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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.
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.
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.
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.
...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?
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.
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.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"If those few hits become public domain while the author/artist still try to make a living, it ruins the "business model" of that profession."
... Pardon, they're part british ... royally fucked.
... then you shouldn't get any more money because you suck.
... you wouldn't want to give that up, would you? Neither would they, but since they are not doing anything or never did anything to begin with they don't deserve to be paid for whatever their ancestor was making. That's just plain ridiculous shit that got our societies into the place we are right now. Wealthy assholes inheriting their wealthy assholeness to their kids, which in turn insist they have the right to earn money with doing nothing while everyone else is struggling to come up with the money for their lifestyle.
Sorry but that's some bullshit argument.
Look at the artists that DO in fact still perform after more than 20 years (which aren't that many) and look at how they make their cash. Take The Rolling Stones for example. They wrote a great deal of songs but only a few of them were actual "hits". If their music became public domain, like say, every kid that picks up a guitar learns how to play one or two of them, their business model should be fucked.
But instead their popularity is unbroken and people pay hundreds of dollars for concert tickets to see them live. I bet the "Running Noses" cover band doesn't make millions of dollars just because they now could legally perform any old song.
You've been braindwashed by the shit definition of what performance and "business" means for the music industry. All these guys care about is to acquire rights to something, lock it away in a drawer and let it collect money for them. That's about the whole "business model" of the industry.
Meanwhile, some people have realized that music is intrinsically connected with the person playing it, people want to see Mick fucking Jagger sing on stage in "The Mummy 4" and not to some stupid kid that knows how to play Jumpin Jack flash half way through.
If you are actually the composer of a piece of music then I would assume that you are a talented musician and that you should be able to defend your work artistically against copiers. If you are not that talented and can't keep making better music than people trying to copy your stuff
End of story, no musician needs to collect royalties for a song they wrote 70 years ago. Usually they are dead by then. Copyright lawyers and relatives on the other hand do want copyright terms to be as long as possible, of course. If you sat in one place, never doing anything but you had that slip of paper in the drawer that guaranteed you money
Bullshit I tell you, Bullshit I say. Wake up.
Good day, fine sir.
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.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.