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
If he deliberately recorded and actually sold physical or digital copies, I have no sympathy for him. Why would I?
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.
We need to have no laws at all
Good luck enforcing that!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I'm just surprised 700,000 people wanted to see Fast and the Furious 6.
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.
There is no way there were 700,000 people who wanted to watch Fast & Furious 6.
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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,
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...