Busted

Saying this may make me unpopular around here, but...

<RANT>
Honestly, I don't typically feel all that sympathetic towards someone who whines when they get caught. Are some of the copy protection laws overbearing? Yes, some are. But in the end -- it's illegal, you knew it was illegal when you did it, and hell, some people only do it because it's illegal. So if you get busted, complaining about it is kind of a "doctor, it hurts when I do this!" situation. It's like that poke-the-penguin flash game. You know that something bad is going to happen if you keep poking it. Even if the reaction was extreme, you knew that was a risk the whole time you were poking it. It's not exactly "unfair". I can understand the thrill of getting away with something, and I can understand the thrill of feeling in-control of somethig. But if that's your game -- seeing how much and how often you can get away with something -- don't act so surprised when one day you don't.

I don't know, maybe "old age" (24 ) has jaded me or made more cynical or something. Ten years ago I was one of those pathetic warez-kiddie-wannabe types. I'm not proud of it, but at least I can blame it on being a kid . And then one day I reached a point of sobriety about the whole thing, where I realized that most of the rhetoric about overthrowing evil empires, "raging against the machine", and fighting injustice was mostly a lot of bullshit, frankly. When you're totally honest with yourself, warezing (at least in the sense of distributing/downloading) programs usually boils down to two motives: Elitism and the base human desire to get stuff for free. That's it. It's not about egalitarianism. It's not about justice. It's not about changing the world. There's lots of ways to go about that that have greater impact and don't involve "K-rAD O-|)4y Wa|2Ez". You don't want to be equal, you want to be 'leet! And as much as you want to gripe about capitalist greed, the fact is that your prime motive for doing what you do is to get something for nothing. And that's the most basic capitalist idea of all.
</RANT>

Ok, that's what I get for drinking too much coffee and reading through old IBFT archives.

So now that that's out of the way:

The ongoing investigations were assisted by various intellectual property trade associations, including the Business Software Alliance, the Entertainment Software Association, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.

Now why doesn't that surprise me? I've come to grips with the fact that these guys have a lot of lobbying power - they have a lot of money, and because of their line of business they have a very large forum to shout in. But actually including them in law-enforcement operations is a serious breach of ethics. Reporters, for example, have very strict rules about their participation in law enforcment activities. They can come along for the ride and report on what they see, but they can't actively participate or assist in any way or it's a conflict of interest. Letting such obviously biased organizations assist in enforcement is a really bad idea to begin with, but even worse, it's a total conflict of interest when you consider that most of those organizations are likely to be the plaintiffs in any resulting civil suits.