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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."
Microsoft was fined $20mil in coupons that further entrenched their monopoly for a crime that made and continues to make them hundreds of billions of dollars.
yes, I'm all for copywrite for a decade or 2 and perhaps after that giving the holders the choice to register their intent to keep the copyright for longer by paying a small fee but really things stat under copyright for a stupid ammount of time.
Companies rarely look more than 10 or 15 years ahead to work out how much money they can make off something so making copyrights last until the end of time isn't going to seriously increase the ammount of money the artists get for setting their work.