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.'"

Comments

Insanity

[aztektum]

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.

Re:Insanity

[EdIII]

I can see how you got the flambait mod, mainly for the last sentence.

However, you do have a valid point about just what danger to society this person poses and whether or not 10 years is a punishment that fits the crime.

It would certainly seem that the powerful in this country are pushing for stronger and stronger criminal punishments for what would otherwise be a civil matter between 2 entities.

Re:Insanity

[dreamchaser]

A stiff fine would seem to be in order, and civil damages. Jail time is pretty harsh for this kind of IP crime though.

Re:Insanity

[deimtee]

They don't want nasty violent people in there, they want nice malleable workers who will do what they are told because they are too shit scared to move. You know, white colar recreational drug users.

Re:Insanity

[suck_burners_rice]

Ok let's think about this. What was the Constitution and the Bill of Rights supposed to defend? Your rights, right? Ok, now that we've established that, from whom is this Bill of Rights defending you, the individual? Mainly from the government. Now you need to realize that the government is not some ephemeral entity that determines the order of the universe. It's a bunch of dudes who happened to get elected and happen, therefore, to have power to make things happen. It is from THOSE DUDES that the Bill of Rights is supposed to protect you. Unfortunately, the Bill of Rights is only a piece of paper. It is YOU who must always monitor what is happening and to fight violations of your rights. I believe that in that Bill of Rights somewhere, it says something to the effect that:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

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?

It might be a good idea...

[deft]

...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.

NOT P2P

[EdIII]

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.