Former Leader of Film Piracy Group Sentenced To Five Years In Prison

colinneagle writes "The acknowledged leader of once prolific movie piracy group IMAGiNE was sent to prison this week for five years, one of the longest sentences ever handed down for criminal copyright infringement. In addition to his prison term, Jeramiah Perkins, 40, of Portsmouth, Va., was sentenced to serve three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $15,000 in restitution. On Aug. 29, 2012, Perkins pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. According to the Department of Justice, Perkins was indicted along with three other defendants on April 18, 2012, for their roles in the IMAGiNE Group, an organized online piracy ring that sought to become the premier group to first release Internet copies of movies only showing in theaters. According to court documents, Perkins directed and participated in using receivers and recording devices in movie theaters to secretly capture the audio sound tracks of copyrighted movies. They then synchronized the audio files with illegally recorded video files to create completed movie files suitable for sharing over the Internet via BitTorrent file sharing technology."

Comments

Re:15k in fines?

[Joce640k]

"pleaded guilty"...

Somebody cut a deal.

gotta keep the prison system full

[0111 1110]

The guy didn't harm anyone and we're locking him up in a cage for 5 years. Well I guess it serves him right for living in this stupid country. Being born here was the dumbest thing I've ever done and remaining here when I could leave is even dumber.

Re:gotta keep the prison system full

[jd2112]

No one harmed? Somewhere there is a movie exec still driving a 2012 S-class Mercedes because he can't afford a new one. How can people live in such utter poverty?

Outrageous

[betterunixthanunix]

Prison time for copyright infringement? Really?

Just another sign of how completely out of control the copyright system has become.

Re:Outrageous

[Internal Modem]

Maybe it's just the fact that a physical structure (the movie theater) has been compromised in a way similar to breaking and entering, but I honestly think there's a difference between copying a DVD and setting up receivers in a movie theater to capture a proprietary audio broadcast.

He made more than $400,000 in profits from his illegal wiretapping. I think part of the defendant's actions do cross the line between intellectual property theft and criminal theft, especially because he set up PayPal accounts to accept payment for IMAGINE's releases.

Why should he feel free to profit off the expenses paid by the movie theater for retail space, electricity, equipment, and movie fees? At a certain point, even if the theater still has the item that is claimed to have been stolen, the defendant is stealing his for-profit content from the movie theater.

Re:Outrageous

[drinkypoo]

Maybe it's just the fact that a physical structure (the movie theater) has been compromised in a way similar to breaking and entering, but I honestly think there's a difference between copying a DVD and setting up receivers in a movie theater to capture a proprietary audio broadcast.

I don't. I think the dividing line is the commercial benefit. Nobody should ever see jail time for downloading copyrighted materials. But selling them without permission? How else are we supposed to provide them an incentive not to do this? On one hand, copyright has been distended all out of proportion, on the other hand these guys were selling current media and the more current the better. I have limited sympathy for them. The only sympathy I do have for them is that nobody should be placed into our prison system.

Re:Outrageous

[kawabago]

The fact that he could make such a profit tells us the content is over priced to begin with. That he could pay for technology to capture the content, deliver it and still make a profit tells the whole story. The entertainment industry creates copyright infringers by demanding far too much for content. Lower the price, you'll eliminate the infringers. Of course, you can't tell anyone that they are asking too much for something they own, even if it's incredibly easy to steal, like content. The war on drugs suffers the same problem. When drug laws are strengthened, illicit drugs increase in price due to increased risk. That increases profits, which attracts more violent criminals, so drug violence increases. The converse is also true, decreasing drug penalties decreases drug profits and drives violent criminals out of the market. Violence can't be maintained without plenty of money for people to fight over.

Re:Outrageous

[betterunixthanunix]

One gets to set the price on the products one labors to produce

Since when? Oh, right, never, because someone has to be willing to pay the price you demand; the whole idea in capitalism is that no single person or entity gets to decide these things. The movie industry gets to inflate its prices because the government gives them assistance, and apparently that assistance now includes the use of prisons (which are supposed to exist to keep us safe from dangerous people, not to keep obsolete business models alive).

Copyright makes no sense in an age where people have the methods and apparatus needed to distribute information on a global scale in their house. Throwing people in prison for it does not change the simple reality that copyright is hopelessly dated and is in desperate need of reform (or simple elimination).

Re:U$A

[Rockoon]

Being poor in the US is also quite unpleasant...

Compared to what?

People like you have no damn clue what being poor means. Subsistence farming. Look it up.

Re:now we can be safe

[Dopefish_1]

At least here, they're going after someone who was systematically and deliberately distributing copyrighted content, rather than just some poor kid running bittorrent.

That's right.

[Anonymous Coward]

In many parts of the World, a US prison would be living like a prince: 3 meals, shelter, clothing, TV and other recreation.

Which makes it quite sad, actually. To think that a US prison is better living than what over a billion people in this World have.

Re:That's right.

[Nidi62]

For a lot of the people he's talking about, they live with literal animals, in a room about the size of a cell.

Re:That's right.

[Trepidity]

To most civilized parts of the world U.S. prisons look positively barbaric, though. Most first-world countries have managed to figure out how to run a prison system without high levels of rape, for one thing.

Re:That's right.

[Jafafa Hots]

It's not that we in the US can't run a prison without rape, it's that as a society we don't WANT to.

We LIKE it that prisoners are raped - we joke about it.

Prison officials like it too. They have hundreds of inmates for each guard. Bad odds. So you encourage racism in prison so the prisoners are fighting and killing each other based on racial hatreds instead of fighting and killing the people holding them captive.

Same way we run our government.

Re:U$A

[ranton]

You have got to be trolling at this point. Using homeless people to represent what life is like for most people in the US. Get a clue.

Re:U$A

[lgw]

being poor in the US is also quite unpleasant

"Daddy bought me the wrong BMW. Life is Pain!"

âoeI have to get dressed so that I donâ(TM)t look too lazy when I go out to pay the gardener. Woe is me!â

"There's nothing to drink at home except an unlimited supply of clean water from the tap. Pity me!"

I grew up poor in the US. I didn't know a single person who starved to death. I didn't know a single person who was "disappeared" by the government. I didn't know a single person who died from parasites, or lost a limb in the factory they worked in as a child.

Your "White Whine" is appalling.

Re:U$A

[lgw]

"My favorite blog still doen't have UTF8 support after all these years. My life sucks!"

Re:U$A

[Rockoon]

You have got to be trolling at this point. Using homeless people to represent what life is like for most people in the US. Get a clue.

Not only that, he cited panhandling, an activity that when conducted in the western world nets more in a week than many in the 3rd and 2nd world earn in an entire year.

These people really have no clue what its like outside the western world.

India, population 1.2 billion.
32.7% of Indians live on less than $1.25 per day.
68.7% of Indians live on less than $2.00 per day.

Thats more than 2.6 times the entire population of the United States, in one single country, that lives on less than $2 per day.

Poor is relative. On a global scale, nobody at all in the United States is poor.

deserved longer

[julian67]

IMAGiNE made telesync cam copies. If that wasn't bad enough they then encoded the already shitty video using xvid thus guaranteeing it would be soft and blocky with muddy colours.

I'd give them another couple of months.

Re:No sympathy here

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and blacks in the US in the 1800s knew it was illegal to be black *and* free. They deserved the penalties they got when they tried to vote. Jim Crow FTW!

Re:U$A

[aaaaaaargh!]

Poor is relative. On a global scale, nobody at all in the United States is poor.

It's not clear what point you're trying to make, because you seem to be contradicting yourself. Poverty is always relative. If you want to compare levels of poverty you cannot take into account values like "32.7% of Indians live on less then $1.25 per day" but need to consider the goods people can actually buy for the given amount of money in their country.

People who are about to starve to death in the US might fare well with the same amount of money in some rural part of India and, vice versa, an amount of money that might allow you to survive without problems in some part of the world would not allow you to survive at all in the US without the help of some charity. Such comparisons are completely pointless, because people have to survive where they are living, of course.

Re:U$A

[Rockoon]

It's not clear what point you're trying to make, because you seem to be contradicting yourself. Poverty is always relative. If you want to compare levels of poverty you cannot take into account values like "32.7% of Indians live on less then $1.25 per day" but need to consider the goods people can actually buy for the given amount of money in their country.

That $1.25 is adjusted for purchasing power.

In other words, other people arent the idiots you think that they are just because what they are telling you doesnt jive with the shit that you yourself cannot back up with facts. Its your view of the world that is wrong.

Re:U$A

[__aablib8664]

this entire thread is an example of how much of a joke slashdot moderation has become..... who the f* are you people anyways....OFFTOPIC

Re:U$A

[0111 1110]

Nicer? I'm guessing you've never actually left your cushy first world paradise to discover that life in other countries is actually quite nice, and it can require less hours as a wage slave worker drone to survive. Immigrants who come here are often very surprised at how depressing life here actually is. Some are willing to grin and bare it because they have dollar signs in their eyes. Some work here for a year in very unpleasant conditions and then go back to their home country with great relief to get out of here. Others cannot take it even that long and return in just a month or two. Not everyone cares only about money. The ones who think life is mostly about how much money you make. Those are the immigrants who stay. If you have been very poor for most of your life it is an understandable attitude, but greed is still greed.

Re:Overkill much?

[pieterh]

They weren't selling the movies. They were putting them onto Bittorrent. This was more a political act than anything; certainly not a for-profit crime.