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."

Comments

Term?

[XanC]

I basically agree with you, however this does raise the question of length of copyright terms. If the original 14-year term (IIRC) were in effect, those games would now belong to all of us, and this fellow could sell his consoles without being accused of stealing somebody else's work.

So the discussion about this situation should at least include a debate on whether these games should still be under copyright at all.

For once they got it right

[alvinrod]

Aside from trying to scare the ever living crap out of Joe Public, I can't see why the RIAA and MPAA bother going after the poor idiot who's sharing five songs from the new Brittany Spears album instead of going after the people like this who are actually making a profit violating someone else's copyright. Not only is it easier to track down the people who are doing it for profit, but you don't look like complete dicks when it turns out the anonymous person you tracked down through an IP address turns out to be a handicapped woman or someone who doesn't even own a computer.

I really don't mind the concept of copyright (although I do feel as though the duration should be significantly shortened to something of at most fifteen years.) and don't have a problem of not consuming any copyrighted media that has an asking price too much for my likes. I've never produced anything that I'd consider charging people to consume myself, but like the idea that if I ever did and decided to charge for it, I'd appreciate it if it wasn't spread across the internet or various other channels without my consent.

I don't really blame the casual infringers either. I understand that most of them are young and poor like I once was and usually can't afford the going rate for most works. I'd be fairly hypocritical of me to want them brought to justice when I've done exactly the same thing. I think that most people on slashdot feel the same, but there are a few people who have differing opinions. I think we should all draw the line when someone is actually taking your work and turning a profit through selling it without your permission.

I really wish the **AAs would take this kind of approach and train the killer legal dogs on the assholes that really deserve it instead of some poor college kids. I don't mind them releasing a commercial telling the casual file sharers who are distributing their copyrighted works that they suck, but the hardhanded legal action against these people is ridiculous.

Re:Sorry Charlie

[tomz16]

He was selling these :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Player_Super_Joy_III

In other words, he wasn't actively producing the pirated systems, or loading the games onto the consoles. He simply bought them wholesale from China, imported them, and re-sold them for profit in local malls. Doesn't make it right, but gives the story a slightly different twist in my mind.

To my knowledge, the games pre-loaded on this set are also currently out of production (but based on current retro-gaming trends may be re-introduced at a later date via online catalogs for existing consoles such as the wii).

In any case, another poster is correct. In my mind, most of these games are 14+ years old now, and not currently being sold by the original author. These two circumstances do lead me to question whether copyright law in this case really serves the interests of society.

Then fix copyright, I guess?

[Moraelin]

Well, then fix copyright, I guess. There's nothing particularly wrong about this case, as far as the law is concerned. If Disney gets copyright extension after copyright extension, just so it can keep some old films hidden for PR reasons, then I guess Nintendo gets the same rules.

I mean, if we all decided (you're a democracy, right? If not, fix _that_ first) that we're ok with people making money for 50 year old works, then it seems to me it's only fair that Nintendo gets to make money with stuff that can't be older than 25 years. (The NES launched in 1983, so games for it can't be older.) What's sauce for the goose, and all that.

Honestly, the Disney case rubs me the wrong way a lot more than this. There it's used to effectively take some works out of the culture pool, which is the exact opposite of what copyright was supposed to _do_. It was supposed to offer an (indirect) monetary incentive to encourage people to publish their works, _not_ to be a way to make already published work disappear.

Nintendo, by contrast, seems to actually use copyright as it was intended. AFAIK a lot of those games are available emulated for some of their other consoles. That copyright extension effectively encouraged them to put some work into keeping some of those games available for more people. That's what copyright was supposed to _do_.

And before you go, "OMG, but you could just download an emulator from somewhere else"... well, that may be true for the NES and SNES, but look at how it takes longer and longer to emulate newer consoles. We've already had the PS3 for a while, and emulating the PS2 is still iffy. It's one thing to emulate an 8 bit CPU with just about enough instructions to count them on your fingers, and a graphics chip which barely scans the RAM as it is, and it's getting to be quite another to emulate the newer ones. For the graphics chips we don't even know the details of the architecture and the opcodes. At any rate, it's getting to be more and more to emulate them, and it's taking longer and longer. We may well soon get to appreciate it, if the vendor writes an emulator himself.

But, at any rate, it's what copyright was supposed to do.

Duly noted, they make more money in the process. Well, that's how copyright was supposed to work.

I'd rather fix the Disney loophole first.

The middleman problem

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I have sometimes suggested that as a means to restore sanity to the copyright market, a copyright could exist for a relatively long time when held by the original creator of a work, but immediately be reduced to a relatively short time the moment it is transferred to any other party. Such a transfer is typically a purely commercial deal, and often with a known quantity so there is little risk involved. This leaves the original creators free to create many works in the expectation that they will have a fair chance to exploit them in an open market, which I think would be an effective incentive to produce many works of good quality. It also means that all the middlemen like book publishers and record labels can't wind up being the dominant force at the expense of both the consumer and the artist, as often happens today.

I think many of the problems with copyright in practice today basically stem from this middleman problem. There are decent ethical and economic arguments in favour of both the consumer and the artist, and while different people will favour different ones (and often produce dubious post facto arguments about the origins and "purpose" of copyright to support their position), I think most people would at least agree that the copyright can be of benefit to both these parties. Middlemen, on the other hand, are of "artistic" value only to the extent that they benefit one of the other groups, and are eminently expendable and readily replaced.

An alternative possibility would be to prohibit transfer of copyright entirely, but provide a legal framework for legally binding exclusive distribution deals with a statutory maximum period that is quite short (I'm thinking months, or maybe one or two years, at most). This way, there would still be a clear mechanism for any middleman to make a return by offering his services to artists, but a middleman who didn't get a work distributed effectively and thus make more money for the artist (and as a side effect, allow more other people to enjoy the work) would risk losing his position, and leave an artist free to seek another distributor. Also, if a work really took off in popularity, this would leave the artist with the power to renegotiate a deal with his distributor, or to seek a better deal elsewhere, rather than (as happens so much today) just making arbitrary profits for a middleman who is just a cash grabber while not benefitting the artist any further. Surely the artist-centric approach is a better incentive to produce works that are likely to fetch a higher price because of their quality or appeal to a wider audience because of their general interest, which again are in the interests of both the artist and the consumer (and the middleman who is actually earning his pay) in this scheme.