7 ms·

“So far, nearly 150 lives have been saved as a direct result of the site and my actions.” I get that those 150 lives were all at risk, because a not-too-bright

by ipsin 5y ago

“So far, nearly 150 lives have been saved as a direct result of the site and my actions.” I get that those 150 lives were all at risk, because a not-too-bright someone wanted them killed, but... I'm also curious how many of those would manage to kill their targets if they weren't intercepted? This isn't an argument against intervention, since they demonstrated an intent to kill. But I'm legitimately wondering how often people with grudges connect with actual contract killers.

BrianHenryIE 5y ago
Clearly we need a double-blind study.
- CaptainJustin 5y ago
  I feel sorry for the control group
  - hawk_ 5y ago
    It's ok the study will be conducted with mice.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    Being part of the control group often sucks: what if you're bing given a placebo instead of a revolutionary cancer drug.
    - niekmaas 5y ago
      There is no way for us to know if the drug is a "revulotionary cancer drug" if we don't test it in a double blinded randomized controlled trial (RCT). Indeed it would be disappointing the later find out you were treated with the placebo, but so many drugs or other interventions have to potential to be revolutionary but fail to really change the clinical decision making later on.
      - amcoastal 5y ago
        I guess I never understood placebo trials in a lot of medical situations. Like what we are discussing here, a "revolutionary cancer drug", why even bother letting people die giving them placebos? Its cancer. Its not like you can placebo effect the cancer away. You don't need a double blind trial to see if the drug stops the cancer, you just give people the drug and observe the cancer! I feel like our medical system is pretty wack. Or maybe I'm entirely wrong and you can placebo cancer away.
        setr 5y ago
        A common medical joke: A cold takes 7 days to resolve on its own. With modern medicine, it will take merely a week ! The placebo is not to eliminate the cancer, it’s to guarantee that we know the “normal” path without the drug, and gives a comparison point between the control and the target. The fundamental problem is that cancer can just resolve/improve on its own, or rather without intervention… so just poking and watching isn’t sufficient proof of the drug’s efficacy
        ithkuil 5y ago
        Yes. Yet it's so hard to have a good intuition about that. We're wired to think in terms of action and agency and be morally judged on its basis. This is deeply rooted in human psychology and acts as a foundation for many of our behaviours, from religion to vaccine hesitancy. Ask anybody I'd they think it's more likely that a disease just went away on its own or if there was some reason, "something". Most people will tell it's more likely something happened, a miracle of some kind for some reasons. Deep down there is always a reason for things to happen, but "your cells in your body did a good job" just doesn't sound right. Even when people accept the idea that the body can fix itself pretty well, they tend to swing the pendulum too much and assume the body can do just anything .... provided you do (agency) the right motions (potions, talismans, right diet, right prayers...)
        daedalus_f 5y ago
        That is not how randomised controlled trials in conditions like cancer work. They are almost always a riff on new drug + current best treatment regime vs current best regime. Sometimes a drug within a regime is swapped with the new agent and the two compared in terms of survival and toxicity. Progress in cancer treatment is almost always achieved by incremental tweaking of how we treat it. There are a few revolutionary agents based on specific disease mechanisms in certain cancers (e.g. imatinib [1]) but these are in the minority - cancer is protean. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imatinib https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imatinib
    - mellavora 5y ago
      or what if the revolution is lead by Robespierre?
    - avalys 5y ago
      In almost all such circumstances, the control group is still given a "real" cancer drug that has already been proven, and the study looks for the new drug to demonstrate an improvement versus the current state-of-the-art.
ufmace 5y ago
That's what I was thinking. Yeah anybody who tries to actually hire a hit man through that site ought to be checked out. Claiming that lives were saved seems a bit over the top though - if you're trying to use a random website nobody has heard of to hire a hit man, the odds seem mighty slim that you'll ever find somebody prepared to actually kill someone.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > if you're trying to use a random website nobody has heard of to hire a hit man To be fair, that's probably less crazy than using a popular website everyone has heard of for the same purpose.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    Obviously the popularity of the site can be both a benefit and a detriment, a very popular site increases the chance that it has hitmen among its users, but it also increases the chance of narcs. We can see therefore that is what is needed is a popular site with the ability to deliver targeted messages to the people most likely to be hitmen. Finally this story shows the kind of problems you can encounter trying to hire hitmen through sites with a conscientious and moral leadership, that should be avoided. Use Facebook.
gumby 5y ago
While I agree I give him a pass: he could simply abandon the site but instead continues to run it. If that thought motivates him, why not? Likely some of the people would ultimately try to do the deed on their own. Probably a small number, but a bunch of tragedies were likely forestalled, even if the seeker is not arrested but receives help. Which is probably what happens for people outside the US.
- sonicggg 5y ago
  That dude just seems like he has too much time on his hands.
  - rolleiflex 5y ago
    Sure, but many good deeds and about all of science pre 20th century was made by people who had too much time on their hands.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    Everyone gets 24 hours a day. He's doing something presumably useful. Are you?
    - vntok 5y ago
      Why do you think his use of time is presumably useful?
rlt 5y ago
Yeah, I’d like to see the stats on how many mentally ill or cognitively disabled people he unnecessarily had sent to prison.
- bigiain 5y ago
  He hasn’t sent anybody to prison. He’s referred some requests to law enforcement, who’ve than taken whatever action they deem necessary. (Admittedly in some jurisdictions for some demographics, there might not be much distinction there.) If your angry 13 year old brother or cognitively impaired cousin that you didn’t get a PS5 for xmas emailed this guy, it’s spectacularly unlikely the cops would send him to prison.
  - watwut 5y ago
    It is actually more likely the cognitively impaired would end up in prison. They people sux even more then usual at navigating criminal system. Same for kids. That being said, the " 13 year old brother or cognitively impaired cousin that you didn’t get a PS5 for" are an actual threat and those around them do need intervention. Not reporting them amounts to enabling.
    - enkid 5y ago
      Right, the problem isn't the guy reporting the people, it's some of the stuff leading up to it and after it.
  - rlt 5y ago
    I think it’s equally unlikely “nearly 150 lives have been saved as a direct result of the site and [his] actions”. I’m sure some subset of those cases were credible threats, but I’m confident there’s at least one person in jail who would have quickly given up if this very convenient site had not existed.
- ghusbands 5y ago
  If someone is trying to get people killed, it may be that they need help, but other people certainly need protection from them, which is meant to be part of the point of the prison system. Also, equating a desire to assassinate with being mentally ill or cognitively disabled is doing a disservice to the majority of mentally ill or cognitively disabled people who do know it's wrong to kill people. I doubt there's a clear correlation between desire to kill people and being mentally ill or cognitively disabled.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
My country is turning into a European Mexico because the middle class needs their cocaine to get through life. Twenty year olds are getting payed just 20k to kill someone. The funny thing is that all these drive bye gang bangers are all invariably caught by the police and then spend the rest of their life in jail. Don't underestimate the stupidity of man.
- cosmodisk 5y ago
  I once had a chat with my colleague about how the country he was born in has changed over the last 20 years. He expressed concerns about safety, gang crimes,etc. Yet he was the one consuming white powder that is responsible for majority of those crimes he's concerned about...
  - rosndo 5y ago
    The powder cannot be responsible for those crimes, if it was, the government could solve the problem overnight by simply allowing a legal supply of white powder. And if that’s the case, how is the government not to blame?
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      Are you sure it's the fault of the people who drove the value of inexpensive to produce substances used in tiny amounts up by multiple orders of magnitude?
      - rosndo 5y ago
        You mean the government? Yeah, I’m pretty sure. This was an entirely predictable consequence of banning recreational drugs.
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    The War on Drugs has failed a long time ago though, and I thought it was obvious. Such crimes exist because of the War on Drugs. That said, legalization is not enough. If the taxes are too high (as it happened to be the case in California for weed), then you will still have a black market for this white powder. There is black market here for meat, too.
pessimizer 5y ago
That's the same problem as with all of the FBI terrorist entrapment. What if people have an honest desire to kill, but lack the intelligence, means, and/or motivation? Do you give them ideas, pretend to give them the means, and encourage (or even nag/pressure) them? I mean, we do, but is that a good thing? Especially seeing as while we're doing it we're giving them ideas, we may accidentally give them the means (or at least an idea of how to find the means themselves), and in a time crunch to show results the pressure that we put on them to carry out the act may actually become threatening? More applicable to this specific case, which is obviously why the guy is sensitive about it, is that people sending unsolicited requests to murder people to a site called rentahitman.com are very stupid. They're the least likely to be able to carry it out, although I acknowledge that's probably somewhat offset because they may also be too stupid to understand the probability or consequences of failing to get away with it. The writer sees the same thing, which is why they gloss over the fact that he has put in effort to dress the site as a website where you order hitmen online, with splashes of satire to signal to people of normal intelligence and ability to detect sarcasm that it is a joke. It is never mentioned explicitly that he's dressing the site that way now until it's implicated by the discussion of the "jokes and clues to show it wasn't the real deal" halfway through the article. Before I got to that, I thought he was a guy who had an innocent site marketing himself as a network contractor who would get sucked into the nefarious plans of stupid strangers because of his domain name. Afterwards, I decided that he's a guy who got sucked into one nefarious plan of one stupid stranger, got her busted, and loved being the center of attention and having his ego stroked by law enforcement. To get that feeling back, again and again, he turned his site into an phishing expedition for people stupid enough to think click-to-murder could be real. This is the same as Nigerian prince scams that intentionally use bad grammar and spelling to limit the replies to suckers. It's a confidence scam filtering the crowd down to the marks. The moral hazard I see is that if you sold the site convincingly, in a way that could trick people of closer to normal intelligence, that might result in danger for you. Somebody normal tricked into prison by this might send a real hit man after you (or maybe a lawyer.) So instead, he focuses on people like the moron he started with, who don't scare him at all. If they don't scare him, are they really scary?
- syshum 5y ago
  >>Do you give them ideas, pretend to give them the means, and encourage (or even nag/pressure) them? I mean, we do, but is that a good thing? All of that should be considered entrapment, and law enforcement should not be doing it for FBI, and other law enforcement I have a pretty simple standard, that many people do not agree with. law enforcement should not be allowed to break the law to enforce the law. We however allow them to do so all time. In relation to this story, it is simple. If you just put up a site like this, people then contact you, and as law enforcement you setup a meeting let them incriminate themselves no problems, you did not break the law, it was unsolicited by you, etc. Flip this though and say you embed an agent at a support group of some kind, this agent then prompts a person with "I know someone that could take care of that for you" after establishing a relationship with the person, then over the course of months they entice the person into committing a crime. That is where the line is cross IMO. That is where law enforcement is today
lmilcin 5y ago
You can argue that actually more lives have been saved because after a public stunt like that a lot of potential murderers will be deterred from searching for a killer for hire on the Internet. It will also make more people aware than just searching for killer makes them liable if somebody thinks they were serious about this.
- ummonk 5y ago
  "It will also make more people aware than just searching for killer makes them liable if somebody thinks they were serious about this." Not sure that's true - if you click through to the CNN article (https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/12/us/hireahitman-website-cracks-crimes-cec/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/12/us/hireahitman-website-cr...), the police will set up a meet and check whether the people actually want to go through with hiring a hitman.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    This is one of proving somebody is serious. It is not required, though. In general, Police will set up a meet because it is much stronger and difficult to refute proof. And they also don't have anything to loose - their case cannot be weakened by the suspect refusing to come to a meet.
    - ummonk 5y ago
      At the very least, simply searching for a killer is not a crime, unless they can prove you actually intended to hire the killer.
      - lmilcin 5y ago
        I can't tell what you are thinking, but "simply searching for a killer is not a crime" is a false statement. There exist no law that says "searching for a killer is not a crime". Now, there exist no law that says "searching for a killer is a crime" either, but this is up to judge/jury and in large part your luck. Judge or jury can't tell what you had in your mind. The prosecutor will lay their case and if they are convincing enough, especially to the jury, you may go to prison just based on "simple searching for a killer". The law does not require any more additional proof for you to be convicted, as long as prosecutor can convince judge and/or jury that you in fact wanted to go through with your plan. Certainly, people went to prison for much less than that. So, yes, you can in fact go to prison simply for searching for a killer if you were also unlucky.
account-5 5y ago
They're using the same argument the copyright industry use against pirates. Instead of this person saying they saved 150 lives, the copyright industry say the artists lost X amount making the assumption each pirate, given no other option, would pay for the copy the pirated. I often am curious how many of those pirates would have actually paid.

by ipsin 5y ago

BrianHenryIE 5y ago

Clearly we need a double-blind study.

CaptainJustin 5y ago
I feel sorry for the control group
- hawk_ 5y ago
  It's ok the study will be conducted with mice.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  Being part of the control group often sucks: what if you're bing given a placebo instead of a revolutionary cancer drug.
  - niekmaas 5y ago
    There is no way for us to know if the drug is a "revulotionary cancer drug" if we don't test it in a double blinded randomized controlled trial (RCT). Indeed it would be disappointing the later find out you were treated with the placebo, but so many drugs or other interventions have to potential to be revolutionary but fail to really change the clinical decision making later on.
    - amcoastal 5y ago
      I guess I never understood placebo trials in a lot of medical situations. Like what we are discussing here, a "revolutionary cancer drug", why even bother letting people die giving them placebos? Its cancer. Its not like you can placebo effect the cancer away. You don't need a double blind trial to see if the drug stops the cancer, you just give people the drug and observe the cancer! I feel like our medical system is pretty wack. Or maybe I'm entirely wrong and you can placebo cancer away.
      - setr 5y ago
        A common medical joke: A cold takes 7 days to resolve on its own. With modern medicine, it will take merely a week ! The placebo is not to eliminate the cancer, it’s to guarantee that we know the “normal” path without the drug, and gives a comparison point between the control and the target. The fundamental problem is that cancer can just resolve/improve on its own, or rather without intervention… so just poking and watching isn’t sufficient proof of the drug’s efficacy
        ithkuil 5y ago
        Yes. Yet it's so hard to have a good intuition about that. We're wired to think in terms of action and agency and be morally judged on its basis. This is deeply rooted in human psychology and acts as a foundation for many of our behaviours, from religion to vaccine hesitancy. Ask anybody I'd they think it's more likely that a disease just went away on its own or if there was some reason, "something". Most people will tell it's more likely something happened, a miracle of some kind for some reasons. Deep down there is always a reason for things to happen, but "your cells in your body did a good job" just doesn't sound right. Even when people accept the idea that the body can fix itself pretty well, they tend to swing the pendulum too much and assume the body can do just anything .... provided you do (agency) the right motions (potions, talismans, right diet, right prayers...)
      - daedalus_f 5y ago
        That is not how randomised controlled trials in conditions like cancer work. They are almost always a riff on new drug + current best treatment regime vs current best regime. Sometimes a drug within a regime is swapped with the new agent and the two compared in terms of survival and toxicity. Progress in cancer treatment is almost always achieved by incremental tweaking of how we treat it. There are a few revolutionary agents based on specific disease mechanisms in certain cancers (e.g. imatinib [1]) but these are in the minority - cancer is protean. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imatinib https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imatinib
  - mellavora 5y ago
    or what if the revolution is lead by Robespierre?
  - avalys 5y ago
    In almost all such circumstances, the control group is still given a "real" cancer drug that has already been proven, and the study looks for the new drug to demonstrate an improvement versus the current state-of-the-art.

ufmace 5y ago

That's what I was thinking. Yeah anybody who tries to actually hire a hit man through that site ought to be checked out. Claiming that lives were saved seems a bit over the top though - if you're trying to use a random website nobody has heard of to hire a hit man, the odds seem mighty slim that you'll ever find somebody prepared to actually kill someone.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 5y ago
> if you're trying to use a random website nobody has heard of to hire a hit man To be fair, that's probably less crazy than using a popular website everyone has heard of for the same purpose.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  Obviously the popularity of the site can be both a benefit and a detriment, a very popular site increases the chance that it has hitmen among its users, but it also increases the chance of narcs. We can see therefore that is what is needed is a popular site with the ability to deliver targeted messages to the people most likely to be hitmen. Finally this story shows the kind of problems you can encounter trying to hire hitmen through sites with a conscientious and moral leadership, that should be avoided. Use Facebook.

gumby 5y ago

While I agree I give him a pass: he could simply abandon the site but instead continues to run it. If that thought motivates him, why not? Likely some of the people would ultimately try to do the deed on their own. Probably a small number, but a bunch of tragedies were likely forestalled, even if the seeker is not arrested but receives help. Which is probably what happens for people outside the US.

sonicggg 5y ago
That dude just seems like he has too much time on his hands.
- rolleiflex 5y ago
  Sure, but many good deeds and about all of science pre 20th century was made by people who had too much time on their hands.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Everyone gets 24 hours a day. He's doing something presumably useful. Are you?
  - vntok 5y ago
    Why do you think his use of time is presumably useful?

rlt 5y ago

Yeah, I’d like to see the stats on how many mentally ill or cognitively disabled people he unnecessarily had sent to prison.

bigiain 5y ago
He hasn’t sent anybody to prison. He’s referred some requests to law enforcement, who’ve than taken whatever action they deem necessary. (Admittedly in some jurisdictions for some demographics, there might not be much distinction there.) If your angry 13 year old brother or cognitively impaired cousin that you didn’t get a PS5 for xmas emailed this guy, it’s spectacularly unlikely the cops would send him to prison.
- watwut 5y ago
  It is actually more likely the cognitively impaired would end up in prison. They people sux even more then usual at navigating criminal system. Same for kids. That being said, the " 13 year old brother or cognitively impaired cousin that you didn’t get a PS5 for" are an actual threat and those around them do need intervention. Not reporting them amounts to enabling.
  - enkid 5y ago
    Right, the problem isn't the guy reporting the people, it's some of the stuff leading up to it and after it.
- rlt 5y ago
  I think it’s equally unlikely “nearly 150 lives have been saved as a direct result of the site and [his] actions”. I’m sure some subset of those cases were credible threats, but I’m confident there’s at least one person in jail who would have quickly given up if this very convenient site had not existed.
ghusbands 5y ago
If someone is trying to get people killed, it may be that they need help, but other people certainly need protection from them, which is meant to be part of the point of the prison system. Also, equating a desire to assassinate with being mentally ill or cognitively disabled is doing a disservice to the majority of mentally ill or cognitively disabled people who do know it's wrong to kill people. I doubt there's a clear correlation between desire to kill people and being mentally ill or cognitively disabled.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

My country is turning into a European Mexico because the middle class needs their cocaine to get through life. Twenty year olds are getting payed just 20k to kill someone. The funny thing is that all these drive bye gang bangers are all invariably caught by the police and then spend the rest of their life in jail. Don't underestimate the stupidity of man.

cosmodisk 5y ago
I once had a chat with my colleague about how the country he was born in has changed over the last 20 years. He expressed concerns about safety, gang crimes,etc. Yet he was the one consuming white powder that is responsible for majority of those crimes he's concerned about...
- rosndo 5y ago
  The powder cannot be responsible for those crimes, if it was, the government could solve the problem overnight by simply allowing a legal supply of white powder. And if that’s the case, how is the government not to blame?
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Are you sure it's the fault of the people who drove the value of inexpensive to produce substances used in tiny amounts up by multiple orders of magnitude?
    - rosndo 5y ago
      You mean the government? Yeah, I’m pretty sure. This was an entirely predictable consequence of banning recreational drugs.
- johnisgood 5y ago
  The War on Drugs has failed a long time ago though, and I thought it was obvious. Such crimes exist because of the War on Drugs. That said, legalization is not enough. If the taxes are too high (as it happened to be the case in California for weed), then you will still have a black market for this white powder. There is black market here for meat, too.

pessimizer 5y ago

That's the same problem as with all of the FBI terrorist entrapment. What if people have an honest desire to kill, but lack the intelligence, means, and/or motivation? Do you give them ideas, pretend to give them the means, and encourage (or even nag/pressure) them? I mean, we do, but is that a good thing? Especially seeing as while we're doing it we're giving them ideas, we may accidentally give them the means (or at least an idea of how to find the means themselves), and in a time crunch to show results the pressure that we put on them to carry out the act may actually become threatening? More applicable to this specific case, which is obviously why the guy is sensitive about it, is that people sending unsolicited requests to murder people to a site called rentahitman.com are very stupid. They're the least likely to be able to carry it out, although I acknowledge that's probably somewhat offset because they may also be too stupid to understand the probability or consequences of failing to get away with it. The writer sees the same thing, which is why they gloss over the fact that he has put in effort to dress the site as a website where you order hitmen online, with splashes of satire to signal to people of normal intelligence and ability to detect sarcasm that it is a joke. It is never mentioned explicitly that he's dressing the site that way now until it's implicated by the discussion of the "jokes and clues to show it wasn't the real deal" halfway through the article. Before I got to that, I thought he was a guy who had an innocent site marketing himself as a network contractor who would get sucked into the nefarious plans of stupid strangers because of his domain name. Afterwards, I decided that he's a guy who got sucked into one nefarious plan of one stupid stranger, got her busted, and loved being the center of attention and having his ego stroked by law enforcement. To get that feeling back, again and again, he turned his site into an phishing expedition for people stupid enough to think click-to-murder could be real. This is the same as Nigerian prince scams that intentionally use bad grammar and spelling to limit the replies to suckers. It's a confidence scam filtering the crowd down to the marks. The moral hazard I see is that if you sold the site convincingly, in a way that could trick people of closer to normal intelligence, that might result in danger for you. Somebody normal tricked into prison by this might send a real hit man after you (or maybe a lawyer.) So instead, he focuses on people like the moron he started with, who don't scare him at all. If they don't scare him, are they really scary?

syshum 5y ago
>>Do you give them ideas, pretend to give them the means, and encourage (or even nag/pressure) them? I mean, we do, but is that a good thing? All of that should be considered entrapment, and law enforcement should not be doing it for FBI, and other law enforcement I have a pretty simple standard, that many people do not agree with. law enforcement should not be allowed to break the law to enforce the law. We however allow them to do so all time. In relation to this story, it is simple. If you just put up a site like this, people then contact you, and as law enforcement you setup a meeting let them incriminate themselves no problems, you did not break the law, it was unsolicited by you, etc. Flip this though and say you embed an agent at a support group of some kind, this agent then prompts a person with "I know someone that could take care of that for you" after establishing a relationship with the person, then over the course of months they entice the person into committing a crime. That is where the line is cross IMO. That is where law enforcement is today

lmilcin 5y ago

You can argue that actually more lives have been saved because after a public stunt like that a lot of potential murderers will be deterred from searching for a killer for hire on the Internet. It will also make more people aware than just searching for killer makes them liable if somebody thinks they were serious about this.

ummonk 5y ago
"It will also make more people aware than just searching for killer makes them liable if somebody thinks they were serious about this." Not sure that's true - if you click through to the CNN article (https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/12/us/hireahitman-website-cracks-crimes-cec/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/12/us/hireahitman-website-cr...), the police will set up a meet and check whether the people actually want to go through with hiring a hitman.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  This is one of proving somebody is serious. It is not required, though. In general, Police will set up a meet because it is much stronger and difficult to refute proof. And they also don't have anything to loose - their case cannot be weakened by the suspect refusing to come to a meet.
  - ummonk 5y ago
    At the very least, simply searching for a killer is not a crime, unless they can prove you actually intended to hire the killer.
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      I can't tell what you are thinking, but "simply searching for a killer is not a crime" is a false statement. There exist no law that says "searching for a killer is not a crime". Now, there exist no law that says "searching for a killer is a crime" either, but this is up to judge/jury and in large part your luck. Judge or jury can't tell what you had in your mind. The prosecutor will lay their case and if they are convincing enough, especially to the jury, you may go to prison just based on "simple searching for a killer". The law does not require any more additional proof for you to be convicted, as long as prosecutor can convince judge and/or jury that you in fact wanted to go through with your plan. Certainly, people went to prison for much less than that. So, yes, you can in fact go to prison simply for searching for a killer if you were also unlucky.

account-5 5y ago

They're using the same argument the copyright industry use against pirates. Instead of this person saying they saved 150 lives, the copyright industry say the artists lost X amount making the assumption each pirate, given no other option, would pay for the copy the pirated. I often am curious how many of those pirates would have actually paid.