Pirates are in the News Lately

Software that is, pixel gold, silicon tea.  The Justice Department charged 10 individuals in the Northern District of California with copyright violations by pirating movies, games, and other software.  This action is the latest result in Operation Copycat which was designed to lure pirates to government servers as a place to upload copyrighted materials.  At the beginning of the sting the government server had 700 megabytes of storage.  Two years later the servers held 27 terabytes of content.

In the meantime,  U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, he of Valerie Plame(gate) fame, announced in Chicago indictments against 19 members of the RISCISO piracy group.  Their warez filled about 23,000 compact discs worth about $6.5 million.  This group apparently liked the thrill of breaking encryption codes on protected content and were responsible for screeners getting up on file sharing networks.

More on this from Red Herring and Reuters.