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DrinkOrDie Warez Trader to be Extradited to U.S.
femto writes "Hew Raymond Griffiths, alleged to be one of the leaders of the warez group DrinkOrDie, is to be extradited to the United States after losing an appeal. The case is of interest as the appeal was based on the fact that during the offences, alleged to have been committed in the US, the accused did not leave Australia."
Give this article a shot. http://www.chokedout.org/SPT--FullRecord.php?Resou rceId=261 Description: After a swift defeat last March, the American government has won an appeal in an Australian court to have Hew Raymond Griffiths extradited to America to face trial - on charges of copyright infringement. Griffiths is accused of being the ringleader of a "warez" group known as DOD (Drink or Die), using the alias Bandido. So-called warez groups reverse engineer software, freeing it of any copy protection, and spread it across the Internet free of charge. Don't be swayed by the US DOJ's propaganda about warez - its claim, for example, that it costs millions (per group) and billions (in sum total) to the software industry each year. These are the same erroneous, inflated figures pumped out by the BSA annually. What's really at stake here is the legal sovereignty of Australia. Admittedly, they gave some of that up by accepting a recent trade pact with the US, and importing the DMCA into .au law as a result. But the implications of the Griffiths' case are much more serious. "Bandido" never profited from his crimes - he was and still is, in fact, unemployed and living with his parents. He showed public disdain to those who would profit from the work of others. Nor does the American government contend this.
They also don't contend a more obvious fact - Griffiths has never set foot in America in his life. Still, despite Australian law being more than equipped to deal with such a case, the DOJ under Ashcroft has decided to impose U.S. law on the world at large.
Why is there a need for America to cast aside the Australian legal system like a weak little brother (then again, in 2004, it basically is the weak little brother, and John Howard personifies this to a T)?
Consider this another step in a downward spiral. It began with the No Electronic Theft Act - prior to the NET Act of 1997, actions such as Bandido's were permissible under United States law because he did not profit from them. The NET Act closed the loophole at the behest of Music Industry officials and others. It was the first major victory in a lobbying campaign that continues today, robbing consumers of their rights and industries of free competition. The PIRATE Act and INDUCE Act have this piece of legislation to thank for their consideration (and, most likely in one form or another, eventual passage).
Then came the DMCA, universally regarded as one of the worst technology laws ever. Implemented in 1998, it outlawed the work of professors, researchers, corporations, and has done nothing but stifle competition and criminalize actions that should be legal - such as backing up a copy of a DVD that a person has purchased.
In 2000 came raids on another warez group, PWA - Pirates with Attitudes. At the time one of the oldest pirate groups on the net (dating back to the days of underground BBS's), the group found themselves at the mercy of the Department of Justice's new push into intellectual property crime and copyright infringement - areas that in the past had been regarded as civil matters.
After originally fighting the charges, group members eventually pled guilty, but not before the government re-calculated its damages claim (to a considerably lower number), assuring themselves of relatively lenient sentences (the longest was 17 months in prison - still harsh if you want to picture millions of Americans facing this simply for using KaZaa to swap MP3s or Doom 3). Papers such as the Wall Street Journal followed the case, setting off faint alarm bells - as Lee Gomes of the WSJ put it in a 2000 article, "This sort of naughtiness has been around the personal-computing world from the very beginning. The very first business of Apple co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs was selling the '70s-era "little blue boxes" that allowed people to make free long-distance phone calls."
After that came the lesser takedown of a group known as Fastlane (who didn't crack software themselves but rather traded it, making them essentially a
I'm not sure how good or relevant an analogy this would be, but I'm thinking it would be like if I, as a Canadian, hired a hitman to kill a U.S. citizen in the U.S. Although I would never have left Canada, my actions would directly influence crimes committed in the United States. Since he likely had fileservers based in the US under his control, that would justify calling it a crime based in the US. Physical location honestly doesn't seem to have a lot of relevance anymore, since a lot of crimes can be done digitally from the other side of the world, and don't require physical access.
IANAL so I don't know all the specifics of extraditions....
However, I am not sure that this is all bad in most cases. Usually extradition deals require a fair amount of dealmaking between the prosecution and the extraditing courts. Usually there is some level of protection of the rights that a person has before extradition. So if someone cannot be tried for the death penalty in the extraditing state, usually this is a condition of extradition. You can imagine what might happen if Osama Bin Ladin were to be captured in a country that has no death penalty (say the UK), the international politics that might result...
So often extradition is not the trampling on rights that people are afraid it might be.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
In the DrinkOrDie case, a different crime has been committed, but the monetary damage was in country 'U' and not in country 'A', thus an extradition is clearly warranted.
Dedicated Linux servers (root access) $45 p.M.
...from one country to another, the country I bomb can't touch me?
It's understandable for the target country to pursue you, and for a missile I wouldn't be surprised if they're willing to break some rules to do so.
However, if your own country doesn't see fit to make the action illegal then I can see no reason for them to extradite you for an act they themselves permit. Similarly, if there are laws against it in the home country then I can see no reason why they should extradite one of their own people rather than having them tried under their own laws. Apart from anything else, extradition to a foreign jurisdiction is a pretty extreme action imposed upon someone deemed to be innocent untless proven guilty.
"What do you really think the Australian government gets for being our lapdog?" Better trade deals, and no attacks on Australian soil by the US military.
We get to keep our ANZUS treaty alive... which is important to alot of Aussies because we have an irrational xenophobic idea that Indonesia will try to invade us one day. (our army being outnumbered 3 to 1 by McDonalds employees and all)
I am an aussie and our government DOES do whatever the US says.
Two australians were being held in guantanamo bay while the french and british got their nationals back.
Our prime minister, john howard, is a lap dog of the US army. We always have been, korea, vietnam, gulf I, gulf II.
The parent is not refering to ganging up to attack the US, just that there should be groups powerful enough to counter-balance. Nobody has a problem with US power, just with unbridled US superpower with a motley crew of fools, religious nuts and captains of industry directing it.
No, but I think it's comparing apples and oranges. Sadly, the courts go your way. Read up on U.S. v Noriega and you shall find what you seek. Here's the best I could google quickly:
http://www.gwu.edu/~jaysmith/Noriega.html
What you are after and the clueless below seem not to understand is the issue of territorial jurisdiction. I think the precedents are wrong-headed, but it is what it is.
Global communications schemes are going to make many extraterritorial acts fall under the reach of the U.S. or whomever wants to prosecute the offense. The legal nightmares have only just begun. If you did it on the internet, you violated a law somewhere at sometime. Sweet dreams...
I can tell I'm reading slashdot when I read a post where someone wants to be raped. ;)
Honestly, I'm not sure males can fully understand the concept of rape. (It's like normal sex, but without the movie, dinner, and talking.) If you had a daughter, and were a millionare, would you rather her be raped, or lose a million dollars? I consider rape far worse than losing money.
Also, no one said it was going to be a female raping you. Would you be ok with being raped by a male rather than losing millions of dollars when you have plenty more money?
Technically, copyright infringement isn't theft.
But copyright infringement is just as illegal.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
America has gone too far. Now it grabs people out of other countries to subject them to its increasingly draconian laws.
"They weren't called "Warez community", they didn't use internet and the PC's, but they were very active in the Sinclair, Commodore 64 and later Amiga games scene.But they weren't hurting M$'s profits, so they must have been innocent at that time..."
I beg to differ. I was a part of this scene at the time, but 'only' as a courier. I ran a board that was set up at specific times and was on a rotating series of numbers as we'd move our 64C (that was the 'portable' C64) to different houses to the point, we'd put them in folks backyards and hookup to the greybox and an external poweroutlets.
Several of my friends were charged for this. One had jail time, but that was for hacking into crap he wasn't supposed to. In the end, the gov't gave him a scholarship and he is now working for one of the cybercrime units -- but then again, back then, we were more interested in exploration than exploitation or vandalism. He got caught because he left a message telling the sysop how he got in and how it could be fixed.
But all in all, we fucked up a lot of companies with our deeds. I've met guys over the years that use to run Commodore based development firms and we'd get to talking about the good ol' days and they'd say everything was fine and then all of a sudden sales dropped.
I remember there was one guy that had an app that we *REALLY* wanted to hack because no one else had -- it was a simple rent management application. No one in the group wanted it, but the way the guy had hack proofed it made us want to bring it down ever more. He was using the 1541 as extra storage almost as a seperate co-cpu -- it had 16k of extra programable space or something like that, and he was using it to run all his copyprotection (not using the disc portion, but actual assembly on the chips itself).
The app sold for like $200 and was updated every few months for a small fee and if you were in the landlord game, it was actually pretty cheap all in all. This is ALL this guy did. Turns out he lived a few blocks away from where I got my first apartment and I rant into him one day in my early college years. I don't know how we got to talking about this, but the issue off the C64 came up and he spilled the beans on his app to which I responded Yeah, That Sounds Like One We Played Around With -- The Code Was Tight And he Used The 1541 -- to which the guy turned white.
Turns out, within a few months of us putting out the crack, almost all sales dried up. He went bankrupt because he had only been doing this one thing because it looked like no one else was in the game. This was one of the turning points for me in realizing this 'copyright infringement' actually had a cost. I was part of something that cost this guy his livelyhood and his marriage. Oh no, it wasn't theft on my part, I only copyinfringed the suckatude on his f'n life.
You know what? I should have been thrown in jail for my involvement in the crime. Its just like every motherfucker that thinks carjacking someone isn't really hurting someone because they should have known the game. They should have realized the proper ediquite is to get the fuck up and not fight or you get hurt -- car jackers don't hurt others, the car owners do because they can't get with the redistribution. Same with rape victims, as Bobby Knight famously said, layback and enjoy it because fighting will just get you hurt.
Seriously, for what I did, I deserved going to jail and getting raped in the ass. And this is exactly what happened to some friends at the time. As such, I take an extreme view of electronic theft. As a programmer, I now see my applications stolen -- its karmic. I get in contact with these guys and trace them down and have my lawyer contact them with specific information about what they are doing to me and I leave it at that knowing full well I could have them jailed easily. Mostly, I feel sorry for these guys because they are killing programmers and they can't understand this and don't see how they are relegating the best and br
The thing that is most disturbing about this is not that people can get extradited for copyright violations, it is that the US can get someone to be extradited for this, but that hell would freeze over before the US would extradite a US citizen for this kind of offense to another nation.
In my lifetime, as I remember it, the American Empire started with the invasion of the nation of Panama and the kidnapping of President Manuel Noriega.
It was during the reign of Bush the First, as I recall. Citing the justification that the President of Panama was involved in the drug trade, the United States invaded the nation of Panama, surrounded the Presidential compound, blared rock music at high decibel levels, and eventually dragged the President of Panama back to a hole in the U.S. until someone remembered to charge him with something and convict him some years after.
Americans thought it was rather funny. I don't recall a single newsman questioning our right to invade Panama. The comedians made fun of Noriega's complexion, but said not one word about the slaughter we perpetrated.
Wow. Imagine a south/central American nation involved in the drug trade. Imagine the CIA ever caring. Negroponte, one of Bush the Second's new viceroys, was up to his ass in creating the death squads back in the 80's. Mass murder is okay, drugs are not...
According to REALLY supressed statistics the Panamanians kept, the U.S. killed over 2000 civilians rolling into Panama. Armed forces, I don't know, And I have no idea what the hell they charged Noriega with, what he was convicted of, or who sat in judgement. Nor under what possible set of international laws the U.S. could use to invade, kill, and kidnap the Executive in other nations because someone there ships chemicals some Americans don't want other Americans to use for recreational purposes. Imagine: Iraq eventually invading the U.S., killing about a half million people. Imagine them surrounding the White House with loud speakers blasting calls to prayer to drive the inhabitants insane. Imagine the Iraqi's dragging Bush II back to Iraq in irons to face charges for invading Iraq under false auspices. Imagine Iraq setting up a friendly government in the U.S. so that they could get favorable oil prices forevermore. And they'd have more justification than we had for kidnapping and murdering Panamanians.
After all, the Panama Canal was about to pass into Panamanian control in 1999. There wouldn't be any incentive to keep the locks in a friendly puppet's hand, would there?
And I really don't want to hear about Noriega's evil rule. No American ever gave a bloody damn about evil rulers in Panama, and we never will.
Half of your wish is already taken care of. We Ameicans happily go to Wal-Mart to shop for cheap Chinese stuff and thereby boycott American goods. As for military 'misadventures'- humm let's see, European misadventures 1. Crusades, 2. Colonialism, 3. WWI, 4. WWII, -American 'misadventures' are basically cleaning up after those messes. Thank goodness those Europeans know better than we do.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
"What does the Australian govenrment get"?
They don't get overthrown by the CIA and replaced with a Pinochet style military dictatorship.
He [Attila the Hun] killed people. Real pirates kill(ed) people. This is why the media's willingness to apply such extreme terms to copyright infringement (yeah, that kills people... how?) is so disappointing and inaccurate. If anything, most of the infringement developer cartels complain to the press about are the kinds of infringement which result in greater sales (hence their poor sales as they go after more of these people). When the original Napster was up and active (back in my killing days) I bought more commercial music (physical CDs) than at any other time in my life. Prior to the DeCSS decision against freedom of speech (yeah my t-shirt really is against the law) I bought DVDs regularly too. Funny how the actions of the media cartels which really do destroy lives have led me to consuming less of their product. Of course, I don't know for much longer that will be legal.
Sorry man, your story just reeks of bullshit. Things like your apparent ignorance of the difference between a C-64C (not a portable) and a C-64SX (portable); unrealistic stories about hooking a portable BBS up to random people's demarc boxes (without it ever being noticed and taken?-- yeah, sure); your melodramatic exposition of personal guilt (I deserve butt raping for my crimes!); your "friend" who got a government hacking scholarship; referring to "putting out a crack", a method of warezing which is only really useful in the modern "network and hard drive" age (software that runs from floppies? You just crack the software and distribute it pre-cracked); failure to mention any specifics, such as cracking group names, or the specific titles of any software, or the years these things happened. Top that off with your posting as an AC, and I'm afraid you sound like a small-timer who copied games for his friends when he was 14 and autobiographically appropriated some "pirate mythology" he remembered reading about on a BBS or in COMPUTE! magazine.
-you "ran a board that was set up at specific times and was on a rotating series of numbers as we'd move our 64C (that was the 'portable' C64) to different houses to the point, we'd put them in folks backyards and hookup to the greybox and an external poweroutlets."
-you cracked an app "that we *REALLY* wanted to hack because no one else had -- it was a simple rent management application." and "No one in the group wanted it"
-and then "Turns out, within a few months of us putting out the crack, almost all sales dried up. "
So you expect us to believe you risked getting caught trespassing and/or losing a VERY expensive C64SX (not a 64c, tard; if you were telling the truth you'd have known that) in order to set up a 'leet BBS in the dead of night for a few hours at a time, in order to distribute an app that (in your own words) "No one in the group wanted", but apparently enough landlords were privy to this super-secret BBS to drive the guy out of business? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! I've seen episodes of CSI that were more believeable. Sounds to me like it's more likely (though probably still not true) that it was YOU who wrote that lame rent program and lost your wife and money because you didn't realize there was almost no market for that shit then, and now you blame it on PIRATES! Go tell your "grim fairy trolls" somewhere else.
...extradite suspects from the U.S., and they'll probably get it.
Not if they've got politicians like the UK. The Home Secretary here signed into law the Extradition Treaty 2003 which allows the US to extradite anyone from the UK for laws which attract one year or more emprisonment in the US (but which might not attract the same in the UK, such as Internet gambling). But there is no reciprocal arrangement.
Yay, let's here it for the British government protecting their citizens!!
Did he inhale?
This could set an interesting precendent for internet gambling sites. They have generally claimed what they do is legal since the transactions occur on servers outside the US, where US law does not apply. The US government claims it is illegal because the gambler is in the US when he makes his bets, so US law does apply.
But here the government is agreeing in principal with the internet gambling sites, that the law in the place where the servers are located trumps the law where the person supposedly violating the law is physically present.
Interesting...