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Man Gets 6 Years for Software Piracy
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."
He should've just wiped his hard drive, and presto! no evidence. Oh, wait...
I can understand the steep financial penalty, but 6 years seems awfully harsh for a crime where no one was physically harmed.
It's one thing downloading software illegally online, but charging others for it brings things down to a whole new level, whether it be Office or the NES famiclone knockoffs.
He was charging suckers for this pirate software and not even providing the courtesy of an nfo.
Good riddance.
This is the kind of thing that we should be cracking down on, the commercial pirates, not teenagers and old ladies who download a song or two.
This guy is driving exotic cars and ripping off people at both sides, the companies who actually create the stuff, and the unsuspecting comsumer (read: idiot) who paid for this stuff thinking he was getting a good deal, and winds up getting screwed (not that you can really sympathize with anyone dumb enough to fall for this, but I guess greed overcomes common sense).
Now there's one business model that certainly could have benefited from picking FOSS.
Hey, here's an idea: maybe we should push this as counter-FUD:
Man sentenced to six years for picking proprietary software
Intrinsic risks of "poison pill" licenses overlooked by many
It's just a thought.
--MarkusQ
I can understand the steep financial penalty, but 6 years seems awfully harsh for a crime where no one was physically harmed.
By that definition, the Enron board, the WorldCom board and all others who cause purely financial damages should be given light sentences.
Noble ideals aside, in a monetized society, money does become essential: Without it, you don't get to eat, don't get health insurance, lose your home, etc.
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.
So, yes, there's no easy direct link to physical harm caused. But the trickle down effect, just like the Enron and Worldcom guys wiping out people's retirements, may well be far more dramatic overall than a single assault. Given that you can't track down every indirect result, all you can do is look at the quantity of money, get a feel for the effects the fraudulent reappropriation of that likely had, and then accept that increasing dollar amounts can be translated in to just as increasing "likelihood" of physical harm.
Is say physical assualt bad? Absolutely. And whilst worse for one person, I'm not convinced the overall suffering is actually worse than say ten guys facing the gnawing fear of layoffs, ten wives dealing with losing their homes they poured their souls in to, ten kids having to deal with daddy suddenly being unemployed and having to move away from friends and ten families living with the risk of no medical insurance.
I wonder how many adobe acrobat software packages you have to sell to pay for a Lamborghini? I mean seriously, this guy was making piles of money:
Ferrer's Web site began selling software in 2002 and was shut down by the FBI in October 2005, authorities said. Prosecutors said the illegal sales cost the software companies as much as $20 million, but industry officials say the amount could be higher.
How exactly were these numbers computed?? This is all going back to the dead horse "but people wouldn't have bought the package if it was too expensive" argument; figuring the losses as each unit sold being a loss is absurd.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy