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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.
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...
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.
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.
This is insane. But then again there is so much more of this going on around the US and Canada right now that is not discussed. Actually not sure if the people of slashdot are aware but awhile back there was an article on a website called Pirate's Den where he was being forced to close down and opened another site to make people aware called Freedom Fight.ca. Well he was gagged the other morning and is now unable to operate his FREE SPEECH website anymore cause DTV has slapped a lawsuit on him and to boot a gag order. So this Frazier guy is only an example of what goes on each and everyday in the US and Canada. Judges seem to be on the side of big business and big brother these days. Its sad.
Another site with information regarding this issue is www.live103.com
future crime? Get the precogs out!
--
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?
" 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*
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?).
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.
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 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
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.
Note: I'm not taking any sides here, just bringing up a fact.
I immediately don't trust any website that throws that many popups at me.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
...will he get cable in his cell? And will he have to pay for it?
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
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
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!
Not quite... there are many other uses for a knife, but not many other uses for a satellite signal decoder (doorstop maybe?)
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?
There's the old gem of a story of the man who was sentenced to death but tried to kill himself while waiting on death row. He was declared legally dead as doctors battled to save him (pretty ironic: 'let's save him from death so that we can kill him!') but through some miracle was revived and declared to have served his sentence and was released.
What a great line for chicks at parties:
You know, I just got out of prison....
Really? What was your sentence?
*Pause for effect, then grin* Death....
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
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?
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 |
And your reaction is knee-jerk as well. On the same amount of information you have come a different set of conclusions. The difference between your set of knee-jerk reactions and other peoples knee-jerk reactions are purely based on the point of view you came into the discussion with. -Points of view you entered with and left with.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Read this explanation from a political science professor, for instance, and try not to be confused. The author, in attempting to reconcile the absurd acts of modern legislatures with actual legal theory, has even managed to confuse himself:
What? He admits that a crime of omission cannot exist because it is an oxymoron. This conclusion is dependent upon the basic definition of crime that has existed since time immemorial: crime requires injury. An injury is an act committed against someone that results in harm to them.
Not doing something is not a crime; it isn't even an act. Yet, implicit also in the acceptance of "prescribed" rules of conduct being punishable as "crimes" is the acceptance of "crimes of omission," which he himself states is an oxymoron.
Thinking about doing something isn't an act, either. It would be more properly termed a thought crime, regardless of what Mr. Gates says.
It should be obvious that even the intellectual charlatans who affix themselves to the coattails of oppressive governments and attempt to explain logically it's actions cannot, in the process, help but become confused themselves.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Well, maybe he should have used the Chewbacca Defense...
In the "Chef Aid" episode, Chef is accused of trying to steal the song "Stinky Britches," which he really wrote many years ago. The record company takes Chef to court, and they hire Johnny Cochran to prosecute Chef. The whole town is wondering if he will use his famous "Chewbacca Defense," which he used during the O.J. Simpson trial. Here's a transcript:
Later in that same episode, Cochran has a change of heart and defends Chef when Chef sues the record company. Again, he uses the Chewbacca Defense, although with some minor changes:
Eventually, Chef wins the case and all is well.
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.
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.
Could we sue them for the current and future losses do to the perversion of democracy? What would that be -- a few hundred billion? Maybe a trillion?
nah, I would say Democracy isn't worth much more than the blue book value these days, maybe $250. Needs an awful lot of work, most of the parts need to be replaced, I think you might be better off getting a new one.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
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
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?
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?
value proposition and its relationship to the judgement at hand.
These companies are making their programming appear to be worth far more than it really is.
I used to subscribe to one of these services. Got the dish, wired my home, basically did the whole bit. Picture was nice, but there was a problem
150 channels plus premium and STILL NOT A FSCKING THING ON! At $60 - $80 per month US, this was not ok. Every time the value of the bundle drops, they either add more channels, split those they have and add more commercials, or manupulate the bundles in ways that drive more revenue (read require more of our money for the same content) their way.
Went to Radio Shack and got a nice antenna. Funny thing about antennas. They cost about the same as they did years ago and still come in the same boxes. How many different cable / sat devices have to needed to own over the years. Is that cost worth what you received?
Now, I purchase DVD media with the money I used to spend on subscription TV. They must all compete on content value or they don't get my dollars. I don't think most people get as much out of the system as they think. It is packaged and promoted in a way that looks like a good value but really isn't.
I purchase a very small percentage of what is produced each year. I just might buy more if they worked harder to provide it. I might even double what I spend now if what I want is easy to get, but its not. To me, this means that most of what we are getting via subscription programming is almost worthless.
If it were really that good, I would pay, but it's not.
These companies see *everyone* as a customer, yet do not have to compete on almost any basis for their wares. Subscription programming used to be a big deal when it was started. Many folks could not get any decent broadcast content; others wanted the premium content and were willing to pay. Early systems required infrastructure, equipment and other things that justify the price.
Congress is wanting to basically kill broadcast TV so they can hand even more money to these companies via the spectrum; at our expense no less.
So, where is the competition? It's not like we have a lot of satellite providers. Kind of hard to put up that many units. Cable is granted a monopoly. Lets say you manage to sell me on competition; that it exists, not the concept. How can we evaluate the worth of the programming?
They do not sell per channel, or per use (other than insane PPV.) What if I want to purchase some programming from them. Maybe Sci-fi, Food Network, HBO, Showtime and a couple of others I see value in. Can I pay 29.95? No. Why not?
Do we know how much we have paid for infrastructure? What are the costs there? Is it being built out or maintained? How long do they get to keep what is in the public interests?
The whole thing looks to be nothing more than a shell game. At least when I purchase media, I have some understanding of its true cost and some understanding of its relative worth.
I can know this worth because there are many suppliers, I know because I can resell the content to others and see what they are willing to pay. Try taking a lame DVD to a swap shop. They will almost make you pay to get them to take it off your hands.
I can produce these things myself and understand the costs from that angle if I want. (Though they *really* don't want that to happen --and for good reason.)
In short, any number these guys propose is simply an indication of their wants, not their needs and that is a problem in the judgement of this case.
I can clearly understand the crime of selling decryption devices for paid programming services. I have problems with the nature of the services, but the crime is clear. I don't understand the result of the information crime however. I just cannot assess the value of the damage to the public and the sat companies. Any court that takes their numbers on their merits is wrong on moral
Blogging because I can...
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
I thought someone was OFFERING $180 million for a piracy conspiracy and I was ready to step up...
Oh, well, back to temping...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!