Street Dealers or Kingpins

 Sometimes you have to feel sorry for the government.  When really difficult systemic issues arise, they are blamed if there is no action - and if there is action. 

As with the drug war, there is no clear point source to attack for the copyright war.  The government then is obligated to go after all links in the chain - from the Kingpins to the street dealers to the casual user to the unwitting landlady who was watching Leave It to Beaver re-runs while her tenants were peddling. 

Recently, the FBI shut down a site and achieved sentence for a 23 year old coder to five months in prison and five months house arrest for creating a bittorrent tracking system called Elite Torrent.

Now here's the rub.  EliteTorrent is free.  So a drug kingpin sits in his kingpin house with his kingpin cars and kingpin big screen TV.  But EliteTorrent pretty much cost this guy and his buddies to make - time, hosting fees, etc.

It was a thought exercise with legs.  Legs that the RIAA didn't like very much, sure.

Also, to be sure, 10 months total sentence and a $3,000 fine is less than he'd get if he were selling crack on the street.  It's also a hell of a lot less than the RIAA was trying to get out of computer illiterate grandmothers and people without computers.  So, at least this time they went after someone with an obvious connection.

I wanted to pass the link around.  I'm puzzling out what I think of the whole thing.   The RIAA's previous litigation targets were so removed from the transaction as malicious actors it was hard to see their logic.  This time, it's a provider of infrastructure.

Technorati tags: bittorrent, torrents, elitetorrent, fbi, riaa, copyright, intellectual property, prison, crack, drugs, drugwar, copyright war

Comments

[n00b]

Works for me, no need to only focus on one particular level of the theft-facilitation chain, better to keep multiple levels aware that they might have to pay big if they get caught.