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Crackdown on BT Users in Hong Kong
griffinn writes "100 BitTorrent users in Hong Kong are about to receive legal threats from the MPIA (Hong Kong's equivalent of the MPAA), BusinessWeek reports. The users were randomly selected from more than 6000 IP addresses collected by investigators. Customs officials are also following through on their previous arrest of a 38-year-old man who allegedly uploaded three movies." From the article: "If convicted, the suspect faces up to four years in prison and a fine of 50,000 Hong Kong dollars ($6,400) for every illegal copy."
If you ask me, the other 5900 BitTorrent users should come forward and say "I'M SPARTACUS!"
...to something like Manslaughter or Murder 3.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
How can you expect the RIAA to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of BitTorrent when slashdot editors cannot be bothered to do the same? Hong Kong is not cracking down on BT Users, but on wilful copyright violators who happen to use BitTorrent.
You might as well run a headline "US police crack down on Drivers", leading to a report detailing the arrest of a guy who drove a getaway car in a robbery.
Sheesh.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
BitTorrent is not inherently illegal. You could use a similar argument to prohibit downloading of ANY files, since they just use a different method.
It appears that their government is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If they tried that sort of stuff in the United States, then the government would catch so much flak from people claiming this is an invasion of privacy (which it is.)
4 years in prison? I can understand thieves and murderers doing prsion time, but some dude uploading a movie on the internet? Kinda a waste of jail space, I think. That and he (or she) won't really fit in, because there are plenty of decent people who swap movies and music.
aside from that, is it just BT users in general, or ones who were found to be swapping illegal content?
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People are pirating entertainment in Southeast Asia?
So sad, I wonder if there was another reason for arresting this man?
He should have done what everyone else does in China, just go to the local street market and buy the pirated copy.
They should also reduce the sentence due to the bad selection of movies he made (Daredevil, Red Planet, Miss Congeniality), he deserves no more than a slap on the wrist and good movie guide.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Its obvious that stealing music is wrong. Just as software pirating is wrong, stealing TV is wrong, stealing movies is wrong, etc etc etc.
But the question I always ask myself when I hear about the RIAA and the MPAA suing individuals is, "What good can come from this?"
And the answer is obviously, "Nothing good can come from this."
Suing customers isn't going to help. Most people who steal media do so for the fun of it. Many are just collectors who would most likely not purchase the media if they couldn't steal it.
Are the lawsuits preventing the piracy? I don't think so. I think they are just driving the piracy deeper underground.
Are the lawsuits pissing off people? Just read slashdot, of course they are.
I think corporate America's whole tack on DRM is completely out of whack. Instead of attacking perspective customers, they should be trying to win their money by providing product that is more compelling than the free copy by being less expensive and easier to get than the illegal stuff.
Instead of being control freaks, trying to control all the people in America to prevent loss of money, they should focus on improving content and find ways lower the cost of digital media distrobution to the point that stealing isn't as fun anymore. Everyone has a different "fun" threshold and for many, releasing tunes for 33 cents or 50 cents a piece would remove the fun of trying to get a decent download.
And that's my main point. Its fun to get something for practically nothing and to collect a massive music collection on the cheap. And that's why people do it, for the fun of it. If Joe P2Per has 2 million mp3s on his music server, how often does he get to hear each and every one of them? Not very often. He sticks to the songs he really likes, and I'll bet he's got those on CD, because he wants to support the bands he likes because he wants them to succeed.
I think RIAA and MPAA need to step back and re-analyze the situation. I think they're going down the wrong path and they need to stop.
Raydude
Linux is not Windows