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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
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.
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.
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.
You missed the point. Just because 'society' says something is wrong, doesn't make it wrong. Society once thought slavery was all good. Society once thought that making women subservient to men was all good...and some societies still do! Me, I make up my own morals based on others' ideas.
Blar.
Even though there exist heterosexual men and women in the world, they don't all want to fuck each other all the time
;)
We're on Slashdot. We're already fully aware of that.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --