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.'

Please remind me again

[Psionicist]

Please remind me again how this man is so dangerous to society he must be locked up in jail.

Re:wow

[ggwood]

Ya, and since "[the judge] measured the seriousness of the case by the harm done to the moviemakers" the sentence should be the movie makers handing cash to this guy. He's advertising their crappy movies for them, for free.

Re:Please remind me again

[AndersOSU]

You know sometimes we put people in jail for reasons other than they are dangerous, like to punish them... Otherwise a "white collar criminal" would never have to do jail time.

Re:Please remind me again

[Rob T Firefly]

You try telling anyone whose life savings were vaporized by the fallout from Enron and such that white-collar criminals aren't dangerous.

Re:Please remind me again

[geekoid]

Yes, but there are other punishments.
Public service comes to mind.

Jails should be about rehabiltating people.

Re:Please remind me again

[Anonymous Coward]

"Society is a collection of rules"

Rules made by a few for the many.

The few, are in the pockets of the Corporations.

Re:Please remind me again

[AndersOSU]

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.) We could make Enron execs effectively harmless in the future by banning them from certain business positions.

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.

Re:Please remind me again

[AndersOSU]

Jails are for lots of things, rehab is perhaps the aspect they are least effective at.

Re:The court doesn't recognize bad movies

[JonathanR]

"[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.

So she made no judgement on the value of the movies, but still could determine that harm was done sufficient to warrant a jail term?

Re:Please remind me again

[mark-t]

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 _COULD_ afford the fine, then it would not necessarily be a sufficient deterrent to stop people from repeating the crime.

* At least not in the same way that people who threaten other people's lives are. However, if copyright has any value at all, then infringement poses a danger to that value, and in turn, to *ALL* copyright holders, so infringing on one person's copyright indirectly reduces the value of everybody's. I don't own any copyrights on anything I make money on (it's all GPL'd), but I damn well do care about whether or not other people respect my copyright by adhering to the terms that I, as the copyright holder, am free to dictate as being required to obtain permission to copy my works (in my case, comply with the terms of the GPL), and I most definitely realize that infringing on anybody's copyrights inevitably reduces the value of my own, because the concept of the exclusivity behind copyright loses significance in the view of the general public as a result, so I have no sympathy at all for infringers.

Re:Saturation

[Lead Butthead]

Now he has been sentenced. Hooray, we were right there with you all the way dude, at least in a metaphorical sense.

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.

It's called deterrence.

[Vellmont]

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. Why not try the same thing if the only consequence is being banned from that practice? This is another way in which sending the Enron boys to jail protects society. If we didn't, society would be threatened by others who want to get away with the same thing.

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.

I disagree. We send plenty of people to jail to prevent them from commiting non-violent crimes. The guy commiting check-fraud sure isn't a violent criminal, but he's still hurting society. A spammer hasn't physically hurt anyone, but most everyone on slashdot is harmed in some small way every day by these people. Locking them up in jail is often the ONLY way we can prevent them from harming others.

German society circa. 1936?

[FatSean]

I mean, that's a collection of rules and people were made to obey the rules.
Sure several million people were murdered for being the wrong race...but that was the law at the time!

really dude...

Re:It's called deterrence.

[Mister Whirly]

"the threat of anal rape is the bedrock of the justice system."
So how does that explain criminals who are gay bottoms?

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

[eno2001]

True. However, I expect that the RIAA and the MPAA WANT this to be a nebulous result. They don't want clarity so that anyone even THINKING of using BitTorrent will be dissuaded from doing so. If it was clear that he was operating at a higher level in the BitTorrent tree, then this case wouldn't be very noteworthy. Especially if people in the know made it clear to the less technically inclined but piracy prone end-users.

Re:Please remind me again

[bidule]

Jails should be about rehabiltating people.

<deadpan>
So should death penalty.
</deadpan>

Re:Actual harm done

[rk]

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 first 15-30 minutes of a movie on line and then say "To see the rest, here's the showtimes for your local theatre". At least they'd be forced to make a few minutes of decent movie, instead of just enough to make a catchy 60 second trailer.

Re:It's called deterrence.

[xantho]

Rape isn't about the act, it's about the power to make someone do something that they really don't want to do. Even though there exist heterosexual men and women in the world, they don't all want to fuck each other all the time, and thus, the idea of rape is defined.

Re:wow

[RKBA]

What else can you do to him that hasn't already been done?

Hanging for treason against the American people and the United States Constitution?

Re:Please remind me again

[StikyPad]

If society is a collection of rules, and he broke the rules, then he broke society!

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:Please remind me again

[jimicus]

Let's try a thought experiment.

Either you can rehabilitate criminals, or you can't.

Similarly, either jail is an effective rehabilitation tool or it isn't.

This gives a number of scenarios:

1. Criminal is jailed, criminal cannot be rehabilitated.
    Why bother? Just shoot them on conviction and save society the money. (Yes I know that's an extreme viewpoint. Bear with me, this is a thought experiment).
2. Criminal is not jailed, criminal cannot be rehabilitated
    So society sees little point in jailing the criminal, but they are free to commit crime which is one thing jail does prevent. Ouch.
3. Criminal is jailed, and can be rehabilitated. But jail's a lousy tool for rehabilitation.
    Why bother? While the criminal can in theory be rehabilitated, society doesn't have an effective means to do so. Shoot them and save the money.
4. Criminal is jailed, can be rehabilitated. Jail works for rehabilitation.
    Oh goody. Finally something that works. Except that every developed country in the world has lousy recidivism rates for formerly jailed ex-convicts, which suggests that this option is far removed from the real world.

Sounds like every option sucks to me.

Re:German society circa. 1936?

[FatSean]

You missed the point. Just because 'society' says something is wrong, doesn't make it wrong. Society once thought slavery was all good. Society once thought that making women subservient to men was all good...and some societies still do! Me, I make up my own morals based on others' ideas.

Re:Big Crook

[Giggles Of Doom]

With a name like Big Crook, it is hard to use the "I didn't think it was wrong" defense. Its like having Mob Boss tattooed on your forehead. Idiot.

Re:It's called deterrence.

[AndersOSU]

There are many reasons for sending anyone to jail, some are better than others. The OP essentially assumed that the primary reason for incarceration was incapacitation - removing them from society to protect us. I responded that the punitive aspect of punishment is much more important in this case, and that there is essentially no need to incapacitate non-violent criminals.

Clearly deterrence is another important aspect, which is why I added the "among other things" parenthetical.

You might be right that incapacitation is an important aspect of some white collar punishment - but I don't think it is in this case.

Re:Please remind me again

[AndersOSU]

You missed the point, jail, as it exists today, is very ineffective at rehabbing anyone. If we want to rehab people we shouldn't send them to jail. Jail does other things, like punishes criminal, stops criminals from hurting society at large, makes said criminal not want to go back once he gets out, makes non-criminals not want to become criminals, and so on.

It also doesn't matter if every option sucks, even if jail is completely ineffectual, it is still a better than the other option, which is to not punish criminals. I'm thoroughly unsurprised that we are talking about jail being a sucky solution.