Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Four Year Sentence For Running Piracy Streaming Site

Posted by Soulskill on from the lesson-learned,-don't-run-it-from-your-bedroom dept.

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."

3 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Pretty reasonable by argStyopa · · Score: -1, Troll

    Obviously the summary was written to generate sympathy: 2 years prison, 2 years probation is NOT a 4-year sentence, in common parlance.
    I don't give a shit about how you feel about piracy (it's not actually piracy, it's copyright infringement) but he did something he knew was illegal, and profited massively from it.

    So 2 years in a minimum security jail? Sure, I think that's reasonable.

    --
    -Styopa
    1. Re:Pretty reasonable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      If you don't use prison, then you just get larger fines. And then everyone would bitch that the fines are too high.

      Just stop trying to defend piracy.

    2. Re:Pretty reasonable by NotInHere · · Score: 0, Troll

      Prison serves multiple goals:

      1. to serve as deterrent
      2. protect society from possibly dangerous people
      3. give some form of revenge for done crimes, and do it in an ordered way (not letting the damaged do the job)

      Here we have at least 1. met.

      But 2. is met in some ways as well. He is a danger to economy, and economy is correlated with society in many ways. If people like him go unpunished, everybody would just start a piracy website, and movie studios would have actual losses.