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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."
hmmmm unusual, the punishment, estimate of damages/losses actually seem reasonable for a change
Or he'd owe... all the money ever minted and printed and all that ever will be.
Luck of the Irish!
Fenian Bastard got what he deserved from a good staunch Protestant Judge ...
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
You'll get less of a sentence for manslaughter.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So, he made 0.023 pounds on ads per movie view right? How do they figure 12,000,000 pounds in damages? Where those people really going to pay 12,000,000 pounds for those movies if he didn't charge for those ads?
12 million movies over 5 years? That's still an average of 6,575+ movies a day. How do you do that with a 2008 broadband internet connection from your bedroom while you're unemployed and have never been employed.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess they weren't HD 1080p videos?
You are equating that justice should be proportional to the damage caused, vs intent, and chances for reoccurrence.
Manslaughter or murder has some of the highest damage that we consider. However most people who do this are not mass murderers, and will not make such a habit. And often it isn't because of disrespect of the law but because the person felt threatened on some level.
Justice requires stiff penalty for such action though as to make it clear to the population that you must take great care before you choose to end a life.
But then you have white collar chrime. In many ways the person is far more evil, not doing a spur of the moment thing, but a long drawn out plan, in spite of the law, with the intent of being somehow above it.
This is a very dangerous mindset, as it causes sliding to more crimes. So while the damage is far less it is punishing far worse behavior.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Incredible that the ad sales outperform the movie values, yet the MAFIAA refuse to take part in such consumer-friendly operations.
Four years in prison for using the Internet!
I'll do two years standing on my head for 280K.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
You have to be fucking kidding right? Hollywood, RIAA, MPAA, etc is not run by Republicans you fucking idiot.
Right. The Democrats and Republicans are run by the RIAA and MPAA plus Disney and some others.
I defend copyright infringement in this thread:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
He should have have burned them and sold them on DVD-Rs. Apparently if you do that you get only probation. lol
http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/04/politics/labor-department-bootleg-movies/index.html
Damages - are they calculated by multiplying the number of downloads by retail price?
Like - ookay.. Everyone who downloaded a movie and the Site would not have been there would have bought the movie retail?
I wonder if one day it comes around that you get sued by a company for not buying from them causing them lost profit, like a mini-TPP?
. . . and cows. Cows that use apps.
... movie industry should go into the fucking piracy business.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
hmmmm unusual, the punishment, estimate of damages/losses actually seem reasonable for a change
Add revenues: 280,000 pounds = $ 432,000 US.
12 million streams @ $5 ea. = $60 million worth of licensed streams.
---- and when a movie is being streamed, I am going to assume that the downloader is sitting there watching it.
That the excuses the geek trots out for his downloads from Pirate Bay don't make any sense here. What he wants is a free movie night and that is the end of it.
12 million streams is an unlicensed wholesale distribution. If the real or intangible property being distributed on such a scale was anything other than a movie, I'd be interested in knowing if the sentence would be so light.
but why not notpirate?
Sure it does. If you're the CEO of a corporation or a politician it goes unpunished all the time.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
The author of cryptolocker makes $1m on a single bitlocker account _per day_. I wonder if he would even be convicted if caught, I mean you could afford a fairly decent barrister and lenient sentencing with that kind of money.
If it's about the MAFIAA society - he sure is a clear and present danger. :P
Should be put away if not down before he caused more damages than there's money in the whole world.
That's nearly 5500 movies per day he was serving. I don't get that sort of bandwidth in MY bedroom!
The same JEWS who are forcing millions of hate-filled, raping, criminal, selfish third world scumbags into every white country on Earth:
"Muslim migrant brutally rape 7 year old White girl - Media don't care"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9cid-8eW3g
Any comments? I expect it was a one off, and all the rest of the 'migrants' are law abiding brain surgeons.
Implying all of those people would have actually bought the film. These "damage" claims are totally invalid. Sure there are some people that might buy it, but really, I'd say most people are just watching it because it's there. There is no loss in money earned.
it's actually not a lot of money for five years, and his real problem is a criminal record and conviction which will result in travel and additional employment restrictions - if he was good at computer, he could have made that money in those five years, gotten better at stuff and not be in jail.
In the mean time Ricardo Taylor a former employee of the Department Of Labor recently confessed to running a bootleg DVD operation out of the department’s Washington D.C. headquarters. — was sentenced to 24 months of probation with no time in prison.
Seems like the amount of ad revenue is kind of irrelevant to HIS prosecution.
Shouldn't there be a law against advertising your product on a piracy site though? Why is funding such a dastardly activity perfectly okay if running a piracy site is not?
If I were the judge, regardless of the sentence handed out to the convicted, I'd do my best to keep the plaintiffs from spewing their ludicrous damages figures. Even for the scale of this case, 12M is ridiculous. Those legally entitled to income from the movies missed out on 12M due to the defendant's activities? No way. 100K? Still high, but maybe.