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Man Gets 6 Years for Software Piracy

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the pirate-gets-his-due dept.

smooth wombat writes "In what prosecutors are calling 'the ultimate case', a Florida man has been sentenced to six years in prison for selling illegal copies of computer programs. From the article: 'Danny Ferrer, of Lakeland, Fla., pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy and copyright infringement charges after an FBI investigation of his Web site, BuysUSA.com. Ferrer also was ordered to pay more than $4.1 million in restitution to software makers Adobe Systems Inc., Autodesk, and Macromedia Inc.' The judge ordered that items he bought with the money, including airplanes, a Lamborghini and other cars, be sold off to pay for the restitution."

4 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. Wow... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I can understand the steep financial penalty, but 6 years seems awfully harsh for a crime where no one was physically harmed.

    1. Re:Wow... by jahudabudy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      j-turkey: Imagine getting into a bar fight and by way of a freak accident, you kill a man with a single punch. Do you think that you deserve to get locked up for life? What about for a consentual sex act and your partner changes their mind about it after the fact and presses charges?

      neonprimetime: What if, what if, what if. Don't put yourself in those positions and you wouldn't have to worry about it.

      Let's see, your advice is to NOT get into the position where you are drinking at bars and having sex with women. j-turkey is worried about "accidentally" killing a man with a single punch when shit goes down. Yeah, I think I'm gonna go hang out with j-turkey.

      --
      ...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
  2. archve.org link by yahyamf · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Archve.org link before the site was taken over by the FBI

  3. Re:Are Financial Crimes Victimless? by shark72 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "This guy made enough he could buy sportscars, planes, the works. Even if you just look at the $4.1m restitution, that's a lot of salaries Adobe, Macromedia and Autodesk could have paid. It's easy to dismiss it as "Oh well, they're big companies, no harm, no foul." but it becomes much more of an issue when they cut the job of a guy whose health insurance got his daughter treatment for cancer."

    Very well put.

    A common Slashdot response to the piracy issue is "the person wouldn't have bought the legitimate copy anyway." In this case, the guy was selling copies of $649 software for $99. This is roughly comparable to the discount that allofmp3.com offers on music, and many people defend their allofmp3.com use because they cannot afford to pay $1 / track. Just like allofmp3.com, this fellow was able to sell $649 software for $99 because he did not need to worry about paying the rightsholders. Unfortunately, lots of people would disagree with you about actual harm to Adobe, et al.

    I suspect that if this were a story about music piracy, the guys writing "They're big companies, no harm, no foul" would be the ones with the 5, Insightful ratings, where you'd be marked down as a troll and likely accused of astroturfing.

    --
    Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.