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Arrest in Caridi FBI Investigation
skillio writes "The FBI arrested one Russell Sprague in Illinois on Thursday in connection with the previously reported Carmine Caridi dvd screener leak investigation. Given the FBI's figure of up to 60 screeners a year provided by Caridi, and Sprague's clearly sophisticated setup, one can't help but wonder if this will prove to be the main, if not sole, source of these dvd screener leaks. Caridi has yet to be charged, but after he's admitted to supplying Sprague with screeners for the last 3-5 years, I highly doubt his innocence will remain unchallenged for very long."
There are only so many screeners sent out by studios - if this guy _was_ sending out as many as they say he did, he probably represented a large portion of all screeners posted to the internet.
If he was just sending the guy movies because he'd watched them and was done with them, the only laws he broke were of the Academy, not criminal laws. As it says in the first article, if he didn't know the movies were being copied, he's criminally innocent.
I can't really believe that Caridi really knew that his screeners were being uploaded to the Internet. He's an older guy, I wonder if he's even familiar with the Internet, much less file-sharing. Anyways, if they were guilty wouldn't he let this other guy know, so he could get rid of the evidence before the feds showed up?
It's pretty safe to say he won't be voting for the Academy Awards anymore.
Isn't it great that a FUCKING US ATTORNEY can't even get the infringement/theft thing straight? She should be disbarred for incompetence.
There's also this choice bit:
Among the movies being illegally sold off the Internet: "Master and Commander," "Last Samurai," "Matrix Revolutions," "Mystic River," "Gods and Generals," "Mighty Wind," "Matchstick Men," "Something's Gotta Give," "Love Actually," "Thirteen" and "Calendar Girls."
There is no evidencd he "sold" anything to anybody. Fuck CNN, they have no respectability anymore.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
It's nice to see the FBI arresting the person actually breaking the law, unlike the RIAA which suied napster and other P2P services for "providing a conduit to break the law." If the FBI thought like the RIAA, they would destroy all roads in the US, because they facilitate people breaking the speed limit.
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
I am probably going to be mod'ed as flamer, but still. I see a lot of double standards here (yeah, it's /., I know). These people broke the law. They should be punished.
People are complaining about wording in the article or from quotes (people suggesting they "stole" something). Does it really matter? Does the description of the act to a news reporter change the crime? If I describe a murderer's act as "He hurt the victims...", does that change the fact that the murderer committed the crime?
And for everyone complaining about how the big bad MPAA is going after people for these "littie" crimes. Remember, they are using the same laws that protect the Linux Kernel. When the community goes after a company that doesn't provide the source code they use, and don't follow the GPL, it's basically the same damn thing. We have rights they agreed to, and we expect them to act accordingly.
I mean, seriously, by suggesting that the MPAA shouldn't be going after these guys is tantamount to suggesting that the laws should be different for big companies and small companies.
Regardless of the current state of the laws in the country, that's just wrong. If these guys did commit crimes, nuff said. They should be punished.
Saying that they shouldn't be punished for committing a crime is just wrong.
Jason Lotito
It's not that simple. The identifying marks are red herrings. The real identifying marks will be obscured. This is easy to do with modern computing technology. Since they're already making multiple copies, and duplication is the hard part, they can stick assorted different symbols/logos into portions of the movie where they will not be noticed. Even easier; Chop specific scenes down here and there by a second or two. If you're writing the mastering software it should be easy to drop MPEG frames off the end of a clip, alter the header, and create your image for burning without screwing anything up. It would also be fairly trivial to add in assorted sounds which are not found in the movie normally, or time-shift them, by overlaying them onto the audio track later. Studios typically have not done this to date because it is harder than not doing anything, but they will start doing it, because they can't just stop sending out screeners (though screeners will typically be sent to less and less people, I think - maybe we'll start seeing more workprints, which must hurt their bottom line less) but they still want to discourage copying.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"