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There's something that I don't understand in this case(I'm not American): to my knowledge in the US the Police can trap you by proposing to sell you drugs or bo

There's something that I don't understand in this case(I'm not American): to my knowledge in the US the Police can trap you by proposing to sell you drugs or bomb making ingredients and then arrest you. The Prenda modus operandi doesn't seems much different than what the US Police is doing, so why do they face prison ? Don't get me wrong I think they deserve to go behind bars, but I would have thought what they did was legal in the US.

jamespo 10y ago
the police in most countries can do a lot of things civilians can't
_r_o_y_ 10y ago
I'm not American either, but if i recall correctly, it's different when dealing with copyright because when you share your work (they publish themselves on torrents) there's an expectation that the work comes with a license
mikeash 10y ago
If a private citizen tries to sell drugs or bomb ingredients, then extorts the buyer by threatening to tell the police, I think that would probably be illegal as well. A lot of the trouble here is how they went about this scheme, not merely the basic idea of what they did. They repeatedly lied to defendants and courts about their operations. Some of the materials they sued over were things they didn't actually have copyright for, but they used false documents to claim that they did. Those false documents involved forged signatures and even invented a person who didn't exist. They even filed defamation lawsuits against a person whose signatures they forged, for daring to say that they hadn't signed this stuff. Wikipedia has a huge list of the crazy stuff they've done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law So, it's not just about trying to entrap people by "pirating" their own content. It's about massive fraud and abuse along the way.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> The Prenda modus operandi doesn't seems much different than what the US Police is doing, so why do they face prison ? There are a lot of reasons, the most critical one being that it involved multiple levels of misrepresentations to the involved courts, which is not part of a normal law enforcement sting operation. (There's also a difference between a criminal sting operation where the prohibited offense is, e.g., buying the goods being offered vs. a civil copyright "sting operation" where the prohibited offense is "copying some work without the consent of the copyright owner", and the active assistance of the copyright owner is involved in the act of copying.)

jamespo 10y ago

the police in most countries can do a lot of things civilians can't

_r_o_y_ 10y ago

I'm not American either, but if i recall correctly, it's different when dealing with copyright because when you share your work (they publish themselves on torrents) there's an expectation that the work comes with a license

mikeash 10y ago

If a private citizen tries to sell drugs or bomb ingredients, then extorts the buyer by threatening to tell the police, I think that would probably be illegal as well. A lot of the trouble here is how they went about this scheme, not merely the basic idea of what they did. They repeatedly lied to defendants and courts about their operations. Some of the materials they sued over were things they didn't actually have copyright for, but they used false documents to claim that they did. Those false documents involved forged signatures and even invented a person who didn't exist. They even filed defamation lawsuits against a person whose signatures they forged, for daring to say that they hadn't signed this stuff. Wikipedia has a huge list of the crazy stuff they've done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law So, it's not just about trying to entrap people by "pirating" their own content. It's about massive fraud and abuse along the way.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> The Prenda modus operandi doesn't seems much different than what the US Police is doing, so why do they face prison ? There are a lot of reasons, the most critical one being that it involved multiple levels of misrepresentations to the involved courts, which is not part of a normal law enforcement sting operation. (There's also a difference between a criminal sting operation where the prohibited offense is, e.g., buying the goods being offered vs. a civil copyright "sting operation" where the prohibited offense is "copying some work without the consent of the copyright owner", and the active assistance of the copyright owner is involved in the act of copying.)