Mr X the Online Spy
p2pnet.net News:- We already have RIAA staff running around pretending to be street cops.
Now we have the BSA playing James Bond.
Remember Ben Sullivan’s LA Weekly story Quasi-legal squads raid street vendors?
Assume the position !
“Though no guns were brandished, the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black ‘raid’ vests the unit members wore,” he wrote. “The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read ‘RIAA’ instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo.
In Sullivan’s story, “Borrayo attends to a parking lot next to the landmark El 7 Mares fish-taco stand on Sunset Boulevard. To supplement his buck-a-car income, he began, in 2003, selling records and videos from a makeshift stand in front of the lot. In a good week, Borrayo said, he might unload five or 10 albums and a couple DVDs at $5 apiece. Paying a distributor about half that up-front, he thought he’d lucked into a nice side business.
“The RIAA saw it differently. Figuring the discs were bootlegs, a four-man RIAA squad descended on his stand a few days before Christmas and persuaded the 4-foot-11 Borrayo to hand over voluntarily a total of 78 discs. It wasn’t a tough sell.”
Sullivan quotes Borrayo as saying, through an interpreter, “They said they were police from the recording industry or something, and next time they’d take me away in handcuffs.”
“Borrayo says he has no way of knowing if the records, with titles like Como Te Extraño Vol. IV – Musica de los 70’s y 80’s, are illegal, but he thought better of arguing the point,” says Sullivan.
“Cleaning the internet of filth”
The BSA (Business Software Alliance) is an industry enforcement / marketing / PR unit headed up by Robert Holleyman.
“He works undercover, has an online identity which he cannot reveal to anyone for fear of exposure and has to maintain anonymity or face threats to his personal security. In the murky world of organised crime and piracy, the investigator known only as Mr X …”
Not Holleyman. He’d be a little more like M in the 007 series.
Mr X is the BSA employee whose job – acting on instructions from H – is to “patrol the internet and take action against online pirates,” says a BBC story here.
“Automated software is used by investigators such as Mr X to trawl the internet and identify possible pirate sites,” although, “Human psychology is paramount when monitoring the activities of the pirates and for this, Mr X must adopt his online persona.”
But at the end of the day, “”The result for me is just to have a clean internet. There is so much filth out there and it is satisfying when it goes down,” Mr X is quoted as saying.
Dah dah-dah-dah-dahhh dah dah dah DAH dah-dah-dah-dahhh dah dah dah …
BSA”s ”World Wide’ members are: Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Avid, Bentley Systems, Borland, Internet Security Systems, Macromedia, NC Software/Mastercam, Microsoft, Network Associates, SolidWorks, Sybase, Symantec, UGS PLM Solutions, VERITAS Software.
‘Policy’ members are Cisco Systems, Entrust, HP, IBM, Intel, Intuit, RSA Security.
May 31st, 2004 at 11:47 pm
you know bureaucrats have a knack for finding new places to extend useless and inefficient bureaucracy, they’ve been dying to get to the internet for years, “theres gotta be some money in it somewhere for us” they say, lets set up policing units, regulators etc etc, lets bog it all done to the pace of a license renewal office, then we’ll improve on it and say look at what we did (even though without them it would have been lightyears ahead of where it was anyways)
Kill all P2P?? Why is it you suppose that RIAA et al not only want to kill copyright infringment on p2p but P2P apps/networks themselves??
Why it’s because eventually artists will wake up to the fact that they can cut the bloodsuckers right out of the loop and distribute w/out them, now that possibility is a ways off right now, but best to eliminate any possibility of it happening, and to do that they have to destroy or control the channels of distribution. Therefore all P2P nets must be quashed, unless RIAA endorsed (owned). They are pathetically transparent in their fear.
June 1st, 2004 at 5:53 pm
Filth? WTF does that mean in regards to this story? This is becoming a war of propaganda and semantics. “Pirates”, “filth”. How long before P2P “pirates” are referred to using the buzzword du jour, ooh, TERRORISTS?!?!
February 14th, 2005 at 11:42 am
I ran into a similar site, called Sitebuster, doing what Mr X does, but it seems to be an organization finding individual users who break their terms of service agreements with sites like Tripod and Geocities by posting porn.
http://www.haktanir.org/sitebuster/