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Feds Demand Prison For Guns N' Roses Uploader
Defeat Globalism writes with this excerpt from Wired:
"Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are pursuing a 6-month prison term for a Los Angeles man who pleaded guilty in December to one misdemeanor count of uploading pre-release Guns N' Roses tracks, according to court documents. Kevin Cogill was arrested last summer at gunpoint and charged with uploading nine tracks of the Chinese Democracy album to his music site — antiquiet.com. The album, which cost millions and took 17 years to complete, was released November 23 and reached No. 3 in the charts. The sentence being sought — including the calculation of damages based on the illegal activity of as many as 1,310 websites that disseminated the music after Cogill released it — underscores how serious the government is about punishing those for uploading pre-release material."
And you think the first is, or ever has been, a healthy kind of relationship between a citizen and their country?
He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, which is violation of CRIMINAL law. It's not a civil issue here, no matter how much you wish it was. There are criminal statutes for copyright infringement, and they have been on the books for some time.
In short, it is you and many other slashbots here who do not "understand what is really going on here." Stop with this nonsense, please.
There is a legal definition of labor theft, and that isn't it.
Currently, the Federal Government hasn't taken jurisdiction on shoplifting enforcement.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/02/13/pennsylvania-judges-plead-guilty-in-juvenile-center-kickback-scheme/
"Once in a while, a story comes along that defies intellectual discussion or debate and just sort of slugs you right in the solar-plexus.
Such is the case with this story that broke yesterday out in Scranton, Pa., where two judges pleaded guilty to operating a kickback scheme involving juvenile offenders. The allegations: the judges, Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan, took more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers. "
No, Patton.
exact quote: "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
This post is so misleading and so wrong... you managed to put together all the fallacies there are about intellectual property.
Please take a look at this, and start forgetting about the labor theory of value (or property)
http://tinyurl.com/5c4289
Make them pay the $50 billion out to those investors he stole from. Sell all of his assets, use that to pay for some of it, if he didn't pay his taxes let the government take that out of there. If there is not $50 billion when everything is liquefied, garnish his wages for the rest of his life until he pays all $50 billion. Sure, even if he lives to be 1000 he might not be able to pay all of it, but its better that he has to work towards it being payed off then just being in jail and those who he scammed get little to nothing.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Watch COPS sometime. People get man handled & 'beat down' while they are following all the commands the police are giving.
I do, regularly.
...and I've yet to see the illegal beatdowns for compliant suspects. I've seen LOTS of people try to argue, pull their hands away, fight the cops, or run. As for unwarranted beatdown? Nothing yet, unless you can present an episode number that I missed.
Don't get me wrong, crooked cops ARE out there; I've run into a few... But the cops *I* know are solid, want to help their community, and aren't in it for a power-trip. Y'know, the real cops.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
The article is inflammatory BS. You don't go to prison for misdemeanors. You go to jail for misdemeanors. They are entirely different places and if you had been to either, you would know how different they are. The six months sentence hanging over his head will not be a prison sentence at all and that is half the maximum time which is also the minimum time anyone can face for a class A misdemeanor offense. (1 year for federal misdemeanors and mostly 6 months max for state misdemeanors)
Now according to the original offense which wasn't a misdemeanor, it was a felony charge, he could have been facing 10 years in prison (not jail), because of the supposed retail value of the songs he distributed or caused to be distributed.
The was actually a treated as a mass bootleg case and not a file sharing case because he supposedly "willfully infringed a copyright for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain." The problem he laid in front of them is that he admitted to doing it and helped identify where he got the files from. But this case isn't the ordinary "junior put the new album on the lime wire interweb".
His lawyer has a different take on it which would follow the pre-sentencing guidelines that recommended 1 years probation. He makes some pretty good points in it and I think this will probably be closer to what happens.
You have to understand that this case is a big political charade. Obama has brought in some RIAA lawyers to help run the hope and Change you can believe in but I don't think they are the problems here (could be but it's just me). It's more of a- they made a big issue out of his site being a commercial venture in order to force information out of him. They offered a reduced charge based his cooperation in telling them everything he knew to help the government in finding who originally released the songs. (according to his lawyers, it could have been the record industry itself or axel rose himself). He took the deal and now in order for there to be a "deterrent" the government has to appear like they are wanting the most they can get in order to have the deterrent factor be present. The judge will likely claim that his cooperation with investigators and mitigating factors like his actions to prevent down-loaders supersedes the Deterrent factor and sentencing guild lines and either negate any jail time with probation or list his jail time as the time he spent waiting bail after they raided him and credit him with time served. If he spent a week in jail, he would probably get 7 days- time served and 1 year probation or possibly 6 months suspended sentence on the completion of 1 years probation or something of the sort. But the point is to keep up appearances. The judge has quite a bit of leeway on this despite that class A misdemeanors have a minimum of 6 months.