Videogame Pirate Gets Long Jail Sentence

Thanks to the San Jose Business Journal for its article discussing the sentencing of a notable videogame pirate to 50 months in prison after being found guilty on charges of "copyright infringement and... mail fraud." According to the piece: "[Sean Michael] Breen... admitted that he was a leader in the Internet-based piracy group known as Razor1911. Since the early 1990s, Razor1911 had sought to achieve a reputation in the underground Internet piracy community... as the leading distributor of cracked computer and console game software." A report at GameSpot has further details, noting Razor1911 "...acquired advance copies of [videogame] titles by posing as reviewers for fictitious game magazines and having them shipped to a derelict storefront address in Oakland."

Comments

Re:Whoa...

[Babbster]

It seems that this Slashdot submission ignores the part of the article that probably contributed the most towards the 4+-year sentence:

"Mr. Breen also admitted that he had illegally used an online customer account of Cisco Systems to order hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware by falsely posing as one of Cisco's existing customers."
"After receiving the hardware, Mr. Breen sold it on the grey market at a heavy discount off the normal price of the hardware, prosecutors say."

He was stealing real physical property in addition to his software piracy. The fact that it was worth "hundreds of thousands of dollars" made the copyright violations almost superfluous. In light of those violations, the sentence doesn't seem harsh at all.

Re:He'll be missed

[dakryx]

His major screw up was the mail fraud. Don't scew with the mail system, the goverment doesn't fuck around when it comes to that.

For people who yell RTFM you should the RTFA

[Bruce J L]

Please people how many times must you be told that the jail was for stealing 600k worth of cisco hardware. Steal that much and you deserve jail time.