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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.'
> 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
Damn, I didnt know bad taste was a jailable offence.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
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.
Please remind me again how this man is so dangerous to society he must be locked up in jail.
He would have gotten away with it due to the fact that they mention a chatroom, which more than likely means IRC, and nearly every single IRC channel related to piracy has the standard: If you are an agent of the government, you cannot enter here yadayada legalspeak yadayada.
Here Hong kong announces their plan to find people violating copyright using BitTorrent.
Here is the report where they actualy find a guy.
The conviction.
Now he has been sentenced. Hooray, we were right there with you all the way dude, at least in a metaphorical sense.
As a contest, the prize for which is my unending admiration, lets all agree not to rehash the same tired arguments in the 3 links above.
"I'm a Mac, and you're going to jail."
Chan also advertised the movies, and the procedure for downloading the files, on an online chatroom.
So basically he confessed and bragged about his l33titude, just like a little script kiddie bragging about defacing a website on an IIS 3.0 server. Had he not done this, perhaps it would have been more difficult to prove that he was sharing this movie and not just random blocks of binary code that happened to be very similar to those found in one rendition of the AVI files.
If you're going to share something iffy on BitTorrent use a public tracker that doesn't require logins, and maybe use an anonymous proxy like TOR. This isn't a 100% safe solution but it's likely better than what this chap did.
"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).
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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!"
How the hell are we supposed to get modded funny when the friggin jokes write themselves??
The funny thing about the bad taste jokes is that if they all know they're really bad movies just what were they doing watching them in the first place.
Chan Nai-ming, a 38-year-old BitTorrent user known as 'Big Crook,'
In prison his user name will be "Ben Dover"
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
While you may be referring to yourself, the situation described in the submission is happening in Honk Kong..
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
It's not as if he shared his food with the poor or something like that. It's more like me telling my buddy I'll share your car with him.
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.
Can you just imagine what it would be like to be in the big house on this charge?
Cellmate: "Whatcha in for man?"
Nai-ming: "Miss Congeniality and Daredevil, how about you?"
Cellmate: "Double-murder, you're a Daredevil huh? well you'll be Miss Congeniality tonight."
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Yes, but we didn't send the Enron guys to jail because they're dangerous. We sent them to jail because they were bad (among other reasons.)
I'm not sure I understand what "bad" means within the context of jail. The reason why the Enron boys should (and did) go to jail was to deter other people from doing the same thing.
We could make Enron execs effectively harmless in the future by banning them from certain business positions.
Which would have little or no deterrance to stop anyone else from doing it again. Why not try the same thing if the only consequence is being banned from that practice? This is another way in which sending the Enron boys to jail protects society. If we didn't, society would be threatened by others who want to get away with the same thing.
When we talk about sending someone to jail because they're dangerous it usually means preventing them from physically harming people in society at large.
I disagree. We send plenty of people to jail to prevent them from commiting non-violent crimes. The guy commiting check-fraud sure isn't a violent criminal, but he's still hurting society. A spammer hasn't physically hurt anyone, but most everyone on slashdot is harmed in some small way every day by these people. Locking them up in jail is often the ONLY way we can prevent them from harming others.
AccountKiller
I mean, that's a collection of rules and people were made to obey the rules.
Sure several million people were murdered for being the wrong race...but that was the law at the time!
really dude...
Blar.
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.
That's nothing. I worked at a campus computer research lab at a major US university. Somebody got into our system through an old forgotten Sparc workstation that hadn't been patched. They deleted the entire contents of our home directories and replaced it with 40GB of porn, that they then proceeded to share through IRC. This was about 6 or 7 years ago, when 40GB was an ungodly amount of anything.
We had nightly backups of our home directories and all our work, so we don't lose anything. It was really kind of hard to be mad at anybody who gives you 40GB of porn.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
With a name like Big Crook, it is hard to use the "I didn't think it was wrong" defense. Its like having Mob Boss tattooed on your forehead. Idiot.
"A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one."