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MPAA Scores First P2P Jury Conviction
An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA must be celebrating. According to the BitTorrent news site Slyck.com, the Department of Justice is proclaiming their first P2P criminal copyright conviction, against an Elite Torrents administrator. The press release notes, 'The jury was presented with evidence that Dove was an administrator of a small group of Elite Torrents members known as "Uploaders," who were responsible for supplying pirated content to the group. At sentencing, which is scheduled for Sept. 9, 2008, Dove faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.'"
This was a release group, and altho they were releasing onto p2p, this is NOT the same thing as all those other cases where the **AA is demanding 3000$ tributes to ignore wrongdoings.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
Sadly, when you are pushing prerelease stuff, you cross a very firm line into illegal territory. There is no grey area. They *are* costing the studios money, and they *are* violating both the spirit and word of copyright law. The maximum possible sentence is definately overkill, but I can't really argue with the conviction itself.
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I've seen cases of murderers getting less than this.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
How does one distinguish between an uploader and a downloader? If someone seeds a torrent, they're an uploader. Yet, if someone downloads a torrent, and lets it seed for a while, are they an uploader? Can we distinguish uploader versus downloader with P2P? I don't think the distinction is clear enough, except in cases like this, where the person's purpose was explicitly to distribute pirated content. Overall though, i think the server, not the p2p is what brought him down. The seeding might be an issue as well as the group classification, but still, the server would be a hub for piracy.
One of my buddies, who was in Fastlight, got a year in the slammer for running one of the central ftps. 10 years is sorta overkill.
TechTV.com did a full write-up, only to give in to a request to delete it by the cops. CNET's coverage was gone the next day too. MSNBC mentioned the situation on their station as well, pulled in because they had two former TechTVer's on-air. (One was at the anchor desk, and a former host of CyberCrime was working at the Laci Peterson trial.)
Now don't you think that getting the kind of sentence that a rapist might get is a tad bit CRUEL AND UNUSUAL for downloading or uploading some worthless garbage?
Unfortunately, the eight amendment is rarely used to find whether a crime is comparable to the punishment, but rather on the punishment as such. This is more like the classic eight amendment stuff: "In Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1878) the Supreme Court commented that drawing and quartering, public dissecting, burning alive and disemboweling would constitute cruel and unusual punishment"
Jailtime is not normally cruel or unusual punishment for a crime. In 1983 they found that "life imprisonment without parole for cashing a $100 check on a closed account was cruel and unusual." but have since retreated to a "gross disproportionality principle." where basicly as long as you get the same punishment as others in the same position it is not unconstitutional. They've upheld several others, like:
Unfortunately, I can see why the Supreme Court wants to stay out of it. Congress passes a law that says you can get up to X years in jail. Is it then really the Supreme Court's job to go in and regulate each and every case to determine if the punishment is reasonable? It'd essentially turn the court another level of appeal on the case, not the law. Plus it comes dangerously close to the courts writing their own law by lowering sentences on some crimes compared to others. Instead they've taken the amendment to be a restriction on the type of punishment, not the scope of punishment. Reading the classic cases, I think this is the original and intended scope of it.
If you think ten years for copyright infringement is excessive, you should ask Congress to lower it. If you think the conditions in jail are cruel and unusual, you may have a case for the Supreme Court but otherwise not. I think the separation of powers in this case is right, that Congress is completely bought by the content industry doesn't justify asking the courts to do Congress' job. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Wait, since when is copyright violations punishable by prison?
If the summary is accurate (I know, I know), the person convicted was responsible for large-scale distribution. There is a threshold where copyright violations become a criminal offense.