First PS3 Jailbreaker Arrested In South Africa 119
GusGous writes "South African newspaper Beeld reports that the first person known to be arrested for jailbreaking the Playstation 3 was arrested in Parktown, Johannesburg today. This raid was conducted by the South African Police Service's Commercial Crime Unit, after receiving criminal complaints from the South African Federation Against Copyright Theft (SAFACT). Members of the police were assisted by the South African Revenue Service (SARS) Computer Forensics Lab. The police confiscated goods of around R100 000 (14000 USD)." See also this story in Afrikaans; Google translation.
PS3 jailbreaking (Score:5, Informative)
Various state of the art computers, circumvention software packages, jailbreak USB devices, PS3 consoles as well as hard-drives were seized during the raid. In addition documentation, fake PS2 games and original PS3 games, believed to be employed as master copies, were also seized.
Information is received about a man who in Parktown Jailbreak software loaded on consoles and games sold stolen.
Slashdot at its best.
Re:The war on information continues... (Score:2, Informative)
You know, originally when the printing press came out people were getting in trouble for printing the bible. http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/
Re:some perspective for you (Score:3, Informative)
turn a blind eye to infringement of traffic laws
For some reason (or maybe because I've lived in Asia, where traffic is chaotic but everyone seems to get by), I think that a guy making huge profit by selling pirated software is a little bit higher on the list than cops spending their time sitting on road.
And even if you don't, these are different police organizations. Every time when someone pirating something gets arrested there's always someone saying that police should have priorities and should spend time on something else. These are not the same policemen. If they work on other crimes it's not off from from your casual everyday street police.
As a South African (Score:4, Informative)
What the person was doing was illegal and deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law, as they were profiting off other people's work by copying it and then selling it.
However, pirated media *thrives* in a place like South African because luxury goods like imported media is over priced for that economy.
Although certain aspects of South Africa are 3rd world, all the major cities are pretty much first world, as someone presently living in Ireland, and having lived in France, I can tell you that for the middle class South African, their life style isn't radically different, but any luxury item is significantly more expensive relatively speaking.
Salaries are based on the price of living, and in South Africa the price of living is considerably less than places like the the US or UK. To put it in perspective, as per 12 months ago (http://www.oanda.com/currency/big-mac-index), the price of a big mac in USD was $2.70 compared to it costing $3.73 is the US. The cost of living is very much like this, most day to day things cost less, consequently, salaries work the same way, you get paid a bit less in terms of USD, because your money goes further, however, anything luxury, is prices in USD and then converted into the local currency.
So, relatively speaking, for our salaries, we pay a lot more for things like software, music CDs and movies. It's also not just luxury goods, business is also expensive, imagine your copy of Microsoft or Adobe software package always costing ~30% more? Thus it's hardly surprising to see so many people turn to cheaper, but illegal avenues.
Copyright holders annoy me greatly because even though we have this global distribution medium called the internet which should really make borders disappear to all intents and purposes, you still get youtube blocking videos because "this content is not available in your region due to copyright issues" and Netflix can't be used outside the US, however, despite them locking down copyrighted work to regions, they still keep the price of the these works the same in all countries, regardless of economic differences. They then get surprised at the lack of loyalty from their "customers", however, in South African, they're more like "suckers".