World's First Jail Sentence for BitTorrent Piracy

Rob T Firefly writes "Hong Kong newspaper The Standard reports on what seems to be the world's first case of a BitTorrent movie pirate being sent to jail. (Others have been jailed for related crimes.) After losing his appeal against a November 2005 conviction, Chan Nai-ming, a 38-year-old BitTorrent user known as 'Big Crook,' has begun serving a prison sentence for making the films 'Daredevil,' 'Miss Congeniality,' and 'Red Planet' available for download via BitTorrent. His appeal was based on the fact that he did not profit from the piracy." From the article: "[Appeals Judge] Beeson noted [convicting magistrate] MacIntosh, in handing out the sentence, was fully aware of the noncommercial nature of the case, but measured the seriousness of the case by the harm done to the moviemakers — not by the gain made by the offender. Chan, and those in the chatroom, 'were aware of the possible criminal implications of uploading films to the system,' Beeson wrote. She also noted the sentence was already drastically reduced, from a maximum of four years, to three months, in order 'to reflect the novelty of the conviction.'

wow

> BitTorrent movie pirate being sent to jail. (Others have been jailed for related crimes.) After losing his appeal against a November 2005 conviction, Chan Nai-ming, a 38-year-old BitTorrent user known as 'Big Crook,' has begun serving a prison sentence for making the films 'Daredevil,' 'Miss Congeniality,' and 'Red Planet' available for download via BitTorrent

Damn, I didnt know bad taste was a jailable offence.

Re:wow

Now if only they would arrest the people who were involved in making those movies ...

Re:wow

I would be happy with just the arrest of Ben Afflack

Re:wow

Ya, and since "[the judge] measured the seriousness of the case by the harm done to the moviemakers" the sentence should be the movie makers handing cash to this guy. He's advertising their crappy movies for them, for free.

Re:

The Tomato Meter ratings of these films are: 14, 37, 44 - which (as I understand it) is the percent of favorable reviews.

Re:wow

And 100% of people who still bring up "Bush stole the election in 2000" jokes in every topic. =)

(No offense. I do believe it happened, but... it happened. Making fun of Bush now is a lot like beating up a man with broken arms and legs. Sure, you could, but... why bother? What else can you do to him that hasn't already been done?)

But as far as bad taste goes, look at any list of top sellers in any field.

Whaddya know, 8 million people bought Madden 0X again, even though it's the same game as last year, with a new guy on the cover!
Hmmm... Bill O'Rielly's book on the best-seller list? O R(iel)LY?
Hey! (Popstar who can't sing)/(Rap artist who sings about crimes he never did) just went quintuple super ultra platinum again! At least until everyone forgets him by next week.

Also, try walking into a fashion or decoration store sometime. I'm against the death penalty, but if bad taste were legal and I were a judge, I'd send half of the USA to the gallows.

Re:wow

What else can you do to him that hasn't already been done?

Hanging for treason against the American people and the United States Constitution?

Just what is "Uploading" in this case?

The article doesn't make it clear, but from the description, it sounds like he posted the .torrent files somewhere and either ran the tracker or put the whole mess on a site that would run it.

If this actually applied to simply seeding the file as a peer (i.e. downloading via BitTorrent and leave the client running), then there's more of a potential chilling effect, as it sets a precedent for downloading-via-BT being the equivalent of distribution.

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it sets a precedent for downloading-via-BT being the equivalent of distribution.

Last I checked, since the protocol works such that having that file in that folder implies consent to upload the file, then yes, it is the equivalent of distribution. The q

Re:

As I understand it, the way bittorrent works means that even if I'm seeding a movie it's fairly unliikely that any one person will get the entire file from me, if there are a decent number of peers as well as plenty of other seeders.
Assuming that you need

Re:

it's true that if I had 75% of the movie, that would definitely be copyrite violation. What I was wondering though is, if I have say, 50% of the bits in a file, but due to where those bits are, they are useless for playing back the file, is that still inf

Re:Just what is "Uploading" in this case?

But bittorrent is if someone else gives them the sheet and you give them the letters to fill it in. I don't think anyone's going to find you guilty for selling alphabet soup in the knowledge that they might write something bad.

Re:

True. However, I expect that the RIAA and the MPAA WANT this to be a nebulous result. They don't want clarity so that anyone even THINKING of using BitTorrent will be dissuaded from doing so. If it was clear that he was operating at a higher level in th

Please remind me again

Please remind me again how this man is so dangerous to society he must be locked up in jail.

Re:Please remind me again

You know sometimes we put people in jail for reasons other than they are dangerous, like to punish them... Otherwise a "white collar criminal" would never have to do jail time.

Re:Please remind me again

You try telling anyone whose life savings were vaporized by the fallout from Enron and such that white-collar criminals aren't dangerous.

Re:Please remind me again

Yes, but we didn't send the Enron guys to jail because they're dangerous. We sent them to jail because they were bad (among other reasons.) We could make Enron execs effectively harmless in the future by banning them from certain business positions.

When we talk about sending someone to jail because they're dangerous it usually means preventing them from physically harming people in society at large.

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That approach has been used before. Remember the stock scam guy Micheal Milliken (sp?)from the 1990s? The Gov't banned him from ever working in the Securities industry as a broker. So what does he do, he makes millions as a "Consultant" to firms showing th

It's called deterrence.

Yes, but we didn't send the Enron guys to jail because they're dangerous. We sent them to jail because they were bad (among other reasons.)

I'm not sure I understand what "bad" means within the context of jail. The reason why the Enron boys should (and did

Re:

There are many reasons for sending anyone to jail, some are better than others. The OP essentially assumed that the primary reason for incarceration was incapacitation - removing them from society to protect us. I responded that the punitive aspect of pu

Re:It's called deterrence.

Even though there exist heterosexual men and women in the world, they don't all want to fuck each other all the time

We're on Slashdot. We're already fully aware of that. ;)

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And make them watch Miss Conegeniality once a day.

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"Enron guys go to some country-club prison at taxpayer expense for a few months"
Well, CEO Jeffrey Skilling was sentenced to more than a few months, he got 24 years - or 288 months to be exact. And former CFO Andrew Fastow was given a 6 year term after co

Re:

Society is a collection of rules.
He broke the rules, and it being punished for it.
Rightr now, society says the punishment is jail.

Hopefully society will change where a judge will be able to come up with punishments that aren't so expensive to institute.

Re:

"Society is a collection of rules"

Rules made by a few for the many.

The few, are in the pockets of the Corporations.

German society circa. 1936?

I mean, that's a collection of rules and people were made to obey the rules.
Sure several million people were murdered for being the wrong race...but that was the law at the time!

really dude...

Re:German society circa. 1936?

You missed the point. Just because 'society' says something is wrong, doesn't make it wrong. Society once thought slavery was all good. Society once thought that making women subservient to men was all good...and some societies still do! Me, I make up my own morals based on others' ideas.

One correction

s/society/government/g

There. That fixes the argument. There is a big difference between society and government. Society is simply a collection of people, whereas government is the ruling force of a jurisdiction of land. In some cases the society and g

Re:

If society is a collection of rules, and he broke the rules, then he broke society!

Society is not a collection of laws, it's a collection of people, and in most societies the majority of those people are at least two steps removed from creating, or causing

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He allowed rich people to have less money. There is no higher law.

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He's not a direct danger to society, obviously*

Now if copyright infringers aren't actually punished when they are caught, and most importantly, the severity of the punishment is sufficient to minimize the incentives to do so in a straightforward risk/g

Re:

Yes, but there are other punishments.
Public service comes to mind.

Jails should be about rehabiltating people.

Re:Please remind me again

Jails are for lots of things, rehab is perhaps the aspect they are least effective at.

Re:

Jails should be about rehabiltating people.

<deadpan>
So should death penalty.
</deadpan>

If he had been living in the US

He would have gotten away with it due to the fact that they mention a chatroom, which more than likely means IRC, and nearly every single IRC channel related to piracy has the standard: If you are an agent of the government, you cannot enter here yadayada legalspeak yadayada.

Re:

You may not realize this, but you're being modded funny because that statement is completely worthless. An IRC channel that says government agents aren't allowed to enter has no more meaning than an opium den with a sign above it that says police aren't w

Saturation

To review the saga:

Here [slashdot.org] Hong kong announces their plan to find people violating copyright using BitTorrent.

Here [slashdot.org] is the report where they actualy find a guy.

The conviction [slashdot.org].

Now he has been sentenced. Hooray, we were right there with you all the way dude, at least in a metaphorical sense.

As a contest, the prize for which is my unending admiration, lets all agree not to rehash the same tired arguments in the 3 links above.

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Now he has been sentenced. Hooray, we were right there with you all the way dude, at least in a metaphorical sense.

In the mean time, pirated DVDs continued to be manufactured (and I mean serious manufacturing, not a couple of guys with a dozen or two DVD b

"Magistrate MacIntosh..."

"I'm a Mac, and you're going to jail."

Confession

Chan also advertised the movies, and the procedure for downloading the files, on an online chatroom.

So basically he confessed and bragged about his l33titude, just like a little script kiddie bragging about defacing a website on an IIS 3.0 server. Had he not done this, perhaps it would have been more difficult to prove that he was sharing this movie and not just random blocks of binary code that happened to be very similar to those found in one rendition of the AVI files.

If you're going to share something iffy on BitTorrent use a public tracker that doesn't require logins, and maybe use an anonymous proxy like TOR. This isn't a 100% safe solution but it's likely better than what this chap did.

Actual harm done

"MacIntosh, in handing out the sentence, was fully aware of the noncommercial nature of the case, but measured the seriousness of the case by the harm done to the moviemakers"

I imagine that the moviemakers actually did lose sales on these products, because most of the people that downloaded and watched these movies probably realized how bad they were and lost interest in purchasing them.

These companies want you to be blindfolded, and purchase based on 30 second blurbs with a catchy voice saying exciting things. When people see product they can make an actual informed purchase (or non-purchase).

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Questionable analogy aside, there are grocery stores that let you do this if you were to just ask. I know it's a Whole Foods chainwide policy to let you do this, and if you at least ask nicely, many other grocers will let you try a new product free. Some

The court doesn't recognize bad movies

There are a ton of snarky "lol the movies sucked" comments being posted, and that's all good, but it's actually interesting to note that this very fact formed another part of Chan's failed appeal. FTA:

Beeson seconded MacIntosh in rejecting the argument the movies "were neither current, nor in the `blockbuster' category." She wrote: "A court was not in a position to assess the quality or value of such material."

what a turn of fate...

Chan Nai-ming, a 38-year-old BitTorrent user known as 'Big Crook,'

In prison his user name will be "Ben Dover"

Re:

This reminds me of something that happened back in college.

I was living on campus that year, in student housing. Early in the year, figuring some sort of file-sharing was useful within the house, I set up two public shares, one read-only and one write-onl

Re:I don't know what's worse

That's nothing. I worked at a campus computer research lab at a major US university. Somebody got into our system through an old forgotten Sparc workstation that hadn't been patched. They deleted the entire contents of our home directories and replaced it with 40GB of porn, that they then proceeded to share through IRC. This was about 6 or 7 years ago, when 40GB was an ungodly amount of anything.

We had nightly backups of our home directories and all our work, so we don't lose anything. It was really kind of hard to be mad at anybody who gives you 40GB of porn.

Re:

Oh wait. This is America

While you may be referring to yourself, the situation described in the submission is happening in Honk Kong..

It wasn't really sharing

It's not as if he shared his food with the poor or something like that. It's more like me telling my buddy I'll share your car with him.

Re:Prison sentence?

If anyone deserves it it was him.

Can you just imagine what it would be like to be in the big house on this charge?

Cellmate: "Whatcha in for man?"

Nai-ming: "Miss Congeniality and Daredevil, how about you?"

Cellmate: "Double-murder, you're a Daredevil huh? well you'll be Miss Congeniality tonight."

Re:

With a name like Big Crook, it is hard to use the "I didn't think it was wrong" defense. Its like having Mob Boss tattooed on your forehead. Idiot.