Word: downloads
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...more like him. Quietly, with no sirens and no breaking glass, your friends and neighbors and colleagues and children are on a 24-hour virtual smash-and-grab looting spree, aided and abetted by the anonymity of the Internet. Every month they--or is it we?--download some 2.6 billion files illegally, and that's just music. That number doesn't include the movies, TV shows, software and video games that circulate online. First-run films turn up online well before they hit the theaters. Albums debut on the Net before they have a chance to hit the charts. Somewhere...
...seductive it is. Start up a program like Kazaa, type in the name of your favorite rock band, and a list of song titles will instantly appear on your screen. See something you like, click on it, and it's yours. An average song might take two minutes to download to your computer if you have a broadband connection. Log on any night of the week and you'll find millions of users sharing hundreds of millions of songs, movies and more...
...Some labels (they're reluctant to identify themselves) hire professional counterhackers, companies like Overpeer, based in Manhattan, that specialize in electronic countermeasures such as "spoofing"--releasing dummy versions of popular songs onto file-sharing networks. To your average Kazaa user they look like the real thing, but when you download them, they turn out to be unplayable. Movie studios, meanwhile, staff screenings with ushers wearing night-vision goggles to suss out would-be pirates with camcorders. When Epic Records distributed review copies of the new Pearl Jam album last fall, it sent them inside CD players that had been glued...
...these services face competition you wouldn't wish on Bill Gates. Unlike, say, Kazaa, they have to clear each song or movie or show for digital distribution with each individual artist and studio. They have made significant progress--Pressplay, for example, has upwards of 300,000 tracks available for download, with membership starting at $9.95 a month--but it's slow work. The for-pay services also mire users in a mesh of restrictions that limit what they can do with the music they download. That $9.95 plan at Pressplay buys you unlimited downloads, but you can't move...
...Bill of Rights is unequivocal. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” Yet the FBI now enjoys expanded power to search private homes and download information from a computer without notifying the occupant. The FBI can also demand access to personal records held by a third party, such as a University, without showing reasonable suspicion that the target individual was involved with a crime. These changes apply to all criminal investigations; they are not limited to cases...