MIT sysop faces piracy charges

[Matthew J Ghio]

nobody at shell.portal.com wrote:

> Many of the Cynosure users hid their identities by using an
> Internet address in Finland that provided an anonymous forwarding
> service for the pirated programs, according to the indictment.  

Although mentioned in the indictment, appearantly Julf's server really
played no part in the software piracy distribution.  Cynosure was an FSP
server run on an unattended workstation at MIT (which David LaMacchia
did not own and did not have permission to use as an FSP server).  It
was not a mail server, and there is no mention of any pirated software
being sent through anon.penet.fi.  Instead, the feds just wanted to use
the indictment as a soap box to badmouth Julf's anon-server.

The indictment is on http://the-tech.mit.edu

They list some twenty charges against LaMacchia.  Interestingly, one of
the charges was that LaMacchia created an anonymous mail pool for PGP
messages on his FSP server.

It looks like the government folks have found themselves a test case
with which to make a statement against piracy, and, more importantly, to
try to criminalize PGP and the anonymous remailers.  This is bad news. :(