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P2P Operators Plead Guilty

Posted by samzenpus on from the be-more-careful dept.

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.

6 of 554 comments (clear)

  1. Demand, where where is the (legeal) supply? by jg_elliott · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Demand, where where is the (legeal) supply? by Maestro4k · · Score: 5, Insightful
      • Quick economics lesson : Demand is a function of price. There is a lot of demand, because the illegal copies are FREE.
      That's not necessarily true. If it was then iTunes store wouldn't sell a single track, but they do. People wouldn't come into stores looking for singles of songs they like, but they do.

      The demand is there for digital music downloads in the format people want, free of DRM crap and at a reasonable price. I suspect you could sell tons and tons of music at around 50 cents a track in Mp3 format. Hell the RIAA companies could still sell tons of CD singles but they've killed off that market trying to force people to buy full albums.

      Besides, books are available for free, you can check them out of the library and read them and not pay a cent. You do have to return them in time, but that's a small issue in exchange for free books. Why would anyone buy a book when they can read it for free? People do it every day though.

      Demand's not a function of price, price is a function of demand. If supply is low and demand is high, price rises. If supply is high and demand is low, price drops. That's the point the RIAA & MPAA are missing. With digital music/movies supply is infinite, so normal economics rules indicate that price should drop. Instead they want to charge as much as, or more, than it costs to buy a better quality physical copy. No wonder they're doing so poorly, they haven't got a clue how to handle the digital market, not technically or economically.

  2. P2P? by Transdimentia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. In the other news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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.

  4. Re:Just goes to show you... by Seumas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unfortunately, most people don't have the money to fund lobbiests in Washington or fatten the pockets of legislators to sway toward consumer rights.

    If you don't like the law, tough-titties. Don't think that you can get away with changing it unless you have more money than those who support it.

  5. Newspeak by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.