US raids Net song swappers

Reuters ^ | Wed 25 August, 2004 | Peter Kaplan

[CurlyBill]

Hmmmmm, I thought the legality of this was still being argued.

[fooman]

Chilling. Wrong battle, wrong time.

[SamAdams76]

10.5 million songs! I didn't even know that many songs were recorded.

[Henchman]

FBI statistics...

[Pukin Dog]

My neighbor kid says half of those 10.5 million songs are by Prince.

[jbstrick]

What a freaking waste of time.

[RandomUserName]

"Each of the five hubs contained 40 petabytes of data"

Liars!

That's 200 petabytes total, or 200,000 gigabytes, or 1000 drives, each holding 200 gigabytes. Nobody spends that kind of money to trade files for free. Either this was an operation where money was involved somehow, or somebody is way off in the reported size of the data.

[Old Professer]

I thought we had more important things for the feds to raid.

[APFel]

Irony: Half of those songs called for Ashcroft's head.

APf

[ARCADIA]

I am glad to see my tax dollars being wasted in support of music publishers. Perhaps the FBI is starting to run out of terrorist and serial killers to chase. This is proof that the department is over bloated and should be scaled back.

[RandomUserName]

Ok. I was so annoyed at the lack of reality I screwed up the numbers...

40 petabytes each is 40,000 terabytes, which is 40,000,000 gigabytes, or 200,000 drives at 200 gigs each.

Now we're way out of the realm of even a for-profit enterprise.

[dinasour]

At $300 per drive that's $60 Million dollars.

But then again they probably qualify for a volume discount.

[On the Road to Serfdom]

I think they mean the hub was linked to that much data, like an index to thousands of computer directories. Obviously they don't mean one location had that much storage.

[dennisw]

Dang..... I always hear about them after they're shut down >)

[RandomUserName]

I think they mean the hub was linked to that much data, like an index to thousands of computer directories.

I might buy that, with the addition of them being off by a factor of 1000. 40 terabytes distributed among the clients is possible. 40 petabytes is not.

[Shanty Shaker]

I need to hire you to do my taxes.

found this on the front page of a reputable online store.

Caviar SE 200GB HD
# 7200RPM, ATA-EIDE

$89.99*

[dinasour]

At $300 per drive that's $60 Million dollars.

I have a pretty good internet connection. Right now I measure it at about a megabyte per second.

I think I will download their file store.

I'll see you in about 1268 years.

[dinasour]

$89.99*

It's probably broke

[DreadCthulhu]

Trading copyrighted material without permission of the copyright holder is pretty obviously a crime, at least under US copyright law, though I consider it pretty harmless in the scheme things - and that the punishments are out whack here - I think the punishment for trading an copyrighted material online should be equal or less than what you would get for shoplifting the CD/DVD in a store.

I would think the Feds have more dangerous criminals to look out for though; I doubt AL Queda is is busy using Kazaa or Bittorrent.