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In Mississippi: 15-Year Jail Sentence For Selling Pirated Movies and Music
New submitter patella.whack writes "A guilty plea for six counts of selling counterfeit media gets a defendant 15 years in Mississippi. An undercover reporter from the Attorney General's Intellectual Property Theft Task Force managed to buy a total of five copied movies and one music CD from the defendant, who had 10,500 pirated discs at home and two prior convictions: one for assaulting a police officer 17 years ago and one for CD piracy that got him a year under house arrest. Says the RIAA: '[This] highlights the fact that the individuals engaging in these activities are frequently serial criminals for whom IP theft is simply the most convenient and profitable way they could steal from others.' Frequently serial criminals? 15 years? I wonder how much of his sentence can be attributed to his priors rather than to other factors."
Maybe this career criminal should have stuck to misdemeanors like bank robbery and murder; he would have received an easier sentence.
These laws are dumb as shit since they make the judge irrelevant, as it takes away the courts power to hand down an appropriate sentence.
Mississippi is a three strikes state. So this is another "20 years for jaywalking" piece of nonsense.
"Prison sentences for rape are not uniform. A study made by the U.S. Department of Justice of prison releases in 1992, involving about 80 percent of the prison population, found that the average sentence for convicted rapists was 11.8 years, while the actual time served was 5.4 years. This follows the typical pattern for violent crimes in the US, where those convicted typically serve no more than half of their sentence.[11]"
source: wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_regarding_rape
It's not selling pirated movies, it's selling pirated movies on an industrial scale, which is *completely* different from sharing a dozen MP3s.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I RTFA this morning. This isn't Joe Blow getting a few movies from the pirate bay, this is a counterfeiter. Copyright infringement isn't theft, but I'd say this is, as the criminal is getting the money that should have gone to the movies' producers.
Also, the guy was imprisoned for the very same offence before, as well as going to prison for some violent crimes.
This isn't Joe Nerd getting fifteen years for sharing movies, it's Joe Beentoprison making money off of someone else's work.
Free Martian Whores!
Because no one would "plead guilty" in exchange for a 15 year sentence. That's not much of a plea bargain. The article mentioned seizures of weapons as well. Missouri has some form of "three strikes" law, which uses the phrase "prior and persistent offender." One wonders whether this sentence was lighter than what might have resulted had he been charged for gun possession.
It seems you got more chance to get a minimal sentence when you shoot your procecutor than copy a few disks.
This sort of imbalances in the judicial system will cost the country dearly in the end.
Everybody must do their part to eradicate criminal scum like this by simply torrenting their pirated media, rather than propping up the repulsive trade in physical copies sold at retail... The Swarm Needs You to fight piracy today!
These are the people the RIAA, MPAA, etc. should be focusing on and suing for the large sums of money. Not the little sharer that makes no money off downloading media.
Let's say...
Sell a CD copy of Michael Jackson : 15 years in jail
Kill Michael Jackson : 4 years in jail
makes sense...
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
At the Federal level, manslaughter is fines and/or up to 10 years. Rape is fines up to life imprisonment. First-degree murder is death penalty or life imprisonment and second-degree murder is life imprisonment.
Actually, cops protect society, mostly from people like you.
The penalties for assaulting them should be very severe.
No, actually cops protect the people who have money and power.
The have-nots are ignored by the police as much and as often as possible.
If you think the cops are on the side of the common man you are either naive,
or an idiot, or maybe you are a cop yourself and engaged in self-delusion.
Plenty of cops are assholes. I've met more than a few. The job attracts people who
have a desire to bully, and the decent people are not attracted to the job, so the very
job itself self-selects for assholes. And fuck you if you don't agree with me, I could care less
what some cop-loving twat "thinks".
capcha = inequity
The irony doesn't get any better than that.
What about all the cops not caught on video abusing their authority, not lying about the facts, not comittig crimes, etc.?
It's kinda like the IT business, for every time some guy steals all the passwords to San Francisco, there are a hundred thousand of us, that do absolutely nothing wrong.
Of course there are bad cops, there are also bad pizza delivery drivers, bad waiters, bad soldiers, and so on and so forth.
It's not like they are politicians or lawyers, where everyone is bad.
21st Century Renaissance Man
Very carefully.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
all of my family is in law enforcement, so i tend to agree with you. not saying there are not bad cops, i have just not met one.
What about all those cops captured on video abusing their authority, lying about the facts, committing crimes, etc.?
This comes under "Officers of the law, being from time to time exempt from statutes of the law, must be held to a higher standard than those who are under the law."
On the other side of the argument:
There are as of 2006, 683,396 full time state, city, university and college, metropolitan and non-metropolitan county, and other law enforcement officers in the United States. There are approx. 120,000 full time law enforcement personnel working for the federal government adding up to a total number of 800,000 law enforcement personnel in the U.S.
--answers.com
How many cases of cops abusing their authority etc. have we seen?
http://www.policemisconduct.net/2010-q2-npmsrp-national-police-misconduct-statistical-report/
3,240 Law enforcement officers cited in recorded police misconduct reports in first half of 2010.
So, assuming that number is representative, we have approximately 0.8% of all police officers cited in misconduct cases per year. Note that this is *cited* meaning a complaint has been *lodged*. This means it includes unfounded complaints and misses unreported complaints. It also means that 99.2% of police officers are likely operating within their mandate, which means it's easily likely that someone who hangs out with a bunch of cops will never have met one of the "bad" ones.
That said, being held to a higher standard and actually *being* a higher standard of human being are not the same thing. Due to the stressful type of job policing is and the personality type that gravitates toward the job, there's likely a statistically significant level of abuse that would go unnoticed in most parts of society, but is highly visible and unacceptable here.
Any time a "good cop" observes a fellow police officer committing a crime and chooses to do nothing (or worse, publicly campaigns for them to be above the law), then they are no longer a "good cop".
Here's my opinion.
You're a cop, and you get caught breaking the law? You lose your pension.
You know a cop broke the law, and you didn't turn him in? You lose your pension.
You know a cop broke the law, and you *did* turn him in? You get his pension added to yours.
Implement this system and watch how fast the cops begin policing themselves.
:(){
never trust the police. in the united states their goal is to make arrests. if they start talking to you, they're trying to get you to incriminate yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
Maybe it's my observer bias, but that figure sounds too low to me.
Those reports are only cases that were reported in newspapers. Lots of cases don't get into the newspapers.
Back in the 1960s, newspapers had a taboo on stories about police abuse. That came up during demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, and counter-culture issues generally. I'd go to a non-violent demonstration, get beaten up by the cops, see other people get seriously injured, pick up the newspapers the next morning, and see a report on the demonstration written exclusively from quotes from the cops, with no mention of police violence. There was a newspaper called the East Village Other that used to print photographs of cops beating up demonstrators that the regular newspapers wouldn't print.
One reason for that was that the cops supplied reporters with news about crime, and the reporters didn't want to alienate their sources.
The cops used to beat up black people all the time. It was only when they started beating up privileged white kids that it became an issue.
The big change came in the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where Mayor Daley decided that the First Amendment didn't apply to people who disagreed with him. The great thing was that a lot of the out-of-town reporters -- the same guys who had been ignoring police brutality up to then -- got their own asses kicked by the cops. It was in all the national newspapers, in Life magazine, on TV. It sort of broke the taboo.
But if you get beaten up by the cops, even if you file a complaint, and you call up a newspaper reporter to tell him about it, the chances of his doing a story about it are pretty low. A lot of these caught-on-video cases didn't make it into the newspapers until the video came out.
Here in New York City, there was lots of police misconduct during political demonstrations -- against the Iraq war, against the Republican Convention, and now Occupy Wall Street. Now a lot of it is caught on video. They even had a high-level office, Anthony Bolognia, get caught on video spraying protesters who were obeying all the laws.
And in my personal contact with cops on the street, I've found a lot of them to be rude, abusive bullies. I approach a cop in with a polite request, and his attitude to me is, "fuck off."
So you get points for looking up the data. Next step -- validating the data. I think the misconduct rate is much higher.