Beware the DOJ

The writing was on the wall two months ago when I told you that the DOJ was going to start treating file sharing [as an] equal threat as terrorism and drugs (06/23/04). You apparently weren't paying attention when I told you. Otherwise, you wouldn have cleaned up your act before the feds swarmed down on you in Texas, Wisonsin and New York. Declan was warning you back in March (Real Nasty Copyright Bill Passes House Panel) that "Congress has pressured the [DOJ] to use the No Electronic Theft Act to jail file swappers, no such prosecutions have taken place so far...."

I'd much prefer to spend my time over at busblog checking out pictures of Danielle or preparing for my fantasy football drafts.

But now almost a 1,000 of you go and get sued by RIAA all on the same day: "The 744 John Doe lawsuits, against unnamed users of P-to-P services, were filed in Atlanta; St. Louis; Oakland, California; New York; Austin, Texas; Covington, Kentucky; Denver; Trenton, New Jersey, and Madison, Wisconsin." PLus 120 more who refused to settle (good for you!).

The thing that bothers me the most though is that some of you don't even look at your mail or don't understand the consequences of a lawsuit and just plain default which just kills me. (RIAA Trampling Consumers with Lawsuits)

In the Times (U.S. Searches Computers, Trying to Disrupt Piracy), Saul Hansell reports that the feds

"conducted a covert investigation by loading two computers with copyrighted material and joining the Underground Network, a move that let it identify five hub computers that coordinated the file sharing. An F.B.I. agent then downloaded 84 movies, 40 software programs, 13 games and 178 songs from the network"

and that "the network required members to share at least 100 gigabytes of data in order to join".

Ernest, add this one to your hit-list. Not only are the feds guilty of inducing infringement, but also of uploading and downloading copyrighted data.

John Borland (c-net) has more information related to DOJ crackdown and the NET Act (Justice Dept. probes for pirates:

The network has been based on Direct Connect technology, which enables individual computer users to set up private file-swapping networks similar to the original Napster. With Direct Connect, ordinary PCs serve as "hubs," keeping indexes of what files are available and linking search requests with the computers where files are stored.