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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.'"
10 years in prison? I realize that's a maximum, but the reality is he's done nothing that should be even closely considered to being a danger to society.
This hangup about defending our bullshit economy which truly only services the "haves" in the first place is being taken to extremes and I'm getting tired of it.
I say pirate everything, convince your friends, family, etc. Let's see what they do when EVERYONE is downloading their shit. Are they going to throw us all in jail? Then where will they be?
Fuckers.
No sig for you!!
...to NOT name your group on a torrent site something that allows information about structure to be gleaned.
Sure, uploaders may be only uploading only legal content blah blah blah, but there's no reason to publicize your role in the organization unless you can sure as hell sheild yourself while these lawsuits are bounding about.
Even the mob knows to call people "freinds of ours", not money launderers, assasins, gun runners etc. Please don't flame me because this is "security through obscurity".... because sometimes it works i.e, I still don't know where angelina jolie lives. Well played angelina, you hot little baby collector.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Now if they won for a downloader or innocent uploader
Define "innocent" uploader. Do you mean "uploader of copyrighted content who has not been arrested, given a jury trial, and convicted?" Or do you mean "uploader of uncopyrighted content"? Because there's a lot of legal difference between the two.
John
You gotta love these people. They are trying to make it sound like P2P itself is criminal, or certainly criminal by association.
This piracy group merely chose P2P as a medium to transfer it's files.
That would be like government catching a bunch of whatchamacallit smugglers on bicycles and then announcing "the first bicycle whatchamacallit criminal conviction". Ummm, yeah right. What the hell does bicycles have to do it?
It's not surprising that piracy groups have chose P2P to transfer their files. It is most efficient transfer medium with the highest market share. It used to IRC DCC transfer, and then before that it was FTP. A long time before that, it was file transfers through BBS. Bootleg copies used to be made on cassette tapes as well. Did that mean cassette tapes were also inherently "evil" and predisposed towards piracy? I think not.
Sorry, I guess I just can't get over how completely full of shit some people are. We can argue about piracy and intellectual copyrights all day long. That's fine. Let's just not be intellectually dishonest doing it.
In other words... these guys were using P2P at the technical level, but they were really doing the uploading of the content. **AA has a long win streak against uploaders, it's downloaders that they've had so much problems with.
Despite how bad it may sound, this is more or less not a big deal for the average person. It is like video game companies going after people who host ROMs of copyrighted games... Not that bad. Now if they won for a downloader or innocent uploader... That would be different.
No this is horribly bad. First, it is a basic travesty of justice. Prison time for P2P? Unless he was putting nuclear weapon designs on P2P, there is no reason for this. lets put people in jail for twenty years if they steal a loaf of bread. That's progressive thinking!
Second, the legal system loves basing later decisions on prior landmark cases. this has just told every judge for the next fifty years that criminal punishment id ok for civil infractions.
Third, the economy is in the dumps, and every peerson we imprision for piddly ass crap like this is costing taxpayers $$$. Ten years is not cheap. The people responsable should be dragged into the street and tarred and feathered for such frivilious use of taxpayer money.
Finally, bad laws erode respect for good laws. The more people become acoustom to breaking laws that are poorly written, the more acoustom they become to breaking laws in general.
Very bad ruling.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
While I dislike the **AA's tactics as much as the next guy...you wouldn't cut somebody slack for not realizing that, say, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit is illegal, would you? Or that going 105 MPH in a 55 MPH zone was illegal?
Ignorance isn't an excuse.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
If you'd like to come over with your car-duplicating equipment and make an exact copy of my Ferrari without damaging it, you're welcome to do so.
:-)
My truck is like a series of tubes.
Well they are involved with organised crime groups such as "Media Defender".
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Agreed, this is not the same as what all those other cases are, but you can be pretty sure that the MPAA is going to try and make it look like it to the general public. Unfortunately, I must agree with the conviction -- this really is clearly wrong (I am not commenting on the sentencing). It was being distributed before the movie was even showing in theaters! This clearly crosses the line of copyright law in both spirit and letter, unlike those other cases.
10 years is just the maximum possible penalty. In a few extreme cases, such as, say, the head of a large-scale commercial piracy ring, I could see it occasionally being appropriate.
You've seen murders getting much more than that, too, however.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How about the 8th Amendment? Or am I going overboard with the interpretation of "cruel and unusual punishments"? It seems 10 years for copy infringement and piracy seems to be overboard in my books.
I've also seen murders get less then this, so yes. I think 8th might apply.
Om, nomnomnom...
It's the maximum sentence, dumbass.
You're the dumbass. It's immoral, stupid, hateful, vindictive, corrupt, and absurd to even have the option for a penalty this severe in a case like this. Under any sane legal system, this would be a CIVIL case, not a criminal one.
Death was "only the maximum" sentence for witchcraft too at one time, dumbass.
Excuse the language, guys, but I'm replying to a witless anonymous coward. Anything goes in this case.
you wouldn't cut somebody slack for not realizing that, say, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit is illegal, would you? Or that going 105 MPH in a 55 MPH zone was illegal?
Both of those though are inherently dangerous. Would I cut someone some slack if they were say, jaywalking? Yes. What about not having a penny needed to buy something if you have a penny on you. Yes. What about a guy who comes back for another free sample? Yes. Downloading things illegally is much like my situations I just gave, it isn't harming anyone really and therefore shouldn't be tried in criminal court and really, all the *AA's fines are excessive, $1 per song max. Any more and it should be considered excessive.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
So, some pirates can get 10 years, yet we have Massachusetts' representative James Fagan calling a 10 year mandatory sentence for 3 time offending child predators 'draconian'. Ridiculous.
-Bradley H.
I agree,
Theft of imaginary property should be served in an imaginary jail.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Courier's pretty much died with BBS's. Broadband has made distribution ubiquitous, the 'scene' is easy to get into, and hell-yea it's going to get onto P2P. Huge respect to the groups that kept my BBS supplied, and I - gaming through highschool, but it's not the elitist wankfest above AC would have us all believe. The people who crack & package, sure. The rest of the chain is all the same.
Wait, since when is copyright violations punishable by prison?
I could see this going to civil court and this guy being sued. But prison? Was he actually getting money for these? Or was it just sharing over the internet for free?
Again, how did this go from a civil matter to a criminal one?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
So, they do it for the same reasons everyone else in the scene has for doing what they do? Golly, that's insightful.