Feds Seized Website For a Year Without Piracy Proof 172
bonch writes "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized a hip-hop website based on RIAA claims of copyright infringement for prerelease music tracks. They held it for a year before giving it back due to lack of evidence. Unsealed court records (PDF) show that the government was repeatedly given time extensions to build a case against Dajaz1.com, but the RIAA's evidence never came. The RIAA has declined to comment."
No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Funny)
My favorite part is that one of the extensions was granted one week after the previous extension had expired.
"My master is always right. If my master is wrong... my master is always right. I must please my master. My master never lies. My master only wants what's best for me...." -- FBI, while handcuffed to RIAA's bed. :(
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Hmm. So the FBI is into bondage...interesting. Wonder if they keep the fuzzy handcuffs in the dashboard compartment.
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Way better than the sadomasochistic paraphernalia that the IRS keeps within reach...
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Funny)
And to think that some people argue that the IRS doesn't give as much as it takes...
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Uhh? Who would have guessed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover#Sexuality [wikipedia.org]
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J Edgar Hoover died in 1972.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, its become so hard to tell the who the master and the lapdog is these days. Is it a true Fascism and the Corporations are in control, in which case you just have political sock-puppets and the Government and Corporations are one and the same? Or is it still a Republic with one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel going to the highest bidder? Like I said, to close a race to tell at this point, and will probably require better minds than mine to distinguish.
In either case, any semblance of civil rights, personal freedom, decency, dignity or real due process seem to have been tossed out the window along with anything that might once have resembled true democracy or representation.
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Education is a terrible thing to waste. To bad the Public Schools in America fail to educate.
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Aren't people who make false claims supposed to go to jail?
Aren't people in government who seize things without cause, or who deny timely prosecution supposed to go to jail?
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Only when the real people in power don't own the government and own the jails.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't people who make false claims supposed to go to jail?
Aren't people in government who seize things without cause, or who deny timely prosecution supposed to go to jail?
The double standards in our justice system make me sick. You or I pull this shit and we get a fine and/or contempt of court. Big business/big media pulls this crap and its no biggie.
On a related note... See rich/famous people who "...Is expected to start [his/her] sentence in 3 weeks for [insert nonviolent federal crime here] after being convicted 6 months ago."
Money is power, power is money. You or I get nailed for something and we get thrown in the slammer on the spot, maybe get bond that we can afford, maybe not. Later after the trial, at sentencing we are handcuffed and remanded to custody on the spot. Famous and/or rich person gets nicked for the same/similarly bad (sometimes worse) offense, and because of who they are, they are granted a delayed sentence.
They wont delay my sentence because I am the only qualified staff member to finish a project for my private employer, but if LiLo has some contract to sign autographs at a car dealership in 3 weeks, do a playboy shoot, etc she can have all the time she needs to fulfill *HER* obligations.
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Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
One was on time. The next was two days late. The third was 6 days late.
They gave back the site almost a month after the third extension expired.
The FBI is a wholy owned subsidiary of The **AAs.
Fuck them.
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my favorite part is that slashdot (and wired) picks this up five months after it was news. much more thorough (and timely) article at techdirt: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/08225217010/breaking-news-feds-falsely-censor-popular-blog-over-year-deny-all-due-process-hide-all-details.shtml [techdirt.com]
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Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
The best government RIAA money can buy.
We're talking U.S. government, they were rummaging through the "everything must go" bins. The RIAA does not like to let go of any money they have - ask any artist.
Okay. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are we seizing websites for copyright-related matters? This is petty, a waste of manpower, a waste of time, a waste of taxpayer dollars, and despite all of this, there is no gain from doing so.
Re:Okay. (Score:5, Insightful)
there is no gain from doing so.
Except, of course, the tactical gain for the copyright lobbyists, who can use such seizures as examples of why we need even stronger restrictions on the Internet. They can point to these seizures and say, "See, when we try to enforce our copyrights, the awful common folk just step around the ban! Therefore, we must be allowed to turn the Internet into a fancy cable TV system!"
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a waste of taxpayer dollars
One thing good about working in the government is that for anything you want to do, you dont have to foot the bill.
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Having worked with large private companies and governments I have not seen any real difference. I know it is popular to say that capitalism encourages efficiency and the government always wastes money but I just don't see it. Capitalism and government are about equally efficient, which is to say not at all.
Companies burn your money just as happily as the government does, especially large ones.
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corporatism isnt same as capitalism. companies that forget to keep competitive and efficient go out of existence. happens every day.
unless the government bails them out that is...
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You'd think so based on accepted economic wisdom, but in reality lots of badly run companies go on and on for years.
My theory is that you can get away with being bad if the competition is terrible.
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or when the government creates barriers to entry so high, they never have any viable competition.
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companies that forget to keep competitive and efficient go out of existence. happens every day.
Small companies, sure. As for large companies, have you ever looked at one on the inside? They could probably fund a few small companies just by eliminating all the fill, file, and forget paperwork. How many YEARS has SCO hung around with no product, no employees that could potentially create a product and a pile of lawsuits they have no hope of winning? There are other trolls doing much better than SCO that have no intention of ever producing a product or service anyone anywhere wants.
How many companies bl
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There is an enormous difference between wasting some (the government) and lying, stealing and cheating every cent they can (corporations). Especially when most of the wastage in government can always be tied straight to corporations lying, cheating and stealing to get it and make it happen.
The only way to keep government as waste low as possible, was to do as much as possible internally. Once things get contracted out to private the corruption just positively explodes. Lazy government workers wasting mon
Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
For the same reason the federal government decided seizing legal medical marijuana pharmacies in California and Colorado makes perfect sense.
We can't have businesses earning money and generating tax revenue.
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It's not SUPPOSED to unless there is ACTUAL interstate commerce involved or it is a constitutional issue. In the latter case, it primarily specifies laws that states may not have, not laws that they must have.
Re:You misrepresent the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here, here!!! Pot is not illegal because its a drug... Our nation is drowning in drugs. Its because the Pharmaceutical business can't monopolize it and make a hundred billion dollars. No chance cheap effective solutions like l-tryptophan for insomnia, or pot for nausea are going to be made available when they can sell you expensive drugs with terrible side effects that require more terrible drugs to cure the side effects with even more terrible side effects, etc., etc., etc.
Adam Smith warned of the key things to beware of with any Capitalistic Economy. 1. Avoid concentration of wealth and 2. Maintain a large and healthy middle class. Simple things. Vital to the operation of the game. We just let it go to hell, that's all.
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We gave up Smith for Friedman, I guess because we were tired of being healthy, wealthy and wise.
Income tax and Milton Friedman ruined our system.
Asset taxes and Adam Smith could bring it back, but it's probably already too late.
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Of course, we ignore Friedman's advice to implement the basic income.
The real problem is political corruption and idiocy.
Same with Megaupload (Score:5, Insightful)
Well somewhat similar. They seized that website and caused millions of people to lose their files, but now the judge is saying the case cannot proceed, because the FBI never had authority to cease the site's servers.
Of course they don't have to win the case..... WMG tried to use a takedown notice via youtube, and that failed, so they called their politicians in D.C. and used a full seizure action instead. The FBI/politicians have driven the company out of business, just as their boss WMG desired. Yay?
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They seized that website and caused millions of people to lose their files
I agree with your sentiments and the overall point you're trying to make. It bothers me when people put all of their eggs in one basket and something unforeseen happens. If I understand your claim correctly when users upload a file to a website, the original file disappears? This is akin to people who don't test backups, while it sucks, it's your own damned fault.
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So, it's their fault the government destroyed their backups? I mean, how do you "test" that the government won't destroy your backups?
PS - By definition, a backup is a second copy. Hence, there was more than "one baske
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So, it's their fault the government destroyed their backups? I mean, how do you "test" that the government won't destroy your backups?
If you have physical control of your backups, and you put them where someone else can't find them, then no one will destroy them. Any other test ("can anyone find these") is a sham.
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To argue that it's a fault of not having enough baskets when two should have been sufficient and would have been
You say it's not their fault, then what happened to their copy? If you lose your copy (and it's obviously important since you're backing it up) you replace it ASAP to keep up the duplication. Why didn't this happen?
I want you to answer this honestly, in your opinion:
Is it or is it not a good idea to back up files at a place where illegally distributed software/music/movies are hosted?
Is doing business with a company that willingly and knowingly breaks laws in host country where they do business a sound
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"...A Justice Department spokesman told DigitalTrends that, in this case, users didn’t have a right to expect their files back, because Megaupload had warned them on its terms-of-service and website FAQ to make copies of their files and that the users assumed responsibility for any loss of data..." Source: GCN (http://s.tt/
Not too bad. (Score:5, Informative)
They only violated four amendments in the Bill of Rights. No big deal.
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Call me when they get up to 10.
Re:Not too bad. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, it's gonna be pretty hard to 'quarter troops' in a website, webfarm, hard drive... maybe in a colo cage!?
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You know, that recent server replacement... If the Feds left malware that allowed FBI agents to break into the server at will I think that there could be an argument for cyber-quartering of cyber-troops since the hosting company is being forced to provide power, cpu cycles, HDD space and rack space to support the FBI cyber activities..
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Exactly. The point with the 3rd, I believe, was to limit the 'national security takes priority over everything else' angle.
And the best part is, it's all true. Those agents or 'cyber-soldiers' as the name may be, are sucking up a fair amount of resources. And if we want to go with the scare angle here, let's suppose that one of those agents ends up where it shouldn't be (a medical device, for instance). Appeasing the security people's lust for power and paranoid desires for spying on Americans inside their
Re:Not too bad. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nonsense. I prefer the interpretation of storing an electronic agent on someone's machine (typically located inside their house) as quartering a soldier (or in this case, his equipment) as a supreme violation of the 3rd Amendment. It lends to reasoning that in the days when that Amendment was first written, the allowing of soldiers (or other government members) to usurp the rights of a homeowner as well as the (often) tremendous cost of resources for feeding and caring for said soldier (and associated equipment, they certainly didn't leave their firearms outside in the rain) was a source of immense displeasure among the colonists; so much so that they went to the trouble of making it #3 of the list of Governmental Don'ts. As electronic agents do consume resources, often as parasites (consuming processor cycles, disk space, and bandwidth), to the owners of said machines, and as they are acting on behalf of the government, it could be easily argued that they fall under a violation of the 3rd Amendment.
"No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." -> Now, some people will argue that it's in a manner prescribed by law, but the reality is that they are constantly switching attacks and methods to achieve their ends, with no care for the cost or the sanctity of the homeowner. A manner prescribed in law as 'whatever it takes' would fail most judicial smell tests. Again, as such, with no third-party oversight into clandestine home-spying operations, we have a huge violation here. However, in so far as the judicial branch is a little...behind the times, I fear that the entirety of our freedoms will be obliterated by appending "online" to the end of various security legislations, which would not pass otherwise.
I imagine someone more nuanced in the various legalities, and writings thereof, could make a good argument based off of this.
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That would be a beautiful reading of the 3rd. Police have been using the arguement that taping a gps tracker to cars is no different than having an officer follow the suspect, but you make a good point that if the gps tracker is an 'agent' then it could become subject to the 3rd amendment. The argument would probably fall apart since the 3rd specifies 'soldiers' and not 'agents of the government', and the originalists would hate diluting the meaning of 'soldier' while progressive judges would, frankly, prob
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Well, the security people have already done the spade work for us by declaring it a "War on Cyber-Terrorists." What more, the DoD has received funding for their 'cyber-warriors,' so again, making the case that this is, by the same parties that want this kind of power, a war, should not be terribly difficult to make.
Precicely apropos. (Score:2)
I prefer the interpretation of storing an electronic agent on someone's machine (typically located inside their house) as quartering a soldier (or in this case, his equipment) as a supreme violation of the 3rd Amendment.
Hear hear!
The main reason for the Third Amendment was that the soldier served as a spy on the activities of the people living where he was quartered. This was a major violation of the British Common Law principle that "A man's home is his castle." The consumption of resources was also sign
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Perhaps because soldiers, at the time of the colonies, were the most common representatives of the Crown that the common folk were likely to encounter and be put upon. While I will be the first to admit that I am not a history scholar (perhaps someone with more knowledge could chime in here?), the common history we are taught is that any ranking official had an estate of their own (Hello Governor), and that it was the poorer soldiers, lacking such lofty estates, that had to find lodgings where they could. A
Re:Not too bad. (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, it goes all the way up to 11.
Year of lost revenue (Score:4, Funny)
They will probably make more money from that, than from active site :).
And RIAA will get wrist/checkbook slap.
Re:Year of lost revenue (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the RIAA should have its assets seized and business halted for a year. See how they like it.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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I can believe that, since the RIAA doesn't make movies... They're the music business. The MPAA is the movie studios.
Sounds like a good idea. (Score:2)
Maybe the RIAA should have its assets seized and business halted for a year. See how they like it.
You know, that's a really good idea.
If the Dajaz1.com people asked for that as part of the punitive damages, I could imagine a judge going for it.
Judges really don't like it when people or companies make a practice of abuse of process.
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Shoot the CEO in the head, and you'll get a similar effect.
Nope. The CEO is just another puppet. They're plenty of replacements.
IMMINENT DANGER !! (Score:3, Insightful)
Proof ?? If you look like a terroist, act like a terrorist, and shout like a terrorist, we don't need no stinkin warrants !!
Sounds like... (Score:4, Funny)
...Dajaz1.com's lawyers are about to make some easy money off the RIAA.
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I doubt it.
They might get something from the government if they are *real* lucky but i doubt that too.
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How about for bearing false witness?
Re:Sounds like... (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess they did? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Let's get real for just a moment... The XXIA will tie this up in court with mountains of legal toilet paper until hell freezes over and the devils go ice skating. The owners/operators of Dajaz1, will have been moldering in their graves for most of a millennium and by that time, the one remaining surviving descendent will probably have to take in winnings in cold pressed Latinum or some silly assed equivalent.
RIAA math (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's do RIAA math:
The site had the bandwidth potential if they weren't down for users to download an average of 10 songs per second at $1.00 per song..
So $1.00 * 10 songs * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days = $315,360,000
oops.. I meant $250,000 per song..
So $250,000 * 10 * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days = $78,840,000,000,000
seems reasonable.. This math came out of the same place as all other RIAA math.
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Yep. The math checks out, I am a RIAA mathematician.
No recourse (Score:5, Interesting)
The real troubling fact is that we have no recourse against this sort of criminal behavior by government thugs.
Re:No recourse (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, when you have no recourse then shooting the motherfuckers starts sounding better and better.
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Except we do have recourse. Not that the jack holes on /. would know thta.
Re:No recourse (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yeah, that worked so well for the Native Americans and AIM when the FBI came shooting to the reservation [google.com]. Don't get me wrong, despots deserve an ass-kicking, you just have to remember that your government has been busy preparing for your upset now for about the last 15 years and they just about have you dialed in now "Ya big-ol-nasty terrorist you"!
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The problem that the Native Americans had when we showed up and started taking over in the first place was a lack of unification. Shooting at the bastards doesn't work unless "everyone" (or close enough) is on board. Bread and circuses only go so far, though. Point is, the lone wacko who takes up arms is a lone wacko. Hang together, hang separately, etc etc.
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The real troubling fact is that we have no recourse against this sort of criminal behavior by government thugs.
You have recourse. Vote the bastards out!
Re:No recourse (Score:4, Insightful)
You assume we still have a functioning democracy, and not a sham. This is a bad assumption. There's less variation between Democrats and Republicans than there was internally in the Communist Party in the USSR. The electoral system is locked down to ensure that no third party ever arises. We have no voice whatsoever.
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Vote Ron Pau... yeah, no, that doesn't quite work in this situation since he's still at least a (R) by choice.
Vote Americans Elect!
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To paraphrase George Carlin "Americans live a sham, a lie, you think you have choice, you have no choice, you are given the freedom to make meaningless choices like Paper or Plastic, with or without fries, scrambled or sunny side up, all so you don't notice that where it matters your say has been gone a long time now."
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Wrong. I mean - no voice whatsoever? Aren't you making it too easy for yourself?
You can enter the parties and change things from within, at least locally. That is a possible way to start effecting changes.
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Getting to choose between Kodos and Kang is not a democracy.
Particularly if there's no way to get rid of them once the wolves take off their sheepskin suits and can only be thrown out of office by their fellow wolves by impeachment.
Not government in this case (Score:3)
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Re:No recourse (Score:5, Insightful)
Socialised healthcare actually benefits the majority of people...
Heavy handed copyright enforcement only benefits a very select few, often to the detriment of the majority...
Surely the government should be there to provide useful benefits to the majority of its people, not just a select few.
Let's Explain This Using FBI Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Your Master is angry at a website, and they are telling you to break the law and take that website down.
2. They pay your salary. They make sure the bosses who give you all your toys and paychecks get elected. They have so much money, they could not spend all of it if they spent 10 million dollars a day, for the next 20 years.
3. If you do not obey, you will not have a job. And you might even wind up in jail on some trumped up charge, much like the trumped up charges you arranged for others you didn't like very much. Oh, and your Master knows about those trumped up charges against an innocent person, so maybe the charges against YOU won't be so trumped up after all.
And the final kicker...
4. You are the US government. YOU get to decide if someone can sue you for something. [wikipedia.org]
So. You have...
100% immunity
100% profit.
100% job satisfaction.
100% power.
See? Math is easy.
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1. The FBI can't say "Contractors did this", however, they could point the finger back at the RIAA and say, "They gave us bad info!"
File for discovery, get buried in paperwork, find evidence that FBI knew better, file to block dismissal.
2. Yeah, that meets the criteria. Of course, the FBI can also say that they were "acting in good faith" on the information they were provided by the RIAA. End of lawsuit.
File for discovery, get buried in paperwork, find evidence that FBI knew better, file to block dismissal.
3. That's kinda ambiguous. Does the FBI qualify as "certain federal law enforcement officers"??
I believe they are practically the definition of "certain federal law enforcement officers".
4. That's the killer. Where exactly did this happen? Los Angeles? (This is where the servers were.) New York? (The address of the site owner.) Who has jurisdiction, and does that state allow such a lawsuit to proceed? If they both allow it, which one will actually permit it to go ahead? Remember, "allow to go forward" does not mean "will go forward". They can still say no.
File the suit as a violation of federal rights. That has jurisdiction in all the states, and any state law that blocks them is another violation to tack on to the paperwork when you file it a second time. Or if
Fines? (Score:3, Insightful)
The RIAA is Scum (Score:4, Insightful)
The RIAA is scum, and the Obama administration (who has appointed too many of their minions to the Justice Department) are their toadies. So who is surprised that this kind of crap is happening? It's all about fat contributions to the incumbent's election and reelection campaigns and screw over the rest of us.
Or should I tell you what I really think about all of this?
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Well, he did try to put somebody in charge of an agency who wasn't a tool of the crony capitalists: Elizabeth Warren. Didn't work out that well, did it? Because we bitch and moan about corporate tools being in bed with the government but we still sit up and bark when the plutocrats tell us too, because the whole corporate puppet thing goes way beyond Washington. We're the biggest bunch of sheep on the planet, and we let the wolves herd us.
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Welcome to the Republicrat. Some are left handed and some are right, but any suggestion for more than a nanosecond that they in any significant way different beasts is clearly a comment made by someone who takes the window dressing seriously. For those of you with pet representatives, let me ask before you even say a word... are they the exception that proves the rule?
Make a political statement with your website! (Score:2)
Why not clearly and explicitly implicate the First Amendment?
Sue the RIAA for everything, move biz out of US (Score:2)
Its just that simple.
There has not been a single FBI investigation of congress since the Carter administration.
Why? Because Reagan signed a law banning such investigations.
Why are congress members afraid of being investigated and audited unless they're taking bribes?
Privately maintained filter lists are bad (Score:4, Informative)
It IS censorship, because invariably the list of sites to block includes many that have nothing to do with porn, including fine art nudes, nude paintings. Will Deviantart be on that list?
One only has to look at the leaked proposed Australian list to see how bad it is in real life.
The only way that you could begin to do this is to have an open list that's published, with a redress mechanism for people who's sites have been wrongly blocked. The censors hate this because then it gives people a phone directory for all the naughty sites.
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Of course, you don't have to publish the list if you have a redirect that states that it has been blocked by so and so, then you know that it is specifically blocked rather than just turning up a 404.
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Even better, go to a country that DOES filter porn (and other things immoral) and do a google image search for porn. I have done so (Kuwait). Yes, there were quite a few blocked images but there were still thousands upon thousands of blatant porn images still displayed. The only search that shows absolutely NOTHING, even in countries without filtering/blocking, is kiddie porn (why is my door getting smashed in?) **NO CARRIER**
An opportunity to nail the RIAA to the barn door (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me understand the RIAA **PUBLICLY** accused the owner/company of this web-site of criminal wrong doing. But after a year, no charges were brought. And the company suffered damages and loss of its website.
Sounds like a pretty good lawsuit (against the RIAA) to me. I hope the EFF tears them a new one.
shouldn't have had it anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a great illustration of why copyright should be dealt with only in civil courts. That way they'd have to prove their case first and tale action later.
48 hours (Score:3)
if a person (who is not a terrorist, and piracy is not that) can only be held for 48 hours without being formally charged. that web site should've also been returned within that same time frame if no charges were brought. a year is fucking ridiculous and if the feds held a random citizen who did nothing wrong for that long, lawsuits (big ones) would surely follow.
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Isn't it required that the site only remove the link until the whole take down procedure has cleared one way or the other?
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Yeah, iirc they have to wait 10 days for a counter-notice.
As far as I can tell the RIAA argues "But the data was kept beyond that", and MU is saying "that's because someone else uploaded a exact duplicate and we didn't get a notice for that one".
So the question becomes... should file/video sharing sites be required to do that?
I'd say... no.
Consider the following scenario (which actually does happen):
1. User A uploads a video he created (and owns all copyrights to) to a video sharing site, sets up ad-revenue