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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 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?
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.
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
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