P2P Operators Plead Guilty

Bootsy Collins writes "In the first such criminal convictions in the U.S., two peer-to-peer hub operators have pled guilty to conspiracy to commit felony copyright infringement. The two men were subjects of raids last August after Department of Justice investigators downloaded content valued at US$25,000 retail from their servers, the Movie Room and Acheron's Alley. They face sentences of up to five years in prison, and up to US$250,000 in fines, in addition to the possibility of being forced to pay restitution to copyright holders.

Comments

is that legal?

[interactive_civilian]

from TFA:

During an investigation, government agents downloaded 35 copyright works worth $4820.66 from Chicoine's site and more than 70 copyright works worth $20,648.63 from Trowbridge's site, the DOJ says.

IAdefinitelyNAL, but for some reason I was under the impression that evidence gathered through illegal means (in this case copyright infringement) could not be used...

Can anyone clarify US law on that matter?

Why is this a Felony???

[advocate_one]

Surely Copyright infringement is only a civil matter.

...value...

[Vo0k]

It's interesting how the value of the media is calculated.
Is a high-compression DIVX of a shaky video of screen in cinema valued the same as retail 4-DVD "special edition" release?
Is a rip of a 4-CD game squeezing it into 300MB calculated as the same game, with a T-shirt and a manual in the box?
Is software that was released 10 years ago valued at the prices of its release or at current "bargain bin" prices?
Is a mono MP3 made through hand-hacked cable from a poor quality cable counted the same as a new audio CD album?

I don't think the real value is taken into consideration. They just match title-price and neglect quality altogether. My friend was caught. The value they calculated on his software was something like $30.000. The real value of the crap if he wanted to sell that, was around $500.

Newspeak

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the points of Orwell's 1984 was that you could subtly influence peoples opinions by changing the language they used to talk about such things.

"Those who steal copyrighted material will be caught, even when they use the tools of technology to commit their crimes," U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft says in a statement. "The theft of intellectual property victimizes not only its owners and their employees, but also the American people, who shoulder the burden of increased costs for goods and services."

The trouble with that statement is that copyright infringement is not theft. The dictionary tells us that you have to remove something in order to steal it. The laws in the USA defining theft don't mention copyright infringement. The laws in the USA defining copyright infringement don't mention theft. The Supreme Court definitively ruled that copyright infringement was not theft in Dowling vs US, 1985 . They are fundamentally different actions. There is simply no basis whatsoever for misappropriating the word "theft" to talk about copyright infringement.

The question is, why is Ashcroft trying to tell us that copyright infringement is theft? The only other people who do that are the RIAA, the MPAA, and Slashdot trolls.

Re:Just goes to show you...

[davmoo]

As someone else has already said in a reply to you, basic human rights and the "right" to rip off corporations are two very different things. To compare the two is so rediculous I can't even come up with a better word than "rediculous".

But I would also like to point out something else.

If you check historical records, you will find that Martin Luther King and many others involved in civil rights protests spent many days in jail for their actions. They did what they had to do to effect change...but they also understood those actions came with a price. And many of them, not just MLK, and both black and white, paid a far greater price.

Are you willing to go to jail or take a bullet just so you can download Britney?