "fixing".
The agenda to kill copyrights and patents (Score:3, Insightful)