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.

From the Croft

[castlec]

"Those who steal copyrighted material will be caught, even when they use the tools of technology to commit their crimes," U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft says in a statement. "The theft of intellectual property victimizes not only its owners and their employees, but also the American people, who shoulder the burden of increased costs for goods and services."
How many times do we have to say it's not stealing????
Aren't these items selling at record levels????

is that legal?

[interactive_civilian]

from TFA:

During an investigation, government agents downloaded 35 copyright works worth $4820.66 from Chicoine's site and more than 70 copyright works worth $20,648.63 from Trowbridge's site, the DOJ says.

IAdefinitelyNAL, but for some reason I was under the impression that evidence gathered through illegal means (in this case copyright infringement) could not be used...

Can anyone clarify US law on that matter?

Re:is that legal?

[jmcmunn]

I don't know the legality behind it either. It does seem like some kind of entrapment or something though. Perhaps they were issued some form of "digital warrant" to search the suspects hard drive through P2P apps or something? I don't know, but law enforcement can pretty much get away with anything "in the name of catching a criminal".

I'm sure any violation this would have been, has been avoided by some recent (BUSH administration) government "improvement" bill or another.

Why is this a Felony???

[advocate_one]

Surely Copyright infringement is only a civil matter.

...value...

[Vo0k]

It's interesting how the value of the media is calculated.
Is a high-compression DIVX of a shaky video of screen in cinema valued the same as retail 4-DVD "special edition" release?
Is a rip of a 4-CD game squeezing it into 300MB calculated as the same game, with a T-shirt and a manual in the box?
Is software that was released 10 years ago valued at the prices of its release or at current "bargain bin" prices?
Is a mono MP3 made through hand-hacked cable from a poor quality cable counted the same as a new audio CD album?

I don't think the real value is taken into consideration. They just match title-price and neglect quality altogether. My friend was caught. The value they calculated on his software was something like $30.000. The real value of the crap if he wanted to sell that, was around $500.

Newspeak

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the points of Orwell's 1984 was that you could subtly influence peoples opinions by changing the language they used to talk about such things.

"Those who steal copyrighted material will be caught, even when they use the tools of technology to commit their crimes," U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft says in a statement. "The theft of intellectual property victimizes not only its owners and their employees, but also the American people, who shoulder the burden of increased costs for goods and services."

The trouble with that statement is that copyright infringement is not theft. The dictionary tells us that you have to remove something in order to steal it. The laws in the USA defining theft don't mention copyright infringement. The laws in the USA defining copyright infringement don't mention theft. The Supreme Court definitively ruled that copyright infringement was not theft in Dowling vs US, 1985 . They are fundamentally different actions. There is simply no basis whatsoever for misappropriating the word "theft" to talk about copyright infringement.

The question is, why is Ashcroft trying to tell us that copyright infringement is theft? The only other people who do that are the RIAA, the MPAA, and Slashdot trolls.

Re:is that legal?

[eht]

It's not entrapment to sell drugs at a standard street price (whatever that means) and is just standing there not yelling out "Drugs for sale CHEAP!", it is entrapment if they sell the drugs at prices so low that no drug dealer would ever sell them because then you're enticing a suspect with an irresistible deal.

Very good site at explaining what entrapment is and isn't. [lectlaw.com]

Wikipedia Sophistry

[goldspider]

From wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]

"More recently, in the 2000s, people have used civil disobedience to protest....the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."

An act of civil disobedience invloves openly and blatantly breaking the law, so that the inevitable arrest is very public, in order to garner public sympathy for their cause.

A couple of guys hiding behind the (assumed) anonymity of the Internet, breaking the law for their own personal gain doesn't quite pass the civil disobedience litmus test.

Somebody needs to correct that entry.

What commercial gain?

[phr1]

It sounds like these guys were prosecuted under the No Electronic Theft act. That defines swapping files for other files as financial gain:

SEC. 2. CRIMINAL INFRINGEMENT OF COPYRIGHTS.

(a) Definition of Financial Gain.--Section 101 of title 17, United States Code, is amended by inserting after the undesignated paragraph relating to the term ``display'', the following new paragraph:

``The term `financial gain' includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works.''.

Move over George Orwell.

Re:Just goes to show you...

[davmoo]

As someone else has already said in a reply to you, basic human rights and the "right" to rip off corporations are two very different things. To compare the two is so rediculous I can't even come up with a better word than "rediculous".

But I would also like to point out something else.

If you check historical records, you will find that Martin Luther King and many others involved in civil rights protests spent many days in jail for their actions. They did what they had to do to effect change...but they also understood those actions came with a price. And many of them, not just MLK, and both black and white, paid a far greater price.

Are you willing to go to jail or take a bullet just so you can download Britney?

Re:P2P?

[MBGMorden]

Okay, I'm just as much for "freeing the information" as the next Slashdot junkie, but why is it that whenever someone talks about outlawing "P2P", people get all worked up saying "all Internet technologies are P2P, even the web, so why not outlaw all of them?". However, whenever someone from the otherside even hints at one of these other technologies being P2P, we all again jump up yelling that those technolgies now aren't P2P and that they're spewing FUD. We can't have it both ways.

Re:P2P?

[lucason]

Software titles that legitimately sell for thousands of dollars

Nahuh... Software isn't sold, it's licensed! Or was that not the point.

For instance: If you download MS SQL enterprise server. It will cost anywhere between $10.000 till $30.000, depending on the use, to buy a license to use it. You do NOT pay for the software.

So if you download MS SQL from my server you can't put a value to it unless you use it. AND WHEN YOU DO... You are breaking the law. Not ME. (You and me used argumentatively not referring to actual you and me)

So not only where they not P2P, the number $25.000 is probably not all that concrete either.

--
P.S. If I'm not right it's always the world that's wrong.

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

[mwvdlee]

Some of us may not particularly like doing things illegally Some of us may not download copyrighted material even if it is for free just because they feel it's not "right". Some might even consider downloading stuff if it were legal and affordable.

Would $1 for a downloaded, DRM protected (hell, streamed for all I care) episode of South Park be a fair price?

The question here is where the sweet spot is. As demonstrated by current media prices, the big corporations have a very different view on this than the consumers.

Yes, AllOfMP3.com does illustrate this as well.

[SuperKendall]

Yeah, I think AllOfMP3.com also illustrates the whole price/demand thing pretty well. Basically the parent seems mostly to be saying there's no point in a pay service since there are zero-cost offerings, making any pay service undesirable. But as you noted it's more of a true curve where you have some demand even for something expensive (like $1 a song) , and huge demand for something close to free ($40 a GB).

Personally I am uncomfortable using AllOfMP3.com as I feel not enough goes to the artist - I still stick with iTunes for that reason, they get around $.10 a song which is not too bad (especially considering I'm mostly just buying singles).

I do wonder though what the sales charts would look like if all music stores added in sales from AllOfMP3 - I'll bet even the ITMS would be a sliver in comparison, despite the much loswer price at AllOfMP3!

Quote from Ashcroft

[oirtemed]

I have a quote from ashcroft on my blog [aspiras.us]
As today's pleas demonstrate, those who steal copyrighted material will be caught, even when they use the tools of technology to commit their crimes. The theft of intellectual property victimizes not only its owners and their employees but also the American people, who shoulder the burden of increased costs for goods and services.