He shouldn't be in prison, but it's a well established bit of law that copyright infringement as a business is a criminal offence, and not just a civil tort. This is present is several jurisdictions.
Can we have this kind of law for privacy infringement too, please?
I personally find it abhorrent when people use the justification of "well it is well established law" as if the law is written in stone, unchangeable, the word of a god and we just have to accept it.
No the law is wrong, the law should be changed, and this is an example if why it should be changed.
Copyright law need to be massively reformed and curbed. Intellectual Privilege is no longer with in its constitutional remit, i.e to Promote useful Arts and Sciences, and instead used to destroy those very things
---Edit: thanks for the downvotes I love how every day HN becomes more and more of a echo Chamber where anyone that disagrees with the popular (generally Pro Large Tech Company) narrative gets downvotes and has their voice suppressed since once a post get negative votes the "You are posting to fast" throttle kicks in and prevents the person from responding
In response, yes laws change. It was once well established that separate but equal was equal; and blacks could have their own bathrooms and drinking fountains. It was once legal to employee 13 year old boys as factory workers.
Disney's big items are well past their trademark expiration dates. Mickey Mouse should be public domain soon, but Disney is large enough they keep lobbying for laws that extend their IP well beyond what it should be.
We do need copyright reform, especially in cases like this where the physical disks aren't even made anymore.
This includes making commercial copyright violation a criminal, rather than civil, offence. It also includes things like making circumvention of technical protection measure illegal.
It's wide ranging, it removes freedoms, it causes economic harm.
> It's wide ranging, it removes freedoms, it causes economic harm.
And how exactly is that? The government didn't go after him because he was distributing pirated media or software to his friends but he set up a manufacturing unit, deceived customs to profit off the operations. Not to "recycle and reduce waste", not to help you or me.
You want to back-up DVD or bluray discs? Might be illegal where you are.
You want to format shift CD to MP3? Might be illegal where you are.
You bought thousands of CDs, and want to pay a service to format shift them to MP3? Probably illegal.
etc etc etc.
You never see someone getting locked up or fined for copying discs for personal use. All of the cases that I'm aware of involved distribution and profiting.
The measures were intended to deter those profiting off the work of others like in this case. Although, I agree that the legal approach sets a bad precedent and unfortunate collateral damage to people who genuinely buy something and face the same deterrence when they really don't have any malicious intent.
Because in most places there's a distinction between copyright infringement done as part of trade and copyright infringement for personal use - which is what I said in parent post.