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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.'"
Rape
Murder
Theft
Or..
Drug posession
Helping people download music
When will we Get a LEGAL system that isnt Bought and Paid for by Greedy Corporations.. It took a NUMBER of Years for Enron Folks to be tried and imprisoned and they stole Billions and Destroyed peoples lives.. I guess the Law and rules only work in favor of the Rich and powerful :(
What a Crock of Manure.
The problem is, most people are content to live like this. Without questioning their rights (hell most people I've come across don't even know what their rights are). We live in an apathetic society, where people are happy just waking up every morning being alive and going to work without being shot at. And it only gets worse every day.
- Aetheral Research -
In order to imprison someone for violating the temporarily granted monopoly, the government should have to prove that he discouraged "the progress of science and useful arts". For that, they would have to prove that the people who obtained his pirated material would otherwise have paid for it. That is the problem with the arguments of strict copyright proponents: They fail to recognize that the absence of piracy does not imply equivalently higher sales. Some of us are simply not willing to pay $20 for one decent song on a CD.
The fine might be appropriate, but prison time is completely unjustified.
Trademarked by the "entertainment industry"
1. Make the (US) government happy by paying politicians for
legalizing monopoly over culture practically forever
2. Kill creativity and competition by killing the public domain
3. Nourish crap tastes, sell crap at monopoly prices
4. Profit
5. Goto 1
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.
So seriously, five months in prison is a gross miscarraige of justice. It's definitely five months, an arrest, and a criminal case too much.
So... what exactly are these "goods" and how were they "stolen"? Did it take a big truck to carry them around? How much is it going to cost the origional owners to replace them?
Oh wait... no theft occured at all. There were no "goods" and nobody lost anything tangible at all. Why is someone going to jail for this?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Jail? For adminning an indexing site?
When are they going to lock up the Google admins?!?
You're using her as bait, Master!
Sorry, hold up there. He mass-distributed /infringing intellectual property/. Labeling it as or drawing analogies comparing it to theft damages my language, and I don't intend to allow that.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Why send someone who hasnt harmed anyone to jail?
Wouldnt getting him to do community work be a better way of dealing with him? And a better use of your tax dollars?
I hope that Australia doesnt end up following America down this path.
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
As somebody who loves innovation and change, and sometimes dream of the pie in the sky, I normally hate this saying with a passion, but I must say it. C'est la vie. There is nothing else I can say. You have to either live with the current system, work and change the current system from within, or relocate to a place where the laws and values matches yours. There are no alternatives. Although I have libertarian-leaning views and I remain a staunch individualist, I also recognize that we don't live in a vacuum; it is very inconvienent (and almost impossible these days) to live on an island or another secluded area by yourself, with no help from anybody. Nobody to grow your food, nobody to make your clothes, nobody to build your housing, nothing. Nobody to talk to, nobody to be with, just lonely. There is a cost to living in a society. We all have some implicit social contract to obey both the explicit rules of society (governmental laws) as well as the implicit rules (moral codes). Sometimes those rules are bad rules that are flawed, foolish, or downright stupid. But you must either live with them, change them, or leave.
Is a private island with your own rules, your own laws, and your own government (assuming that you have one) worth the seclusion, the loneliness, and lack of help and resources from the outside world? If living with my loved ones and friends meant not being able to legally download movies and music on BitTorrent, then I'll choose my loved ones and friends. My free movies and music can stay on Utopia Island.
It's not he didn't know what he were doing was determined to be unlawful and punishable as a federal crime.
It's not? It sure is the first time that I have heard someone being prosecuted for providing the technological means to somone else to violate copyright law. For that's all a Bittorrent-tracker is. It is NOT an act of copying or distributing anything, merely a way for clients to get in contact with each other in order to copy something.
As far as I can tell, this verdict means we will haul librarians to jail if they put a photocopier into the library: providing others with the means to violate copyright.
Where exactly is the line here? Which section of the USC was actually violated here?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
The GPL violator steals from the poor and sells to the rich.
Do you really see no difference?
Calling copyrighted information intellectual property isn't any better. It's still Orwellian doublespeak.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I pity you. Truly. To have so little regard for human rights and decency that you think putting this guy in a place where he will probably be raped reapeatedly, beaten and stand a greatly increased chance of developing a chemical dependency degrades us all, including you.
All for sharing a 1s and 0s.
Was he wrong? Undoubtedly. But until the law catches up with this class of crime, this is simply mob justice.
I have filed the waiver (basically cannot afford it) of financial hardship several times. Basically I couldn't afford to take a potentially long time unpaid off work .
Now let me get out the soapbox yet again. I don't understand the injustice system. The judge gets paid well, the bailiffs & cops get paid well, the lawyers get paid very well, but the jurors get lunch money. What is wrong with this picture?
If you want to get a jury of your peers, the jury MUST be paid the same wage they would otherwise earn. Without this you'll get nothing but juries which are composed of retirees, stay @ home parents or the unemployed.
Good luck trying to justify your high tech crime to people who know nothing about computers or intellectual property.
I been working 20+ years and I've never had a job which would pay my regular wage for a potentially long time. No thanks.
BTW I have mod points, but once again this needs to be said.
Who will guard the guards?
As far as I know, no one went to jail for violating the GPL. But I suppose you already knew that, and were fishing for responses such as this, werent you.
More than mere navel gazing.
open source != non-profit
once you go slack, you never go back
Messing wit da man's money is a bigger crime than killin each other.
illegal, maybe, criminal? no.
this is and should only be considered a civil case and jail time should NEVER have even been considered. this is beyond ridiculous.
MABASPLOOM!
Yep, definitely missing the point. IIRC, jacking a car while the driver is inside (ie. forcing/demanding their exit from the vehicle so you can take it) constitutes a violent felony, and carries greater penalty than stealing a car while it's parked and unattended. It may not be a huge difference, but yes, violent crimes should carry greater penalties than non-violent crimes. Hell this doesn't even constitute "theft" (denial of use), it's merely "theoretical loss of possible future revenue that we think we might have made". Hardly grounds for five years in prison.
You want to see the Enron exec go to jail. Fine. But don't start whining when the smaller fry have to serve their time as well.
There is a vast, vast gulf of difference between premediated corporate fraud causing direct and demonstrable loss, and casual, non-profit copyright infringement. So vast a gulf, in fact, that it's difficult to see how the two can even be considered vaguely similar.
And that's what it's all about, folks: balance. On one hand, creators of original works need some way to make sure no one else can simply steal their hard work out from under them; on the other hand, the punishment needs to fit the crime and not be too heavy-handed. I don't claim to have the perfect solution, but the current set of laws isn't it.
It isn't that clean cut though. Chevrolet aren't making their offering as a "pedestrian killer 1500", they are offering something which clearly has a legitimate purpose and are offering it for that purpose.
If someone is running a bittorrent site and they have set up categories such as "TV Shows" or specific show names then I can't see how anyone can claim that they are offering something neutral.
Bittorrent as a tool is neutral. However if you expend effort designing a site in a way which specifically assists illegal use then I don't think it's surprising to be included as part of a "conspiracy". You have specifically assisted people to use the tool for illegal means.
I've not seen Elite Torrents so I don't know how much this applies to it specifically. Having said that from what (little) I have seen "subtlety" isn't a word I'd associate with that sort of site.
Search engines and so forth may contain similar information. However they have not expended effort to specifically help people find that type information, it is just there because it happens to be part of all the information out there.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I couldn't agree more. The punishment should be proportionate to the crime. Isn't this a widely accepted minimum standard of justice? I've heard it said that the "An eye for an eye" standard of the Torah can be considered progressive in that it restricts arbitrary, disproportionate punishments. Whether this meant anything in practice I do not know, but I think most would agree that judgments of "Your arm for a finger" or "Your life for an eye" would be unjust, and not just because of their brutal nature. There is something that seems fundamentally wrong to us about disproportionate punishment.
It is troubling that our society and our lawmakers seem to lose sense of this principal when it comes to monetary awards.
U.S. Code pertaining to Copyright on a plain layman's reading (and the hell if I'll be ruled by laws that can't be understood by the common man) explicitly states that the prosecution need not establish that the award sought is even porportionate to the cost to the copyright holder of the defendant's infringement. If I were to send you 10 copies of the latest Christina Agulera (sp?...) album - whatever that might be - the fact that under no circumstances would you have considered paying for the album does not factor in at all. In fact, there isn't even any requirement that the actual cost of the album be factored into the monetary judgment against me at all.
The amounts awarded in suits against casual file sharers are absurd.
Judgments of many thousands of dollars against students and working people who in practice most likely resulted in an actual loss to the copyright holder of - if anything - a small fraction of the monetary award, are miscarriages of justice.
And now jail time and a criminal record for facilitating casual infringement by a bunch of poor teenagers watching movies??? I personally don't infringe their copyrights primarily because I don't want their crap. But these vindictive bastards do not merit our money, and I would suggest in many cases neither do the artists who are in bed with them to make bucks.
And you're right, the only thing worse than lawyers backing big monetary awards to line their own pockets are lawyers literally writing (for corporations, through congressmen) our needlessly complex legal code while at the same time criminalizing laymen trying to interpret amongst themselves the very laws we are ruled by, without paying their exhorbitant fees.
It is no wonder our legal system lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the next generation.
Or tell them to fuck themselves and flee the country. Neither outcome - a lifetime of debt in imaginary restitution, or hard time in prison - should be lent legitimacy by a just society as punishment for contributing to the casual infringement by a bunch of internet dwelling poor teenagers of some silly moves. Should we destroy a young person's life for contributing to the infringing distribution of copies of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy?
Isn't it enough that this guy is now a convicted felon? He is 23 years old. He was just a college student. But now for doing something stupid in school - something of which most college students know no shortage - he has lost his right to vote - his right to a voice in our democracy - for probably the rest of his life, he has lost the right to bear arms, and he will carry this mark on his record at every background check and job interview for years to come.
Is this the way to show the way for the next generation? Isn't this enough? But now we need to throw him in prison too?
We The People grant copyrights - temporary and limited monopolies on reproduction - to promote the Useful Arts and Sciences, not to promote the bottom line of large corporations. Somehow I find it hard to believe that the promotion of Useful Arts and Sciences afforded by some corporation making a few more bucks off of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy outweighs the destruction of a young man's life.
I talked to an old friend recently who works in the music industry. He both plays in a band, runs a studio and does A&R. He's always been extremely anti downloading music and we've crossed swords on this a few times as for *me*, the ability to sample huge amounts of music has resulted in me actually buying considerably more CDs.
We had a chat about how in the good old days a band could have maybe 3 or 4 albums before they started to get it together, the label would support them as they grew and matured. The few mega bands, the likes of the Beatles, U2 etc all earned so much money for a label, they allowed them to prop up the other 90% of their roster that lost money. Record companies made money, bands thrived, everyone was happy.
These days an artist gets maybe two singles or an album out the door and if they're not hits (and big hits at that) then they're dropped. Why? Seems the bands that make big money no longer do so. If the price of a CD (or vinyl) since 1980 kept up with inflation, wages etc they should be almost 4 times higher than they are now so the big bands are making the label one quarter of what they were. Thus, less money to support the up and coming ones. A&R is all but a memory for many of them.
On top of that, we have all got used to polished sound so studio time and costs grew to ridiculous levels, again eating in to the bottom line. I read that Heaven 17 only just broke even on their 1982 album last year. Result is that many of the big studios are shutting down as they can't cover costs with production moving to purely PC based setups in many cases.
Music downloads make it even worse as the amount of money everyone gets from a (legit) download is less than from a CD.
It's a bad state but TBH, whilst it means big record labels, studios etc are all falling by the wayside, the alternative model of bands doing their own thing, selling via web sites etc is really taking off, as is live performance. I guess we're seeing a shift away from the 'music industry' back to the musicians. The EMI's of the world see the writing on the wall so are fighting for survival hence the heavy handed tactics. I can't see how they can avoid it now though, the Genie is out the bottle and the power has shifted. Good or bad? I can't say myself.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
How tragic. But this guy isn't going to jail for bankrupting Jane Doe. He's going to jail because his site had a Star Wars III pre-release. So now try making us feel sorry for George Lucas. Lucas actually got a load of free publicity from the "pirated release" at the time, and the box office was enormous.
The feds don't give a shit about Jane Doe unless she has a lobbyist in DC.
I swear to god I'm going to take a claw hammer to the next person who repeats that myth.
For the thousandth fucking time, that bill only applies to non-citizens!
We are all citizens...
When the constitution was written it did not at any point say that these rights should only apply to a subset of people. Americans have over the past 200 years changed into something else, a people that have no regards for the rights of the people that the constitution was supposed to protect, that is 'ALL' people. It is now simply, I'm OK so fuck the rest. Americans are losing those rights at such a fast rate that it will not be long before you will see the real stupidity of what you are saying. Yesterday you would have shouted about how the government can only spy on non Americans but today you see that they can spy on you too. Today you say but it is only non Americans that can be locked up without a reason, what will you say tomorrow?
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
5. Learn how to be a better criminal
He went in a non-violent criminal. Let's see how he comes out.
Seriously, we really need to re-evaluate as a society what we actually put people in jail for. I understand that #1 and #2 are applicable in this case. It's just that #5 above is an unfortunate part of the reality of prison. When you put lots of bad people together, they learn from each other.
As someone else mentioned, he's also been put in physical danger by being in proximity to violent criminals and possibly the guards themselves. For a first offense, it seems that 1 year of house arrest and only approved computer usage would have cured this guy. Just make his life a pain in the ass for a while. If he does it again, then yeah, send him to prison for a few months.
The idea is to only punish as much is necessary. Anything more is gratuitous. Sort of like Occam's Razor for the judiciary.
This is undoubtedly something he did because he thought he was like Google -- providing a search and point kind of service without actually downloading or uploading the illegal material himself. Now that he's been disabused of that notion, I'd say that there's a good chance he'd never do it again -- especially if he knows that the next step is FPMITA prison. It's tough to be the first guy EVER prosecuted for something when you see others making billions per year doing essentially the same thing.
I swear to god I'm going to take a claw hammer to the next person who repeats that myth.
For the thousandth fucking time, that bill only applies to non-citizens!
Or anyone who is determined to be an enemy combatant. And the rules for being declared an enemy combatant is that the president says you are. So yes, it DOES apply to every single person, since anyone at any time can be declared an enemy combatant for any reason.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
For the thousandth fucking time, that bill only applies to non-citizens!
That's ok then - as long as it's only non-citizens* that you treat as being sub-human.
(* And anyone declared to be an enemy combatant for whatever reason, citizen or not)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
We stopped another 10 terrorist attacks today thanks to the Patriot Act! Yay us. Aren't these the same people who were certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and then couldn't find them? Aren't these the same people who KNOW (as well as the world) that N. Korea is a bigger threat but in that case, we prefer diplomacy? I wonder what could be the primary difference in those two situations? Maybe if Americans where consuming billions of barrels of Kimchi things might have played out differently.
The problem with this solution is it's a losing battle. For every "Bin-*, Abu-*, and Al-*" you kill off, another dozen replace them from a Madrasahs in Pakistan or Afghanistan. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrasasin )
In the meantime those of us in the West have our freedoms eroded piece by piece.
IMHO the only real solution is a very long term one - Things like funding education in Pakistan so the children learn to read and write and learn geography and history and mathematics - Instead of just studying the Koran all day long and learning Israel is evil and America is the great Satan. But sending textbooks to Pakistan so thirty years from now they don't blow up the Golden Gate bridge or explode a dirty bomb in Atlanta doesn't win any votes today.
The drug use itself isn't the problem, but it's a symptom.
Then why is posession of the drug illegal? You said it yourself. If junkies bought drugs with their own money, then quietly shot up in the corner and never bothered anyone, it wouldn't be an issue. So why is this a crime, again?
The people who are in prison for "using drugs" are not innocent drug users. That's simply all they got caught for. But make no mistake: they are liars, cheaters, thieves, burglars and in many cases, much worse.
Lying and cheating are already crimes (fraud). Thievery and burglary are also already crimes. If this is all that those evil drug users do, then why do we need to make possession a crime? Surely they could be put away for robbing people.
If you swept through a neighborhood and locked up all the drug users, you'd see virtually all other property crime disappear.
You'd see virtually all the people disappear too. Mass imprisonment is not the solution to any problem.