Four Year Sentence For Running Piracy Streaming Site

An anonymous reader writes: A 29-year-old man from Northern Ireland has been sentenced to two years in jail and another two "on license" for running a website from his bedroom that streamed pirated content. (Being on license is similar to a strict parole in the U.S.) Police say the man made over £280,000 from ads on the site . Law enforcement was put on the case by an anti-piracy group in the UK. Between 2008 and 2013, users of the site streamed approximately 12 million movies, which prosecutors say caused £12 million in damages. The judge in the case said time in jail was necessary "to show that behavior of this nature does not go unpunished."

Comments

Re:Pretty reasonable

[turbidostato]

"So if I look for cars in garages that haven't been driven in a month, and I steal them, you have to prove that there was some actual loss of utility, not just a loss of property?"

The day you can take my car from the garage but still I can take my car from the garage whenever I want, you can come back with that argument. If you are honest, you need to think harder; if you are a troll, you already should know this kind of equivalence between physical and intellectual property is a no-go you need to avoid since... ages.

In the meantime, it's still apples to oranges.

"People paid him about $1,000,000 for movies illegally shown. That would seem to indicate at least $1,000,000 in actual loss."

No sir. *Advertisers* payed him 280.000 pounds for showing their adds on his web, which is something he did. Nobody paid to see the movies. So the only indication here is that advertisers are happy to pay 280.000 pounds to a site with as much traffic as the one operated by this guy, nothing more and nothing less.

"The court indicated it was about $12M in actual provable loss."

No sir. That was the claim from the prosecutor, which the judge happened to accept (but then, the accused already pleaded guilty so there's no much wonder about that). These loses to be real or not, are a different matter but my bet is that if we sum up all the claimed loses due to piracy from the likes of the RIAA they not only wouldn't earn a penny but that they even would owe some money to the pirates by the end of the day.

Re:very strange

[AmiMoJo]

That didn't stop the RIAA claiming $75 trillion in damages. Granted they didn't ask for that much, but they claimed it was possible to under applicable laws.

This guy's mistake was to enrich himself. Only commercial copyright infringement is punishable as a criminal offence. The guy running Oink's Pink Palace was found not guilty on all counts because he was doing it as a hobby and any ad revenue was used to run the site.