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Feds arrest man for sharing DVD rip of Spider-Man movie with millions online
- kelseyfrog 2y agoUsing state violence to enforce intellectual property is morally bankrupt. Reserve that hammer for pastors who prey on kids.
- kyrra 2y agoAll adults in a position of power over kids can do this. Many children are abused by teachers as well. https://www.pennlive.com/news/erry-2018/05/5e56fa19a94444/child_sex_crimes_catholic_prie.html https://www.pennlive.com/news/erry-2018/05/5e56fa19a94444/ch...
- EA-3167 2y agoWhile true, most groups of adults with power over children don't have a wealthy, trans-national organization that spent decades shuffling them around, hiding their crimes, and silencing victims.
- sdsd 2y agoIf you read the article in the comment you're replying to, the whole point is that despite having a wealthy, transnational organization, the Catholic church is not an outlier, and in fact, abuse is higher in many orgs that don't do the things you describe (eg, evangelical churches, sports, and school).
- EA-3167 2y agoI did read the article, but the obvious rebuttal is that "abuse is higher" really translates as "abuse is more frequently reported, confirmed and punished." It's not shocking that an organization which has dedicated a vast amount of time, effort and money to hiding its misdeeds has... hidden some of its misdeeds.
- sdsd 2y ago>It's not shocking that an organization which has dedicated a vast amount of time, effort and money to hiding its misdeeds has... hidden some of its misdeeds. If you go this way of thinking, you can just as easily come out on the opposite end. Maybe the Catholic Church is in fact hiding less than these other orgs, and that's why we associate them with abuse. If the known rate of abuse is mostly correlated to an org's skill at hiding, then who knows how much abuse happens anywhere.
- ranger_danger 2y agoYou're not wrong, but I would say this is a little bit more than just IP theft, as these charges are technically criminal in nature. Physical theft and fraud, bypassing encryption explicitly for unauthorized copying (regardless of what it was), etc.
- fibers 2y agothat logic can be applied broadly to the unbelievable amount of ip theft that LLMs train on
- ranger_danger 2y agoI'm pretty sure courts have already ruled that to be fair use, and either way I don't think it's appropriate to compare the two like that, I consider it a false equivalency.
- varelse 2y ago[dead]
- pipes 2y agoDo you see any potential down sides f the state decided not to protect intellectual property?
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- ForTheKidz 2y agoLarge swathes of the US economy are based on holding and licensing IP. Why would anyone subscribe to Disney+ if they could get the same service for $1 a month from anyone?
- like_any_other 2y agoThe poster asked for down sides.
- kelseyfrog 2y agoWe would return to normalcy. That makes some people angry.
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- tiahura 2y agodon't do the crime if you can't do the time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sHA7Uuz4oY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sHA7Uuz4oY
- ameister14 2y agoUsing state violence to protect property is literally one of the main reasons for having a state at all.
- timewizard 2y agoTo protect real property. Violations of copyright should be strictly civil issues. Why are the people who arrest murderers and vandals involved in this?
- floydnoel 2y agothey don’t really worry about murderers nor vandals
- jebarker 2y agoI honestly don't see why the cops should arrest someone that burgles an office building (say of a film producer) and not someone that gives away the content they paid to make for free. In what way is it different?
- timewizard 2y agoIf I take your property you cannot have it or use it. If I copy your content you still have it. It's not an exigent issue that requires officers with guns to solve.
- jebarker 2y agoAh, yes, that's a good argument for property definition. I agree that it seems excessive to use armed force to enforce this, I was more questioning how to differentiate the two situations in law so cops don't have to exercise that judgement.
- aydyn 2y agoIntellectual property is not property, its a misnomer. A bluray disk is property. Do you own it or no?
- ranger_danger 2y agoWorth nothing that this wasn't some teenager who casually downloaded a movie and left it seeding overnight. They were stealing DVDs from the factory and ripping those, even selling them for profit, and people found enough evidence left behind to even get him arrested in the first place for it... so monumental levels of stupidity and provable intent are here.
- joshuamcginnis 2y agoAnd he was doing it for movies that hadn't even been released yet.
- qwerty456127 2y agoNevertheless this seems a waste of resources for the feds to bust as long as there are many really dangerous criminals, doesn't it? Gangs terrorize the streets, corrupt politicians ruin the economy, foreign nation states operate huge covert operation networks but the feds rather hunt DVD rippers LOL
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- LexGray 2y agoIf every book, video, and painting is ripped off and shared for free why would any sane person pay? Of course the feds are going to act to defend the big budget spectacles which distract us from the corrupt clown show that is our world.
- qwerty456127 2y ago> If every book, video, and painting is ripped off and shared for free why would any sane person pay? What about games? Do you mean the people buying games on gog.com are insane? I already spent over a $1000 there although I technically could easily pirate almost any of their games. At the same time I don't buy anything from Steam because I hate DRM. And the only place where I often buy digital books is HumbleBudndle - also because DRM-free. If something is both cheap (or not so cheap but still possible to afford and visibly great value) and DRM-free I see no incentive to pirate it for anyone who is not extremely poor (so they wouldn't buy even if there was no option to pirate).
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoOfficial release: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/employee-multinational-dvd-company-charged-stealing-selling-pre-release-commercial-dvds https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/employee-multinational-dvd-co...
- catlikesshrimp 2y agoI am more interested in the malware by russians distributed instead or along the movie rip than in the movie.
- HPsquared 2y agoOfficial media is more likely to come with malware. Sony rootkits being one infamous example. Or, depending on perspective, all the "telemetry" and advertising built-in to Windows these days.
- chasil 2y agoThis is the classic example. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...
- redrove 2y agoAn MKV file is virtually safe for all intents and purposes. Sure there could be some kind of vuln in the media player you’re using to open it and it could contain a payload but there’s so many media player and OS combinations that this becomes extremely unlikely. I have never heard of this happening.
- progbits 2y agoAren't most media players (by market share) just wrapper around, most often out of date, libffmpeg? Famously a huge pile of old C/assembly? I'm not shitting on ffmpeg, it's a great project but let's call it what it is. "Virtually safe" is nowhere near accurate.
- vagrantJin 2y agoHaha, you are most certainly shitting on ffmpeg, however politely you might go about it.
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- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoThis does raise the question of whether Meta (and others) will face any fines for training AI on copyrighted books etc.
- varelse 2y ago[dead]
- CursedSilicon 2y agoCorporations facing meaningful consequences for their actions? That'll be the day
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zamadatix 2y agoThis is about a guy stealing pre-release media with the intent to sell it and then distribute exact copies prior to release. I wouldn't extrapolate too far what that means in regards to the AI training story just because both involve movies as, even if it were considered the same type of copying, the rest of the situation is very different.
- markus_zhang 2y agoShouldn't do that without enough protection.
- rad_gruchalski 2y agoPoor man, oppressed by the rich of Hollywood. Maybe Carlson interviews and Trump pardons him. /s
- croes 2y ago> bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying That statement is obviously wrong
- conradev 2y agoWhy? Aren’t Blu-ray discs encrypted?
- readyplayernull 2y agoMeanwhile encryption itself will become illegal, unless it can be backdoored.
- geor9e 2y agoMost English sentences can be read in different ways with different meanings, so one must always gage the probability that the author is rational and intended that meaning probably no: (successfully) prevents (all) unauthorized copying probably yes: (exists to) prevent (at least one instance of) unauthorized copying
- LeoPanthera 2y agoIf you only read the headline you'll miss critical information: > A 37-year-old Tennessee man was arrested Thursday, accused of stealing Blu-rays and DVDs from a manufacturing and distribution company used by major movie studios and sharing them online before the movies' scheduled release dates.
- BearOso 2y ago> The DOJ claimed that "copies of Spider-Man: No Way Home were downloaded tens of millions of times, with an estimated loss to the copyright owner of tens of millions of dollars." Except those weren't prospective buyers--they were downloads, which don't have a direct 1-1 mapping. On top of that, you can only infer they were people who thought the movie was worth downloading if it was free, not that they would have purchased it at the retail price. Who's to say it wasn't downloading for convenience, i.e. to use on a plane or something, and the person hadn't already bought a license another way? The total loss was probably 10s of thousands at the most.
- wakawaka28 2y agoDid you miss the fact that he stole the movie before it was released from the DVD publisher? There's not a 1-1 relationship between DVD buyers and pirates but some people just want to watch the movie or save it for posterity, and don't care what format it's in. There is definitely a cost to piracy. But nobody knows exactly what that cost is. Wanna know what's really stupid? Some people pay $20 or more to rent or buy a digital copy of a movie through a service that can pull the content any time. Compared to that, the hard copy is a fantastic value.