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$180 Million for Piracy Conspiracy
theCoder writes "According to an AP story printed in the Orlando Sentinel, Steven R. Frazier has been ordered to pay $180 million restitution for attempting to sell a device that would decrypt the satellite signals sent into everyone's homes. In addition to spending the next 5 years in Federal prison, Frazier will have to pay $500 a month for the next 30,000 years, though no one really expects him to live long enough to make all the payments. That value is based on estimated loses DirectTV and Echostar may have incurred had Frazier been able to sell his devices. Being ordered to pay restitution for actual damages is one thing, but paying for some made up number of future damages? Maybe if I catch someone trying to break into my car, I can sue him for the damage he would have caused if he succeeded..."
That value is based on estimated loses DirectTV and Echostar may have incurred had Frazier been able to sell his devices.
they don't put people to death for attempted murder, do they? that seems a little harsh to me.
There is something severely wrong about financially crippling somebody for life.. it is just totally out of proportion. Someone needs to pass round the smelling salts to the judges.
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
If he'll be in jail for years how can he pay that much money per month?
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
When I was a kid you actually had to commit a crime before arrest, trial and conviction.
IMHO having to pay that money indefinately is essentially slavery, and any sane person would flee to another country to regain thier freedom.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
In this case the key element was information. Had this information got free the satallite providers could have lost a *lot* of money. There would be no way to stop the spread of the information.
Murder or robbery is a bad example. Everyone knows how to do it, there isn't much special knowledge involved.
It's very, very apples to oranges.
It says that "The companies estimate they could have lost $900 million" (Firstly this number is overinflated.)
Many of the people that were part of this scheme dont have the money to pay for satellite legally. They chose the illegal option because it was what they can afford. Thus it is not lost revenue to the companies since these people would never have paid full price.
The same goes with things like.... ohh.. say mp3's. I would not go out and buy a cd. I have a perfecty good radio and am happy to listen to that.
Just my $0.02
See the forbiden post Here
And why should we feel sorry for Mr. Frazier? The man probably tried to sell his findings for a profit. I say good riddance. I would feel more sympathetic towards him have he GPL'ed the decryption method.
" An estimated 3 million people illegally watch satellite television using devices that unscramble satellite TV signals. The industry estimates it loses $4 billion a year in revenue."
Is that right? Satellite TV costs well over $1000 a year? No wonder people don't want to pay for it.
They can't possibly be worried about lost ad revenue, because those people are all watching the ads.
Weasel maths, I'm guessing.
Talk about the punishment not fitting the crime? How long will it be before we are all Winston Smith, hiding our thoughts? They really need to appeal this ruling be and win before this gets more out of control than it already is.
Strong words... Strong words from a strange man ~ Kent Brockman
*twitch*
Oh, his rights! Too harsh! Communists! Innocent until proven guilty! Judges suck!
Come on. You all will have a knee-jerk reaction to anything. With just a few paragraphs of fluff from an AP report to base your statements on, you freely second guess our legal system and judges.
This guy pleaded guilty. Obviously he and his lawyer thought there was a pretty solid case against him. Have any of you criticizing this case seen any of the evidence? If you have more knowledge of this case that the rest of us, how about posting a like along with your breathless comments.
Myself, I'm glad what happened to this guy. I think everyone these days knows well that what he was doing is illegal. This guy deserved to be make an example of.
What would have been so bad about using his obvious skills to get a real job and earn an honest income? How about not being to damn greedy and selfish?
Obviously Frazier has been given a sentence which is outrageously out of proportion to his crimes. But let's think about things from a different point of view...
I live in an area which has its share of crime. Not crime like Frazier's, ordinary crime like vandalism, graffiti, burglaries and so on. The police are always hugely overstretched in trying to respond to these things. Now house burglaries cause far more distress than anything that Frazier did. Vandalism and the like take far more out of a neighbourhood than anything Frazier did.
Yet, Frazier is worthy of some massive surveillance operation. We are entitled to ask why limited police resources were used in this way.
"It isn't technologically feasible for them to beam solely to subscribers and non-subscribers"
Is exactly my point. The technology is flawed. I mean if I mailed a book to everyone in the US just because sorting addresses is too hard can I sue you for reading the book?
*They* beam data into *my* house. Tough cookies if I examine it.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
With the crap you get on TV (terrestrial, cable, satellite, whatever ...), is it worth risking that much money and jail time ?
...
I could set up an illegal repository of OCRed books, a la Gutemberg project, but with recent releases, and probably only risk a nasty slap on the hand in court compared to this guy, despite the fact that I would provide content that often requires a lot more work and talent to make, and would give people a lot more culture than, say, Jerry Springer. Funny
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I have no sympathy for this guy. It is one thing to casually trade music. It's another to be selling pirated music to people. He wasn't simply giving away the decryption devices to people - he was trying to make money off a crime.
True, he hasn't actually caused all this damage yet, but the article says that he already had 5000 orders for these decryption devices and he was trying to crack the latest DTV cards. Furthermore, this isn't the first time he's been arrested. The article says that he had been arrested in 2000 for the same crime and was let go.
This is not a guy who was just doing this casually. He was trying to make money and already had a warning. Maybe $180 million is too much, but it's not like they expect him to pay it. It's more to make a statement to other pirates who are doing this for profit. Remember that DirecTV is a company that needs to make money. There aren't even moral arguments here like with the RIAA and artists.
The fact this case looks like the principle behind Minority Report - arrest people BEFORE they commit crimes - is undeniable, however, there's something a bit more frightening. I didn't see nor read Minority Report, but correct me if I'm wrong, in that movie/novel, people are imprisoned because the Law is sure you're going to do some bad out there - and for the majority of cases they're right because that's what would have happened. (then there's the problem about a minority...)
u sed-for-massive-copyright-infringement ?
But here, we aren't talking about predicted crimes. We're talking about POTENTIAL breakings of the law.
Should the corporates have caught the guy actually selling the thing, they would effectively had reasons to sue him like hell, but as it seems, he hadn't even begun to do so.
I know, the same guy had already been having quite a lot of problems with that the previous years, but, hey, it seems to me you are free to do whatever pleases you as long as it doesn't breaks the law, right ? Here, the DoJ's anticipation got a bit too far. What's the problem with carrying around some-electronics-stuff-that-could-potentially-be-
There's a context, a record behind the man. But it once stood somewhere into the brains of at least SOME policemen/inspectors/lawyers/judges that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty. Where's the guilt here ? They could have permanently glued someone on his tail, tapped into any communication line the POTENTIAL "criminal" used, and caught him the moment he was "officially" - that means, to the eye of the public, and to the eye of the law - causing "financial harm" to the companies.
That's not what they did, it seems. Judging he was going to get dangerous again, they ensured he'd be punished before he could do any real harm.
In some ways it resembles what happened to people who looked "suspect" to the authorities, a few days and weeks after some madman decided to scare the hell out of any proud American out there - and achieved his goal the best way possible. Remember 9/11, right ? Since then, as it seems, you can be arrested for the seemingly arbitrary reason of suspected terrorism.
In the case I'm talking about, it's (heavily) suspected copyright/rights infringement. In the first case, at best you save lives. Here, at best, you save money. Quite a proof that in the mind of way too much people out there, human lives and money have become quite the same in terms of value...
Simply put : the rights of those who've got the money, therefore the power, are enforced, and this, now is possible even before said rights are violated.
That's widening the subject to a wider debate, but I do not call that justice, knowing that your rights won't be as efficiently defended should you not have enough zeros on your accounts. I do not call that Justice.
Anyway, what's the most scary is that the US calls that vision of things justice. And are pretending it is fair. Come on...
Besides, you just can't demand $180M from a physical person. This is even beyond our good ol' friend Gates' reach. Not to mention the fact this amount was "evaluated". How ?
- Hadriven
In America if you start a business, and you almost succeed, you don't get anything. But if you try to break the law, and don't succeed, you get punished?
Stuff like attempted murder or attempted armed robbery is reasonable to punish. By doing these crimes, you terrorize people and waste their time. From the sound of this case, the only time wasted was his own. He didn't hurt anyone, yet he still gets punished? The conspiracy charge might be warranted, but the fine is ridiculous. Maybe someday McDonald's can sue me because i conspired to go to Wendy's instead.
Also, I'm tired of all these businesses talking about hypothetical losses. "The industry estimates it loses $4 billion a year in revenue." I'm sorry, but you can't tell if you're losing something you never had in the first place. The majority of these 3 million people probably wouldn't pay for the service if they couldn't descramble it, so that's revenue The Industry would never have to lose. Granted, they are losing some money, but there's no way it's even close to $4billion.
In other news, mcp33p4n75 is losing 10 trillion dollars a year in revenue from freeloaders who won't pay for the air they breathe...
Not quite... there are many other uses for a knife, but not many other uses for a satellite signal decoder (doorstop maybe?)
True, as far as you go.
But how many of those people would have actually subscribed to those additional channels if they had to pay?
Any rational estimate of lost revenue has to take that into account.
Gordon.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
Frazier was arrested in October 2002, when Customs agents tracking his operations found computer chips and hacking gear in his luggage on a flight from Canada.
Computer chips are illegal? And "hacking gear"? What would that be, a keyboard? A soldering iron? An oscilloscope?
OK, let's forget about the $500/month payment and just focus on the FIVE YEARS in prison for a crime he never actually committed. To top it all off, this wasn't even a serious crime; it was IP infringement, which is already a sketchy area to begin with.
Every time something like this happens, I always see a few people that say "good, they broke the law, they got their punishment", well I have a little something called "empathy".
Put yourself in their shoes, would you like it if you were sent to federal prison for five years just because you might have cut into the profits of an already greedy and overpaid corporation? You need to put this in perspective, people charged with assault and other various violent crimes get off easier than this. This is complete and total bullshit and you people are just going to sit there and not only take it, but praise the government for brining another "dangerous criminal" to justice. Let me make it absolutely clear that the he didn't actually do anything, he was charged with conspiracy to do something.
Doesn't the amount of power that corporations are demonstrating they have SCARE YOU at all? Or are you just to completely oblivious to the world around you?
I don't know why people consider decrypting signals broadcast into their homes theft.
In any case, this supposed crime has been unusually punished. Confiscations, judicial extortion, banishments, these are the hallmarks of tyrany.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I guess this establishes precedence to sue/charge anyone who builds a hammer, sells it to a car thief who uses it to break my windshield and steal my car. Is this the same line of logic, or not? Am I missing something? I saw a reply to this post calling for "us" to get off our buts and do something instead of just talking about it. So, I'll "vote" with my money and not use satellite services. I've already decided not to buy an music CDs...
jg
If I recall, there was a movie last year called: "Minority Report" that involved this very same thing. The premise was that people could be jailed for what they MIGHT do.
I guess the judge here must have seen that movie while on LSD and confused fantasy with reality!
Oh give me a break. THe DMCA was passed under Clinton and so was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, so dont act as if Bush should get all the blame.
Was that particular judge appointed by Bush?
Comments? Explanations from any legal brains out there?
I'll admit, I have trouble feeling sorry for any of those companies when I'm paying $50/month for "basic" cable that sucks and they are cleaning up on my addiction to Iron Chef....
WBGG
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos