The Department of Justice is stepping up its efforts to help the entertainment industry battle the increasing threat of P2P. As many of our readers know, the entertainment industry, represented mostly by RIAA and MPAA has been suing illegal movie and music swappers. Now the target has changed - from going after the users to going after the operators of peer-to-peer hubs which provide information to individual users as to what files are located where on the network.

Trowbirdge of New York and Chocoine of Texas each pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to one count of conspiracy to commit felony copyright infringement. Both operated P2P hubs offering wide variety of computer games, music, and movies.

"Those who steal copyrighted material will be caught, even when they
use the tools of technology to commit their crimes," U.S. Attorney
General John Ashcroft says in a statement. "The theft of intellectual
property victimizes not only its owners and their employees, but also
the American people, who shoulder the burden of increased costs for
goods and services."

This is another of series arrests or pleas that the feds have reached in their increasing efforts to stop criminal copyright violations under the Copyright Act. Although copyright violations, large scale ones, are a major problem in the cyberspace, they are not nearly as dangerous of the problems that hackers and cyber-criminals pose to the critical infrastructure that almost all of the United States businesses rely on (which network do you think your bank uses to transmit info between branches?)

Although large amount of attention is paid to often teenage copyright violators who are arrested by brave officers, arraigned, and put to jail, very little attention is paid to serious networks of zombies, for example, that have the potential and capability to bring down a major Internet server, or worse. It seems like such intense federal efforts are driven by a deep-pocket interest in the United States, in the current case - the entertainment industry. Shouldn’t other deep pockets such as banks, utility companies, and ISPs join hands in lobbying Congress and the federal agencies in DC to step-up the true "criminal" threat online?