US Attorney General John Ashcroft reported that US agents had raided the homes of 5 people suspected of illegally trading copyrighted material. Agents raided homes in Texas, Wisconsin and New York, and seized computers involved.
Ashcroft, viewed by many as a hard-line Attorney General, remarked that "P2P does not stand for 'permission to pilfer'". He also commented that the he believed that the DoJ shouldn't turn a blind eye whilst piracy on such a large scale was taking place.
The targets of the raids were users of popular file sharing program, Direct Connect. The 5 people were acting as hubs; hubs are the Kazaa equivalent of "super-nodes" - users sharing massive quantities of files. Ashcroft said that each of the 5 hubs had 40 petabytes of data in them (ed - this figure seems massively in-correct - and would more likely be 40 gigabytes - perhaps terabytes. The DC website claims to have only just reached 1 petabyte of data network-wide.).
The DoJ hopes to reduce the spread of illegal piracy by taking down these main hubs of copyrighted material distribution. Asides from a physical effect, these raids haev a large psychological effect on the p2p community, as the RIAA and the MPAA have learned to their advantage. Record labels and associations have initiated about 4000 lawsuits over the last 2 years, most of them being settled out of court for $5000.
News source: in-house
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