Slashdot Mirror
Feds Convict Warez Dealer
XaviorPenguin writes "News.com.com.com has a story that says the DoJ has '...landed its first conviction against an American defendant trapped via Operation Fastlink, a multinational law enforcement effort undertaken against online software piracy. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa said that Jathan Desir, 26, of Iowa City, has pleaded guilty to charges related to his role in a criminal enterprise that distributed pirated software, games, movies and music over the Internet.' Desir is the first conviction that Operation Fastlink has done. He will possibly serve up to 15 years in prison when his sentencing is in March 18, 2005. Previous Slashdot articles are included here(1), here(2), and most recently here(3)."
Queue "Rapists get less time" posts. If you think this is unfair punishment, lobby your congressmen, complaining about in on /. will accomplish slightly less then nothing.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Why go with "warez" but eschew the customary "d00d"?
Is it just me, or does a possible 15 years in prison seem a bit harsh for a pirate? I know, I know, he cause who knows how much damage in money but he didn't rape someone. Hell, people who rape get less time in prison.
...Or you'll sit next to Bubba, the convicted butt pirate.
This is just a scare conviction, an example to those who pirate. Beware!
------ ( Read More... | 666 of 682 comments )
Fifteen years for distributing data. The jail time for violent crimes must be way longer than that!
What? What's that, you say? You can be in prison for less than a year for beating the shit out of another human being?
Something is terribly wrong with this system.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
... it's just scary.
... it's just another world.
In one case you've destroyed an individual- taken his/her dignity, the right to be safe, the very 'temple' of his/her body with a violent act such as rape.
In another, we have little bits of signal that have 'more' importance than the afore mentioned victim.
I have always been cynical and said everything comes down to money- religion, lawyers, corporations- it all revolves around that little dollar sign.
But when you hear about someone getting locked away for 15 years (sorry Kevin)
And it scares me.
Can't let such a good opportunity to be wasted. After all, an article like this will bring in hundreds of outraged posts complaining about how infringing on other peoples' copyright should be OK and how the feds are oppressing us.
Kudos to Taco for having a good business sense.
Only on /. do dupes include links to previous versions.
I see this going the way of the "war on drugs" in the way they jail people...but is this really going to stop the flow of mp3's or software or movies? I mean, do they REALLY think they're going to stop this now that the genie is out of the bottle?
Perhaps, they should re-think their distribution methods on how they receive payment for their work/art.
I don't have the answers or even a suggestion...but jailing people left and right certainly isn't working on drug use...why do they think it will work here?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Of course, people are still having unprotected sex, too.
The CB App. What's your 20?
I was hoping that we as a society was passed the "add an X or Z to something to make it sound exciting" phase in our development. 1. Fire 2. Agriculture 3. Industry 4. IT 5. eXtreme 6. Time-travelling Deloreans 7. Rise of the Machines 8. Rise of the ancient Old Ones 9. ??? 10. Profit?
From warez pirate to butt p1rat3 in 15 years...
I
Is copyright infringement a felony offense? I thought it was more of a civil issue and resulted in fines and such? And what is the justification the US government is using to justify doing the **AA's bidding? Let the **AAs findthese guys, then sue them. Take 'em to court for damages. I don't get it. Seriously..
What is your penile percentile?
Wasn't PWA's founder Robin Rothburg a conviction as well, and was he from the US? How can this be the first conviction? http://www.cybercrime.gov/pwa_verdict.htm
Some call me Howie Feltersnatch
Violent cimes-- the ones that really matter-- tend to be crimes that lend you in state prison. State prisons are overstuffed so if you go in, you get out on parole in a fraction of the time you were sentenced for.
Crimes against property and society, like running a web server or giving someone drugs, tend to be felonies. Federal prison == no parole.
"In Germany, they first came for the communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist, Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics. I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak up." - Rev. Martin Niemöller.
Next...
Well, it doesn't cost (in theory) millions of dollars to fix some jackass's face after a well-deserved ass-whuppin'.
They're basing the punishment on the (theoritical) cost of the crime. They mentioned the value of the pirated stuff at $50mil. That's quite a lot of money - hence quite a lot of software to be pirating.
What they DON'T really mention, as far as I saw, was whether this guy was putting up stuff for download, or was actually *selling pirated software*. If the former, the punishment should be far far FAR more lenient. But of course, the software lobby wouldn't look at it that way.
Reminds me of Operation Sundevil back in the 80's. Three guys in the Legion of Doom (one of which I met shortly after he got released) got sent to the pokey over that E911 document. The baby bell claimed the document was valued at some ginormous amount - and the way they reached that figure? They counted the costs of all the computers, etc. that were used to create the document. Meaning, if one employee opened that document and made one tiny change, they decided that that document was worth however much it was *plus* the cost of the computer or terminal that was used by that guy. Insane!
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
While I commend the law and the government for doing their jobs, I don't think that it should be illegal for warez tu be distributed. Maybe I'm just too much of a commie, but I think that something should be freely redistributable if the people redistributing or receiving it don't put any additional burden on the company that manufactures it.
But I still don't do it, because for moral reasons I follow the law whether I agree with it or not.
Le français vous intéresse?
A possible 15 years for software piracy? That's insane!
I think even one year would be enough to deter warez distributors from doing it again. This can be nothing less than setting an example to scare others.
Surely that is not the point of the law.
news to me
Yeah. Getting shafted for warez is just like being oppressed by the nazi-Germany...
The owls are not what they seem
Violent rapists should obviously be punished severely. But what about cases where both individuals were drunk but it's somehow the man's fault because the woman was too drunk to say no?
Anyway you just can't compare the two.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
He suffers of stuttering.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
I just hope any 'attempted murder' sentences will last more than 15 years because if software pirates get 15, then convicts arrested for shooting somebody should have double!
Remember, Hitler seemed nice until he cancelled elections...
a little tip to the guy thats serving 15 years...you're close to canada, GO THERE.
If you want to make a quick buck, mug some little old lady.
"Up to"
Given that he allocuted, I'd bet he'll get far less for playing ball with the feds [and likely far far less if he's ratting out his fellow warez buddies].
Have gone unanswered. What you dont realize is that 'elected officals' only listen to people that are worthy of their time. ( i.e. people or corporations that can 'donate' huge amounts to their campaigns... ) The little people dont count anymore. Have not for a LONG time. And in this fight, the *AA has the bigger pot....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why should I spend even more money keeping him in prison?
People who are a danger to society should be kept away from society, but why not financially punish non-violent criminals?
Indeed. For simply distributing something that someone else created without letting them get their money is worth 15 years for some reason. Someone can be arrested for cocaine, beat their wife, have sex with animals, or steal the equivalent amount of copyrighted materials from a store and still not get as many years in prison... So according to US law and most laws in other nations, one can steal all this stuff and keep it to himself, and get off with less jail time then someone who simply gets a copy that was already stolen and allows others to steal it from him... Confusing yes but then again remember how long congress takes to care about something. Also remember that when money is involved people drop logic and morals and think about how they can save their cash flows.
read the first post.
when you have taken his advice please report back.
until then....
If the methodology behind finding and apprehending software priates becomes totally automated then the courts are going to be flooded with cases of this sort.
I would think that, given the fact that there are now many free software packages which are as good as (or better in some cases) pre-existing software packages, maybe the pirates could be convinced to switch to other software. Sort of a rehab for pirates. After all, why do we - as citizens - want to have even more people in jail freeloading off of the taxes we are paying? I say give'em better software which is free to begin with and let them use that instead of ripping off some company which may have buggy code in the first place.
(But then again - I'm also in favor of a redlight district in every major city so people who want that kind of thing can get it without getting into trouble. We are, after all, living, breathing, creatures with needs which, when suppressed, find their outlet in other ways - like pirating software. So make this legal and regulate it like we do everything else.)
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
I'm happy to read this, as it means the FED's have nothing better to do then run around enforcing **CIVIL** issues ( on MY dime even )..
All the terrorists, rapists, murderers, etc have been eradicated from the earth.
We can all feel so much safer and sleep better tonight knowing this.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think it's awesome that someone finally got the book thrown at them for cheating hard working professionals out of their profit. It's fun to watch.
Screw the software/music/movie pirates.
Way to go Iowa City!
(I'm going to the University of Iowa here.)
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
This was not a case of the teenager down the street sharing movies and music for free with others via Kazaa or Bit Torrents. This was a person who was involved in a ring that charged for access to copyrighted materials. I think the time fits the magnitude of the crime.
"I don't have the answers or even a suggestion...but jailing people left and right certainly isn't working on drug use...why do they think it will work here?"
Yeah! And why do people think that jailing crimminals (murderers, rapist, oklahoma city bombers, etc) is going to stop people from being crimminals? What's up with that?
The Justice Department estimated that the seized copyright material alone was worth $50 million.
You think if this guy was sitting on $50 million dollars that he would be peddling warez and playing games?
This is the key issue. Did they charge for the bits? Having to upload other stuff doesn't count at all of course. If this guy charged $money$ for the bits, my opinion of him would change for the worse drastically.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
At least he has the manners to use the proper utensils.
Get some culture!
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Not if you're the one running it. Rapists: not a threat to your empire. People breaking laws which make you rich: a threat.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Allowing a judge to sentence anyone to prison for copyright infringement is ridiculous. The maximum sentence should be a fine.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm sure they'll be finding new exploits every day...
Not that I last checked. Maybe it's some rich kid who pays thousands to get it first.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Copyright law violations are a federal matter, rape and murder are a state matter. If you feel that the latter are not being enforced properly then push for reform in your state if after some investigation, you still believe it's not level. Your state may be tougher on such crime that you think, VA for example which doesn't seem that tough compared to some, has the second highest execution rate in the U.S. last I checked.
The irony of your choice, rape, is that it is so often not punished because so many young women lie about it. I know tons of girls who claim they were raped. Some even go so far as to claim that several guys have raped them because their standard of rape is being pushy, not literally forcing them to. One of the biggest problems now are how so many college age women in the U.S. will get drunk, fuck and then freak when they're sobre and cry rape. I know guys who've been caught up in that before.
If you want to blame anyone for rape laws not being enforced much, blame the young women who cry rape as a weapon against guys they don't like. The situation has gotten so bad that a friend of mine watched a number of her girlfriends get literally raped back home in New Jersey and the cops said that since they had no real injuries they wouldn't believe them. The only way to get justice back is to take all of the Tawana Brawleys and lock them up in the deepest, darkest hole in a maximum security prison, "coed" and let Bubba have some "real sweet meat" for a change.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Prison isn't about punishment, much less rehabilitation. It's all about the money. Soon other countries will "outsource" their prisoners to the U.S. The prison industry is booming now, thanks to their criminalizing the smallest of offenses in order to feed it. They will become the world's prison colony soon enough. Revenge must be scarce. Everybody's so desperate to have it. They are willing to pay top dollar to acquire it at all costs.
What?
Or deciding to sue people ofr using Linux, because you wer drunk and people causing highway accdents becuase their to drunk to drive righgt without hitting other car.
well i aint drinving right now so you saf.e
The sad thing is that the E911 document was originally valued at $79,449 but had roughly the same information as the "BellSouth E911 Service Interfaces", available for $13 from a Bellcore catalog (_Hacker_Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling).
15 years for priacy is lame. A murderer can walk away in less that 10 years but if you are part of a group that distributed copyrighted works for FREE (what!?! yeah, it really is non-profit) you get screwed.
Get a fucking brain and get these laws changed.
So since you're going for the moral high position here. How is ruining people's livelyhood any better? That "signal" must be worth "something" otherwise we wouldn't be repeatedly having this discussion five times a week.
Since when is it ruining someone else's livelihood? So if Toyata someday comes out with a car that's as good as a Mercedes and sells it for less, are the Japanese destroying the Germans?
Look here.. livelihood involves constantly working to earn your keep. NOT to sit on your ass, come up with one idea, and EXPECT^H^H^H^H^HDEMAND money to come in!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
...but an individual rapist affects only a handful of individuals. Someone unlawfully distributing software like this is negatively affecting the economy and social structure of the United States of America. The United States economy has for a large number of people become an intellectual property economy. Many people don't want to go back to the days where they had to toil in factories for minimum wage. Instead, we'd rather be writing software, making games, making movies, writing music, or designing products that get assembled in China by poor workers there. Anyway, people like this--whether they are distibuting for profit or not--are undermining the economy of the United States and we will not allow that to happen.
If you want "free software", use free software that's really free.
My other first post is car post.
"So a kid that smokes a joint or downloads an MP3 and is caught is the same as a murderer? A rapist? LOCK HIM UP!"
And I was waiting for you to miss the point. People go to jail, not because of any "futility" argument. But because jail is both a place to keep people who can't/will not function in society, and to provide a lesson both inside and out that one shouldn't do the crime. There's some rehab, but that's incidental.
"Also, you forgot to throw in the idiotic "I don't feel like walking today so I'm just going to steal this car" non-sense."
Why? You would have missed that too.
... for letting money and copyrights become far more important than human beings. If you'll excuse me I have to buy some plane tickets to the US, I want to rape a few folks there I heard I won't get a lot of jail...
I live in Iowa. Warez is like a pastime here. If it's gone we might have to resort to spamming to make up for all the spare time.
Way to go, waste more money on prison time for people responsible for non violent crime. Who cares about people murdering people when we have people out there pirating software!
I remember a drugs bust in the paper a while ago, something like 9 kilo's of cannabis found, which they valued at some ridiculously high price. When I used to smoke it (in not very large amounts), I worked out I could've gotten it at less than half the price the newspaper valued it at.
I think when they said 'street value', they must've meant the drugs plus all the houses in the near vacinity.
15 years, minimum security, approximately 80000 per year, 12 million. The d00d gets to play with his laptop, his wireless connection, hack his cellmates fridge.
How about just taking all computer access away. I'm sure that would hurt more.
Now if we only had those ID cards, biometric logins, completely centralised worldwide computer systems. Mmmmmmm big brother.
News.com.com.com
News.com.com.com: If our name doesn't say we're definitely from the Internet, nothing does.
The eradication of Washington DC and all politicians who reside there will be the single greatest achievement for mankind in the 21st century.
It's not a terribly hidden fact that many official circles have a definite and finite value for human life and it is easily exceeded by capital costs. In fact, people are most often listed as liabilities rather than assets, so you see where the value of human life gets factored in right?
I'm not at all shocked or even appauled by this. I wish it weren't so for a number of reasons. And I think the most significant of these reasons is that the deterrent need not be quite so high to be effective. Hell, for most people, the threat of the government conficating their toys would be enough deterrant forget about anything beyond that for most people. For those with a real attitude problem, to hell with'm and give'm some time... say like a year or maybe 6 months. Again, that is MORE than enough deterant for the majority of people who would be involved in such activities.
been sentenced to 15 years. It is simply the maximum he could get. In reality, he will get one or two - much less than a typical rapist. In any case, here is a fun argument as to how this person could have caused more harm than a rapist. Let us presume for a moment than the $50 million figure cited was correct (actually, it is more complicated than this, of course). How much harm, in monetary terms, does a rapist do? Many people quibble about how one can do this, but I have no problem with it at all. First, we start with the pretty solid basis that a typical American values their life at roughly ten million dollars. How do you figure this? Risk analysis - people with risky jobs are paid more than otherwise similar jobs. One can then simply extrapolate the risk/reward curve to figure that at the margins, $1 is worth about 1/10 million of your life. Other methods of calculation by various economists produce similar results. Now, given that your whole life is worth about $10 million, it is obvious that being raped, while sucking quite hard, is clearly better than dying. Maybe 10% as bad, at most. So therefore, a rape is something on the order of $1 million dollars in damage, mostly to the victim, but also to society in general which experiences fear and must pay for police protection, courts, etc. So at least by this logic, this guy caused 50 times the damage of a rapist. The primary difference is not that he did less damage, but that his damage is diffuse - spread among thousands of stockholders, rather than essentially focused on one person. Stealing a few bucks from millions of people doesn't manifest itself as clearly as stealing a million bucks from one person.
I am so glad they are taking these punks out, it makes life much safer living with serial killers, serial rapists, mass murderers, terrorist sleeper cells, and the other forgotten assorted riff raff. I now feel safe walking the streets echoing with gunfire ripe with trigger happy gang bangers, and quite pleased with the allocation of resources and humanpower to accomplish this great feat that they have.
Thank you!
I think it's scary that you can get 15 years in prison for doing something that is generally accepted by the society!
If you would do a vote whether it should be legal to download copyrighted material or not, I'm quite sure that people would like it to, at least here in Sweden.
The state exists to represent its people, not to disallow them doing things which they themselves think are fair!
as a former gnaa member and insider with close ties to the administration (lol hy penisbird) i can tell you that rolloffle is only 15 years old (or was that the other moron from the uk, i can't remember)
So...rapists don't get punished today? And major piracy rings should be allowed to continue?
You have argued and offered nothing but skewed rhetoric. Yes, there are cases where rapists get less time than 15 years. That's because we have judges and juries who decide the punishment of the crime based on the situation and not on a code of absolute law.
There are warez people who have gotten less time as well. I love that people are conveniently forgetting all those RIAA settlements. It's all down to the severity of the crime, and in those cases it was just some music files on their hard drives. In this case, it was $50 million dollars worth of software being pushed through a piracy ring.
Sorry, I forgot the mantra...money sucks, capitalism sucks, etc.
...but then, I wouldn't be serving my civic duty to /. , so here goes...
/.ers will argue something along the lines of, "The laws are crooked. They were written by rich RIAA-like bastards. We're rebelling against an unjust law, therefor it is just to rebel!" Sadly, vigilantism will not get you much further than a jail cell these days. Punal consequences aside, you are distributing something that is not yours and does not belong to you, therefore you have no right to pass it to others, through whatever medium you choose to do so with (CD or peer-to-peer). Best analogy I can think of is counterfeiting. You take faux productions of something, which themselves have no value assigned to them by a governmental power, and yet you illegally use it as if it has said power. It is theft. You choose to do it, fine by me. But you better be ready to face whatever consequences exist.
Queue "Rapists get less time" posts.
So what we need to do is lobby harder for longer prison sentences for rapists, rather than lobby for less prison time for software "distributors."
First, let's get one thing straight: what this guy did was illegal, in the sense that it was against the law (hate to be redundant, but it sets up my next point). Anyone who can't see that can't see straight.
Second, I know a lot of
Finally, there are those who will say that 15 years is too harsh a penalty. Well, last I checked, most rapes committed have "penalties" of 15 or more years, but most of those criminals actually have experience working the system where they can get out in seven years or less. And the other problem (I hate to get into a sociological discussion here, but...) is that society has been dealing with rapists since the beginning of time. We're accustomed to the crime being committed, and the sentences that are handed down have been shaped over changes in cultural views throughout the millenia. On the other hand, mass illegal software trade and distribution, as seen here, has been developing for the last 30 years (and really persecuted for the last 10). There's very little social precidence to base judgements on, and instead, judicial courts are basing their rulings merely on law, which takes us back to who writes the law...
"Allowing a judge to sentence anyone to prison for copyright infringement is ridiculous. The maximum sentence should be a fine."
Maybe we should cut to what (some) people really want, and have pirates vote on what they think their punishment should be.
The answer is really simple: Asset seizure.
Sigh, just listen to all the corporate drones towing the company line. Really, it's just so sad that all you shallow greedy first worlders don't or won't understand the real issue here.
Face facts, the laws have been bent by those seeking undeserved profits. Copyright, intellectual property protection and modern patents are all just evil vehicles used by the rich in order to exploit the public domain.
Words to men, as air to birds.
The funniest things I have seen in Moscow (Russia) in the shop, there was pirated DVD collection od engineering programs and pirat designed cover for it and put "cover copyright..."
I'm not surprised. Thanks for sharing.
... I really don't know where to begin with you.
Most of you are just throwing around "numbers of years in prison" as if they mean nothing at all. The maximum sentence this guy could receive is 15 years. Don't you have any concept of just how LONG that is? 15 years ago, it was 1989. Think about where you were in 1989 and everything you've done between now and then. Now imagine it ALL WIPED OUT, instead spent in a cell. And not because you killed or raped someone. No. Because you committed "copyright infringement".
Now does the punishment really fit the crime?
Others of you say if we disagree with the penalty, we should lobby our congressmen. This is laughable. If you're not a sizable organization, namely one with a lot of money, you're not going to get to DO any lobbying. And that's the problem here. The system is currently set up completely in favor of the big corps. Due to the money they have, they can influence the laws to favor maximum profitability for them, rather than what's best for the entire country. They can also scare almost anyone out of doing something, whether it's an illegal activity or not, simply with the threat of an expensive lawsuit. And this is without even getting into the ridiculous patent issues - again, because they have the money, they can afford to use a good chunk of it snapping up questionable patents and then trying to profit from them later (again, usually via "scare" lawsuits, and not from actually defending the patents).
But... I'm going off on something else now. The point is: I don't argue against copyright infringement being illegal. What I argue is that it should be no more severe than a misdemeanor.
I remember reading up on a study on the highway speeds and how 75 vs 65 resulted in less fatalities...
... yes. There's a price for taking a life- and it should be small for a true accident (kid running out in front of a car from behind an SUV and with NO chance to stop) ... but it should be high for a planned, premeditated execution (Peterson (I'm not getting into exactly *how* they reached that) for example).
When it was all done and concluded it worked out to be about 1.3 million (if memory serves) per life saved.
Unfortunately, the lack of speed cost society about 4.3 million per life (Very convoluted logic- I didn't follow it) due to increased time 'wasted' while commuting.
So
And then you have money - theft of money almost ALWAYS gets a stiffer sentence than a violent crime... and if you steal in the process of a violent crime it becomes much more stiffer penalties.
I guess software piracy is like a flasher: Everyone says it's a victimless crime. But in reality everyone is hurt at some point... but man oh man, 15 years? Sigh.
This is so nuts. Nothing anywhere in this says this guy was profitting. He was merely copying and distributing games/apps. There is also no evidence anyone suffered any real damages because of this.
I know some collectors. The mentality is to get copies of everything, they never even install 1/10 th of the stuff, use my maybe 1% of what they install. It is just like a big game to them.
Blah blah this is the law... Frankly it is an insane law. The law is bought and sold by psychopathic corporations and dirty politicians.
We have a system were someone trades information at no personal gain and no measurable loss to the "owner" and they are a federal criminals.
I see a bleak future for the individual and small buisness. As corporations buy more laws and patents and monopilize more technology, eventually you won't even be able write software without being part of the giant corporate hegemony.
Every day I look at this I see a steady trend toward corporate police state.
Blow it out your ass, you anonymous shitbag. I work in the entertainment industry, creating intellectual property. I know the issues damn well. I don't want a free ride; I want a sane fucking justice system. And my whole point was that the circumstances and situation of copyright infringement do NOT justify even the POSSIBILITY of 15 year jail sentences.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
If you lower it to "0 mph" it will elminate fatalities altogether. Please someone think of the children. Why do you want our children killed on highways?
What does our government have against people named Kevin?
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Well, it doesn't cost (in theory) millions of dollars to fix some jackass's face after a well-deserved ass-whuppin'.
There's a guy in my city who has finally come out of his coma, after over a year, with permanent brain damage and limited mobility. He was attacked outside his own home, by a drunk at three in the morning, who had been wandering down the street hollering at the top of his lungs while people tried to sleep. The victim 'earned' his current disability by trying to tell the guy to be quiet. What an asshole, eh? Really had it coming.
It boggles the mind that in centuries of legal proceedings resulting in precedents galore, that no judge has gotten fed up with behaviour like this and charged the person(s) involved with being in contempt of court, and them put them in the slammer for the balance of the prosecution's proposed jail time versus what the judge thought a more reasonable amount.
Doing something like this would result in a far saner legal system, as people would be loathe to overstate their claims.
Show me where people from the political donor class who cheated on millions of dollars in taxes got 15 year sentences. It just about never happens.
for goodness instead of evil. If the law enforcement officers had instead used all the subpoenas, wire taps, warrants, etc. to track down a few spammers they would have saved the world far more than the piddling few dollars that this guy cost Microsoft.
Yeah, that must really suck -- but this is the part where we all take notice of the fact that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
Yes, we all know that the feds tend to overblow the figures. $50 million is the amount of software if it was all purchased at retail price - AutoCad can go for a small fortune, as can Photoshop, as can 3DSMax, as can Visual Studio .Net. Add them up at retail price, you'll get $50 million.
/.ers PC consists of several hundred thousand dollars "worth" of pirated software at retail.
I'm sure the average
I'd rather have a guy on the street who, in the heat of passion, shot his wife when he caught her in bed with another man than somebody who is a habitual thief.
Ok, I'll byte: Why was the guy's wife doing in bed with someone on the street? And why did he shoot her as he climaxed?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
"Except this just your postulate, you have shown no proof."
If he can't prove that it's hurting the economy? Then that means that all arguments that piracy is helping are equally unprovable.
"You haven't shown proof that anyone has actually gone from toiling in a factory on minimum wage to suddenly producing "intellectual property" so we'll assume nobody actually have and you just made it up."
Only for those who ignore the past 30 years.
"However it does seem likely that a lot of people want a job where you just have to do the work ONCE and then can keep raking it in over and over and over - those without morals probably dream about that."
Since no pirate has actually produced a movie, music, game, or a book, and depend on the output of others for their continued existance. The accusations of lazyness are exceptionally hollow.
"So your argument is that if someone downloads a program he hurts the economy but if he uses free software he doesn't? Since this appears to be utter nonsense you will be hard pressed to show why this is not so."
He doesn't have to prove the words you put in his mouth. The person who's created and distributed free software has evaluated his situation and determined that releasing his software free will not impact him adversly. The pirate however hasn't given his victum that option.
I must put the usual IANAL disclaimer in place here first, but as someone who was actually investigated for copyright infringement on a criminal level (some years ago) I believe I have a little bit of info on these types of situations.
(BTW, I was not found guilty of anything, and my computers were eventually returned to me, minus a few odds and ends they managed to lose, and plus a couple weird items I never originally even owned!)
Before the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) went into effect under the Clinton administration, copyright infringement could only be prosecuted as a criminal case (rather than civil) if it was shown that the accused distributed 10 or more copies of an infringing work, AND was shown that the accused intended to financially gain from the distribution. (Note, the accused didn't have to actually make any money "pirating" the works, but he/she had to demonstrably be attempting to benefit in some tangible way by doing so. This could take the form of a BBS sysop receiving free computer hardware in trade for giving a user "download credits" as a matter of practice, or even collecting a substantial amount of money for copies of the works, whether or not it was enough to meet the expenses of running the operation.
Post DMCA, things have changed. The "profit" motive is all but gone now, as far as I understand it - and they can pretty much just total up the claimed dollar value of the distributed infringing items. If it exceeds a certain min. dollar amount, they've got a potential criminal case against the person.
I know I was told that I was lucky I was still grandfathered in under the old laws, because I might have actually been charged with a crime under the new rules. (I had a fairly popular multi-node BBS throughout the 90's, and like most BBS's of the day, tended to collect up a lot of "warez" that people uploaded to the "catch all" folder called "New Uploads". Someone apparently turned in my board for pirating after seeing some stuff in this folder....)
What is right and wrong is not an opinion, even if it's a legally imposed opinion, it is measurable learnable and observable.
There is nothing wrong with copying and distributing information. It is not even wrong if you do it for a profit as part of a private orginasation. Now maybe if you use it fradulently, or in a way that is malicious, but were talking about information here not violent activities.
What is wrong is when you try to controll everybody else in the universe of what they can copy and what they can not because you think you have a god given right to a government granted monopoly on its distribution. If anything, that is a wrong that should be punished.
This is a political crime. Sharing software is free speech. End of story.
Industry in the US, back in the clolnial days, started out by explicitly violating the British patent system.
That system was intended to create long-term monopolies on many manufacturing processes and devices, such as thread mills and power looms. Part of the point of these patents was to keep colonies agricultural and raw-material producing, dependent on the "mother country" for their manufactured goods (rather than competing with it and becoming a world power).
The arrival of people with knowlege of mill manufacture, who set up their own plants here, was a major factor in the colonies achieving the ability to break away. And the "mother country"'s attempts to enforce these monopolies produced some of the major greviances that lead to the revolution.
So now it looks like the US has come full circle. B-(
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
In addition, this time "cost" is spread out in a way that the effected individuals and society find preferable to murder. The distribution of costs and benefits is immensely important, even when comparing two scenarios where you believe the total costs and benefits are the same by your measuring system. Would you find it equally preferable to live in a country with the same average income as your current country, but where one person made all the money, and everyone else was starving?
People are willing to concede that time = money and life = time, but they are unwilling to follow it to the conclusion that life = money.
It sounds like you need to more clearly state what these alleged equalities mean exactly before claiming that people are "willing to concede" them, especially "life = time". Then restate your argument replacing these supposed equalities with your proposed definitions, and then readers can tell if (a) they agree that "life = time" and so on as given by your definitions and (b) your argument that "life = money" necessarily follows. I read somewhere that an average of something like one person dies during the construction of a large skyscraper (which I would expect to be a thousand person-years of work anyhow). I don't have a problem with people choosing to take that risk, just like they choose to run a program that will send them copies of what arrives on port 25 of their computers, but I would have a problem with people being drafted to work on construction projects. Nobody is forcing people not to filter their email.
By the way, attempting to dilute the definition of "force" to argue otherwise would mean that all other statements about why the use of "force" is bad would need to be reevaluated, because they were not made with that definition of "force."
Las in the USA is not an end in itself. No the end in itself and the justification for law in the USA is very clearly stated in the preamble to the constitution. "Life, liberty, and the Persuit of Happyness...".
Now I would like anyone to tell me how copying stuff is going to deprive anyone of Liberty. And tell me, how the persuit of happyness wouldn't include sharing information at your disposal with people who you happen to come into.
But that's not what's happened. A better analogy would be if Toyota stole the plans for the Mercedes, started making them and sold theirs for less than the original. What you suggested was simply compitition.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Next time someone says this, and I explain why. I'll have my argument bolstered by this and this.
So by the end of the month, at the rate things are going. My database should be full, and any arguments that Slashdot isn't biased towards "group think" should no longer be viable.
Blah blah this is the law... Frankly it is an insane law. The law is bought and sold by psychopathic corporations and dirty politicians.
Although I agree with you, I think it's deeper than just dirty politicians. How many of the politicians do you think actually really know what a computer is or even a server. They just have some big company that's coming to them saying, "Hey, we've got all these people stealing from us, can't you do something to make it illegal and help us not go out of business." Then in some cases there is probably a nice campaign "donation."
I'd like to believe that a lot of this could be solved by having technically literate, honest people in the government. (But since we know that honest and government do not go together, we have a problem.)
But that's not what's happened. A better analogy would be if Toyota stole the plans for the Mercedes, started making them and sold theirs for less than the original. What you suggested was simply compitition.
Your analogy would be more acurate if Mercedes printed their plans in the wall street journal accessable to anyone who buy's a copy. And then they press criminal charges against anyone who uses it.
BTW, what do you half to say about all these companies who coppied the interface to the IBM compatable PC?
Did the software companies report $50 million in losses? No.
They claim that every download or copy is a lost sale, which is total crap. I'm sure many people here on slashdot remember the days of dialing in to the local pirate BBS, downloading crazy expensive business programs, and playing with them for the fun of it. Did I need autocad? No. Was I using autocad for business? No. Was it lost revenue from Autodesk? No. Did I even know what I was doing? No.
I understand the software publishers desire to get paid for their work. Things are much better today, I downloaded a preview of Combustion!! Didn't know what to do with it (like Autocad) but got a glimpse of the real software.
We all knew those people that had the insane software collection. They didn't play the games. They didn't use the applications. They stored it away, stacks and stacks of disks.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
Your comparing the maximum amount of time that he could receive to the minimum amount of time that someone could receive for assault. In my state, Kentucky, a person convicted of first degree assault can receive up to 20 years. This guy was a first time offender and plead. I would be surprised if he gets more than a year, and possibly some massive fines.
Very true, for whatever reason Iowa does seem to have a lot of warez. Maybe its because we're in Iowa and its relatively isolated from any high-tech centers. However with the recent court ruling on the 1 billion dollar spam case I'm thinking we might not want to take up spamming. Try a slashdot search on iowa, we apparently also had anti-spyware legislation proposed.
Just because it wasn't physical damage to another human such as rape The damage was heavy. This is the same as white collar and blue collar crimes. Look at Enron they didn't rape anyone but they screwed peoples life's. Crime like this is done all the time and usually get a small slap on the wrist. Its about time crime at this level is treated as it should be. This will deter people from pirating. It won't stop it. But losing your education over software is well not worth it.
I'm a graduate student at the University of Iowa, pursuing a Master's in CompSci, focusing on computer security. Until last year, Jathan was the Graduate Student Secretary at UI.
I have no knowledge of any crimes he may or may not have committed.
So, that said... Jathan never did me anything but right. He was quiet, kept to himself an awful lot, but in a department which seems defined by professors who keep their office doors shut, Jathan's door was always open--both figuratively and literally.
My first day at UI, I walked into his office to get a registration number. I looked over his bookshelf and found a surprising number of really high-quality texts on C++, which he told me he'd found laying around MacLean Hall or which someone was throwing away, or whatever. (Strangely enough, the engineering library at Seamans Center has a far, far larger programming library than the CS department in MacLean Hall. The ECE, Electrical and Computer Engineering, geeks have a much better library. In MacLean Hall, getting the book with the right information is a matter of borrowing it from the grad student who owns it, or else hitting Amazon.com.) I walked in there just expecting to get my registration processed; I walked out of there with three good C++ texts under my arm, gifts from him. No money, no favors, no nothing: just "here's how the library situation works, and here, have a few books, do you already have a copy of Josuttis? You do? Okay, never mind that, then..."
So. No matter what happens, let's please remember that Jathan's a human being, with real history, and real people he's helped out in the past for no reason at all other than he wanted to help out.
"Your analogy would be more acurate if Mercedes printed their plans in the wall street journal accessable to anyone who buy's a copy. And then they press criminal charges against anyone who uses it."
The relation between your simplified "anyone who uses them" and what's actually happening are different. Those who are using the material within the confines of copyright aren't being penalized. Those who are distributing copys without permission, or compensation are having crimminal charges pressed against them.
The difference between cars and digital bits, are in the ease of duplicating and distributing exact copys of the original. If ST's replicator ever comes true. This truth will immediately become obvious.
maybe people will think this is a troll too. Do you own slaves? It amazes me how many time people half to have it pounded and pounded and beat into them that just because a system or institution calls somthing a free market property right - does not mean that it is. It would be more accurate to call copyrights a government regulation restricting how people can use information at their disposal.
Bringing the GPL into this is a red herring, the entire prupose of the GPL was to undo some of the damage caused by copyrights with copyrights. Fight fire with fire.
Finally, big companies who do not innovate use IP to lock out innovative competition far more than the other way arround. In fact, people who "do it for the money" are usually not good innovators. It's the people who do it for the meaning that innovate. Give them access to 10'million innovations that they didn't have access to before - stand back and watch what happens. Actually, you don't need to, it's happening now with Linux, p2p, and the internet.
"It gives the companies (software) motivation to succeed in lowering prices and improving their product so that people will be motivated to buy rather than pirate."
So how did people get lower prices, and a better product before piracy? Also how is piracy a more effective method than not purchasing the product, and letting the company know why?
Who did he hurt, or is it the principle of the thing?
15 years for that is immoral.
Direct away from face when opening.
Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson
/ v1ch16s25.html
13 Aug. 1813Writings 13:333--35
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.
"There is also no evidence anyone suffered any real damages because of this."
Right you are. There is the mathematical possibility that of the thousands of copies of software he helped distribute, not a single one was distributed to someone who warezed the software so that they wouldn't have to buy it.
"Every day I look at this I see a steady trend toward corporate police state."
I think everybody here agrees with you. If I can summarize:
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
The west is looking more like great justice nations such as Saudi Arabia and China, 15 years is just insane, thats most of this guys life ruined, I really hope he did some bad things to deserve this, he should have atleast attempted to beat one of the agents to death with a CD rack.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
And I'll bet he got way way way less time in the pokey than the kid this article is about.
"maybe people will think this is a troll too. Do you own slaves? It amazes me how many time people half to have it pounded and pounded and beat into them that just because a system or institution calls somthing a free market property right - does not mean that it is."
Saying it's not is as much a self-justifying reason as the other.
"It would be more accurate to call copyrights a government regulation restricting how people can use information at their disposal."
Incorrect. Copy-right covers what falls under copyright, and the penalties for violationg copyright (which is an "after the fact" action).
Ideas howver aren't regulated in any manner, and no attempt is made to do so.
"Bringing the GPL into this is a red herring, the entire prupose of the GPL was to undo some of the damage caused by copyrights with copyrights. Fight fire with fire."
Howevr there's the assumption in your post that the only way that information can be secured is through legal means. In the absense of the legal, there are other means.
"Finally, big companies who do not innovate use IP to lock out innovative competition far more than the other way arround."
And yet we had an example of a "small" company supposedly holding the entire banking industry hostage yesterday.
"In fact, people who "do it for the money" are usually not good innovators. It's the people who do it for the meaning that innovate."
Both an assumption, and it forgets that while "doing it for the love" is important. "Doing it so you can live" comes first.
"Give them access to 10'million innovations that they didn't have access to before - stand back and watch what happens. Actually, you don't need to, it's happening now with Linux, p2p, and the internet."
All are examples of were the decision to "give to the community" was made by the creator, instead of made "for them" by a pirate.
lol bare?
Seriously. Sure, your average college kid downloading some mp3s doesn't deserve to be punished more than a rapist, but this is repeated, organized offense (with serious distribution) of likely uncountable software/movies/etc.
/. : where copyright infringement is never wrong and laws are always too severe
You're trying to compare this to raping ONE person? I'm sure the punishment for raping lots of people (repeated offense) is far more severe. Likewise, the punishment for this type of organized distribution should be severe.
welcome to -1!
Note I said "well-deserved".
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
How can you compare the loss of revenue with destroying a human being? This guy is going to be terrorized, raped and destroyed inside of jail. THIS QUIET, SHY computer nerd's LIFE IS OVER. Death is better than what awaits him. If this was a 15 year sentence in a prison system where all he had to do was serve his time, then I would have no problem.
Even though I am American, the way in which the US puts corporate money over human life and dignity really scares me. It absolutely sickens me to see what the state is going to do to this stupid kid. Another reason for me to emmigrate to the EU.
On a side note, I live 4-5 hours away from Iowa. If there is going to be an appeal or some kind of protest, I will do my best to make it.
Looks like the reporter was excited :P
Have you metaroderated recently?
What are you talking about? I see your point, I agree 15 years is disproportionate punishment, but your analogy makes absolutely no sense. Everyone is hurt by a flasher? I repeat, what are you talking about?
see, here's the important bit nobody's talking about:
your average rape, hommicide, assault, robbery, etc, is against a poor person, and frankly, the criminal justice system doesn't really care about poor victims
your average warez distributor is ripping off rich copyright owners, the kinds of people who are chummy with lawmakers
and, it goes even deeper-
take two hyppothetical violent robberies, one committed in richmond california, and one committed in lafayette a few miles away... lafayette is an affluent area, with big wide roads and lots of nearby hospitals, and an overall low instance of 911 calls... the robery victim is rushed to hospital, and if the perp is found, he gets charged with assault
in richmond however, things are very different... roads are poorly maintained due to underfunding, emergency services are over extended, hospitals aren't as nice, etc... all the hallmarks of a poor ghetto... our robbery victim here suffers from a slower 911 response time than he would if he lived 40 miles to the southeast, and is delivered to less-modern hospital with a lower-paid staff... he's less likely to live, and the perp is more likely to be charged with murder
the point here is that money not only determines sentencing for crimes, but the very factors that lead to what you're charged with
i guess this just a very long-winded way of agreeing with other posters that our current system is whack
The problem with your line of thinking is that it doesn't account for the intangibles. I'm not distraught with grief, nor do I have to worry about who will provide my family with income so they can survive all because I had to delete the 3 or 4 spam messages in my Inbox.
This is where common-sense overrides the numbers.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
I get the feeling this guy just doesn't know how to argue, and thus, he is a troll. If you look, he seems to take a post which is generally against punishment by the DoJ in this story's comments section, and then respond with something completely unrelated to the points brought up in the parent post.
For this post, obviously he didn't so much as acknowledge Jefferson's ideas, just took a pot shot using race relations. You wanna talk about that, Shark72? Go find the thread on it.
Another example: here.
In this post, the parent concerns the mentality of the average warez pup. The idea is, it's about collection. Not a very strong argument if you're going to consider acts, not intentions, to be the deciding factor in ethical (and legal) behavior. Of course, some of us have read Kant and see this is indeed important, but Shark72 just brings up some derisive, completely-out-of-left-field rant about open source software.
In summary, this guy is a troll. Reading his posts, he very likely thinks he has honest arguments and is too intelligent generally to be a bonafide, died-in-the-wool troll by intention; nonetheless, he is wasting all our time with posts like this. You on the other hand honestly want to have a substantive discussion, and he is just wasting your brain time. Ignore him please.
all I have to say is YAY for Iowa. This proves that there are actually a few interesting people in the homestate. And death to the Uranisians!
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
I actually think that, compared to most states, Iowa is more technically advanced. We've got two good colleges that both promote security, and the Jabber protocol was developed by an Iowan.
15 years for pirated software? Absolutely ridiculous. Complete garbage. If this guy gets more than 3, then that is only a queue to the rest of us that we need to put these damn software companies lobbying for this out of business by never buying software again.
Tell me. Imagine you are Bill Gates or some other amongst top 10 rich guys in the world. Someone kidnaps you and threatens your life unless you surrender all your wealth to him as ransom.
So what is the amount of money where you decide that you will prefer to die instead of paying the exhorbiant amount, assuming that you can afford that amount ?
1 billion ?
2 Billion ?
3 Billion ?
10 Billion ?
I know you're a troll, but I can't help myself.
Comparatively speaking a rapist gets a lot less than someone who infringes copyright law (note I didn't use the sympathy grabbing phrases "pirates [product]", or "steals [product]").
Nobodies saying a rapist should do more time, they're saying a copyright infringer should be doing a lot less time, if not no time and just a fine with a max cap of a few thousand dollars at that. That'd make a lot more sense than throwing someone in the klink for up to 15 years over a copyright violation...
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
"Ok, you're either not familiar with federal sentencing guidelines, or you are just a moron. "
Or he's using the time honored debating technique of "ommission". Leave out the parts that either weaken, or contradict one's position, and/or exaggerate the parts one does have to create an impression that his audiance wouldn't otherwise get if all the facts were known.
It's however our responsability to discover and poke holes in such weak arguments. Unfortunately a "majority rules"* intermediate will distort this process, and the truth will be it's first victim.
*Read that as "Rob Malda's system for getting out of paying professionals to do the job."
Piracy does NOT hurt people's livelyhood (at least not in as direct a way as the powers that be claim) Most people will not pirate something they would normally have bought, it's just not going to happen. If so, then M$ would be broke. Yet, they're not...
...the 'Lady of Justice' holding, instead of the scales, an M-16, for stories relating to the fact that the United States is one scary country, and getting scarier.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Seconded. Regarding Autocad, all I can say is that there were a lot of disks to download, and they were being downloaded from a BBS in a different country (hi Cutthroat!), and thank goodness I wasn't paying for the phone calls.
I'd mod you up if I could. Agree 100%. I've downloaded tons of stuff I would never use. When companies like Aliashttp://www.alias.com/eng/index_flash.shtml provide a download for a type of preview/not full software of their popular Maya program it gives people lik eme a chance to use it. I heard Maya was cool, didn't know anything about it, but I was able to download it. Come to find out it just wasn't for me, but I would definately suggest that to anyone who asked me. Now, if I had downloaded an illegal copy if they didn't offer that, they would not have lost a single sale. I wish more companies would follow suite.
Since you're familiar with the law in this area, perhaps you can answer a question that's been bugging me. In the MPAA's bout of "take down" notices to .torrent sites, they keep saying "bring the evidence or we'll levy sanctions against you" (paraphrase).
So, exactly how can a corporation levy "sanctions" against a person for "destroying" evidence in a civil case (assuming some of these cases end up being civil)? What are they going to do, blockade his house?
Is this just an empty threat? Or is it pure stupidity, akin to Police Chief Wiggum telling Homer to bring that evidence to court, or they have no case?
Seriously, wtf are they talking about?
And thanks for the info.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Forcibly confining someone against their will is only acceptable in extreme circumstances, such as if they are likely to kill or injure other people if not so confined.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'd rather have a guy on the street who, in the heat of passion, shot his wife when he caught her in bed with another man than somebody who is a habitual thief.
Wow, your values are pretty out-of-whack. Disappointed wife looks for fun and gets greased by poorly-chosen hubby? Versus me losing my chunk of $5 million dollars (or whatever the figure was, in a previous post) divided by 250 million supposedly affected people, to some abstract thief? In that [totally hypothetical] tradeoff, I'll pay my $0.02 to save the poor woman's life--even if she's a horrid nauseating harpy. But maybe it's just me. At that rate I could save 50 people for less than the price of a blank DVD.
Also, the "habitual thief" is a senseless concept. If someone is a habitual thief they're probably not stealing very much at one time; they're probably putting food on the table, also (theoretically) saving a life (or lives) or at least meeting minor needs (i.e. drugs). Genuine habitual thieves (ahem, Dick Cheney) aren't getting due prosecution but that's another dimension to the argument entirely.
Actually, the whole thing is pretty bogus. Repeated theft of your home PC? You must have a pretty sweet computer.
Jesus WEPT it's time some of you assholes got out of your fucking bedrooms and actually THOUGHT about the fucking world around you.
Okay, there are a couple of posters here to whom I can better explain my ideas.
First of all, one of the ways in which software piracy hurts the economy is not in a direct way. Suppose someone wants Photoshop, but doesn't want to pay $500. Suppose he can afford to pay perhaps $100. There are a LOT of these people out there. Many of them right now pirate Photoshop. However, there are photo manipulation programs out there that cost around $100 that they could legitimately buy. If these people with $100 didn't pirate Photoshop, then there would be a larger market for $100 photo manipulation softwares. Some company would hire programmers and software designers and marketers to produce and sell $100 photo manipulation software.
By the way, with digital cameras being so popular, the market for photo manipulation software has exploded recently and there are many more choices available. Your Mom and Dad generally don't buy a digital camera and then go onto suprnova or torrentreactor. They'll either use the software that came with the camera (and the camera maker paid the developer a couple of dollars to include) or they will buy some low-cost program or maybe they will go all-out and buy Photoshop. Personally, I think this is a Good Thing. Money changes hands, people are employed, the market grows, more choices are available.
Second, as far as affecting society being more serious than affecting an individual: of course a crime against society is more serious. Look at the case of the Rosenbergs for example. In one sense, they just copied some information and gave that copy to someone else. Sounds like copyright infringment, maybe. No one was directly injured by it. The original people still had their information. However, they gave vital information on the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. For this they were found guilty of treason against the United States and were executed. Obviously that's an extreme example, but it does show how a seemingly simple crime can be elevated in seriousness when it affects a large number of people, an industry, or an entire nation.
Lastly, regarding free software: Free software is just filling another segment in the market for software, even if it is at a $0 price point. I think the best part about free software is that it raises the bar for commercial software. Any program that someone is charging money for had better be superior to free alternatives otherwise it's not a good value. Also, commercial software companies have obviously not had a problem competing with free software in most cases.
My other first post is car post.
We tried the soap box. And it failed.
/. is gonna get a subpoena and my house is gonna get broken into by gov't goons for talking. So, let me clarify by saying I'm not planning or preparing for anything. It hurts me that I actually have to say that to ease my fears. It saddens me that I'm actually afraid to post this.
We tried the ballot box. And it failed.
We're trying the jury box. And when it fails, what's next?
The ammo box.
*sigh* Maybe all those freaky militia-type hermits have the right of it. We'll see when American Revolution II comes around.
Just posting this scares me, thinking that
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
1: "so, what are you in for??"
2: "murder..rape..pillage.. what about you??"
1: "software piracy..."
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
to buy him the Student and Teacher Edition of Office for $100, or hell, he could have gotten Works for $50, or downloaded OpenOffice for free.
> Well, it doesn't cost (in theory) millions of
> dollars to fix some jackass's face after a well-
> deserved ass-whuppin'.
You cannot replace some things which garner a lighter sentance recommendation: lives, innocence, and dignity, for starters. I'm sorry, but no matter how much that little kid deserved to be raped (heh, bad paraphrase I know), that bastard who did it will probably get a lighter term in the 'house.
"I'd like to believe that a lot of this could be solved by having technically literate, honest people in the government. (But since we know that honest and government do not go together, we have a problem.)"
I agree with you. There was a certain amount of hyperbole in what I originally posted. The problem as I see it currently is that the current system allows corporate "donations" to campaigns and while there are some honest politician and maybe even a few that are technically literate, there are many more potential Orrin Hatches.
Time and Money is on the side of the corporate lobby eventually they will get more and more egrgious amendments in place.
Your summary is off the mark: What is wrong is that software patent laws are being hideously abused by large corporations. They will continue the abuse by buying more patents and simultaneously lobbying to extend patent and copyright protection.
This will be a barrier for entry for anyone wishing to develop software. Individual and small companies, both for profit and non-profit will all be stifled. There are no more reasonable checks and balances in the system.
And before someone is convicted of a felony crime I think proof should be required that he either profitted, or that actual damages can be proven not assumed.
I was one of the unfortunate ones that got busted in Finland for running a p2p site and the max. punishment they could impose on me is 2 years of prison (very very unlikely) and to think I thought I was screwed. Man.
Click on his ID to see his posting history.
I only looked at the first page, but I have to wonder if someone posts only one consistent message. Every post he made is a rant against anyone who challenges the status quo on copyright law.
A shill or a one issue troll?
http://wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59305,00.htm l
"Milonic's Woolley said the senator's unlicensed use of his software was just "the tip of the iceberg." He said he knows of at least two other senators using unlicensed copies of his software, and many big companies.
Continental Airlines, for example, one of the largest airlines in the United States, uses Woolley's system throughout its Continental.com website. Woolley said the airline has not paid for the software. Worse, the copyright notices in the source code have been removed.
"That really pisses me off," he said."
Any *individual* life is priceless to said individual.
... how much money do you think I'd pony up?
;)
But if you, mr. Anonymous Coward (funny you should post that way) were to call me up and say "If you don't pay So-and-So 10 billion dollars by 10pm, he will kill me"
In general a life is valued at 1.3 million.
Yours, to you, is worth more. Mine, to me, is worth more. My fiancee's, to me, is worth more than mine. My sister's, to me, is worth more than mine. Your's, to me, isn't worth nearly so much.
Unless I know ya.
Make the malefactor pay the original license holder(s) for each license that they verifiably fraudulently sold/distributed. So it isn't too onerous, make it the cost generally required for a mid-sized volume discount. In the case of published works, photographs, etc, the cost should be set by the originator. The remainder, if any, will be taken out in either prison time or volunteer service, their choice.
Copyright holders get paid, miscreant gets more than a slap on the wrist, folks that believe that there are worse crimes are happy, everyone (except those who are completely against copyrights of any kind) rests better.
Problem resolved.
"A shill or a one issue troll?"
Neither. Consider the possibility that not all Slashdotters have the same moral compass as you do. Being a geek does not necessarily mean that you're pro-piracy.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
This is the most insightful comment I've seen in this discussion yet. Realistically, this is not like the drug issue. There are victims to ip theft. The govt. is charged with protecting those victims.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
This fellow was already convicted of abusing several kids, and received a number of years for that. However, on the federal charges (crossing state lines via the net, I guess) of child pornography, he was convicted and sentenced to life (no possibility of parole for this federal time).
It is frightening that the physical acts on the children received less time; in the end, I was glad to play a part in getting him off the street for good, but it still seems the wrong way to have achieved the goal. (Like nailing Capone on tax charges.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
By destroying the savings of those Enron Employees and the Investments of those investors, Andrew Fastow and his 'team' permanently decreased the amount of money those people can use in our economy. Those people won't be buying many of the things they were going to buy, this negatively impacts the jobs and livelihood of people that never worked for Enron, since they won't be selling or making the things that would end up being sold.
This 'Poor Kid' by his warez activities may have cost the jobs of hundreds of people or at least decreased the earnings of those people. Now, those people don't have the money they needed to run out and buy the things they wanted and needed, which decreases the sales that would have otherwise been made.
The ripple effect of this is that everyone from the store salespeople, the delivery men all the way back to the factory may now face layoffs or paycuts, whether in hours worked or smaller end of the year/month bonuses. These crimes affect so many people that it's not even funny.
Murder and rape are terrible crimes, and don't get me wrong, these crimes should always have heavy penalties attached to them. However, in the bigger picture of things, murder of one to several people has a lower economic impact on greater society then committing the crimes this 'poor kid' or Andrew Fastow have committed.
The problem isn't necesarily with our criminal justice system. The problem is that people need to see beyond the crime and look at the impact and or potential impact beyond the crime in question.
Honestly, this 'poor kid's' crime could lead to the loss of jobs, which invariably leads to an increase in crime or at least assault as people tend to become quite on edge when they have no method of keeping a roof over their heads or keeping food in their bellies.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
"There's a price for taking a life- and it should be small for a true accident (kid running out in front of a car from behind an SUV and with NO chance to stop)"
That is foolish. If there was NO chance to stop, then there was NO culpability and NO "taking" of a life. Hence, there should be NO punishment. Follow your own logic.
Yeah, hardly seems like it was worth it now does it?
Don't do the crime if you can't do the time, oh no, don't do it.
You aren't looking at the bigger picture here.
13,000 titles stolen and warezed out to the world.
Do you know how many jobs that may have negtively impacted? Do you know that crime rates, including violent acts of rape, murder and assault steadily increase when an area loses a significant number of jobs?
How many truck drivers lost their jobs because there were no software packages to ship to the stores because this kid stole and gave away over 13,000 different software titles? How many stores closed their doors because they couldn't sell as much as they needed, due to the ex-truck drivers no longer buying anything? How many factory workers lost their jobs because people, both store clerks/salespeople and the ex-truckers could no longer afford to purchase durable goods, like automobiles, refrigerators and microwave ovens?
The economy is so intertwined that it is possible that the actions this 'poor kid' took may have assisted in increasing the crime rate and murder rate. Honestly, I don't believe it is possible to punish this 'poor kid' enough.
Go ahead, keep thinking that this is nothing more then the gubmint doing the police work of corporations.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Your response to his summary is off the mark. This isn't a case of some kid writing competing software and being hit with a patent lawsuit. He was distributing copied software. I'm sure if you wait another 15 minutes /. will have an article that fits your post.
"Most people will not pirate something they would normally have bought..."
That is a presumption on your part. But, assuming you are correct, so what? Pirating is still removing the right to control the copying of a person's work without their consent.
Big of you to proclaim your desire for free goods trumps their time and talent.
Um..no. I purpose to change the IP laws.
Music is the easiest to change of course. The only "victims" here are the RIAA. The suits looking to save their million dollar a year jobs when they actually produce nothing. They're afraid of facing the future with no real skills. Yeah, that's a cheap shot, but I honestly believe it.
The music artists will get along just fine. GIVE away their music on their websites, come see the show when we're in your town. Instead of touring to promote an album that they will see very little cash from (this is a proven fact), the album instead will be to support the touring of the band!
There are 1000's of bands out there that do this. Actually, more band make their living off of live shows and NO record label then the ones that do. Wrap your head around that. Don't believe me, look it up...just about anywhere on the web will show that the RIAA signed bands make little off of album sales...at least the beginning ones.
But this won't happen overnight. The RIAA has congress in their wallet. They have millions of dollars to lobby and sue and keep their desk jobs. But as I said, the genie is out of the bottle. There is no chance that it's going back in. So instead of FIGHTING and JAILING and throwing a temper tantrum, the RIAA should look at it from another side. A new perspective.
Also, I'm not blaming the goverment nor the police or FBI that are kicking in the doors and charging these guys...I blame the RIAA for telling the government and police and FBI what to do. The RIAA says jump and the government jumps.
John Lennon said: "Music belongs to everyone. It's only publishers who think they own it."
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
...but jailing people left and right certainly isn't working on drug use...why do they think it will work here?
Just some thoughts you inspired...
The return on investment in the drug arena is a big motivator for people to remain involved. Consider the users... they are either looking for an altering experience or just a fix to keep them satisfied. For those who are addicted, it becomes a necessity. Users of some drugs may become impaired or apathetic about the punishment due to the altering effects of said drugs. Those involved in the industry have the potential of becoming rich.
Sharing mp3's, software, or movies doesn't really offer that ROI to the people involved... which means you have a situation of great potential risk for no reward save the potential esteem of peers... unless you are selling your booty, in which case you are a real pirate... arrrrrrrrg.
I was attempting to point out that the taking of a life, unintentionally (you *are* in control of your vehicle and responsible for it at all times, right?) still will have a penalty associated with it. Civil or Otherwise (Federal? Doubt that). But there will still be a penalty... whether it be commuted or monetary.
And of course there is the whole civil court room suit of wrongful death....
Im not a troll at all. Im stating the simple reality that the rules are written by the people they are designed to benefit, and they make (a perverted sort of) sense in that context.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
What? You don't think I deserve to get paid or that you can probably find something free (and therefore better) elsewhere? Fine. Just don't call me for support on that other product. But that doesn't give you the right to buy it with a stolen credit card, put it up on a web page and make sure lots and lots of people can get a non-free product for free.
That is what this fight is all about.
Wasn't replying to you, was replying to the AC. :P
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
- If you put all your 401K money in the company stock, you are going to get burned. No matter how good the company looks today, it is a dumb thing to do. Anyone that put all their 401K money in Enron deserved to lose it all. Sort of like taking your life savings to Las Vegas when you're 65 and hoping to win it big.
- Enron investors, well gosh that's too bad. Investors invest because they get paid for taking the risk. Lying about the status of the company and defrauding investors isn't good and they deserved to lose the company over that... but wait, that already happened, didn't it? Maybe some fines, but I'd rather see them have to buy the stock back.
I'm really tired of the "Enron defense" as to how tough the employees had it losing all their 401K money they invested in a single heap in the company stock. They did it, they knew they shouldn't and should have had lots of people telling them it was a bad idea. They did it anyway and lost it all. What can you say? Should the government come and bail them out? Wait, the government is already going to bail them out - it's called Social Security.Other than that, I agree with your about the impact warez distribution has. Not making a single copy and sharing it with your friend - putting it up on a web site and competing with the publisher.
> Everyone is hurt by a flasher? I repeat, what are you talking about?
Cowboy Neal flashed me and I went blind. Now I'm on welfare because I can't work. Ergo, everyone is hurt!
(Yay, my first CN joke ever! Last, hopefully)
Suppose someone wants a meal. They can either grow potatoes themselves using instructions available for free and cook a meal using a free recipe or they can go to a resturant and buy a meal. Being able to grow food yourself hasn't killed the market for resturants.
My other first post is car post.
CHill with the condescending tone. Your position is seriously weakened when you assume ignorance on the part of the person you are communicating with. Especially when you spell "purpose" when you really needed "propose" in your opening sentence.
I actually do know a little about indie music. In fact, I probably have exponentially more first-hand knowledge of how the independent music industry works than you do. Your generalization is pretty true. Most smaller bands on big labels make the lion's share of their money from touring-- that's door and merchandise. Primarily merch, though. Royalties from record sales are miniscule. The deal is, though, in order to pull off a good tour, the major label will usually do the booking. They'll usually help arrange for the fledgling artists to tag along on tour with their larger labelmates, thereby increasing exposure for the smaller band.
Don't jump to conclusions. I'm no fan of major labels or excessive profiteering by bands (i.e. Slayer charges no less than $25 for tour t-shirts that cost less than $5.00 to print). But I have friends who are on major labels and they are in a precarious position. This is their shot. If they make it, they won't have to get a straight job for the rest of their lives. They've gotten to where they are by making their music and the band their ONLY priority. When I asked one of them a few years ago, "What is your plan B?" He responded, "There is no plan B." He meant it with more seriousness than anything you can possibly imagine. They're popular. They're touring the world constantly. NME ranked their album two years ago as the 28th best album of the year. These guys aren't in a position to revolutionize the music industry. They're just looking to make music and pile up enough money while they're young so they don't have to dig ditches when they're old. By pirating their music, people are jeopardizing this goal for my friends.
Besides, your argument is fundamentally flawed. You're extrapolating a disagreement you have with how some corporations manage the IP they own and applying that disagreement to all recording artists. You're saying that since Warner Records sucks and exploits its artists, then you have the right to wholesale pirate any artist's work. Even if my friends weren't on a major label, I don't think it's the right of yours to say, "Hey, the music industry is backasswards. I'm going to just copy this music." Don't you think the artist deserves some input on the matter?
Besides, this discussion isn't about the RIAA. It's about software pirates. If you've ever worked for a software company and had a vested interest in the code you write, then you'd care that people are avoiding contributing to your paycheck by simply stealing your work. It's real easy to say, "Oh, that's a big corporation. Fuck them." Guess what. There are real humans who work at those corporations and pay their bills by the work they do for those companies. A lot of them are hanging by a string due to outsourcing to India and other impoverished nations. Stealing IP from these companies exacerbates the situation for the software coder hoping his job doesn't get sent overseas.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I seem to recall that the Enron 401k program gave employees the option of only putting their money into Enron stock and perhaps even Enron Subsidiaries. From what I understand, those employees had little to no choice in the matter and they ended up being robbed blind by the upper management.
The whole Enron fiasco is a very complicated piece of work and set in motion a number of important rules for accounting and also rules for retirement accounts. It is terribly unfortunate that those people lost what they did and they should have some sort of 'bail out', but that should come out of the rear ends of those that bilked them out of their 401k account balances.
It would be great if Social Security would be able to take up the slack and bail out these people. Unfortunately, Social Security simply doesn't work that way.
For instance, the death benefit of Social Security hasn't increased beyond $300 for over 30 years. The last time a checked, the average funeral was reaching $7000. When you pass on your family will be stuck footing the rest of the bill.
Beyond that Social Security simply doesn't provide enough money to continue living the same life someone lived before 'retiring'. Speak to your grandparents or parents and find out what they made the last year of working and what they recieve from Social Security. Also understand that the benefit stays nearly the same from the first check to the last Social Security Check with minimal increases for 'standard of living' which often amounts to little more then a few percentage point increase over a few years.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
> The last time a checked, the average funeral was reaching $7000
This doesn't change your argument, but the only reason that average is so high is because people get ripped off by funeral homes. They are taken advantage of because they are grief-stricken & vulnerable. If these people had the forsight to look ahead & plan their funerals BEFORE it becomes such an emotional time (still emotional to think about it, but you have a better chance of being reasonable), they wouldn't be paying 7 grand. You can get the whole thing done for less than $1000.
Less than that if you get cremated -- IMO, burying people is egotistical. It's taking up land that could be used for housing the homeless, or at least something else. Cemetaries only have so much space & when full, they have to take up even more land to "house the dead." Taken to its logical conclusion, unless some of these are dug up or built over, we will eventually run out of usable land (granted, that'll take a long time).
When I die, burn me up & throw me in the forest, so that I might one day become part of a tree or something, instead of putting me in an airtight container so that my body takes forever to rot.