World's First Jail Sentence for BitTorrent Piracy

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.'

wow

[joss]

> 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

Damn, I didnt know bad taste was a jailable offence.

If he had been living in the US

[Hubbell]

He would have gotten away with it due to the fact that they mention a chatroom, which more than likely means IRC, and nearly every single IRC channel related to piracy has the standard: If you are an agent of the government, you cannot enter here yadayada legalspeak yadayada.

Re:wow

[HappySqurriel]

Now if only they would arrest the people who were involved in making those movies ...

"Magistrate MacIntosh..."

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm a Mac, and you're going to jail."

Re:wow

[geekoid]

I would be happy with just the arrest of Ben Afflack

Who needs comedians?

[charlesbakerharris]

...has begun serving a prison sentence for making the films 'Daredevil,' 'Miss Congeniality,' and 'Red Planet' available for download...

How the hell are we supposed to get modded funny when the friggin jokes write themselves??

Re:Anymore room in here...

[kentrel]

Don't worry, they're just warming up for the pro-piracy, anti-"The Man" comments they're getting ready to write. It wouldn't be slashdot without someone denying downloading means less ticket sales or splitting hairs over why copyright theft isn't the same as stealing.

The funny thing about the bad taste jokes is that if they all know they're really bad movies just what were they doing watching them in the first place.

what a turn of fate...

[east coast]

Chan Nai-ming, a 38-year-old BitTorrent user known as 'Big Crook,'

In prison his user name will be "Ben Dover"

Re:Please remind me again

[j00r0m4nc3r]

And make them watch Miss Conegeniality once a day.

Re:Prison sentence?

[danpsmith]

If anyone deserves it it was him.

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."

Re:I don't know what's worse

[meta-monkey]

That's nothing. I worked at a campus computer research lab at a major US university. Somebody got into our system through an old forgotten Sparc workstation that hadn't been patched. They deleted the entire contents of our home directories and replaced it with 40GB of porn, that they then proceeded to share through IRC. This was about 6 or 7 years ago, when 40GB was an ungodly amount of anything.

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.

Re:wow

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Beg Clook? What is Beg Clook?

Don't raugh at me!

Re:It's called deterrence.

[jb.hl.com]

Even though there exist heterosexual men and women in the world, they don't all want to fuck each other all the time

We're on Slashdot. We're already fully aware of that. ;)

Re:Just what is "Uploading" in this case?

[Kijori]

But bittorrent is if someone else gives them the sheet and you give them the letters to fill it in. I don't think anyone's going to find you guilty for selling alphabet soup in the knowledge that they might write something bad.