Reuters is reporting that the Justice Department has orchestrated raids on the homes of five file-sharers who operated hubs on the Direct Connect network. According to the Washington Post, while none of the offenders were arrested, their computers and other equipment were seized.

This is the first, and unlikely the last, such raid in the U.S. and appears to represent a significant shift in the Justice Department's willingness intervene on behalf of the content industries. According to Attorney General Ashcroft, "P2P does not stand for 'permission to pilfer.'" Wonder who's been talking to him lately?

With the Grokster decision delivering a serious blow to copyright holders' attempts to eliminate p2p technology, the escalation of their efforts to pursue individual users is hardly unexpected. But should we be surprised that they appear to have successfully enlisted the AG in this war against the 60 million Americans who use p2p networks?

In the ongoing SCO v. IBM legal battle, IBM recently filed a motion for partial summary judgment (pdf) as to one of their many counter-claims against SCO.

The claim in question asserts that SCO has violated the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) which covers GNU/Linux distributions by implementing its SCOsource Licensing program that attempts to extract licensing fees from GNU/Linux users. This is a violation of the GPL because its terms insist that one may only charge for the physical cost of transferring a copy of the code, not the $699 SCO asks for a single CPU running GNU/Linux and certainly not the $4,999 they want for an 8-CPU machine. IBM also argues that SCO is distributing sixteen of IBM's own contributions to the kernel, while simultaneously rejecting the GPL license that covers them. IBM effectively asks, "What's up with that? You want to distribute our code, you have to accept our license."

First of all, the IBM brief linked above is remarkably well-argued. I would hardly change a word of this thorough brief, except perhaps to emphasize more the SCOsource program and the high licensing fees SCO is charging for GPL-covered code. Perhaps that is what the brief does in the redacted portions. (But as I'll mention later, this may be a smart strategic move by IBM, because the licensing fees are actually irrelevant.)

Second and more importantly, if IBM were to lose this motion it would not mean that the GPL is not enforceable. This message should be spread far and wide in the coming days so that people who are not attorneys do not over-react if this decision goes SCO's way. While I think it could, I also think it shouldn't. Here's why:

The currently available video of the INDUCE hearing is missing what was perhaps the day's most stomach-turning moment: MaryBeth Peters swooning over Sen. Orrin Hatch. Was this display of a burgeoning bureaucratic/legislative romance simply Too Hot for TV? Nope. Its absence is due to nothing less mundane than a few dropped frames in the video capture.

Here's the missing scene.