Seems like the Feds have been busy in recent year, all kinds of hackers, phishers an dnow pirates are getting arrested and imprisoned for some serious jailtime.

The latest in this strung of busts is the music piracy ground RNS or Rabid Neurosis, very eminent in the scene in the late 90s/early 2000s.

With P2P and people ripping stuff themselves, is ‘the scene’ dying or are most releases repackaged group releases? I’ve been out of the whole 0day warez/racing/fxp thing for a long time, so I honestly have no idea.

Six men have been accused of running the world’s most prolific music piracy ring, an online crew federal prosecutors allege delivered more than 25,000 copyrighted albums, often before they were officially released.

As members of Rabid Neurosis, or RNS as the group was called, they tapped insiders at music retailers, radio stations, and CD manufacturing plants, who were able to get their hands on music titles before their commercial release in the US. In other cases, they turned to affiliates elsewhere in the world, who were able to supply music that was not yet available in America.

“These reproductions were done for the benefit of the members of RNS and other affiliated piracy groups, in that, by getting a reputation for providing pirated materials that were previously unavailable on the piracy scene, RNS members were granted access to massive libraries of pirated music, video games, software and movies,” prosecutors alleged in court documents filed Wednesday.

They have an impressive record though often releasing full retail albums before they were for sale! They stopped around 2007 tho, I guess that’s when Bit Torrent and p2p was really taking off.

25,000 albums is a serious number though I’d guess their restitution is definitely going to be in the millions. But then historically the fines given out for piracy cases has just been completely ridiculous.

The most likely outcome, 6 more people filling for bankruptcy.

The claim of personal benefit is important, since sentencing guidelines frequently require a showing that copyright infringers financially gained from their activities.

Wednesday’s indictment, filed in US District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia, named Adil R. Cassim, 29, of Granada Hills, California, the alleged leader of the group, Matthew D. Chow, 28, of Missouri City, Texas, Bennie L. Glover, 35, of Shelby, North Carolina, an employee of a CD production plant, and Edward Mohan II, 46, of Baltimore.

Each was charged with a single count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. If convicted each faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000, in addition to a possible order to pay restitution.

Patrick L. Saunders, 30, of Brooklyn, New York, was charged in August and pleaded guilty on Tuesday to one count of copyright infringement. James A. Dockery, 39, of Mooresboro, North Carolina was charged on Tuesday.

They had an impressive network of contacts with people from retail outlets, cd printing factories and radio stations. All the people who get tracks and whole albums before they hit the streets.

I’m sure there will be plenty more similar cases to follow in the near future.

Source: The Register

Google has offered multiple reasons why it shouldn’t have to comply with a Justice Department subpoena. One is privacy. An excerpt:

If Google is forced to compromise its privacy principles and produce to the Government on such a flimsy request, its search query and URL data, Google will, without a doubt, suffer a loss of trust among users. Google’s success can be attributed in large part to the high volume of Web users attracted to Google.com every day. The privacy and anonymity of the service are major factors in the attraction of users–that is, users trust Google to do right by their personal information and to provide them with the best search results. If users believe that the text of their search queries into Google’s search engine may become public knowledge, it only logically follows that they will be less likely to use the service.

The Justice Department subpoena normally would have been a routine matter, and America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo voluntarily complied with similar requests. But Google’s resistance sparked a furor over privacy, with Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, asking the Justice Department for details, and a bill appearing in the House of Representatives that would require Web sites to delete information about visitors.

Google lashed out at the U.S. Justice Department on Friday, saying that a high-profile request for a list of a week’s worth of search terms must not be granted because it would disclose trade secrets and violate the privacy rights of its users.

In a strongly worded legal brief filed with a federal judge in San Jose, Calif., the search company accused prosecutors of a “cavalier attitude,” saying they were “uninformed” about how search engines work and the importance of protecting Google’s confidential information from disclosure.

This response came after the Justice Department last month asked a judge to force Google to hand over a random sample of 1 million Web pages from its index, along with copies of a week’s worth of search terms to aid in the Bush administration’s defense of an Internet pornography law. That information is supposed to be used to highlight flaws in Web filtering technology during a trial this fall.

Source: Cnet