Cops Seize Dorm PCs In College File Sharing Raid
from the um...-but-wait... dept
Great. Now the police are getting involved. The RIAA somehow convinced police on the Ohio State campus to raid student dorm rooms and confiscate computers for those suspected of running a file sharing network. I hate to ruin this for the RIAA, but everyone who is connected to the internet is connected to a "file sharing network". That's what the internet is. Furthermore, since the ruling stating that Grokster and Morpheus are just tools, it's going to be tough to show that these students were doing anything worse. Of course, they'll probably scare them into paying some sort of fee, and continue "Operation Scare Students". One of these days they're going to arrest someone with some money to burn and good lawyers, who will turn this all around on the record industry.
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Maybe so, but...
Maybe so, but before that happens there will be a LOT of poor college students that will give in rather than try to fight (and lose BIG TIME).
The RIAA isn't all that interested in getting money from people by suing them. Obviously it wants to discourage people from continuing to share files. I'm sure the RIAA believes that for every 1 person they can threaten with legal action, 1000 other people will think twice (or three times) about sharing files when they know that they could get caught as well. After they have charged 1000 people with lawsuits, 1,000,000 people will have quit sharing files (or so they believe).
I'm not even sure that the EFF or other "freedom fighters" will be able to come to the aid of people who are threatened with lawsuits, because, according to the copyright laws, copying content without permission is still illegal, no matter how popular a practice it has become.
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Yeah, I thought about it three times... and then I
Plausable deniability (reasonable doubt) plus a encrypted filesystem go a long way towards keeping the powers that be off your back.
Now when I get those nasty letters from the BSA or RIAA, I just foward back a canned letter informing them that they'll need to come by with a wiretap box (and court order) and/or a wireless scanner. That seems to be well above their threshold of effort and I have yet to hear anything back from them.
No wonder WiFi is taking off, eh?
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Warrent required?
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