Random thoughts of a Disturbed Mind: 33 Internet users here probed in piracy crackdown...

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

[33 Internet users here probed in piracy crackdown...]

Read about the news at the Straits Times Interactive: http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/free/story/0,6418,353015,00.html. My comments are below.

If you keep up with P2P news, you'll know that this is the result of the latest wave of crackdown by the IFPI. You can read about it at http://p2pnet.net/story/6992 (this is not a neutral site, it is biased against RIAA/MPAA/IFPI, so use some good judgment on your part). Of all the users identified by IFPI, 33 of them are Singaporeans.

It might be interesting to note that one of IFPI's members is Sony BMG. From what I understand after reading the articles, it seems that IFPI collected the users' IP addresses, then went through them to classify them according to country, and then passed them along to the local arm of their offices, in this case the RIAS. RIAS then proceeded to lodge a police report against the users.

What I find most interesting was that there's practically no legal action being carried out after the recent Sony rootkit fiasco. To cut the long story short, Sony recently implement some sort of DRM on their audio CDs. When these CDs are inserted into your computer, the CDs would automatically install a piece of software known as a rootkit. What Sony has wanted to do was to prevent users from copying the tracks onto their computers. In the first place, this is wrong, as users who bought the CD had the right (Fair Use) to make a copy for backup.

The rootkit not only took away a user's fair use rights, it also opened a ton of backdoors into the user's computer, prompting Microsoft to add it onto it's spyware list. Other anti-virus companies are following suit. You can manually remove the rootkit, but doing so would render your optical drives unusable.

All these sounds like someone could invoke the Computer Misuse Act (local law) on Sony BMG. I've read somewhere that this could be a felony in the States.

So here's the kicker....Users buy original CDs, and get rootkits on their systems. They download the tracks, and get their asses hauled to jail.

Who's the real victim here?

^^^ by Locksley @ 10:23 AM. 1 comments.
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[Comments]

Yepz yepz. Just wanted to show my support. Everything else is on my blog liao so i shall not comment more.

^^^ posted by Anonymous @ Thu Nov 17, 02:02:00 AM.

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