Man Who Stole 1,000 DVDs From Employer Strikes Plea Deal Over Movie Leaks (arstechnica.com) 51
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An accused movie pirate who stole more than 1,000 Blu-ray discs and DVDs while working for a DVD manufacturing company struck a plea deal (PDF) this week to lower his sentence after the FBI claimed the man's piracy cost movie studios millions. Steven Hale no longer works for the DVD company. He was arrested in March, accused of "bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying" and ripping pre-release copies of movies he could only access because his former employer was used by major movie studios. As alleged by the feds, his game was beating studios to releases to achieve the greatest possible financial gains from online leaks.
Among the popular movies that Hale is believed to have leaked between 2021 and 2022 was Spider-Man: No Way Home, which the FBI alleged was copied "tens of millions of times" at an estimated loss of "tens of millions of dollars" for just one studio on one movie. Other movies Hale ripped included animated hits like Encanto and Sing 2, as well as anticipated sequels like The Matrix: Resurrections and Venom: Let There Be Carnage. The cops first caught wind of Hale's scheme in March 2022. They seized about 1,160 Blu-rays and DVDs in what TorrentFreak noted were the days just "after the Spider-Man movie leaked online." It's unclear why it took close to three years before Hale's arrest, but TorrentFreak suggested that Hale's case is perhaps part of a bigger investigation into the Spider-Man leaks. A plea deal for Hale significantly reduced the estimated damages from his piracy case to under $40,000 and led to the dismissal of two charges, though he still faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for one remaining copyright infringement charge. His final sentence and restitution amount will be decided at a court hearing in Tennessee at the end of August.
Among the popular movies that Hale is believed to have leaked between 2021 and 2022 was Spider-Man: No Way Home, which the FBI alleged was copied "tens of millions of times" at an estimated loss of "tens of millions of dollars" for just one studio on one movie. Other movies Hale ripped included animated hits like Encanto and Sing 2, as well as anticipated sequels like The Matrix: Resurrections and Venom: Let There Be Carnage. The cops first caught wind of Hale's scheme in March 2022. They seized about 1,160 Blu-rays and DVDs in what TorrentFreak noted were the days just "after the Spider-Man movie leaked online." It's unclear why it took close to three years before Hale's arrest, but TorrentFreak suggested that Hale's case is perhaps part of a bigger investigation into the Spider-Man leaks. A plea deal for Hale significantly reduced the estimated damages from his piracy case to under $40,000 and led to the dismissal of two charges, though he still faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for one remaining copyright infringement charge. His final sentence and restitution amount will be decided at a court hearing in Tennessee at the end of August.
That's Crazy (Score:3)
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Or a pirate ... arrrrhhh
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#PirateNutsFreake
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Nuts. Probably.
Unless he stole over 1000 separate titles, or he was selling the physical discs, why so many? One each, per title. Rip them and sell on line. And his employer probably would never have caught on to the inventory loss. He's still exposed for the online sales if he wasn't really smart about covering his financial tracks. Which doesn't seem likely, given his high volume pilfering. So, nuts.
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It makes me wonder if he should be charged with embezzlement.
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DVD is an obsolete optical data storage format.
It is superior to streaming and Bluray in some critical ways:
1) It can't be turned off by the seller once you've bought it.
2) It is easy to turn into a digital copy for your home media server.
3) It won't randomly disappear from your collection because a service provider is running out of storage space or doesn't like your politics.
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I think it's fair to call anyone who steals that many DVDs nuts.
I think it's fair to call anyone who steals "Spider-Man: No Way Home" has no taste in movies.
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On the other hand, this is one of the very few cases where copyright infridgement was indeed theft.
Would he steal a car? (Score:3)
It seems that he would steal a car. He should have watched this https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Thanks for that, I haven't seen IT Crowd in ages. Love that clip!
(and I would do most of those things - especially with the policeman's helmet)
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Really? (Score:4, Informative)
This feels like a headline I should have read at least 15 years ago.
Re: Really? (Score:3)
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This feels like a headline I should have read at least 15 years ago.
Bought my first 1080P HDTV in 2008. Here we are 15+ years later with the average TV stream that might push that technology to its limits.
Ironically enough that is the main reason Blu-ray is still alive, still being made, and still in stores.
Too far... way too far (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe current copyright laws are on a a collision course with outright civil disobedience. Information is not just the battleground of the future, and fair use is being swept under the carpet under the heels of corporate content. And governments look the other way because controlling the information flow means everything. The balkanization of streaming services from the "Good ole days" of when Netflix had licenses to almost all existing content everywhere just exacerbates the problem and is beginning to exceed the worst excesses of old cable charges. The ask, $10/mo for Netflix, Paramount, Spotify, Britbox, CBC Gem, Disney, Prime, CuriosityStream... is just obnoxious.
So enforcing one's ability to circumvent restrictions that would otherwise hinder free and fair use is not piracy, it's necessity.
That all said, this goes way too far. Way too far. It's nothing short than a declaration of war against the movie producers, and a huge violation of trust of his employer. While movie companies often egregiously inflate the costs of what they label piracy, in this case they may actually be in the ballpark. With that kind of financial incentive, getting caught was a inevitable.
The plea deal is a gift.
Re:Too far... way too far (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the opposite of too far. Here we have a case of someone who has stolen unreleased content and sold it online for commercial gain. There is zero, no, NONE WHAT SO EVER justification to even mention the word "fair use" here.
If you're trying to make a stand against encryption and promote fair use this is the exact wrong story to do it on.
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Maybe there will be sane copyright laws soon since AI firms are complaining about them currently.
And they seem to have Trump's ears, at least for now.
Of Course (Score:2)
The FBI assuming, incorrectly, that each download equals a loss as always. The FBI wasted significantly more resources than any loss incurred by the studios for essentially no real payoff. Hell, just the court costs alone are more than any losses from pirating. Good ol' FBI wasting not only their own, but everyone else's involved, time.
Re: Of Course (Score:2)
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I see no evidence to support the idea that he was making money off of the leaks (other than wages earn working for the manufacturing company). Even if he did make some extra money, I doubt it was worth anywhere near the amount wasted by the FBI, not including time and salaries.
Re: Of Course (Score:2)
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This isn't a "it goes both ways" type situation. I'm not saying they shouldn't have arrested him. He did a bad (stealing, not the piracy) and should go to jail. The article even points it out that no one seems sure why it took the FBI three years to arrest the guy. They had all the information they needed three years ago.
But anyway, back to your faulty counter, I would feel the same way... IF it took three extra years for what amounts to some loose pocket change. Employers do wage theft all the time in vari
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TFS says he stole over 1000 Blu-ray and DVD discs. Assuming that's accurate, that's physical theft of actual items. I doubt anyone has any significant issue with holding him accountable for the physical theft.
It goes on to say that the Spiderman copy was downloaded "tens of millions of times". I have a hard time believing that, and an even harder time believing those resulted in anywhere near 10+million viewings, and still harder time believing that deprived the studio of millions of sales.
Also, is everyone
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The FBI assuming, incorrectly, that each download equals a loss as always
By your logic all the books AI keeps training on doesn't cost the authors anything.
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all the books AI keeps training on doesn't cost the authors anything.
You are correct. It does not.
Re:Of Course (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Someone saying that it's not 1:1 is not the same as them claiming it is 0:1
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It doesn't. Nor can you effectively make the claim that it does. It may seem logical that if something can be obtained for free that everyone will try to get it for free, but that simply isn't true. Pay-what-you-can models work and tend to generate more money than setting the price yourself.
I don't give a flying fuck if ChatGPT is freely fed a copy of every single creative work in history, because it literally does not matter.
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Spoken like truly someone who has never produced anything of value in his whole life.
People not being able to sell their creative works because of a hypothetical market that prefers AI slop over human generated content isn't something copyright law was intended to prevent. In fact, even before AI, the whole "starving artist" stereotype exists because putting up some "art" up for sale does not necessarily mean anyone will be willing to pay for it.
Copyright law was intended to address exactly what happened here in the story we're discussing. Someone who didn't have the right to make and dis
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The monetary value of a creator's work inherently cannot be determined by the creator itself. There are creative works that people have poured hours and days and months into, only for no one else to value, or want, it. You can, of course, set prices based on the cost of materials and what you think your time was worth, but that's a balancing act, especially for physical creative works. With digital works that can be effectively copied infinitely for next to nothing, it's much easier (and usually better fina
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Yes, they most certainly do not cost authors anything.
And they most certainly do not have an impact on their revenue.
Re:Classified documents (Score:4, Funny)
Thank god he didn’t steal classified documents and keep them in a country club full of foreign nationals
To be fair, Trump probably would've faced the music for this, had not a jury of 77,302,580 of his peers found him innocent. So, if the DVD pirate guy had run for president and won, he'd probably be able to make those pesky charges go away, too.
Come to think of it, I'd be okay with voting for a movie pirate, as long as he didn't run as a Republican.
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He would have faced the music for it, in front of a jury of 12 like a normal person, but for a massive thumb on the scales of justice [slashdot.org].
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Mod parent funnier. Especially the bit about "peers".
You were going for funny, right? Not another Poe's Law trap?
However I do see the math somewhat differently. Starts with the actual base of today's fake GOP. Repeated research indicates that about 30% of most populations actually do hate freedom. One label is "authoritarian followers" for the people who actively prefer to be told what to do and think. Most of the time they are "mostly harmless" because they are scattered and following lots of piss-ant two-
Guess the DMCA Is still in effect. (Score:4, Insightful)
"bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying"
Haven't seen this referenced in a long time.
Oh the simpler days when stuff like a Sharpie could be considered as a circumvention device.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
And judges ordered people who had the DeCSS source code printed on T-Shirts to take them off in a courtroom.
Reality (Score:2)
In reality the companies lost only the cost of the DVDs.
Should have worked on wall street (Score:2)
The problem is the theatres (Score:2)
Just make the movie going experience worth the cost. If these Movie studios want to reclaim their old business model they need to make it worth my $20 or whatever to see the film in the theatre. Otherwise I'll only maybe watch it, and if I do it will only be because it's included in the steaming app I'm currently subscribed to. Oh yeah, and make decent movies...there is that part. I'm more than happy to wait for a movie to come out a few months later on streaming so I can watch it in the comfort of my l