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Comments: 280 +- Your Rights Online: World's First Jail Sentence for BitTorrent Piracy on Thursday December 14 2006, @02:56PM
Posted
by
Zonk
on Thursday December 14 2006, @02:56PM
from the ouch-three-months-for-miss-congeniality dept.
from the ouch-three-months-for-miss-congeniality dept.
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news
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.'
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wow (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, I didnt know bad taste was a jailable offence.
Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:wow (Score:4, Interesting)
(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.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just what is "Uploading" in this case? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 question is only whether or not the distribution is illegal. It seems hard to argue that distribution takes place unless you can prove that you somehow turned off that feature.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming that you need at least, say, 75% of the file for it to be even semi-watchable, I would suspect that with the distributed nature of bittorrent, very few peers or seeders actually distribute enough of the file to any given person for it to really be that "person A got th
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Now what if I have the whole file, but I never share out enough to anyone that they would watch the file just with what I've shared?
I'm certainly not qualified to answer any of these questions, it's just sort of my brain wandering off into a tan
Re:Just what is "Uploading" in this case? (Score:5, Funny)
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Please remind me again (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Please remind me again (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Please remind me again (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Please remind me again (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's called deterrence. (Score:3, Insightful)
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) go to jail was to deter other people from doing the same thing.
We could make Enron execs effectively harmless in the future by banning them from certain business positions.
Which would have little or no deterrance to stop anyone else from doing it again.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Clearly deterrence is another important aspect, which is why I added the "among other things" parenthetical.
You might be right that in
Re:It's called deterrence. (Score:5, Funny)
We're on Slashdot. We're already fully aware of that.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 cooperating with prosecutors and helping them secure Skilling's conviction - or 72 months. Ken Lay would have probably got at least 10+ years, but the bastard died before we could punish him. Skilling also faces a possible $18 million dollar fine - still les
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Rules made by a few for the many.
The few, are in the pockets of the Corporations.
German society circa. 1936? (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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One correction (Score:3, Interesting)
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 government are somewhat intertwined, whereas in other cases the government is far removed from the society that it is governing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 the creation, of law. Hopefully the morons who decided that non-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense will reconsider.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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/gain analysis, the chance of a repeat infraction after the penalty has been paid is minimized.
Fining people impossible amounts of money usually doesn't accomplish anything, because if they don't have that much then there's nothing they can do, and if they
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Public service comes to mind.
Jails should be about rehabiltating people.
Re:Please remind me again (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
<deadpan>
So should death penalty.
</deadpan>
If he had been living in the US (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Saturation (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 burners) and sold by street vendors.
"Magistrate MacIntosh..." (Score:4, Funny)
Confession (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 days, they even try to push samples of new or featured products on you. Barring all that, call a manufacturer. They are very likely to give out a "get our product free" coupon and send it to you if you only ask.
Movie makers could learn from this, put
The court doesn't recognize bad movies (Score:4, Informative)
what a turn of fate... (Score:5, Funny)
In prison his user name will be "Ben Dover"
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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-only. A folder where I could post things and a dropbox. Within a few months I'd forgotten about the dropbox.
Sometime the following year I was cleaning up the system and stumbled across the folder. Embarrassingly, I discovered two very large MPEG files conta
Re:I don't know what's worse (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
While you may be referring to yourself, the situation described in the submission is happening in Honk Kong..
It wasn't really sharing (Score:3)
Re:Prison sentence? (Score:5, Funny)
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."
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)