P2P Operators Plead Guilty

Bootsy Collins writes "In the first such criminal convictions in the U.S., two peer-to-peer hub operators have pled guilty to conspiracy to commit felony copyright infringement. The two men were subjects of raids last August after Department of Justice investigators downloaded content valued at US$25,000 retail from their servers, the Movie Room and Acheron's Alley. They face sentences of up to five years in prison, and up to US$250,000 in fines, in addition to the possibility of being forced to pay restitution to copyright holders.

Re:Conspiracy?

[It doesn't come easy]

It would have to be because of a plan for them to cooperate together, I would guess.

In the other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

...new BitTorrent sites are appearing at the same time others are closing. One of these sites is mininova [mininova.org], which is the follow-up of the well-known SuprNova.
A full list of torrent sites can be found here [slyck.com].

Re:Conspiracy?

[JohnnyKlunk]

A conspiracy is a plot to carry out some harmful or illegal act or a secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act . You don't have to actually perform the act to be convicted. In many cases just planning to do something is against the law. Especially these days where having a map of a government building and a few pounds of fertaliser in the shed means you're conspiring to commit acts of terrorism. For which you'll definately do some hard time.

Re:is that legal?

[OgTheBarbarian]

Check how undercover cops conduct drug busts some time.

Re:P2P?

[brainburger]

Yes, they were Direct Connect hubs. This means the accused may not have actually hosted the infringing material, similar to Napster.

For those of you shocked about the plea...

[njfuzzy]

Presumably they pled guilty as part of a plea-bargain. There's very little reason to plead guilty to anything unless it gets you better treatment that you think you would get by fighting the charges.

Re:From the Croft

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Could of swore the American people can record something with a VCR/TiVo and happily watch it back. Surely the same thing applies to downloading it after watching it on TV a day or so before too. I'm not American but this applies to most places, just a shame people totally ignore anything "in the real world" when it comes to "cyber" crime.

Re:is that legal?

[ThousandStars]

IANAL, but as far as I understand, in the US it is legal for law enforcement to buy (or, in this case, copy) from someone who offers it to you. The closest precedent is probably buying drugs and then arresting seller, which is a legal tactic (in the sense that it's okay). What you're probably thinking of is entrapment, which would occur if a police officer tried to sell drugs to someone and then arrested them.

So downloading works in copyright from a public website is legal, or very probably legal. What wouldn't be legal is sending an IM to one of the guys offering works in copyright and then nailing them for receiving it. That's part of the reason the entertainment industry lawyers are going after the guys distributing, not the ones downloading.

Re:Conspiracy?

[the_mad_poster]

No, the parent is either ignorant or a troll. Willfull copyright infringement is punishable with jail time, the length of which varies with the severity of the act.

Re:Demand, where where is the (legeal) supply?

[cgenman]

There are certain legal sites out there, but they all have that all-too-familiar achillies heel: The content owners want to use the step up in technology to ratchet a step up in price. They also only work on Windows XP machines. On the other hand, these days they have a heck of a lot more movies than when they launched.

Cinema Now [cinemanow.com] - High cost but a lot of good stuff.
Movieflix [movieflix.com] - Cheap and plentiful, but old and obscure.
Movielink [movielink.com] - The original, but won't even let you in the site without I.E. Similar cost / selection to cinema now.
iFilm [ifilm.com] - Always free, always a crapshoot as to what you will get. Probably the best thing to happen to independent filmmaking since Clerks.

Re:Conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it does (as do most countries I believe). It is an inchoate crime. If you enter into an agreement to break the law with another, and take some action in furtherance of that purpose, that is a conspiracy to commit X.....
Logically it makes sense, you have their intent to break the law via the agreement with another, and then they are doing something that shows they really do plan to break the law.
For example, if I were to agree with you to rob a bank, and we buy ski-masks and guns, and then start casing the bank, why should we not be arrested prior to actually robbing the bank if the police find out we intend to rob the bank?

Re:Conspiracy?

[h4rm0ny]

From TFA:

after Department of Justice investigators downloaded content valued at US$25,000 retail from their servers

Yes, but also from the article:
Member sites required their users to share large quantities of computer files with other users, according to the DOJ.

Given how P2P works, I'd say the previous comment in the story about downloading from the website, is just ignorance / confusion on the part of the story writers. This is PC World after all.

Re:Just goes to show you...

[geoffspear]

Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the right to make laws regarding copyright. How is making such laws a violation of "every precept of the founding documents"?

You're either a troll or an idiot.

Re:Newspeak

[Anonymous Coward]

Your assessment is compelling but overbroad/incomplete.
In Dowling, giving a narrow interpretation of the National Stolen Property Act, 18 U.S.C.S. 2314 the Court wrote:

The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use. While one may colloquially link infringement with some general notion of wrongful appropriation, infringement plainly implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.

So the infringement is wrongful because it deprives the copyright holder of some of the 15 USC 106 uses of the copyrighted expression, whereas I think strict theft would require complete conversion, deprivation of all uses. So whether the infringement is theft is a matter of degree, because if the infringer deprives the holder of ALL (most?) uses, i.e., completely usurps or vitiates the market for the legitimate uses, it would undisputably be theft.

Re:Just goes to show you...

[aBlooMoon]

Here is an inconclusive list of inane laws in the state of New York. Tough titties indeed.

The penalty for jumping off a building is death.

Slippers are not to be worn after 10:00 P.M.

A fine of $25 can be levied for flirting. This old law specifically prohibits men from turning around on any city street and looking "at a woman in that way." A second conviction for a crime of this magnitude calls for the violating male to be forced to wear a "pair of horse-blinders" wherever and whenever he goes outside for a stroll.

A person may not walk around on Sundays with an ice cream cone in his/her pocket.

While riding in an elevator, one must talk to no one, and fold his hands while looking toward the door.

A license must be purchased before hanging clothes on a clothesline.

It is against the law to throw a ball at someone's head for fun.

Anyway, my point is simple: just because there is a so-called law doesn't mean it is 'right' or 'just' or even applicable in the modern world.

Re:P2P?

[Pixie_72]

Apparently, it is P2P - more specifically Direct Connect. At least according BBC News [bbc.co.uk]. The two guys are said to belong to a group called The Underground Network [udgnet.com].

Gallery of CSS Descramblers

[Björn Stenberg]

The wikipedia entry is correct. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

One of the more famous examples is Dr. David S. Touretzky's "Gallery of CSS Descramblers [cmu.edu]", which contains more than 20 different examples of code that is (assumed to be) illegal under the DMCA.

The page also prominently displays Dr. Touretzky's name, email address and a photograph of him. It was explicitly created to draw attention to the absurdity of the DMCA law, through civil disobedience:

If code that can be directly compiled and executed may be suppressed under the DMCA, as Judge Kaplan asserts in his preliminary ruling, but a textual description of the same algorithm may not be suppressed, then where exactly should the line be drawn? This web site was created to explore this issue, and point out the absurdity of Judge Kaplan's position that source code can be legally differentiated from other forms of written expression.

Re:Max 5 Years?!

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be the Federal system, which doesn't prosecute date rape, and a state system which does. It's always worse to be prosecuted federally, those guys are brutal mother fuckers.

Re:Max 5 Years?!

[dmarx]

You do realize that comparing the maximum possible sentence for one crime to the sentence actually meeted out in a specific instance of a different crime is truly an apples-to-oranges comparison, right?

Now, if you were comparing maximum sentences for different types of crimes, or were comparing the sentence of the average copyright infringer to that of the average rapist, you might be on your way to a point. However, just because some lawyer somewhere once got his guilty client a light sentence doesn't mean that suddenly all sentences everywhere must be reduced or else the system as a whole is unsupportably unfair.

(The system may in fact be incredibly unfair, but you need more than one second-hand anecdote about a completely different crime)

Actually, I think prison for any nonviolent crime is incredibly unfair, unless we institute some serious prison reform. As it stands now, prison is a violent place, and only violent people deserve to go there. It is a place where rape is a commonplace occurence, ignored by the authorities. Only the absolute dregs of society deserve to be put in that environment, certainly not copyright infringers, or tax cheats, or people like that.

Re:Er, felony?

[Anonymous Coward]

A felony is a crime for which you can be imprisoned for one year or more. http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/eousa/kidspage/glossary. html [usdoj.gov]

It doesn't strictly have anything to do with the heinousness of the crime, just whatever some legislator decided was worth at least one year.