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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."
Anybody else see an imbalance here? He made $390,000 but he's getting about the same penalty as some people who downloaded a dozen songs on P2P.
Justice? Not here...
No sig today...
Disingenuous reaches new lows with an AC idiot acknowledging his own stupidity yet continuing to assume he holds the moral high ground. Get this, Nintendo doesn't own Super Mario. He's a part of *our* culture. We own him. All of us. And copyright is just an excuse for Nintendo to keep him from us.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Wow, you seem to know a LOT about how artists should lead their lives! I'm sure you are one, huh?
>REMEMBER: COPYRIGHT MUST BE TO STIMULATE GOOD NEW WORK, NOT TO ENDLESSLY CELEBRATE PAST ONE.
Well BZZT, wrong, it's to provide at least ONE fighting chance for the artist who doesn't want FREELOADERS to MAKE A PROFIT OFF THEIR FUCKING BACK.
That dude was selling thousands of roms with the systems and got burned. He's not an innocent 13-year-old kid who downloaded five britney spears songs on Kazaa. He was making money from various products he cobbled together, but never participated in their design. By what right does he get to make a living with this, and not the thousands of games' creator? "Oh, it's an old game" just doesn't cut it. "It's just a copy and nothing was lost" is wrong in this case.
Don't get me wrong, I pirate shit, and get my own paintings pirated, it's life, try before you buy, and so on. But I don't earn a living by selling pirated shit.
It seems to me that the IP haters always quote this line, but don't seem to grasp the concept. You seem to think that they are saying that the expiration of the right is what promotes progress. It is not. What is promoting progress is allowing people to profit off their discoveries, thereby giving them a motive to advance the science and useful arts. If the copyrights on the games in question had already expired, how is what this guy (or anyone else) is doing with the games advancing anything except his own profit?