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DoD Warez Leader Faces 10 Years in Jail
An anonymous reader writes "After spending nearly 3 years in a detention center fighting his extradition from Australia, a leader of notorious warez group 'DrinkorDie' was yesterday arraigned before a U.S. District Court to face charges of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and one count of actual criminal copyright infringement. If found guilty he faces 10 years in jail & a $500,000 fine."
Why is this person being tried in the US? He's a British citizen living in Australia, what does this have to do with the US?
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
IMHO this kind of crimes shouldn't be punishable by imprisonment... but I guess indenture isn't such a hot alternative either. Anyway, 10 years for replicating electrical signals in a magnetic medium (nit pickers go away!)... basically he "stole" an idea, hot air. He *should* be punished for breaking the law, but wasn't there something against disproportionate punishment in western codes?
+Raider of the lost BBS
It seems obvious, then, that the jury trying this case should use one of the rarely-used options available to them: Jury nullification.
In this case, it seems that the jury would have to consider the case as a whole - not merely the facts presented by the prosecution, not merely the letter of the law. They must consider this man's motives, and the motives of the government that is bringing about this case. Is the government being driven by a corporation known for its bullying thuggishness and its lawsuit-happy executives? Is copyright law fundamentally wrong? I look forward to this jury's answer to these questions and I hope that it is the answer I expect from conscionable human beings.
Hard work pays off tomorrow, but procrastination pays off NOW!
but from TFA... his cohorts were sentenced to 46 and 33 months respectively ...... he has apparently spent 3yrs in a detention facility (36mos) and now could get up to 10yrs...(in theory).
one might think that it would have been better to just waive extradition and come fight his case here....3yrs ago...cause he'd be about out by now... even if he was convicted. =p (based on the other sentences)
I'm glad for my part that I don't like people enough to be a "robinhood" cause I'm not going to jail for a bunch of poor bastards that can't buy software...but can mysteriously afford shinny new PCs to run softwarzes on???
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Not true. I remember reading about someone from another warez group (or maybe it was a hacker?) who got busted years ago (~4-5 years?) and he wrote about his ordeal at the isonews forums (if I recall correctly).
He started out in minimum security (and said that he helped the prison staff with their computer problems and advised them on how to get free warez !haha!). This was all good and ok. Then he was moved to a higher security prison because of some lame reason outside his control... I think it might have been a prison official with a score to settle (it wasn't a case of misbehavior).
I recall him writing about sharing a cell with someone locked up for drugs, and this cell mate was making his own alcohol in the cell from food scraps.
Maybe someone else can link to this story if you remember what I'm referring to.
Either way, with the amount of people in prison within the USA for all sorts of trivial matters, it is no wonder prisons are overcrowded. There is no guarantee he won't be put in a high security federal prison (especially seeing as this is a federal crime) for any number of reasons... such as prison overcrowding, an official being paid out by the MAFIAA, bad luck, whatever.
You also liken it to 'stealing' or vandalism, but I don't think that's right. Those crimes have victims who suffer directly, and more importantly, are deprived of the enjoyment of their property in respect of any possible use of it, whether in relation to the person committing the offence or any other person. If I smash your shop window, your shop is closed to me and to anyone else who might have come in that day. Copyright infringement is fundamentally different in that it deprives the copyright holder only of enjoyment of their property insofar as the infringement leads someone who would have paid to use the copyright to use an infringing copy free of charge. But it does not prevent the copyright holder from selling licenses to other potential users of their work. In other words, the effect of the 'crime' is heavily diluted, and there is no direct deprivation of enjoyment.
Society has a way of dealing with these types of 'crimes', in which an individual's behaviour is detrimental but only in a very diluted way. Parking fines come to mind. Speeding fines. Fines for failing to pay car registration. Civil offences, in other words.
I prefer to think of copyright as a mandatory, many-to-one contractual arrangement. If I create something original and subject to copyright, you and the rest of the world has an automatic contract not to exploit it in certain ways without my consent, and that contract expires after a certain amount of time (about 20000 years thanks to Disney and co). If you breach the contract, I think I should be able to pursue you on a civil law basis, but I do not think the cops should be throwing you in prison.
Read Pynchon.
What annoys me the most about this is that Australia has perfectly good laws under which to charge him. Why aren't they good enough?
Issues of copyright in regard to software infringe on the issues of free speech. Yes, I said that. If someone were to decry the evils of BMW, or publish how to make them more gas efficient there would be no foul. When it comes to copyright, there seems to be no justice.
Even if a person is guilty of helping people download movies for free, they should not be punished for the following reasons:
1 - you cannot help someone break the law if the act is committed without your presence.
2 - Telling someone how to break the law is not an illegal act.
3 - Even if you send them the file sharing program, you did not commit the act.
4 - If you complain to the police that someone stole your paper bag of money containing $50,000 dollars that you left on some street corner, they will laugh at you and tell you that you are stupid.
5 - Theft of copyright is not possible, the premise is theft of 'presumed' revenues. There is no proof that any 'illegal' activity caused known damage to revenues in a quantitative way.
6 - Current legislation doesn't provide protection or compensation for all copyright holders, only the very few and very rich corporations with copyrights. The law is not being applied equally.
7 - The reasonable doubt that 'fair use' implies means that most copyright litigation is of questionable nature to start with.
8 - There is NO proof that pirated copyright materials deprive the artist of what they would have received anyway.
9 - The US entertainment industry is not the lawmaking body for ALL of the world. Resist now.
10 - Punishing hackers does not protect the children, nor does it stop terrorism.
11 - Copyright infringement is not theft, but copyright infringement for profit is. See number 5.
12 - Australia is not a US state, nor is any other sovereign country. Any country that gives up sovereignty to the US over copyrights is seriously sucking ass...
13 - you make up your own for this one
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Its a legal system, not a "justice" system. Justice has nothing to do with the law.
i.e. Government can decide that we all should or shouldnt do something, but that doesnt make it right. --> insert example of your choice
A) He was in Australia, where what he did wasn't a crime at the time. How can you be tried for an act that isn't a crime in the country you reside?
B) Unless you suppose that US law should apply to the whole world. Exactly when did the US conquer all of Earth, pray tell?
Your argument is utterly off topic because it presumes to judge this situation based on US law when US law has no legitimate standing here at all. There was no reason to extradite this guy - he committed no crime. For what he did to be a crime it would have to be a violation of the law of the land he lived in. Is any of this, like, getting through to you???
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
If everyone who got warez from DoD gave $1 for every $1000 "worth" of warez they downloaded, he could probably afford every lawyer that anyone's ever heard of.
Interestingly, one of the American soldier who gang raped a 14 year old girl, killed both her parents and sister, then shot her in the face, and set her on fire gets to get out prison in 10 years.
I agree. Prisons is an option that needs to be reserved for criminals who are a significant threat to society
You know what I find sad about USA prisons? It is that the fact that you go to prison is that the government wants to Lock you up to punish you for your crime and let you rot and be raped and god knows what. I have just read a report (from a digg.com link no less) about the number of male to male rapes on USA prisons. Thinking about this case in particular (the DoD guy), today he is an intelligent man with computer knowledge and some pretty good understanding of technology (maybe even cracking). If the guy gets over the USA prison, he will be so fucked up (the USA system will destroy his life) that when he gets out (if he does it) he might be an addict, killer, and a bunch of other more nasty things.
That is quite sad. Just to put a bit of contrast, in my country, "prisons" are not called "prisons", and their main focus is not just on locking out "bad guys", a prision is usually called CERESO (social readaptation centre) or CEFERESO (social federal readaptation centre) which aim to re adapt the "bad guys" in order to make them *useful* to the society.
I think that is one of the reason why in USA the death penalty is liked, because for them, bad people must be punished, they do not like to see the root of the problem (if someone steals food from others it means he was HUNGRY... no the solution is not to lock the thief but to see WHY was he hungry, maybe more jobs?). But that is the *normal* thinking of the USA government, as they proceed similarly with Terrorism (instead of thinking WHY does the "terrorists" hate us?) they just want to bomb the fuck out of them. Blah!
Of course, you might argue that even my "happy happy" country with their "CERESOs"is not really happy... fuck no, we are very fucked up with corruption and all the same if not more violent crimes than USA (I am talking about your south neighbors), but hell, one of the things I have learnt is that the first step to fix ones problems is to acknowledge you have that problem and then to attack the ROOT. Not the symptoms.
I feel pity for this guy, as I felt pity for the British guy who hacked the CIA and was extradited to the USA. Heck, they should jail them *in* their country. And you people from the USA what the fuck, wake up!. It will be so cool to see in ten years, when half of the world is dead and the other is in USA "prisons" because of your stupid fears.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
So, what you are in essence saying, since it's not caught much, penalties should be harsher? Speeding is also very hard to police, requires a lot of setup, and isn't that effective, only a minute fraction get caught. Would death penalty be the correct punishment then? A lot more people are speeding, compared to the amount of people cracking software, site opping or trading.
Let's say some corporate software engineering manager decided to incorporate GPL'ed code /.'ers say "throw him in jail and let him rot?"
/. is "I want to be able to do exactly what I want."
into a comercial product, without releasing the source to the whole work.
Wouldn't you and lots of other
So enforcing GPL based on copyright is good. Enforcing closed source software
distribution based no copyright is bad.
I think the underlying principal on
If software and music publishers don't license their products exactly as I want,
then I am justified in copying it and distributing it to as many people on the internet
as I want.
What if a company that violated GPL did so in an Austrailian subsidiary to avoid U.S. law?
I'm sure they would argue against extradition to the U.S. too.
Let's consider two hypothetical scenarios:
1) A mugger snatches a purse from a women. In the process she is knocked down and her wrist is broken.
2) A Micheal Ley type is convicted of funneling off for himself, the pensions of 5,000 people.
You would put the first in jail, while letting the second off with only a fine, even though the largest harm to society is obviously from number 2. Jail violent criminals, yes. But I don't see the justification for making jails exclusively for them. White collar crimes can, and often do, surpass the amount of damage caused by more visceral crimes.
In the cases above, and given only one space/bed left in prison, I would argue giving it to #2.
damaged by dogma