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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
"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.
I agree he deserves to be punished and I get that he probably doesn't have enough money to pay a fine so it's off to the joint he goes but is 33 months really a fitting punishment here? That's almost three years of this guy's life. And the claim that "millions were lost" has been proven to be exaggerated over and over again. A download does not equal a lost sale; those that download do not buy, they simply go without. I'm not saying that makes it OK, I'm just saying the punishment does not fit the crime.
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Why should anyone have control over the copying industry? Free market here would be great IMO.
I'm all for the free market but it's not the copying that is the problem. The problem is that it takes thousands of man hours
to produce a movie and all those people want to get paid. If you made copying legal then one of 3 things happen:
1) Noone produces movies anymore
2) They figure out another way of paying for the movie (merchandise tie-ins, product placement, etc..)
3) Metal detectors, etc... at the movie theatre and/or some other way of preventing copying.
Copying is too hard to enforce and we need a better way. I don't think swat teams and prison is the answer but I
don't really like the idea of movies being even more corrupted with advertisement either.
artists can get payed better when not bottlenecked by shitty distributors with monopolies
That might be so but if copying is legal then the indie film producer has the same problem. They can only sell 1 copy.
How do you fairly compensate the people who spend the many man hours producing the movie? The movie industry
isn't perfect by any means and there are plenty of people getting rich who maybe shouldn't but removing all copy
protection would require movies as we currently know them to cease to exist.
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.
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...