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Comment by reimertz | Hacker News Reader

As a CEO, you can have a business model that is ethically and morally wrong without getting into jail.

As a CEO, you can ignore obvious security flaws leading to 100 million social security numbers getting leaked without getting into jail.

As a CEO, you can sexually harass your employees without getting into jail.

Try and save the world by repurpose old computers, causing one of the biggest companies in the world to maybe lose 0.0000001% of their revenue and you're fucked.

Shame on you, Microsoft.

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he didn’t actually cause anyone to lose revenue. microsoft isn’t pressing charges against him in this case. (to my best understanding)

They might argue that repurposing old computers and licenses attached to said computer might have an (minimal) effect on Microsofts revenue since that might lead to potential sells not happening. That is the only reason I can see why they would pursue a case like this.

But I cannot phantom how they cannot see how this will backfire quite badly, making them look both greedy and environmentally disconnected.

whats next?

"Diet coach Daisy, sent to jail as McDonalds loses customers"

"CPU designer Claire, sent to jail as its optimized caching algorithm lowers demand for RAM sales"

"Louis Pasteur, unearthed from the grave, incarcerated as milk sales fall due to longer shelf-life"

Wouldn't be surprising really. If you base your society on worshiping greed, don't be surprised when it ends up being run by the greedy.

None of your examples actually use intellectual property of McDonald’s, ram or milk products.

It’s like selling your own burgers with less calories and calling them Big Macs and selling them next door from McDonald’s store. You can’t do that according to law

I don't see your point. You can't use the disks without already possessing a license to use the disks. Without a license, the disks are useless - unless you buy a license.

It's not like he was giving people keygens and cracks. He was just giving them the disc, burned from an ISO available for free on Microsoft's website, for the price of the blank medium used - and then giving people the information they needed to use their existing license rather than purchase a new one.

His crime appears to have been limiting Microsoft's ability to get people to pay for excessive licenses.

He was taking the restore media, burning it onto discs _with official Microsoft and Dell logos on them_ and then _selling them to computer refurbishers who would then include them with PCs they were selling._ In other words, people were buying PCs with these counterfeit restore discs passed off as actual Dell/Microsoft product.

But your example also isn’t what happened. A more accurate Big Mac example would be McDonald’s is giving away Big Macs, so you go and get a free Big Mac, and then give that Big Mac to your friend. At that point McDonald’s cries that you’re giving away counterfeit Big Macs.

An even more accurate Big Mac example would be McDonald’s is giving away Big Macs in locked boxes placed at every street corner, but you need to pay for the keys to the box. So you let people know that the keys that they paid for earlier are still valid and can still be used, and you show them how. McDonald's cries foul because they just expected people to buy new keys.

How about this analogy: McDonald’s sells counterfeit Windows CDs. Microsoft’s licensing scheme has nothing to do with copyright law. McDonald’s rightfully loses in court.

The end.

This gentleman is going to jail for making copies of something on a website. I thought Google et al won the right to cache copies of websites without a license. I browse to Google and it does this on a massive scale. Except for the labels, that appears to be exactly what he did. Larger issues in play here and I hope this is not the end of the story.

Also, a 15 month prison sentence for this fictitious price per CD? Really?

More like filling and reselling old printer cartridges.

But these examples are not good because the value for software is in the license really. Microsoft distributes the binaries of win10 for free, it is the license they make people buy. So it is rather a weak case for Microsoft.

> microsoft isn’t pressing charges against him in this case.

“These sales of counterfeit operating systems,” Microsoft lawyer Bonnie MacNaughton wrote to the judge, “displaced Microsoft’s potential sales of genuine operating systems.” But Lundgren’s disks had no licenses and were intended for computers that already had licenses."

I’m really confused on what a “counterfeit operating system” would be. The only thing I can think of is some Linux distro made to look like Windows.

Nowadays counterfeit means the vendor says it's counterfeit. The burden is on the buyer to prove it's not

the [28,000] disks had "labels nearly identical to the discs provided by Dell for its computers and had the Windows and Dell logos," the Times wrote. As a result, Lundgren pleaded guilty to two of 21 charges, conspiracy and copyright infringement. He told the paper, "If I had just written 'Eric's Restore Disc' on there, it would have been fine."

But, to be fair, they are byte for byte the same. It'd be one thing to use the trademarks on something that wasn't originally Microsoft's (or maybe had modified it).

But this isn't a ghost shift Louis Vuitton bag, it's literally exactly the same. Using Microsoft's trademark isn't misrepresenting the product.

> you can have a business model that is ethically and morally wrong without getting into jail

Rule of law. You go to jail for breaking the law, not for being unethical or immoral. Societies which forget this distinction fall fast. (Legislation, turning morals and ethics into laws, is the intermediating process your complaint more properly addresses.)

There is no law violated here.

Most copyright jursidictions make a difference for non-commercial copyrigth infringement and commercial copyright infringement. Most of them put commercial copyright infringement in the criminal offence category.

The law violation is akin to being ticketed for jaywalking across an empty road.

The court ignored expert witness testimony that the disks were useless without a valid license and came up with a ludicrous amount.

The defendants belief was that many customers weren't knowledgeable enough to download restore images from the internet. He was selling them to used computer shops so they could provide them to their customers as a courtesy.

He charged $0.25 per disc, and had 28,000. So his total would have been $7k? He eventually sold them for less than $5k. Not any kind of windfall profit.

Given you can download those restore images for free, what exactly was the copy right infringement?

> The court ignored expert witness testimony

Do we know why? Courts don't throw out testimony for no reason.

In any case, from what I understand the calculation of value principally factors into the fine. The jail time results from the defendant selling disks with others' logos on them.

It wasn't thrown out, the judge ignored it.

Another commentor dug up more detailed information, which intimated that the defendant wouldn't have made $80,000 worth of discs that had no value.

> the defendant wouldn't have made $80,000 worth of discs that had no value

To be fair, arguing that someone you sold has no value is a bit hare-brained.

All that said, this is a side show. The criminal sentencing resulted, principally, from his using others' logos without permission on a product he sold. The combination of infringement and commerce is apparently something our laws are paranoid about.

Trademarks are the most important kind of intellectual property law, not for the owners of the trademark, but for the public.

It protects you from shoddy fakes that do stuff like install malware (which other counterfeiters might have tried if the law were more lax on counterfeits) or stuff not following safety guidelines (like fake chargers that burn your house down).

Well enforced trademark law means that you as a buyer can investigate a seller and know what you're getting based on their reputation. And well enforced trademark law means that you as a seller are incentivized to protect your brand by making good/safe products.

EDIT: you can argue copyright or patents are bad, but fundamentally I cannot see the world be a better place without trademark laws in some form.

That he's not very good at turning a profit doesn't take away from the fact that he engaged in copyrigth violation as part of business, which tips it into a criminal offence.

I agree that the US system is fucked up when it imprisons people who haven't committed violent crime.

These images where provided by Microsoft for Free and are still available on their website. To use them you need to burn them to disks thus by providing them Microsoft is implicitly giving you that right.

Without a licence which he was not providing they are useless.

You're missing the whole crux of the story. The supposed law broken here (none, actually) is based on multiple judges being absolutely clueless about technology and refusing the regard the testimony of an expert witness who was trying to set the first judge straight.

The other thing that makes this story different than most the others you hear about is that there wasn't multiple layers of indirection and middle-management working on vague ideas of what was wanted by their executive management (wink-wink-nudge-nudge).

That's one of the sad truths about life. Those that break the law, or do things seen as unsavory, take pains to hide their actions, motivations, and responsibility. Those attempting to do good that inadvertently break the law don't take those steps because they didn't think they were doing anything wrong, or that if people thought they were they could of course explain away the misunderstanding.

What you're left with is this, where the majority of corporate malfeasance goes unpunished or severely under-punished, but the accidental minor criminal gets jail time. It's definitely a failure of the legal system, but how do you address the fact that those that worry about being caught up in the legal system will be more prepared for if they eventually are?

> The supposed law broken here (none, actually) is based on multiple judges being absolutely clueless about technology

The problem is we criminally charge commercial infringement. The defendant put others' logos on disks he sold. This shouldn't result in jail time, but that's what the law says. The problem isn't the court, it's the law.

> The problem isn't the court, it's the law.

>The judge said he disregarded Weadock’s testimony. “I don’t think anybody in that courtroom understood what a restore disk was,” Lundgren said.

Oh, I think there was a problem with the court.

> The judge said he disregarded Weadock’s testimony

That testimony seems irrelevant to the charge which resulted in the jail time. Theoretically valueless or not, the discs were sold with an infringing logo. That combination--infringement and commercial intent--is a crime under our laws.

Gross negligence with severe dude effects and sexual harassment could easily fall in a criminal category.

Sexual harassment can and does frequently rise to the level of criminal conduct. Dave McClure's behavior, which he will face no legal repercussions for, comes to mind.

Wells Fargo CEO defrauded millions of people and didn't go to jail.

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