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Man Handed Conditional Prison Sentence for Spreading Information About Popcorn Time Service (torrentfreak.com)
A man from Denmark has been handed a six-month conditional prison sentence for spreading information about Popcorn Time, an authorized on-demand movies and TV shows streaming service, news outlet TorrentFreak reports. From the report: In what is being described as a first for Europe, the man was convicted after telling people how to download, install and use the movie streaming service. He was also ordered to forfeit $83,300 in ad revenue and complete 120 hours community service.
In August 2015, police in Denmark announced they had arrested a man in his thirties said to be the operator of a Popcorn Time-focused website. Popcorntime.dk was subsequently shut down and its domain placed under the control of the state prosecutor.
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PopcornTime.dk was an information resource, offering news on Popcorn Time-related developments, guides, plus tips on how to use the software while staying anonymous.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
Article says he ran a website that hosted no software. Just news about and information on how to use [banned service]. He got ad rev from the site. Didn't even link directly software, just to places that link to it.
I read the article, and as near as I can figure, he was busted for posting instructions on how to download, install, and use software for pirating content from PopcornTime.
From the /. excerpt, it sounds like all he was doing was helping people to legally use the service. Highly misleading.
And what a crappy headline... I have pretty low expectations for accuracy in /. postings, but this is one of the more egregious cases of crap editing, or something. Unless it was intentionally misleading.
A man from Denmark has been handed a six-month conditional prison sentence for spreading information about Popcorn Time, an authorized on-demand movies and TV shows streaming service.
So either the summary is wrong and the site was illegal (which is what I suspect) or someone needs to explain why making money pointing people to a legal streaming site is illegal.
Clearly making money off of the illegal thing is enough. Courts are allowed to employ the common sense eyeball test, obfuscations don't get you out of trouble.
Although true, I still have trouble believing they would not simply find something else to charge him with even if he ran the site on his own money. Look how far authorities have gone, in some cases even breaking their own laws, not to mention issues regarding national sovereignty, in order to go after those they perceive as threats to the copyright cartels and their business models.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Should we mind that entirely made up tax rate?
The Danish income tax is just around the EU average. E.g. in 2013, the average single Dane paid an effective income tax of 38%, compared to 31% in the US, 49% in Germany or 56% in Belgium. (Source: OECD)
(Many people in the above mentioned countries will react with disbelief when they see these numbers, but then, it really shouldn't surprise anyone that OECD understands the tax systems of the respective countries better than most citizens.)
Incidentally, that Belgian average tax rate of 56% is the same as the Danish marginal (and thus also maximum) rate.
Maybe you're thinking of the OECD "tax burden" (total tax revenue, including VAT and fees, as a percentage of GDP), which is sometimes brought up by politicians campaigning on tax cuts? But even that is only 46%, and while it is indeed (barely) the highest in OECD, it's also a largely meaningless number, as revenue-neutral changes to the tax system can have significant impact on it. (E.g. in Denmark, people pay taxes on welfare checks. If instead we did like most countries and just paid out equivalent tax-free – but smaller – checks, the OECD tax burden would drop an estimated 4% points, and six OECD countries would suddenly be ahead of us.)