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US Court Gives 15 Months' Jail, $415,900 Fine For Game Piracy
An anonymous reader writes "A Florida man has been sentenced to 15 months in prison and ordered to pay US$415,900 in restitution for selling video game systems that were preloaded with more than 75 pirated copies of games." If that fine sounds a bit steep, note that his profits on the devices "exceeded $390,000."
It obviously wasn't for "backup purposes only or home brewing. I say serves him right. Gives everyone else a bad name.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
There is a massive difference between pirating something and selling someone else's copyrighted work. The minute you turn piracy into a for-profit operation is when criminal copyright infringement makes sense.
If those NES games had been songs, however, he'd be several million dollars in the hole and jailed for two-digit number of years, not months.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Ahh, the wisdom of Florida's courts. This is probably the most harmless white-collar crime ever, and yet the man gets 15 months in prison. No better way to turn an ordinary citizen into a hardened criminal. If it was jail, it would be a little more understandable, but since he is going to a Florida prison (among the worst in the country), may God have mercy on him. Minimum security prisons (if DOC is nice enough to send him to one) aren't a cake-walk either.
Seriously, fine the man, put him on probation with a suspended sentence before sending him to prison for an utterly victimless crime.
Excuse me, but no. Not everyone does agree with you and it's disingenuous to proclaim that they should.
Every game for the NES should now be out of copyright. 100+ copyright terms for these works is just, simply, unjust.
How we know is more important than what we know.
'One could argue though, that if none of his customers had planned to purchase the original work, then not much harm was done. But that's unrealistic and impossible to *prove*...'
In the US justice system the burden of proof is SUPPOSED to be on the one claiming harm, not the one claiming there was no harm. I would argue that it is not unrealistic that the people purchasing from him would not have purchased from the vendor but likely.
Most of the people I know who consume pirated material have thousands of songs, hundreds of movies, dozens of games, etc. Those same people would NOT have bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of content if they had to pay for it. That collection might turn into one game, two movies, a few CD's, if that.
...it sounds like a neat little device. Come to think of it, I may have seen a few of these things in malls and flea markets or something similar not long ago. I believe one version of such a device offered a bunch of really old games like Atari 2600 games, and there have been others.
This man did not make these devices. He did not load the software onto the devices -- they shipped to him that way. He sold devices he imported. While for many people born and raised in the US, it would seem very obvious that such devices would be of dubious legality, to this guy it's hard to know whether or not he knew it was wrong to begin with. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" -- okay... especially if you're the President of the United States violating the nation's Constitution. But seriously, this guy just bought and sold. He may not have had a full understanding of what he was selling and that it wasn't legal in the U.S. (It this device legal in other countries? That would be interesting to know!) Supposing this guy had no knowledge that these devices were actually illegal in the U.S., and had no prior offenses, don't you think it would be more fair to simply have the profits seized?
People who make a profit have the money to fight back. Casual infringers tend to be easily cowed into settling.
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
Indeed, who would pay for an aggregation of otherwise free software?
Okay, one of you people that claim piracy is always okay, riddle me this. If this person profited by selling a piece of software that took money, time, and labor to make, how did he not deny someone the money they should have made?
Because these games are old enough that they should be in the public domain. More than a fair return for them has already been made.
Copyright is supposed to be an incentive to create new works, not a license to print money.
14+ years? Much of the preloaded stuff he's (re)selling is well over a 24 years, and is easily older than I am. After 18 years my parents lost a lot of the legal control they had over me. Imagine if those laws were treated as copyright is... *shudders*
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Actually, as a citizen of a democracy, it is my right to decide what should be law and what should not.
Unfortunately my rights are being stomped on by people buying my political representatives.
But don't worry, sooner, not later, globalization will end these ridiculous restrictions on trade called "copyright" that the western nations are trying to push as beneficial to the rest of the world.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If an artist only produce a few "hits" in their lifetime, then they must have another job to pay the bill. If copyrights are here for the one-hitters, then something is wrong. Copyright is here to help creator to live from their arts not to go to in an early retirement after a few hits. If for example a singer can live from compilation of his old songs without creating new ones, then copyright doesn not promote creation and by it's own definition is not working.
Where do you get off saying that something that doesn't physically exist belongs to someone else?
The whole concept of copyright is arbitrary. It was arbitrarily decided upon that, to offset the costs of creation, a short term monopoly would be provided on duplication of said creation so that the creator could attempt to recoup the costs of creation, if not make a profit.
However, without this creative work entering the public domain, no one else gets to use it in any way other than as a consumer. Maybe you don't think this is a bad thing, but there are those who disagree with that sort of stance vehemently.
COPYRIGHT MUST BE TO STIMULATE GOOD NEW WORK, NOT TO ENDLESSLY CELEBRATE PAST ONE.
copyright excuse is that it must promote the society advancement by encouraging good artist to produce more good works.
if an artist could not make enough good work paid enough to sustain himself it's unfortunate, maybe he is not good enough, not famous enough, the industry is not kind enough on him, or simply he is really not so much able to significantly improve humanity culture.
SO there are 2 possibilities:
- you make the industry pay him more (attention, the industry pay more the artist NOT the user pay more the industry)
- he simply is not good enough to sustain itself with his art so he must work like everyone else (at least part time) and make what it could during spare time.
it's unfortunate that maybe some good art piece could be missed, but the really good and driven artist had always worked even when starved and broke, if they were appreciated they somehow find a way to be paid, if they are not appreciated the future generation still has some of their pieces.
if a current artist that produce a single great hit is not paid enough to survive till his next hit (or is not really good enough to produce a next hit) there is no way that the society must pay him a lifetime pension!!!
REMEMBER: COPYRIGHT MUST BE TO STIMULATE GOOD NEW WORK, NOT TO ENDLESSLY CELEBRATE PAST ONE.
While I have fundamental issues with copyright law as it exists in the US, I have to actually agree with your stance on this issue. If they are no longer making and actively seeking profit from an application, then it should be up for grabs. However, when the maker is still selling and profiting from it, then someone who is actively pirating software for his own profit should be prosecuted.
Bullshit. You believe that a work should stay protected by copyright for as long as it sells?
Then the works of J.S. Bach would still be protected, putting music teachers all over the world out of business.
If "relevancy" is the measure of whether a work should have extended protection, pray tell, how the fuck do you measure "relvancy"? Is it relevant if it sells one copy a year? A thousand copies a year? A million? How about five copies a month?
Believing that it's a crime to sell a console filled with pirated video games is a long jump from granting everlasting property rights to "anything that keeps selling".
You are welcome on my lawn.
I disagree. Steamboat willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, really ought to be in the public domain by now. It's a piece of our culture. It is because it became a part of our culture that Diseny has made billions of dollars on the property, but it is because it becomes part of our culture that it ought to be freed after a reasonable time to make a profit has elapsed.
Our language, and our culture requires the assimilation of the arts. That same assimilation can make people rich, but when an old man's childhood memories are subject to copyright, and will be until decades after his death, copyright has become an unreasonable limitation on our culture.
Best example: The birthday song my parents sung me on my 1st birthday will be copyrighted until after I'm dead. How is that just?
It's been a long time.
So? You're free to ignore them and choose alternate sources of entertainment.
If everyone followed this logic then nothing would ever change. What about "If you don't like your government then you're free to choose another country to live in"? And "If you don't like priests molesting children you're free to convert to Islam"? Moreover this is not a debate about giving people free entertainment but amending laws which go counter to their purpose.
And copyright lawyers have exactly what interest in the length of the copyright?
I don't know either but most of them are in favor of long terms, so there must be a reason.
If you don't like it, don't buy it
GP is not in favor of abolishing copyrights but shortening the term. The argument is not about stuff that is actively marketed and available. It is about obscure stuff that you can't easily buy and "artists" making 3-4 hit songs and then sitting on them indefinitely without further activity.
It's up to them how they want to make their money.
It's not. They can make money on vintage stuff only because WE (the society) are letting them by instituting copyright laws.
Copyright was never intended to be anything less than the life of the author
First, citation needed. Second, "Life of the author" is a shitty measure because:
1. It discriminates against people who create late in their life.
2. It makes determining whether a given work is copyrighted difficult if the author is obscure. You need to know his/her death date, and that is an information that is not supplied with the work itself, while the year of creation / publication usually is.
3. What happens if an organization holds the copyright? Does it ever expire? (I don't know here but probably some aspects of cipyright are non-transferable)
4. What about works by multiple authors?
survivorship is an important issue in Western society, so the term has extended to ensure preservation of benefit.
I don't know what you mean. What preservation of benefit? Why we should preserve the benefit of authors' descendants at the expense of society when the authors are long dead? What did the descendants do to deserve special rights to protect them?
For 95% of the entitled
The discussion is not about the 95% of people but the 5% elite of "content producers" that long copyright creates.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Best example: The birthday song my parents sung me on my 1st birthday will be copyrighted until after I'm dead. How is that just?
I may have a better example: Thanks to copyright and royalties, I have to suffer hearing shitty non-infringing happy birthday jingles at restaurants till death!
You have a fundamental misunderstanding about what the whole "copyright" regime is supposed to be for. It is not to "work once and make oodles and oodles of cash, like, foreveah!" (and the very fact that you seem to think so and others here agree with you is a sad testimony as to how far the whole idea has been corrupted by greed-mongering mega-corporations).
The purpose of copyrights is to "promote arts and sciences". To that effect the public grants a (naturally non-existant) temporary privilege to the artist for a time-limited monopoly on his works. In exchange for that monopoly, the time limitation (which is supposed to be wholly unrelated to how much money is the dude making) was originally set to expire after a sane period and the works were to enter the public domain.
Unlimited (for practical purposes) copyrights are a perversion of this idea and serve no communal purpose. A never-ending copyright has no societal justification (and in fact it is extremely dangerous to the society - just imagine someone still holding copyright on this thing called "the Latin alphabet" and charging everyone per word, which would be the case if copyrights were based on "sales" and "money earned" as you seem to suggest).
Any attempts to extend the copyright warrant only one sane response from the society: abolishment of the vast and unjustifiable privilege of copyrights. Facing utter corruption by the money resulting from abuse of copyrights of the responsible for this mess officials, a fully justifiable and righteous response by the society is to ignore copyrights (after all it is the society which grants such extravagant privileges to the authors), which is what is happening at a global scale, represented by phenomena such as the mass scale proliferation of P2P networks.
Should their great grandkids be entitled to a cut from each copy sold?
As it stands if an author dies before his works become popular then someone who never did a tap of work on the book gets bags of money for nothing.
Why are authors/artists "special"?
If a mathamatician writes an equation which later gets used in designing cars to to make them safer- why does he not get a cheque for each car sold while a musician who writes a piece which later gets encoded on magnetic strips or optical disks and is used to make the environment in the car slightly more pleasant get a pile of money for each copy of the magnetic strip sold?
Both works are creative, both works have value, both works are used in items sold for profit.
What make artists more special than scientists?
My great grandfather helped the a friend who invented reinforced concrete by doing the math for him, why am I not being handed a check for every reinforced concrete building? What makes those math equations less special than "happy birthday"?
Or inventors even? inventors get a chance to make money off their inventions but patents expire much more quickly than copyright, why? why are inventors less special than artists? You seem to think it's right that a singer should be able to live off a single hit his whole life...and his grandkids should be able to do the same.
But why shouldn't the great great great grandkids of the inventor of the mouse trap still be getting money for every mouse trap sold?