Sharing HBO Go Accounts Could Result In Prison 221
coolnumbr12 writes "In a recent New York Times article called 'No TV? No Subscription? No Problem?' Jenna Wortham noted how she used, 'the information of a guy in New Jersey that I had once met in a Mexican restaurant.' Dave Their of Forbes admitted that he used his sister's boyfriend's father's account in exchange for his Netflix information. But this is stealing under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a misdemeanor with a maximum one-year prison sentence to 'obtain without authorization information from a protected computer.' It is also a violation of the Digital Millennium Copy Act because it is knowingly circumventing a protection measure set up to prevent someone from watching content like 'Game of Thrones' without paying. Forbes points out that a crafty prosecutor could also claim that using an HBO Go password without paying is a form of identity theft."
Theft of Service! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Theft of Service! (Score:5, Insightful)
We're not talking about the lack of availability for a family-plan here.
This is about the lack of availability of a random-people-I-once-met-but-don't-even-know-their-name-plan.
As much as I dislike DRM, DMCA and big-content corporations in general, I can't really fault them on this one.
Re:Theft of Service! (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as I dislike DRM, DMCA and big-content corporations in general, I can't really fault them on this one.
The fault with this situation is that the punishment should fit the crime, and in this case, clearly does not.
Are you really suggesting that the punishment for watching a bit of tv that you haven't paid for should carry a possible one year prison penalty? This is a non-violent crime which only has very small financial consequences. As such, the penalty should be a fine of some sort. What it would have normally cost to subscribe to the service, with a small punitive multiplier would be appropriate.
Taking someone's liberty for a year for such a small infraction is tyrannical in every sense of the word.
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Re:Theft of Service! (Score:5, Insightful)
Prison should be reserved for people who pose a serious threat to society. Is copying a DVD and selling it a serious threat?
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Somebody better tell this to the government because they seem to have tossed this idea out the window as soon as they realized there was money in building building prisons. I knew a guy who was jailed for years over a package of flowers that he was receiving in the mail.
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Nope, cannabis flowers; but dried flowers none the less.
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It is when they use it to fund organized crime.
If you're just selling a few from your car to make ends meet... that's on a totally different scale.
copying one is not (Score:2)
Copying millions of them could be.
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No. Copying will never be a threat to society. It could be a threat to the profit of the investors though but that is still up for debate.
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Yeah, potentially dangerous actions like aggressive driving are just fines (and maybe loss of license). Sometimes just Warnings. A prison sentence for account sharing is insane. If the person is using it to actually pirate shows (copying them to DVD and reselling them; the *real* definition of media piracy), then they should get prison time for that one, not this one (should still be a fine, and not a [value of TV watched times ten thousand] style of fine either).
Getting it from bittorrent has a far smaller sentence, and is far harder to prosecute. (Not to mention that spending a year in jail would ruin the entire life of a normal law-abiding citizen. Goodby career, goodby family, goodby prospects of getting a job at anyplace more demanding than mcdonalds.)
And flat-out stealing it from a store would carry even less of a sentence.
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Right there in the summary:
misdemeanor with a maximum one-year prison sentence
I feel like we had an article not too long ago about how retarded it was to look at maximum sentences, and then cry about how unfair said sentence is for the average instance of that crime. Yea, well, that may be because its not the average sentence.
Perhaps the maximum is there in case someone turns it into a commercial operation. But on the face of it this looks like an utter non-issue.
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For punishment that fits the crime: Anyone convicted of this type of stealing should be sentenced to watch TV for as many hours as they stole watching movies.
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Perhaps they should be forced to perform plays for MPAA execs.
Re:Theft of Service! (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be a valid point, if you got to choose the minimum instead of the maximum.
Instead, you are threatened with the maximum, and history shows that it is very likely in any trial situation (especially regarding copyright or CFAA issues) the prosecution/plaintiff is going to go for the maximum because you dared turn down a plea bargain. It is prudent to assume that you must defend yourself to a level commensurate to the maximum pentalty because you cannot know that the prosecution will not seek the maximum penalty. In fact, the prosecution has an interest in seeking the maximum penalty in almost all circumstances. In persuing (or threatening) to pursue the maximum penalty if a plea bargain is rejected, the prosecution makes the plea bargain a hard deal to refuse given the high rate of convictions. If the prosecutor was known to not pursue the maximum sentence, then the consequence to rejecting a plea bargain is reduced and the negotiating position of the prosecutor is weakened.
From the perspective of the person targeted for prosecution, without any explicit guarantee that you would not face the maximum sentence, it makes sense to plan your defense around the very likely situation that you would face the maximum sentence.
Aside from public backlash, there isn't really any reason a judge/prosecutor/jury must apply the minimum sentence. Without any real pressure to minimize the sentence, it might as well not exist.
The maximum sentence is the measure by which a law must be evaluated, because that is the measure by which the government is bounded.
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Instead, you are threatened with the maximum, and history shows that it is very likely in any trial situation (especially regarding copyright or CFAA issues) the prosecution/plaintiff is going to go for the maximum because you dared turn down a plea bargain
Oh my gosh! I went to negotiate with the prosecution, and he implied that hes actually trying to get me punished! And that he is pushing for the harshest sentence! How utterly unexpected!
I suppose its a good thing that its "jury of your peers" and not "jury comprised of the prosecution", huh?
Re:Theft of Service! (Score:4, Interesting)
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The prosecutions job isnt to make you feel safe or innocent. Why on earth would you listen to him over your own attorney?
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Likely your attorney knows the score and recommend you cop to the plea.
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if one can be watching at the time, who cares.
that's how spotify does it. you listen on another device and the others stop. and that's how it should be.
what's next, using kinect to verify that it's you and you have less than 5 people watching the screen at a time?
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I would have a lot more sympathy for companies like HBO if they made these services available to everyone. But, instead, you need to spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per year on separate TV service from one of a few blessed providers. If HBO had a ~$10/mo plan that gave access to HBO:Go only, I'd be right there with you condemning people for sharing accounts. But as long as they're using the new online services to prop up the entrenched satellite/cable services and make the service unavailable t
Re:Theft of Service! (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry. Under PRISM the NSA can watch movies all day long using your credentials.
This is actually how this whole mess will get resolved. The MPAA sues the NSA for trillions and bankrupts the whole spying industry after which the FBI rounds up all MPAA execs for terrorist activities and sends them to a camp in sunny Cuba.
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Don't worry. Under PRISM the NSA can watch movies all day long using your credentials..
Laugh all you want, but I recall working for a certain gov't project while in uniform, and we had access to *all* the satellite channels in the barracks out on the test range. They eventually ditched the pr0n channels in an attempt to cut back on the divorce rate.
(Seriously - true story. Only diff is it wasn't the NSA, but the USAF back in the late 1980's.)
Re:Theft of Service! (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps the wives were turning up on-screen...
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But the gubmint is infringing on our rights to enjoy someone else's work without paying for it!
But I would argue that the gubmint is infringing on our rights to enjoy someone else work by paying for it. Ever tried to watch HBO without cable? Not going to happen.
Re:Theft of Service! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Theft of Service! (Score:5, Insightful)
I tried to turn myself in at the local police station. I told the officer there that I had borrowed a book from someone else. I had not paid for it. My friend has also read it. So, that's three people, in three different households, that have all read this book for the price of one!
The officer threatened to give me a fine for wasting his time, then sent me home.
Re:Theft of Service! (Score:5, Funny)
The officer threatened to give me a fine for wasting his time
That's because it was obvious to him that you'd been already booked.
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I tried to turn myself in at the local police station. I told the officer there that I had borrowed a book from someone else. I had not paid for it. My friend has also read it. So, that's three people, in three different households, that have all read this book for the price of one!
The officer threatened to give me a fine for wasting his time, then sent me home.
The difference with a book is that when you bought it there was not a long set of terms and conditions of server for you to read and agree to as part of the purchase. With HBO / Netflix / Whatever there is so you have the choice of agreeing to them, or walking away from the deal and not buying the service. Wanting some third option of paying for the service then refusing to honour your part of the deal is simply not on the table. You might say it should be, but our democratically elected government does no
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See, this is why the consumer mindset is breaking down here.
"IP" was kept straight to some degree with books because the cost to produce the copy was still significant. I still don't own the words in the book, but when I bought a physical copy there was an association that the paper and printing costed money and had value, so it was "mine".
The ONLY different between the book and an electronic copy of information though is the cost of reproduction. You can check out virtually any book you want to from a l
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You say freeloader, I say lucky ducky.
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Not only that....but a really crafty prosecutor would realize that the person giving out the password intended for this to happen and colluded to make it happen, meaning.... its time for conspiracy charges!
dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
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Its a maximum sentence, and this is all hypothetical, so Im not really clear how you can judge whether its overkill. Maximums are there to prevent "overkill laws"; it doesnt mean that 95% of the cases under that law will ever see the maximum sentence, regardless of what the prosecution says.
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Netflix removed the six device limit some time ago. You're still limited to two streams (though Netflix offers a four stream plan now for a little bit more money).
And Netflix doesn't care if people share streaming subscription plans.
(Netflix cared, a little, when libraries were using a DVD subscription to offer their patrons movies -- and given that the incremental cost to ship a DVD was way higher than the incremental cost to stream a movie, this sort of makes sense -- but still didn't do anything to even
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Agreed, perhaps the on-line service should limit access to one concurrent user, I can't see how Identity theft can be applied here. Should everyone who repeats "I'm Spartacus" also be found guilty of "identity theft".
Sit tight, they're on their way.
Re:dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, serving up video isn't free. The company pays for servers, electricity, bandwidth, and the salaries of all the people required to make it work.
And the account owner pays for that. So if the account owner has a friend visiting and tells him "I wanted to watch [insert-a-movie-name-here] but I have to go get my car fixed, why don't you watch it instead?", where's the difference?
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Not quite the same thing.
Your neighbor's electricity is metered the same no matter who uses it, so there is no stealing because your neighbor is paying for it AND also gave your permission.
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Not quite true since there is typically a service charge on top of what you pay for metered usage.
Since when is sharing stealing (Score:5, Insightful)
netflix sharing llc (Score:3)
idea. you and whatever other person you wish to share account with start a limmited liability company that signs up for account as "employees" of said company you get access to their netflix/hulu/hbo go account. if sued the limited libabillity company goes under and nothing happens to you. use the corporate contorted legal system to your own advantage
Re:netflix sharing llc (Score:5, Interesting)
if sued the limited libabillity company goes under and nothing happens to you. use the corporate contorted legal system to your own advantage
Why would they sue the company? The company has a paid account. They'd sue you, personally, the individual using their service who does not have an account.
But even so, it raises some interesting points:
Can a corporation have a netflix account?
If not, why not? Is that discriminatory? After all, "Corporations are people too my frienda".
If they can have an account who is allowed to stream content on their behalf, employees? shareholders? officers?
Maybe I should incoporate for steam. Now the account holder (the corporation) never dies, and presumably my wife can play my games without violating their EULA; solves at least one of the larger gripes I have with Steam...
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"A corporation is people" like "Soylent Green is people": it's composed of people who retain their rights even if they voluntarily assemble. A corporation obviously isn't identical to people, which is why they get taxed and treated very differently.
Furthermore, regardless of what they are, you can discriminate against anybody you want, except the few classes that are protected by law. Don't like redheads? Don't hire
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Sorry, but only the elite are allowed to take advantage of the corporate controted legal system.
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They didn't steal accounts from each other. They shared. What is this world coming to? A place for fascist corporations and governments who clearly support them.
Try going to a buffet restaurant and using the "it's only sharing" argument. It won't work. Buffet restaurants aren't "fascist" for not allowing you to feed all your friends for the price of one person.
Re:Since when is sharing stealing (Score:4, Insightful)
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Do you have a food replicator? If yes, your analogy would actually make sense.
Even with your amazing star trek style replicator it would still take energy. The real issue here though is that the original copy took hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, even if each subsequent copy takes less than 0.01 of a cent. They have to use the profit made from selling copies with are cheap to create to cover the cost of the original.
Netflix must have to pay a fortune to the studios for their licence to resell their content. That deal may also include a small amount extra per user they have
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They didn't steal accounts from each other. They shared. What is this world coming to? A place for fascist corporations and governments who clearly support them.
Try going to a buffet restaurant and using the "it's only sharing" argument. It won't work. Buffet restaurants aren't "fascist" for not allowing you to feed all your friends for the price of one person.
But the buffet just kicks you out if you cheat. They don't try to send you to jail for a year.
But of course HBO doesn't want to disconnect even their cheating customers. That would be killing their own revenue stream. So instead they can scare people with this scary "1 year imprisonment" to convince people not to cheat the service. Its a hell of a lot easier than building in real security.
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N
So much for your sense of ethics (Score:2)
We whine and complain about the RIAA and MPAA suing people in bulk for sharing files on bit torrent. Our reasoning is that the record companies cheat the artists out of legitimate revenue and then they add on a new litigation-based business model so they can extract more revenue from people who may or may not have violated copyright. We justify some copyright violation as civil disobedience, because the media companies are criminals (in an ethical sense). There's a lot of truth and a lot of bullshit in t
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I know! I think they should set a "maximum sentence" on the law so that it cant be abused!
But this is stealing under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a misdemeanor with a maximum one-year prison sentence
Oh, nevermind.
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A single person who can only watch Netflix in the morning and evening pays the same as a household where there are kids watching all day long and adults who still watch in the evening.
Netflix and other subscriber services should be charging by the minute instead of a flat rate or a flat rate for a set monthly allowance with tiers and a rollover plan, etc.
Sarcasm (Score:5, Funny)
Fortunately our US Attorneys are well-known for their common sense and restraint, and when they *do* go overboard, they get fired and disbarred like Carmen Ortiz.
A choice to make (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are facing the choice to either sit down in front of the TV or to go in the street and kick the living dayligths out of an innocent stranger, now you know which one is safer.
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There's a good reason that people can't kick "addictions" though -- it's that most addictions exist as a way to cope with serious problems in everyday life, which is also why people that manage to quit one addiction often develop a more socially acceptable one in its place. In those cases, either the real problem is that the person doesn't have healthy coping skills, or the problem itself is so severe & pervasive that regular healthy coping skills aren't enough; sometimes it's a combination of both.
If
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If we want this situation to improve, we'll have to start identifying the aspects of our society that leave so many people overly stressed & unhappy, and start changing them.
I don't think that popular rejection of whiners has anything to do with it. There are far more objective reasons. For example:
The Future is Now! (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome to the new world where you are all criminals!
Now do what we say or we'll lock you away.
Re:The Future is Now! (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was growing up, I thought that was how things were behind the iron curtain. Now I realized that the iron curtain was lifted, it merely shifted position so we're all behind the curtain now. . . .
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In Soviet Russia, HBO shares you!
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Its almost like noone on slashdot knows what the words "maximum sentence" mean.
It means that it is a LIMIT on how much you are liable for. Would you prefer it didnt mention a maximum at all?
Story would have been a lot more interestinging if (Score:5, Insightful)
Piracy? (Score:2, Informative)
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Why do you watch Game of Thrones?
(a) For the tits
(b) For the blood
(c) For the story
(d) For the CGI
(e) Game of Thrones? Wuzzat?
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Well, sorry folks, it's only available in Australia. And we wonder why people are attempting to steal it? Seriously
Exactly. I could be convinced to pay $50/month for a streaming on-demand service if it had nearly everything -- to re-iterate, the key factors are:
(a) ON-DEMAND
(b) NEARLY EVERYTHING
Furthermore I propose that the content owners could offer this service at nearly no cost to themselves, by simply indemnifying subscribers from any and all legal and contractual repercussions if they are caught torrenting their content. $50/month in order to never get sued by members of the RIAA and MPAA.. I'll take it.
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And now you know why this comic was made [theoatmeal.com].
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where is the bluray? (Score:2)
I would happily buy the bluray of GoT season 3 today if I could. I can't so i'll find 'other means' to watch it. When I can, I will buy the bluray (just like I bought season 1 and 2).
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Avoiding book spoilers is relatively easy. For most books, not everyone is reading it at the same time (and same pace), fewer people are reading it in general, and book plots (let alone the existence of books) are rarely covered by mass media. Avoiding spoilers for a show that 5 million people watched last night and have already generated billions of words on the internet about, including mass media sites, is quite different.
It's not for sale. . . (Score:2)
I would be less not ok with this if it were actually possible to purchase HBO Go, which it isn't.
Solution (Score:4, Informative)
HBO could easily solve this problem by offering their shows for sale/rent online the same day or the day after it's aired on cable. They have no one to blame but themselves when they only provide a single means to watch their programs, and people resort to pirating or sharing credentials. I know I'd be more than happy to pay 2 or 3 bucks for a one-time pass per episode.
The world is moving forward, and it's up to the entrenched media industries to move with it if they want a piece of the action.
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I suspect that HBO would be thrilled to offer a standalone streaming service to anyone willing to pay, even absent a cable subscription. They would, I am sure, make a lot of money doing it. However, I also suspect that t
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Give me a legal choice HBO (Score:3)
Cable isn't available at my house (not even internet, I have to use a cellular data access point), I don't have a clear view for satellite, there are no FIOS options and you won't let me just subscribe to HBO Go so I can watch from my phone or whatever, give me a legal option and I'll take it.
Hell, I bought the previous two seasons already, I'd LIKE to buy this one.
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You'd think I was in the boonies, but I'm not.
Prior to moving in I was told that not only was DSL available but they were upgrading to FIOS.
It IS technically available here, the issue is that there are no subscriber slots available.
Cable has never responded to why it's not actually available other than 'it's not sorry'.
Just torrent it via a VPN service... (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly the safest way is to torrent the stuff. These companies are hell bent on hating the consumer, so screw them.
Scaremongering FTW (Score:2)
Sharing HBO Go Accounts Could Result In Prison
...but probably won't.
Next!
If they give you the password (Score:2)
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(:Damm, all the states are making pot legal... Who are we going to go after for nice easy busts so we look like we're working?
I get the feeling that busts will be much easier when everyone is sitting at home, cabbaged on their couches.
Re: Ohh for fuck's sake (Score:2)
Happy to, Trollio. It's the other $80 for 90000 channels i dont watch that I object to.
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Would love to. Please point me at the page on their website to subscribe to HBO-GO without Cable TV.
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Indeed, since the ToS specifically denies you the right to have multiple accounts on Steam (commonly done to allow the account to be sold so the game can be sold, or so that a ban on one account does not ban all games on steam), many people doing so are just as "guilty" of computer fraud and misuse as this HBO case, even if you're NOT sharing your account.
But does Steam list prison as a consequence?
Or does it just say they'll kill your account and thus lose all of your purchases.
The "prison" thing is the headline-grabber here. Not that HBO is against you doing it.
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A rather convoluted way to say one of the following:
The nephew of the brother is either the nephew of the father or the child of the father.
A: Your cousin's former roommate
B: Your brother/sister's former roommate
C: Your former roommate
There is a very high likelyhood that Dark Helmet went to the dark side of the Schwartz because he was owed rent and the Lonestars are deadbeats.