Use Kazaa or Morpheous and Go To Jail...

[HAZE]

U.S. Navy Seizes Cadet Computers in Internet Probe

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Officials at the U.S. Naval Academy have seized the computers of nearly 100 students in a search for bootlegged music and movies, an Academy official confirmed on Monday.

Cadets could face court martial or expulsion if investigators find digital songs or other copyrighted material on their hard drives.

Naval Academy administrators seized the desktop computers last Thursday while students were in class, newspapers in Baltimore and Annapolis, Maryland, reported.

An academy spokeswoman confirmed that the reports were accurate but declined further comment.

Record labels and movie studios worry that the wild popularity of programs like Kazaa and Morpheus that allow users to download songs and other material from the Internet for free is cutting into their sales.

Entertainment groups sent a letter to thousands of colleges and universities last month asking them to crack down on the use of such programs on their internal high-speed networks.

The letter asked administrators to tell students that the activity was illegal and punish violators.

"We appreciate institutions who take intellectual property theft seriously," said a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites). "However, we do not dictate what their enforcement policies should be, and, in this particular instance, we do not know the facts of the case."

Academy spokesman Cmdr. Bill Spann told the Baltimore Sun that students found to have improperly downloaded copyrighted material could face penalties from a loss of liberty to court martial and expulsion.

Students at the Annapolis academy receive a computer when they enter school and pay it off gradually over their four years.

The recording industry has also taken the software makers to court and asked the U.S. Justice Department (news - web sites) and individual Internet providers to help enforce copyright laws.

[dialectics]

it should not be up to the ISPs to enforce copyright - just like it isn't up to the phone company to regulate what you can and can't say on the telephone. this is america god dammit.

[t0nythelover]

ya right? wtf, what if the cadets owned copies of all that music and movies at home but didnt want to carry it to the school. im sure they wouldnt appreciate mad dvd pornos and rap cds in the cadets room. oh man though i could just imagine how much porn they found, maybe even some gay porn. wow thats gonna suck for some kid and their parents.

[joeg]

yeah, i have to agree with rob... its not the ISP's problem...

and like tony said... if i go buy a cd today, i can download that cd every hour on the hour for the next 6 months and it would be legal, because i bought the liscense to it...

[dialectics]

see that's the thing - you don't own anything but the little plastic disc. you have no lisences, no rights, no nothing. all you have is a little plastic disc.

that's why mp3.com originally had to shut down their service that let users who OWNED the cd (and could prove it using hash code from the disc) download the mp3 from the web.

[phuturephunk]

. . one small thing you all are overlooking . . . When you sign up for millitary service, you pretty much sign away ALL of your rights as a US citezen over to the government so that they, in effect, can do what they please with you . . .