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BitTorrent Site Admin Sent To Prison
Marc wrote in with a Torrentfreak story which opens: "The 23 year old Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in prison, followed by five months of home detention, and a $3000 fine for his role in the private BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents.
This ruling is the first BitTorrent related conviction in the US. Stanley pleaded guilty earlier this year to 'conspiracy to commit copyright infringement' and 'criminal copyright infringement.' He is one of the three defendants in the Elitetorrents operation better known as 'Operation D-Elite.'"
The federal prison system does not allow conjugal visits. Conjugal Visits
For anyone that makes it this far, theft is legally defined as "the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving that person of it." Until recently, copyright infringment was a civil matter. That means that you couldn't be brought to court by the state, and you couldn't serve jail time. You could be made to pay reparations to the party or parties whose copyrights you infringe, though
that kinda of depends on what you think is recent.
The willful infringement clause that establishes criminal liability for willful copyright violation was added to section 506(a) of title 17 of the u.s. code on May 24, 1982. So you've been able to serve jail time for copyright infringement for over 24 years.
(This addition had nothing to do with the internet. Name servers and the use of TCP/IP as the standard protocol for the internet didnt happen until 1983. DNS was introduced in 1984.)
5 months in prison is a pretty light sentence compared to what he could have gotten. the maximum prison sentence for willful infringement is 5 years (depending on the type of infringement. that's the worst possible case).
That isn't to say that i agree with the charges against him.. The actual infringement of the copyright is done by the seeders. The tracker maintainer seems like he would be the person in the chain who is clearly not guilty of actual infringement since all he is doing is saying "hey, that guy is giving away free copies of Memento, Microsoft Word, and Half-Life 2".
However, he did plead guilty. I cannot fault the judge for finding him guilty when he pleads guilty...and in light of the possible sentence he could have received, he got off pretty light. Given what i know of the case, i think he could have fought it, but he (and his lawyer) might have been privy to more damning evidence against him.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
You're in good company -- Thomas Jefferson always referred to them as "monopolies" (albeit without the "intellectual" part) too.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There really is no other type.
In the UK there are "Open Prisons": low security places for low-risk criminals. Armed robbers, gangsters, murderers, rapists etc. go in high security prisons, while perjurers, embezzlers, tax avoiders, shoplifters, manslaughterers by negligence and, er, copyright infringers are put in open prisons.
As I understand it, in an open prison, you're locked in a cell -- more like university accommodation than a barred cell like in Prison Break -- for stretches of time, but if you wanted to escape, you could just wander off during the time you're not locked up. Very few people do escape, because when you're re-apprehended, your original crime is trumped by the worse crime of escaping from prison, and this time you get put in a far more unpleasant high security jail.
Isn't there something similar in the US?