Slashdot Mirror
33 Months In Prison For Recording a Movie In a Theater
An anonymous reader writes: Philip Danks used a camcorder to record Fast & Furious 6 in a U.K. cinema. Later, he shared it via bittorrent and allegedly sold physical copies. Now, he's been sentenced to 33 months in prison for his actions. "In Court it was claimed that Danks' uploading of Fast 6 resulted in more than 700,000 downloads, costing Universal Pictures and the wider industry millions of pounds in losses." Danks was originally told police weren't going to take any action against him, but he unwisely continued to share the movie files after his initial detainment with authorities.
Is bothering to upload a camrip. Just wait for a DVD release or at least a leaked screener copy!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
“Also what can they possibly sue me for? I have no job, no savings and no means of paying any compensation regardless of the outcome. Is it simply going to be a waste of everyone’s time?” he concludes.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
If he deliberately recorded and actually sold physical or digital copies, I have no sympathy for him. Why would I?
This is what you get if you do.
Yet the banksters who cost the public billions and TRILLIONS have yet to spend a single day behind bars.
"Danks was originally told police weren't going to take any action against him, but he unwisely continued to share the movie files after his initial detainment with authorities."
In other words, the cop had decided to let him go with a warning for speeding, and then, while the cop was walking back to his car, he peeled out and gunned the engine, accelerating as hard as he could.
Understatement of the year. This is a sad case of a stupid law intersecting with an incredibly stupid person.
All laws are bad.
Distributing copies, whatever... "distribution and selling copies for profit" - You screwed.
Real crime was making a crappy, movie theater copy instead of a DVD ripped version.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I'm just surprised 700,000 people wanted to see Fast and the Furious 6.
Making a copy for yourself is one thing, but selling them is another. THAT is copyright violation.
I would say he got 33 months for that, not the act of recording it.
Any financial transaction whatsoever technically makes it a commercial venture. Why do you think all the old tape swappers usually had you give them a tape to copy their mixes onto?
As above, I have no sympathy for the guy. Additionally, willfully doing it AFTER getting swatted for it is just asking for trouble.
And now it's time for the rest of the story...
Yes, this happened in the UK, not the US, but I don't think that the point I'm about to make is invalid...
Crimes and punishments need to be re-evaluated. No truly-victimless crime (personally using drugs without any intent to distribute, for example), when being the only crime, should never receive stronger sentences than crimes that don't affect persons directly and only lightly, at best, affect corporations (like this theatre-cam incident), and those types of crimes should never receive stronger sentences than for those where a person is individually victimized or significant chattel property is stolen (mugging, home burglary, car theft, etc), then would come violent personal crimes (any crime involving brandishing of a weapon, battery, threats of a greater harm like using the claim of a planted bomb, etc) and crimes where a person's life-savings were taken putting them into severe hardship, etc.
The scale should be steep; it should take numerous, numerous counts of the small crimes to even approach the sentences of the next crime up the scale, and the nature of what becomes a count should accurately reflect what's going on. In the case of providing copyrighted material, the law needs to bear in mind that much of the time the material would not have been purchased by the consumer had it not been available for free anyway, so the actual damage to the content creator is lower than usually represented.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Moral of the Story, don't steal other peoples stuff. It will get you into a lot of trouble. I would ask the person, was it worth it? Im betting people would howl to the moon if the person got 6 months in jail. 33 Months is a very long time and just knowing that will keep ME from stealing movies.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Perhaps, he should take the most money he made (legally) on any one day of his life, then counter sue for lost wages for every single day incarcerated. I mean if he made 1500 on that lottery ticket one day, then he should have made 1500 every other day including weekends!
Silence is a state of mime.
No.. It didn't cost them anything, because you can't prove that those people would've even went out and bought the damn movie to begin with.
The shallower end of the gene pool just aquired a new permanent resident.
instead of time in prison, he should be forced to watch the shitty movie continuously for 33 months
...in his own crappy cam-rip format.
If you're going to divide sentence by number of crimes, then shouldn't you divide his 33 months by [number of physical sales x scaling factor for profiting + number of downloaded copies]? If the 700k downloads number isn't totally made up by the studio (I'm making no judgement here) and ignoring the physical sales entirely, then he was actually sentenced to less than 2 minutes per infringement. That makes murder about 69 thousand times worse than contributing to copyright infringement.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Oh... wait...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-28810439
And apparently we're going to need a lot more real soon now
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/22/one_in_three_brits_are_now_terrorists/
then you got nothing to cry about especially when you got a free get out of jail card and then kept on breaking the law. Even at 33 months I don't feel sorry for the guy if he was making money by selling copies. If he got 33 months for sharing the file that would have been a bit excessive.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
There is no way there were 700,000 people who wanted to watch Fast & Furious 6.
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The sentence was not from recording the movie, it was from SELLING it.
Even for me, that crosses the line. For profit piracy is wrong.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Our Constitution's Bill of Rights has a provision against cruel and unusual punishment.
is to protect the wealth and power of the wealthy and powerful. Many violent crimes against ordinary people have earned lesser sentences.
Would you feel the same way if a financial advisor intentionally stole all the money your parents had for retirement?
The financial advisor isn't a geek ---
and the geek should never have to serve hard time.
That is the argument as it usually plays out on Slashdot.
Prison sends the message that the white guy with a six or seven figure income will be treated the same as the poor and the black.
It sends the message that intangible property is still property.
Something that the geek --- who spends his entire working life inside a digital universe defined by the value given to endless streams of ones and zeroes --- ought to be applauding,
He was not sentenced to prison for recording the film, but for distributing the copies.
but isn't a camrip the same thing as a screener?
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
He was even given a 2nd chance, instead of knocking it off he took it further and distributed and sold it. He very much deserved prison, as gentler warnings didn't work.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
However, even the idea of individual justice seems ambiguous in regard to scope. Plato in the Republic treats justice as an overarching virtue of individuals (and of societies), meaning that almost every issue he (or we) would regard as ethical comes in under the notion of justice (dikaosoune). But in modern usages justice covers only part of individual morality, and we don't readily think of someone as unjust if they lie or neglect their children--other epithets more readily spring to mind. What individual justice most naturally refers to are moral issues having to do with goods or property. It is, we say, unjust for someone to steal from people or not to give them what he owes them, and it is also unjust if someone called upon to distribute something good (or bad or both) among members of a group uses an arbitrary or unjustified basis for making the distribution (this last aspect of individual justice obviously has reference to social or at least group justice). Discussion of justice as an individual virtue standardly (at least) centers on questions, therefore, about property and other distributable goods.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entr...
Ars Technica has more on the story, and links to actual news sites covering the mess. And as many insightful Slashdot commentators have surmised, there's more to the story than a lousy cam-rip of a lousy movie.
Copyright silliness may have led to him being caught, but Danks got his 33 months all by himself.
Danks was arrested only six days after he'd uploaded the video, and two days later he wrote on Facebook, "Seven billion people and I was the first. F*** you Universal Pictures."
Danks had also sold DVD copies of the movie for £1.50 each. He said his total profit from the scheme was about £1,000.
To who? Who buys these things? Why would anyone spend money and time to suffer through a cam-rip?
how much of this was earned after he was arrested?
The prosecuting and defending attorneys both seemed to agree that Danks' motive for the piracy of Fast and Furious 6 was “Street Cred.” His defense attorney told the court, "He has no substantial assets of any sort, and his financial gain has been extremely limited, but he was obviously aware that it was a popular film that would be of interest."
The judge was particularly harsh on Danks because of his cavalier attitude."This was bold, arrogant, and cocksure offending,” he said to Danks, as Sky News reports.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
for being a dope.
A slap on the wrist for his kind? Perhaps the UK should get some real laws and judges ...
While I think the idea of imaginary property is in need of complete rehaul, camrips won't help bring about enlightenment. Bad idea, sir. Also, you're an idiot for persisting. Now...
>> 700,000 downloads, costing Universal Pictures and the wider industry millions of pounds in losses
Oh no you don't. OH NO YOU FUCKING DON'T. Do not claim that equivocation. Do NOT equate those. I will not tolerate that bullshit. Shame on editors/journalists that indulge it, shame on all of you for letting it fly. Shame on your honor, shame on your family, shame on your horse.
TWENTY-SEVEN months for 27 offences — that was the prison sentence handed to Perth pervert Stuart Arthur Clarke yesterday morning.
It’s a sentence that has upset one of his repeat victims.
Clarke, 52, was caught in January following two years of reports to police of a man appearing at homes at night and committing an obscene act in full view of female occupants in Maylands and West Perth.
For each of seven indecent act charges and one obscene act charge, Clarke was sentenced to four months imprisonment.
There were an additional eight obscene acts and one indecent act which each received a punishment of five months prison.
Clarke was also sentenced to 14 months prison for two trespassing charges, 18 months for two stalking charges, and 12 months for a 1997 burglary.
However, all of those sentences are to be served alongside a head sentence of 24 months for two burglaries and three months for an assault on a man who confronted Clarke during a flashing incident.
With parole, Clarke could be out in 15 months.
-- Victim of serial sex pest Stuart Arthur Clarke shocked by his prison sentence
So. He is getting punished for infecting hundreds of thousands innocents with cerebral gonorrhea for free. I saw it and agree with the verdict. Hang the evil bastard!
Can we now see Diesel, Morgan, Johnson, Thompson and Lin dangle next to him?
No? Didn't think so. Fuck you Hollywood!
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
Nuff said.
...that enables the thief to be arrested and the phones returned to their actual owners the first time the miscreant tries to connect the phone to a service provider, that would be, I dunno, undemocratic. Un-amurrican. Besides, it would undercut the important corporate businesses that insure phones, make new phones, sell you upgraded phones, and they employ a lot of people. If we actually arranged it so that phone theft is impossible because stolen phones could always be traced the first time the non-owner tried to register to use them anywhere in the world, how would poor people and unemployed teenagers ever get smartphones?
No, it makes much more sense to completely rearrange it so that the phones can automatically be turned off when they are stolen (or whenever some official wants to violate your civil liberties without a warrant) and not even try to arrest the criminals. Our police are too busy busting pot smokers, underage beer drinkers, and giving out citations for expired boat trailer license plates -- y'know, keeping those streets safe -- to bother to run down actual theft, even when it is impossible to use the stolen device without connecting it to a network that can locate it to within a meter or so almost anywhere in the world at will.
This makes complete sense. Go California!
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
this brainiac went through hell and learned nothing from it. Dodged a billet and went right back to what brought five cars around in the first place. 33 months well deserved for failing Darwin's test.
--- Say something clever. Pretend it was me. Thanks.