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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..."
Sounds to me like something right of Minority Report. When the movie came out, I took it as something that probably wouldn't happen anywhere in the near future, but now it seems that you can punished for crimes that you may have committed just as harshly as if you'd committed them. The limits to the lunacity of our court system seems to have no limit....
what was the exact definition of "hacking gear" again?
it was a laptop and quartz crystals last I looked, but they might have changed it...
Hey, at least it's not 1.9 billion or trillion or whatever the RIAA tried to get out of those collage students.
Anyway, This still seems ridiculous. I'm guessing that the $180 million figure was what would have happened if every single person who has DSS right now switched to the illegal free system. That's like Eli Lilly suing a company that made Ecstasy, based on the argument that everyone taking Prozac might switch to Ecstasy. The only way that they would have lost all of that money is if the DMCA had been repealed (although, I think decrypting satellite data may have been illegal before the DMCA, not sure though) and the devices were made legal.
Even then, they could have simply switched to a new encryption standard. Just mail out new access cards and that would be it.
(btw, I wonder how these systems work. I have a friend who's been getting free DSS TV for a couple years now, the feild is intresting)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
See what I don't get is why people don't question satelite tv in the first place.
I mean with Cable at least you have to *physically* hookup to their drop boxes [re: their property]. That at least counts as theft of services.
But with satelite they beam the RF to your house regardless. I mean I'm bathing in 30 different versions of friends right now [stupid time shifting].
It seems that if the satelite companies don't want non-customers to receive service they shouldn't beam to non-customers. Otherwise by a similar exageration of the law can I sue them for tresspassing? I never gave them perission to make the RF energy appear in my house.
I hereby order StarTV to construct an RF shield dome for my house!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
That is going to leave a mark. Not just on him, but it's chilling when you consider that this could set a precedent for future cases.
Imagine if I was create a new file sharing program, and then I was to be forced to pay restitution of $1000 a month for enternity because it could be used to illegaly distribute material (movies, software etc)
Will I create this software? Hell no. With the imaginary axe of potential damage looming over the heads of would be programers and developers, its going to become a gamble for any individual to try and develop any type of new software.
What if you build a new OS, MS or someone claims that you stole part of their code, or claims that it poses a massive security threat or whatever, use your imagination, and proactively sues you for a few billion in damages that might be caused by your software. Now your company is gone, and the big kids keep ruling the block. Where the hell is due process?
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Since when is decrypting a signal illegal? I don't see that in the canadian criminal code and I doubt its in the american one too.
The OP point was you can legally own a decoder though some argue you cannot legally operate it without a license [I'd argue the opposite].
Just like you can legally own a cell scanner, operate it, but you cannot use the info to defraud people.
You have to actually *commit* a crime before you arrest people. Otherwise you wind up on the slippery slope where kitchen knifes are all tools of murderers.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Weasel maths, I'm guessing.
Indeed. The $4Billion they calculate is based on what it would cost those 3 million people to subscribe to every single channel available, which is what those people are supposedly watching. At least they're not adding in what it would cost to purchase every single pay-per-view (even the ones running concurrently), like they do when asking for damages in court. Nice logical rationale: "if we don't know what they watched, we must assume they watched everything-- at the same time"
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Three million people, twelve months in a year. That makes for thirty-six million monthly payments. Roughly $100 per month per person descrambling. That's about right considering it's about $40-50 per month flat and if you add in premium channels, pay-per-view, etc. it could reach/exceed that $100/month figure (after all, are you just going to unscramble basic service or the whole damn thing while you're at it?).
I have come around to believing this bumper-sticker philosophy
The fact that such ridiculous court decisions are being made, with nary a chance of ever being realized (like 30,000 years, or in Jordan'case billions of dollars) means that there is a disconnect between the laws of copyright and the reality of digital distribution. Crazy models and interpretations that generally came out of the academic confines of class rooms, are now coming from the real world of the courts.
I fully respect someone's ideas, and completely am against plagarism. But I am starting to differ about how much they should be allowed to profit from them, and am starting to see how the role of piracy is underappreciated in the wide dissemination of ideas.
The decision whether piracy is good or bad must be made based on two factors:
We are in a new world, unimaginable even 10 years ago. We can make infinite and perfect copies of a product, something which we could never could earlier.
And here we are being trapped into artificial market segmentations by middlemen who, thanks to the FCC and Powell, are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger ... This is just pathetic .... (maybe I am a little harsh, but after hearing about the RIAA decision to sue thousands of file-sharers I am not in a very generous mood).
The providers of content that can be digitized, just have to forge a stronger relationship with the audience ... they have to use their static and digitized content as a "marketing and business card" towards the development of a dynamic relationship between the audience and the engines of creation.
I will reverse myself in any court of law, but right now I say Kill Plagiarism Support Piracy ...
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Since he will being doing 5 years in jail and paying $500/month for the rest of his life for something he had been planning on doing but never did, does that mean that after he gets out of jail is he allowed to go ahead with his plan? Instead of of a sentence, this sounds more like a bizarre licensing agreement similiar to the tax on CD's in case you intend to use them to pirate music or software.
My next Slashdot post will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
the deal here is that the ruling was for $180,000,000 SORT OF. IF this guy could afford $180,000,000, he would have had to pay it.
And the woman originally just wanted them to pay her medical expenses, which they refused.
What if these companies were to disappear in 10 years ...?
Move to Mexico. Finish the device there. Sell it to the black market satellite world for a huge amount, as originally planned. Move to some latin american country with no extradition treaty. (Brazil?)
No, otherwise Bell Expressvu and StarChoice wouldn't exist. It's just that those two are the only licenced broadcasters allowed to broadcast into Canada.
This is where the big grey area occurs .. DirecTV and Dish etc are not allowed to broadcast into Canada, so, obviously, they're also not allowed to sell the equipment here. It's not illegal for Canadians to own the equipment. It's also not illegal to recieve DirecTV broadcasts because DirecTV isn't allowed to broadcast here. If they made a law saying Canadians aren't allowed to recieve the signals, then that's basically contradicting the fact DirecTV isn't allowed to broadcast here.
Note: IANAL, and this is just how it's been explained to me.
Speak before you think
There is something severely wrong about financially crippling a company and potentially many of it's employees by selling a device designed to steal a valuable service. This is not out of proportion. It's 6 grand a year for as long as he chooses to live in a country that can enforce it. Big deal. He knew it was illegal.
He can always... uhm.... pick up soap for money.
/. humour. How amusing. Given the proportion of the population of the US in jail, it strikes me that there is something deeply sick in the psyche of many American males...
Anal rape and prositution in prison: always one of the mainstays of
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
The information is already free. It's just in encrypted form. This is not something like stealing cable, where you buy a connection - agreeing to pay for it - and then reneg. These satellite fuckers are beaming this shit everywhere, without our permission. One has to wear a tinfoil hat to keep these (harmless, but that's not the point) signals from going through our brains.
A device like this should be completely legal. Apples to apples? It's like me reciting my own copyrighted poetry in France and then suing any bilingual Frenchman for not paying for my official translator.
c-hack.com |
This is just one more in a long line of extortion suits DirecTV has been filing over the past few months. They have sent out lawsuit threats to over 100,000 end users who in many cases have done nothing more than purchase an ISO Standard Smart Card reader.
Basically they offer a settlement for $4000 or they take you to federal court. So far almost 7000 people have had federal civil cases filed.
The whole process is self perpetuating. Most people can't afford to defend a federal case so they can use the settlement cash to take the rest to court.
"Planning" to break the law should not be a crime unless someone will be physically injured.
This "potential" damage crap is just ludicrous. I don't give a rat's ass what some employee from one of the Dish companies thinks to the contrary.
Anything else takes us down the path to thought control.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
The Shire of Kalamunda (satellite city in Perth, Western Australia) has (or had) a bizarre law on its books that specified a fine for operating a two or four stroke motor between midnight and midnight on Sundays. Why so specific? Why only Sundays?
It turns out that this particular law is due to a single councilor who lived in sunny Bickley, in Kalamunda's East Ward. Said Councillor was in the habit of going out and "raging" (nightclubbing, partying etc) every Saturday night, coming home at silly- o'clock on Saturday morning (or sometimes holding the party at his house and keeping his neighbours up to silly o'clock), and expecting to sleep in until the sun was over the crow's-nest.
The sand in this particular vaseline was his many Seventh-day Adventist neighbours, who after enjoying a refreshingly restful Sabbath day between sunset Friday and sunset Saturday would get up early on Sunday morning, full of beans, vim vigour and vitality, and start doing stuff. Like mowing their lawns not before 07:00 as per the excessive noise laws.
Three or more neighbours running two-stroke mowers was not exactly what Mr I-went-to-bed-at-04:23 wanted to hear at 07:00, so he acted. He went out and talked to his neighbours about it - not. Instead, he talked the Shire into enacting a "Blue Law" prohibiting the operation of two-stroke motors throughout the Shire between midnight and midnight on Sundays.
Not to be outdone in the lets-resolve-this stakes, and of course turning their collective backs on 1Thessalonians5:14-15, the dawn chorus in Bickley the following Sunday included a four-stroke-mowers section from all of his neighbours. Taking care not to abuse his position as Councillor, Mr I-went-to-bed-at-04:23 then had the law amended to include four-stroke motors.
The consequences included that as he was driving his car home at 04:07 on Sunday morning, he broke his own law. Any propellor-driven aircraft flying over the Shire were in violation, and so on. I don't think he realised how lucky he was that turbine-driven mowers are still hard to buy. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's $500 a month. Chump change.
You should move out of your parents basement.. $500 a month ain't chump change when you have real bills to pay.
I live in a highrise apartment next to Comiskey Park. I look out my window; I see an ongoing ballgame. I sit down and watch the game. I didn't pay for the right to see the game, but due to the nature of the "content", I am able to view it anyway.
Am I a criminal?
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
with Iraq. Come now people - around 67% of the US population supported Bush's preemptive strike against Iraq because of what might happen... if they actually had the weapons.
If our oracle-like leader of the so-called free world can make these decisions then what's wrong with this type of punishment? The people are for it.
You have to actually *commit* a crime before you arrest people.
Conspiring to commit a crime is a crime as well. If you don't believe this, head down to your local donut shop with your friends and plot out plans for robbing an armoured car: About 15 minutes later you'll be in cuffs, though probably ignorantly claiming that you've done nothing (yet). Plenty of people get arrested before they've actually committed the crime.
As a sidenote, if you carry a weapon with the provable intent of committing a crime with it, you can be charged. If you have burglary tools, such as a screwdriver, and you're sneaking around someone's house at night, you can be charged.
Conspiracy to commit
In other news, Microsoft sued Linus Torvalds and all companies distributing Linux and they were forced to pay for all the licenses to Microsoft software that would have been bought if Linux had not been released for free. Then again, isn't this pretty much what SCO is doing?
The satallite TV business plan:
Put a free can of stew every day in every mailbox in North America and sell can openers.
Note that this business plan only works if the government imprisons everyone who tries to use their own can opener. The law does NOT exist to fix broken business models. DirectTV has absolutely no right to expect people to be put in prison for decryption. Hell, with enough effort I can do the decryption calculations purely mentally. The law therefore makes it a crime to think certain thoughts.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.