MPAA Scores First P2P Jury Conviction 335
An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA must be celebrating. According to the BitTorrent news site Slyck.com, the Department of Justice is proclaiming their first P2P criminal copyright conviction, against an Elite Torrents administrator. The press release notes, 'The jury was presented with evidence that Dove was an administrator of a small group of Elite Torrents members known as "Uploaders," who were responsible for supplying pirated content to the group. At sentencing, which is scheduled for Sept. 9, 2008, Dove faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.'"
Not that bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
Darknet, GO! (Score:5, Interesting)
Quite possibly things may evolve to the point where you aren't allowed to join without proving your identity and uploading something illegally. Compare Russian Business Network, who do this for the same purpose: you won't betray the group if they have the dirt on you also.
Mix that with segmentation among darknets to prevent inevitable compromises from taking everything down and you're golden once you set up trusted peers between different subdarknets to diffuse data between them.
Re:Insanity (Score:2, Interesting)
Goddamn selfish people trying to earn a living producing music, art, software, games, etc! Who do they think they are?
Look, I'm not a huge fan of the MPAA/RIAA tactics. But I AM someone who makes their living making software. Good software. Software I'm proud of. And while I get some satisfaction from my work, I need to make a living here. I work for a company that charges for software. I'm not ashamed of that, and I don't feel I should be. We charge reasonable fees for a superior product and good support.
So when someone feels there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking my work and making it available for free on the internet, well, I'd kind of like to punch them in the face. I'm not a millionaire rock star. My company isn't a huge billion dollar corporation. We still struggle to make payroll sometimes.
"Pirate everything! What are they going to do?" Well, here's what WE'RE going to do with your ridiculous philosophy. We'll go out of business, and stop making good products for people to use. So will a lot of other small software houses.
I'm sure this will come as a great shock to you, but you're not somehow magically ENTITLED to enjoy whatever you want whenever you are for free. Things cost money. Deal with it.
Re:Those types of people legitimise the MPAA effor (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly, when you are pushing prerelease stuff, you cross a very firm line into illegal territory. There is no grey area. They *are* costing the studios money,
I don't agree that distribution of pre-release content costs the studios any more than distribution of post-release content. The MAFIAA do not have a business plan that is significantly based on release of content. I.e. they do not use something like the "ransom" model where they charge money for the release of content rather than the distribution of content. Thus illegal distribution of pre-release content is not significantly any more costly to the MAFIAA than illegal distribution of post-release content.
Re:Those types of people legitimise the MPAA effor (Score:2, Interesting)
Ah yes, the classic counter arguement. I was waiting for this.
Your arguement is entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand. Prerelease stuff is entirely different to already released material. You are, in effect, committing a form of industrial espionage by releasing a product before its release date. The fact that they used p2p as the medium to distribute it does not suddenly make it a p2p arguement.
Re:Insanity (Score:5, Interesting)
Jail time is pretty harsh for any kind of IP crime. That's just it though; It's INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY crime. It's not tangible.
A copyright defines rights which are granted to somebody from the government. They use these rights to diminish competition and allow them to have an advantage to collect profits for a reasonable period of time. The period of time is certainly no longer reasonable IMO, but that is up for debate.
What is not really up for debate, is that violating these rights falls within the jurisdiction of the civil courts. It was never supposed to be a matter for criminal courts. The GP of your post tried pointing out that seemingly corrupt government entities have been responsible for turning into a criminal matter, what has always been a civil matter. Simply to give them the upper hand. They don't need to spend money in the court systems defending their intellectual property against minor violations.
I recently watched a special about prison systems. I am 32 years old right now. I can remember being 22 years old, but that seems to be as far away from me now as being 11 years old. 10 YEARS is a very LONG time. Assuming that you get 60 years of adult life in this world, 1/6th of that being taken away is a huge punishment.
It's easy to forget that. I'm all for the death penalty and harsh criminal convictions, but only for violent crime. IP infringement is not a crime that we need to take 10 years from somebody for. Let's not forget that we will spend anywhere between 300K and 400K as taxpayers to do it too. Is is really that cost effective for us to do this? To protect big media companies? To protect society, or our values?
I just don't think so. Maybe huge fines and 6 months in jail or prison might be adequate.
I am more concerned by the fact that turning this into a criminal matter has provided government and corporations the impetus to do away with our privacy and rights altogether simply to provide protection for a few companies profit margins.
Re:Not "really" P2P (Score:3, Interesting)
How easy for the **AA's to stretch this win to make it P2P itself to be the crime?
Re:Insanity (Score:5, Interesting)
First, someone uploading a copyrighted item is NOT the same as "turning someones life upside down". Sorry, it is just not even close. Can you tell me that one high-paid exec of the RIAA/MPAA has had their "life turned into hell" because someone uploaded "Spiderman 3"? No.
Please get some perspective.
Oh, and spare me the "little artist" crap. The MPAA/RIAA take away the copyrights of those "little artist" and then do "creative accounting" to basically pay them shit for their works of art while trying to maximize their profits.
I have an idea, how about no corp can buy a copyrighted work from someone, they can only exclusively lease it for a period of no more then 5 years. This way the TRUE artist still holds the copyright. If the work is great and makes great money, THEN the real ARTIST has the corps by the balls after 5 years and can get a real fair deal for their work.
Not this "creative accounting" deal where a popular artist seems to have made NEGATIVE money in the first few years.
Yeah, this will never happen as long as the MPAA/RIAA are allowed to bribe our "representatives". Mickey Mouse needs another 200 years!
Re:Insanity (Score:5, Interesting)
If someone COPIES Spider man 3, guess what, no physical property was taken. Someone copying spider man 3 doesn't take away the ability for other copies of spider man 3 to be sold.
I am not saying it is right. However, there is a HUGE difference and it should be treated as such. Maybe the cost of the movie/video/game/etc X 10?
So illegally upload/download spider man 3, and get fined $20 X 10 = $200. Sounds fair. The copyright holder would not have gotten a sale so now they get 10 sales! How more freaking fair can you be?
Oh, wait. Yeah, lets charge $1,000's for that copy AND put the person in jail for a long ass time.
Ah, the laws bought by Corporate America!
Re:Insanity (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, if someone steals the secret designs for the new Widget(tm) that a company has then they should get jail time
I disagree. If they are in jail they are costing society money. If they are given a massive fine that won't go away with bankruptcy then their life will be dedicated to contributing money back into society in one way or another. They might not like it, but it sure beats jail time, and it's not like they are at a high risk of hurting anyone.