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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]
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.
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?
Had this information got free the satallite providers could have lost a *lot* of money.
Did the information get free? Did the [sarcasm]poor corporations[/sarcasm] lose a lot of money? You don't put people to death if they don't actually kill someone. similarly, you ought not be fined for money that could have been lost, but wasn't.
food for thought: cable descramblers aren't that hard to come by, yet cable companies, cable networks, etc. seem to be doing just fine. I doubt that had this information gotten out that it would have spelled the end of DirecTV, or even cost them that much.
my pet machine
" 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.
And why shouldn't he? DirectTV is beaming their signal into your brain at this very moment. Why should it be illegal to perform a mathematical transform on the EM passing through your own head?
Rough Translation:
"Anyone trying to steal satellite feeds deserves to rot in jail.
Especially if he doesn't tell me how to do it too."
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
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.
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
Note: I'm not taking any sides here, just bringing up a fact.
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?
Really? I think there is a valid bit of constitutional law here.
Who owns the electro-magnetic fields in my house? Does DirectTV own them, or may I sample them freely?
Now, I respect the rights of DirecTV to make money by selling cable through the airwaves, but I have a real problem with the government telling me what I can and cannot do with EMFs someone else is beaming into my house.
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"
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