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I'll believe it when I see it...

I have a feeling this is just some propaganda shoveled out by the Justice Department to appease the recording industry.

Oh they may shut down a couple people running servers with 20,000 songs on them as an example. There is no way they would risk the political fallout of mass arrests of teenagers and college age kids. Remember we live in the society were the "children" can do no wrong.

I think you're right. There's no way the feds can determine if mp.3s and divx's are legally owned anyway. Obtaining evidence against end users will be difficult at best, and convictions will be difficult.

1. The law is hazy. Say for instance, you purchase a CD, rip the songs to your computer, then sell or give away the CD. Since you made that copy for your own private use, the copy is legal. I do not think the law specifies whether it has to be destroyed or not.

2. Also, how are the feds going to get the evidence? There's no probable cause in seeing a teenager w/ an MP3 player.

3. With civil cases the legal standard is preponderance of evidence. Criminal cases require guilt beyond a resonable doubt. That reasonable doubt standard would make it very difficult for the feds to convict pirates.

Apillar, you are right on the money. Also, the RIAA SUX!!! :)

I'll believe it when I see it...
I have a feeling this is just some propaganda shoveled out by the Justice Department to appease the recording industry.

Oh they may shut down a couple people running servers with 20,000 songs on them as an example. There is no way they would risk the political fallout of mass arrests of teenagers and college age kids. Remember we live in the society were the "children" can do no wrong.

This may not be all about music. I've used a few of the P2P services, mostly looking for stuff that is is so old that it is no longer available for sale, not even on eBay.

Mixed in among all those .mp3s are countless zipped files which contain large application software packages. Want WinXP? No problem. AutoCAD 2002? It's there. Every Norton utility program ever conceived? Easy as pie, just click "download". That only scratches the surface... there are "cracks" and keynumber generators and computer games galore - the sheer number of file transfers must be making the phone lines heat up.

There's another little problem... lots of this stuff is hosted outside of the U.S. Even if they clamp down on the largest offenders *here*, the stuff will still be out there, somewhere. Software audits will will keep the bootlegged stuff out of the workplace, so it is the personal user they intend to target.

Whether we're talking about a teen-aged girl playing her N'SYNC .mp3s or some middle-aged guy playing a rousing game of Ghost Recon, they'll have to go door-to-door to find the offenders. How secure is *your* firewall? Or your front door, for that matter?