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World's First Jail Sentence for BitTorrent Piracy
Rob T Firefly writes "Hong Kong newspaper The Standard reports on what seems to be the world's first case of a BitTorrent movie pirate being sent to jail. (Others have been jailed for related crimes.) After losing his appeal against a November 2005 conviction, Chan Nai-ming, a 38-year-old BitTorrent user known as 'Big Crook,' has begun serving a prison sentence for making the films 'Daredevil,' 'Miss Congeniality,' and 'Red Planet' available for download via BitTorrent. His appeal was based on the fact that he did not profit from the piracy." From the article: "[Appeals Judge] Beeson noted [convicting magistrate] MacIntosh, in handing out the sentence, was fully aware of the noncommercial nature of the case, but measured the seriousness of the case by the harm done to the moviemakers — not by the gain made by the offender. Chan, and those in the chatroom, 'were aware of the possible criminal implications of uploading films to the system,' Beeson wrote. She also noted the sentence was already drastically reduced, from a maximum of four years, to three months, in order 'to reflect the novelty of the conviction.'
The article doesn't make it clear, but from the description, it sounds like he posted the .torrent files somewhere and either ran the tracker or put the whole mess on a site that would run it.
If this actually applied to simply seeding the file as a peer (i.e. downloading via BitTorrent and leave the client running), then there's more of a potential chilling effect, as it sets a precedent for downloading-via-BT being the equivalent of distribution.
Society is a collection of rules.
He broke the rules, and it being punished for it.
Rightr now, society says the punishment is jail.
Hopefully society will change where a judge will be able to come up with punishments that aren't so expensive to institute.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
He allowed rich people to have less money. There is no higher law.
"MacIntosh, in handing out the sentence, was fully aware of the noncommercial nature of the case, but measured the seriousness of the case by the harm done to the moviemakers"
I imagine that the moviemakers actually did lose sales on these products, because most of the people that downloaded and watched these movies probably realized how bad they were and lost interest in purchasing them.
These companies want you to be blindfolded, and purchase based on 30 second blurbs with a catchy voice saying exciting things. When people see product they can make an actual informed purchase (or non-purchase).
This reminds me of something that happened back in college.
I was living on campus that year, in student housing. Early in the year, figuring some sort of file-sharing was useful within the house, I set up two public shares, one read-only and one write-only. A folder where I could post things and a dropbox. Within a few months I'd forgotten about the dropbox.
Sometime the following year I was cleaning up the system and stumbled across the folder. Embarrassingly, I discovered two very large MPEG files containing the movie, Entrapment. Apparently someone had found a writable share, uploaded it with the intent to transfer it somewhere else, and discovered they couldn't get the file back. (This was exactly why I made it write-only in the first place -- so it couldn't be used as a transfer point).
I told my brother about this, and he laughed and said, "At the very least they could have pirated a good movie!"
s/society/government/g
There. That fixes the argument. There is a big difference between society and government. Society is simply a collection of people, whereas government is the ruling force of a jurisdiction of land. In some cases the society and government are somewhat intertwined, whereas in other cases the government is far removed from the society that it is governing.
That approach has been used before. Remember the stock scam guy Micheal Milliken (sp?)from the 1990s? The Gov't banned him from ever working in the Securities industry as a broker. So what does he do, he makes millions as a "Consultant" to firms showing them how to avoid the scams like he ran and also showing them the loopholes he found that he didn't get caught for using. Kinda like hiring the hacker to show you how not to get hacked which has happened many times. The ability of the Enron execs to make any sort of living after they serve time is going to be compromised, not many firms want to hire a well-known felon. When Skilling gets out of prison he'll still get his Social Security plus anything he had before Enron that his soon-to-be-ex-wife doesn't get in the divorce.[NOTE == this assumes SS is still around in 30 yrs)
can you imprision for something so stupid and inconsequential. oh, and the u.s. And can anyone actually cite an independent piece of research that shows if file sharing actually hurts the industry, and if so by how much. Everyone just assumes this tech hurts movie/record companies...but as far as I know, no non-industry funded research has shown this. & the tobbacco industry showed us how good industry science can be. Whereas the enron guys devestated peoples lives.
And 100% of people who still bring up "Bush stole the election in 2000" jokes in every topic. =)
(No offense. I do believe it happened, but... it happened. Making fun of Bush now is a lot like beating up a man with broken arms and legs. Sure, you could, but... why bother? What else can you do to him that hasn't already been done?)
But as far as bad taste goes, look at any list of top sellers in any field.
Whaddya know, 8 million people bought Madden 0X again, even though it's the same game as last year, with a new guy on the cover!
Hmmm... Bill O'Rielly's book on the best-seller list? O R(iel)LY?
Hey! (Popstar who can't sing)/(Rap artist who sings about crimes he never did) just went quintuple super ultra platinum again! At least until everyone forgets him by next week.
Also, try walking into a fashion or decoration store sometime. I'm against the death penalty, but if bad taste were legal and I were a judge, I'd send half of the USA to the gallows.
"Skilling also faces a possible $18 million dollar fine - still less than he bilked investors and workers out of though..."
Now compare this to the punishment for shoplifting. If the punishment were proportional, shoplifting a can of soda would get you a millisecond or seconds of jail time (not long enough for the cops to even get handcuffs on you) and a fine of perhaps ten cents - and you get to keep the soda.
Alternatively the death penalty could be used on him, but I object to it on a moral basis. But the fact is, Bush is not lame at the moment - he's still the president unfortunately.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say