Convicted BitTorrent Seed Farmer Reaps Potential 10 Year Sentence
Posted 07/01/08 at 12:07:55 PM by Paul Lilly
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In today's legal climate surrounding copyright infringement, one thing's becoming clear, and that's to take the plea bargain. Jammie Thomas, accused of illegally sharing 24 copyrighted songs, may wish she had if she can't get a retrial and remains liable for the original $220,000 verdict levied against her. Now it's 26-year-old Daniel Dove who's finding his legal wings clipped in court.
Dove, a former administrator of the now defunct EliteTorrents.com website, opted to plead 'not guilty' to felony copyright infringement and conspiracy charges, but failed to win favor from a federal jury and now faces up to 10 years in prision. Meanwhile, Scott McCausland and Grant Stanley, the two other administrators involved in the suit, each pleaded 'guilty' in 2006 and have already served their respective 5 month sentences.
The Department of Justice accused Daniel Dove of being in charge of a small group of 'Uploaders' tasked with recruiting members to seed illegal content to EliteTorrents' users. Much of the evidence used to convict Dove was supplied by the MPAA, and with another successful high profile conviction notched into the recording industry's belt, we can expect this trend to continue.
Image Credit: Flickr
PEERS
Submitted by JNorman on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 10:14am
I just cant believe a Jury of your PEERS would convict you of something like that. Wow you must of made alot of money off them. And knowing they are your PEERS "they do the same thing".
ummm no.
Submitted by whisp on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 9:28am
Wow, ok no. You don't take the plea bargain. This is because 99% of the time the RIAA or MPAA sends you a letter demanding fees or to face court, they don't act upon it. I cannot believe your giving into their bs scare tactics and actually recommending people pay up? Have you read any of the stories go on about this subject? If you think its best to submit and give in then read www.piratebay.org/legal for a rude awakening friendo.
For every 1 person you come up with who has been forced to battle these organizations in the courts, i can come up with 5 who have not despite the fact they recieved malicious letters.
http://torrentfreak.com/an-open-letter-to-the-cria-071004/
We plan for Tomorrow, but we Live for Today
There's Another Alternative
Submitted by One4yu2c on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 9:44am
Or better yet, don't put yourself in these situations. I'm no fan of the RIAA or the all-emcompassing DMCA, but that comment was directed more towards the high-profile criminals. It's hard to feel sympathy for a BitTorrent admin who gets taken down for seeding pirated content running the gamut from videogames to movies, and who refuses to take a plea bargain for a relatively light sentence.
Submitted by whisp on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 10:13am
Whether your the manager of isohunt or a 12 year old, both of which have had these organizations come after them, you can still fight. college students get these letters around the clock and the ingorant of them actually pay. They RARELY come after you especially if your a college student and your traffic was over the college network. The reason here is because if your at a public university its illegal for the university to hand over your credentials to these organizations. And without your info they dont know who you are........... until you contact them about payment which provides them with all the information they need to sue your pants off.
No matter who you are or your living situation you can fight them and under no circumstances should pay the exorbitant fines. The amount of wins the RIAA and MPAA have can nearly be counted on 2 hands (exageration obviously but not that far off) while the amount of litigous letters they have sent out is well over a few hundred thousand.
Besides the likelhood of you being targeted is likely about the same as being struck by lightning.
Mind you half the reason I loath these conglomerates is because of the illegal tactics they use to hunt down the pirates. Their dirty cops attempting to attain evidence in an illegal manner, often in ways that involve posing as notable uploaders such as aXXo, deliberately targeting poor people or not paying back the artists they are sueing in the name of from the start. If you want links i have them all. Their dirtier then the pirates they hunt.
We plan for Tomorrow, but we Live for Today
Those letters you refer to
Submitted by Phyzicistblue on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 1:41pm
Those letters you refer to aren't plea bargains. If you get one of those letters, you haven't been charged with anything, they are just trying to scare you and you are unlikely to be facing a ten year prison visit.
Submitted by One4yu2c on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 10:29am
The two other administrators involved with EliteTorrents.com got hit with a $3,000 fine and a 5 month jail sentence. I wouldn't classify that as exorbitant, given what they were involved in doing. And I can't imagine facing a 10 year prison sentence along with whatever fines get tacked on is a better alternative than taking the plea bargain.
Obviously the same concept doesn't apply across the board, but if you're a high profile cookie thief caught with your hand in the cookie jar (or in this case, hijacking the cookie factory and distributing cookies worldwide), recent legal precedents would say take the slap on the wrist.
Submitted by whisp on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 10:43am
$30,000 per song “distributed". I consider this an exorbitant fine. Obviously not everyone has faced chargest this high but some people have been sued who don't even own a computer, its pretty ridiculous.
The only reason I feel these admins should be hit with charges, is because their stupid enough to operate their torrent sites on US soil where their a bit more liable then if they hosted say, in sweden.
The only reason these torrent sites are being hit with fines in the first place is because the music industry doesnt know how to deal with ummm the internet. They need to learn they cant fight sites like youtube posting their music videos and instead need to adjust their business model to incorporate it. If Trent Reznor can get it right, they sure as hell can.
We plan for Tomorrow, but we Live for Today
Umm...
Submitted by jwalch.hawk on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 1:10pm
"The only reason I feel these admins should be hit with
charges, is because their stupid enough to operate their torrent sites
on US soil where their a bit more liable then if they hosted say, in
sweden."So you're saying that those lacking the intelligece to manipulate the law deserve to suffer the consequences more than those who weasel their way around it? I can see you're big on equality.
Also, the music industry is, well, an industry. Industries like to make money. It's what they do. I think what you seem to be forgetting here is that between copyright law and the DMCA, the written law (legislative branch) pretty well says these things are illegal. So the music industry, operating under the assumption that the courts (judicial branch) would rule in kind in trial, already has a great model for making money via the Internet. If the legislative and judicial branch are going to allow them to fine the hell out of the high-profile Internet targets they choose, why would they bother adopting a new strategy? Seems to me like from an economic standpoint the music industry is doing pretty ok with the Internet.
The thing that needs to learn to deal with "ummm the internet" is the US government. The DMCA is God-awful. Consumer protection for a lot of areas of the Internet is piss-poor compared to the protection you have in physical markets. The music and recording industries are taking advantage of it, which is terrible and greedy to be sure, but hardly suprising for any industry of that magnitude. Right now the law says that these preople are wronging the industry, and they're suing accordingly. You disagree, I disagree, but that doesn't change the law any more than us thinking 12-year-olds should be allowed to have booze would. Blame the terrible law, not the people following it.
Submitted by whisp on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 2:10pm
If they went after the pirates in accordance with the law i would agree.. but they dont in much more then only a handful of cases. And I don't consider sueing everyone according to US law a 'great model for making money'. Besides, the money they swindel by sueing paraplegics is rarely if ever given back to the artists they supposedly represent.
i blame the law and the organizations abusing it. if the mpaa and like wants to fight dirty, dont expect torrent admins to play fair.
We plan for Tomorrow, but we Live for Today
Submitted by jwalch.hawk on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 2:32pm
Yeah, there's a lot of truth to that; they don't target everyone. But on the other hand, would it be possible to? I mean, piracy is pretty rampant... I'm not sure they could go after everyone even if they wanted to.
Your response makes me realize that perhaps I wasn't clear about what I meant when I said it was a great model. What you're saying, unless I'm mistaken, is that it is ethically and morally reprehensible. I wholeheartedly agree with that. What I meant was that it was a good way to make money, dirty as the money may be.
I definitely agree with you that they don't represent artists quite the way that they claim to. They play up the whole "starving artist" crap in an effort to drum up sympathy. Like you say at the end there, that's definitely playing dirty.
The way I see it, business is largely responsible for just two things: Making money and following the law. It's the law's job to set the moral and ethical boundaries which business cannot cross. But that's just an opinion, and I wouldn't claim that there is a right or wrong view on that... Yours is probably quite different from mine. I just think that it's kinda tough to fight the juggernaut of those industries and convince them to lay off what they're doing. I think convincing Congress to fix copyright laws and the ilk to be better suited for today's Age of the Internet is a far easier battle to win. And if you win that, then the MPAA, RCIAA, this-a-that-a-AA all have to respect those legal bounds or suffer dire consequences.
Submitted by whisp on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 2:41pm
Agreed, There is a lot of house cleaning that needs to be on in the legal system and the business models surrounding this whole enterprise, but i do argue that bit torrent sites are the result of the failure of the music industry to innovate in this day and age of web 2.0. If it was done right from day 1 then people would have no need to scour these torrent sites for a drm free copy of their favorite artist's new album.
We plan for Tomorrow, but we Live for Today
Submitted by opulent_rigs on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 12:21pm
they weren't in a bargain, were they?
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