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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.
They did commit copyright infringement. How is that conspiracy?
Anyone have a torrent ? ;)
If you don't like the law, work to change it. Don't think that you can get away with breaking it because you don't believe in it.
If there is so much demand for being able to download movies/tv episodes, then why the hell don't the distribution companies take advantage of it and let poeple downlaod things legally at a fair price?
Maybe I missed it in TFA, but how was this p2p? The statment "The two sites offered a wide variety of computer software, computer games, music, and movies in digital format, including some software titles that legitimately sell for thousands of dollars, the DOJ says." seems to indicate non p2p pirating activity. Calling it a p2p hub seems to be FUD unless there was an explanation of the technology used.
...new BitTorrent sites are appearing at the same time others are closing. One of these sites is mininova, which is the follow-up of the well-known SuprNova.
A full list of torrent sites can be found here.
Can anyone clarify US law on that matter?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Next then I know, I'll be arrested for "Conspiracy to download porn"
Seriously though, I can understand that turning a blind eye to something is not good, but if you're running a hub, then surely you're just negligent, not malicious?
My UID is prime. Is yours?
Surely Copyright infringement is only a civil matter.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
If you steal stuff, or substantially contribute to it, you pay the price.
Unless you are a government. When I grow up I'm gonna be a government.
The belief in a biblical god is an ignorant one
...thank God the FBI is doing its job.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Presumably they pled guilty as part of a plea-bargain. There's very little reason to plead guilty to anything unless it gets you better treatment that you think you would get by fighting the charges.
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The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
Could of swore the American people can record something with a VCR/TiVo and happily watch it back. Surely the same thing applies to downloading it after watching it on TV a day or so before too. I'm not American but this applies to most places, just a shame people totally ignore anything "in the real world" when it comes to "cyber" crime.
I like muppets.
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.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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.
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.
"100GB of material, the equivalent of 250,000 songs," Wouldn't 100GB be about 25,000 songs. The iPod 20GB advertises 5,000 songs can be stored on it. So wouldn't 100GB be 25,000. Just a little technical inaccuracy I found.
Oh get over yourself. An act of civil disobedience invloves openly and blatantly breaking the law, so that the inevitable arrest is very public, in order to garner public sympathy for their cause.
A couple of guys hiding behind the (assumed) anonymity of the Internet, breaking the law for their own personal gain doesn't quite pass the civil disobedience litmus test.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
From wikipedia:
"More recently, in the 2000s, people have used civil disobedience to protest....the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
An act of civil disobedience invloves openly and blatantly breaking the law, so that the inevitable arrest is very public, in order to garner public sympathy for their cause.
A couple of guys hiding behind the (assumed) anonymity of the Internet, breaking the law for their own personal gain doesn't quite pass the civil disobedience litmus test.
Somebody needs to correct that entry.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Dear god. Felony copyright violation charges? *blink* That has to be a misprint.
Maybe I don't understand what the word "felony" means or applies to. My understanding is that a felony charge is given for causing life-threatening or altering harm to another person.
What kind of things get classified as felonies? Is grand theft auto a felony? How about breaking and entering? I don't think inciting a riot is, or in many cases even something like attacking another person (non-lethally). Drunk driving isn't a felonous charge unless you -really- fuck up.
This isn't a violent crime, has not even the slimmest chance of harming someone's livelyhood, and about as harmless as some guy on the street in Mexico selling "Timex" watches on the street for $15. Maybe less so.
It just seems incredibly draconian and fascist to have laws that protect corporations to the utmost while punishing the violators with a life-destroying sentence. Copyright law is a fucking civil issue. The parties involved should have the option to take them to a civil court, and nothing more. Now, if these people hacked into systems to store or acquire their warez, sure, prosecute them federally. But this is just rediculous.
I can see it now. School cops will start looking for CDs and removeable hard disks when they search through students' lockers now, and burned CDs will first be an automatic 2-week expulsion, followed up by a $20,000 fine the second time and 6 months imprisonment at the county jail. Then, it's pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
One of the more famous examples is Dr. David S. Touretzky's "Gallery of CSS Descramblers", which contains more than 20 different examples of code that is (assumed to be) illegal under the DMCA.
The page also prominently displays Dr. Touretzky's name, email address and a photograph of him. It was explicitly created to draw attention to the absurdity of the DMCA law, through civil disobedience:
These guys could get 5 years?!
My Corrections professors told the class about somebody who got 1-2 years for date rape. Under what system of morality is copyright infringement worse than drugging somebody and raping them?
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
Market value is the only true value. Why isn't someone screaming this in the courts?
When you buy a CD or piece of software, you get the support... the nice packaging... the printed manuals... the fancy CD... the liner notes... The legal serial number.
When you download media, you only get the media itself, and usually a much crappier version of it (if it's video) or a mildly crappier version of it (if it's sound) or a version you are forced to read on a screen (if it's a PDF of a book).
Not to mention that there is no proof that every download is a lost purchase... I'm telling you, most of these people are merely into collecting and hardly have time to "consume" the media or software.
Mod parent up!
You are wrong. I have something more powerful than all the money a company can throw at lobbiests: an informed vote. Money works in politics because people can be bought with pretty adds on TV. If you become an informed voter to whom ads do not matter you scare all polititions because you have the power to vote them out, and they cannot influence you easily.
In most elections the difference between the winner and looser is only a few thousand votes. IF you work at it next time around you can change that many people's vote without spending a penny!
Become an informed voter and get your friends to become informed. (Or if they won't become informed, tell them to stay home rather than vote for the guy who looks better on TV!)
Yeah, I think AllOfMP3.com also illustrates the whole price/demand thing pretty well. Basically the parent seems mostly to be saying there's no point in a pay service since there are zero-cost offerings, making any pay service undesirable. But as you noted it's more of a true curve where you have some demand even for something expensive (like $1 a song) , and huge demand for something close to free ($40 a GB).
Personally I am uncomfortable using AllOfMP3.com as I feel not enough goes to the artist - I still stick with iTunes for that reason, they get around $.10 a song which is not too bad (especially considering I'm mostly just buying singles).
I do wonder though what the sales charts would look like if all music stores added in sales from AllOfMP3 - I'll bet even the ITMS would be a sliver in comparison, despite the much loswer price at AllOfMP3!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Under what system of morality is copyright infringement worse than drugging somebody and raping them?
Uh, that would be capitalism.
Now if they had lots of money, wore suits and drove around in limos the DoJ wouldn't even have arrested them. They would have probably just got a C&D letter in the mail or a call from their lawyer. Maybe next time they'll think ahead and sell their stolen movies for the millions it takes to avoid legal problems. Cuz we all know millionaires never break the law.
I have a quote from ashcroft on my blog
As today's pleas demonstrate, those who steal copyrighted material will be caught, even when they use the tools of technology to commit their crimes. 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.