IPTV Pirate Must Pay £963K or 88 Month Prison Sentence Becomes 168 Months
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Nobody goes to jail when it's Apple v Microsoft.
When it is Apple v Microsoft or similar it is generally not willful infringement. Whichever side is being accused of infringement generally believes that either they did not copy from the other company, or that what they copied from the other company was not covered by copyright, or that their copying was covered by fair use, or their copying was covered by a license agreement they have with the copyright holder.
Willfulness is an element of criminal copyright infringement.
This is false. The climate 'change' movement is 100% financed by these sort of entities -- to what end is an open question but it's not to save the planet and definitely not to save you or me.
> privacy
You are correct in that nobody fights for YOUR privacy but you will find all sorts of companies and governments protecting THEIR privacy with your money.
Privacy is essential for sanity like the saying goes but the current plan seems to be to deny people privacy and make them crazy, meaning led around by their emotions, and consequently more easily controllable.
The problem with that is (1) human lifespan places an upper limit on jail time, and (2) the possible severity of money crimes has a very very very large range.
Even if we made murder and rape always result in life sentences, and put the most severe money crimes at just under that, because of the range of severity possible with money crimes I think we'd end up with a fairly large value for money crimes required to get enough jail time to actually discourage doing that crime.
Another way to look at it is from the bottom instead of the top. How big should a money crime be to earn you a year in jail? That threshold should be a small enough that people don't find it worthwhile to just alternate doing that crime and then spending a year in jail over and over.
As the amount of money made in the crime goes up, so too does the necessary jail time to make alternating doing the crime and serving your jail time less lucrative than earning an honest living. Because of the large range of possible financial crimes you necessarily end up with it possible to get long sentences.
> In broad terms punishment may be expected to affect deterrence in one of two ways. First, by increasing the certainty of punishment, potential offenders may be deterred by the risk of apprehension. For example, if there is an increase in the number of state troopers patrolling highways on a holiday weekend, some drivers may reduce their speed in order to avoid receiving a ticket. Second, the severity of punishment may influence behavior if potential offenders weigh the consequences of their actions and conclude that the risks of punishment are too severe.
Jail time can reduce crime by a third mechanism (I'm not sure if this would be considered "deterrence" or something else but to the people the crimes would be committed against it doesn't really matter) which does not involve any decisions on the part of the person, rational or not.
Namely, during their time in jail their opportunities for committing crimes are greatly reduced. Consider someone who would normally rob one bank every 6 months. If that person spends 10 years in jail every time they are caught, and is caught within a month after each robbery, they are going to commit under 10 bank robberies over their lifetime.
If they only spend 1 year in jail after every robbery they could commit they could do 80 or more robberies over their lifetime.
Whether the cost of keeping them in jail 10 times as long is worth it for a nearly order of magnitude reduction in the number of robberies they commit is worth it is an entirely different question.
If white-collar crime is big enough to where thousands of people lose their jobs, that is real societal harm and should be sentenced accordingly. But if someone decreases the profits of a monopoly from $5 billion to $4.999 billion, I'm a little less sympathetic.
> Over a period of more than 10 years
> Precisely when King began serving his initial prison sentence of seven years and four months is unclear but given the June 2022 instruction that he cannot travel abroad, assuming that he served substantially less than the 88-month sentence imposed in 2019 seems reasonable.
They made £5M over 10 years and the main guy actually spent 3 or fewer years in prison.
Ultimately this seems exceedingly reasonable to me. Granted I’m from the US and I’m not familiar at all with the justice system in the UK.
He is presumably out on some kind of supervised release which is probably good. He had the motivation and ability to execute on an admittedly illegal business — he can now put those same skills to work doing something productive and the supervision will presumably make sure he isn’t committing fraud or anything.
If they qualified for a drug rehabilitation program (RDAP) they could get that down to 5 years assuming they documented their addiction and how it influenced their crimes early in their legal case.
With some of the new First Step Act and similar changes it's theoretically possible to reduce the sentence by more if they participated in qualifying rehabilitative programs, but many of the federal prisons don't actually offer the programs yet despite lying and saying they do to meet legislative due dates.
The 'additional' time for not paying £963k is designed to be coercive. The court has, in theory, decided that not only does he owe the money but he can be expected to find it. And the prison in default is supposed to encourage him to do so. Importantly, it's not an either/or: he still owes the money even if he serves the default sentence.
Like, it sounds like this guy might actually have all that money from the activity.
Contrariwise illegal streaming has never directly killed anyone and illegal streamer gangs aren’t doing drivebys or otherwise murdering people.
> the trafficking business also adds considerable marginal violence
Because of it's black market situation and the war that the DEA wages. Other countries have shown pathways to regulation where the dust settles.
I don't know anything about UK law, but what on earth is a "private prosecution"? And it can result in prison time???
In USA you have a criminal prosecution brought by the state. Anything else would be a civil lawsuit and those don't result in jail time.
This is possible because otherwise, you are at the whim of the Crown (or in the USA, the District Attorney) as to whether or not a crime gets prosecuted. It doesn't seem equitable for a crime to be committed but never prosecuted because the government doesn't care, or doesn't have the resources to do so. The same standards of evidence apply.
It's rarely invoked (but not unheard of), and given how topical Chesa Boudin is at the moment, you can see the reasoning.
The same thing it is in the United States. When you're taken to court by something other than the state.
If Kentucky sues you, it's a public prosecution. If I sue you, it's a private prosecution.
Google could have explained this.
.
> In USA you have a criminal prosecution brought by the state.
Not usually, no.
.
> Anything else would be a civil lawsuit
A private prosecution is a civil lawsuit if it's a lawsuit.
Not all prosecutions are lawsuits. If I take you to court for breaking a contract, your private prosecution will be a lawsuit. If I take you to court for shooting me, it will be different.
> > In USA you have a criminal prosecution brought by the state.
> Not usually, no.
Yes always, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Harding_(forger)
Hanged in 1805 for forging the tax stamp on the decks of cards he sold.
I'm not condoning piracy, but does that seem a bit farcical?
I tend to read that as: we won't get as much money and will cry into armani suits as we drive our lamborghinis into the sunset.
We didn't get as much money as we estimated to have. We blame that one person on losing £963k that we never had, but we imaged being entitled to having it and it felt nice to our shareholders.
It's crazy that gang members who stab people by tesco for £20 will get less than 1 year in prison.
Following that logic, you shouldn't go to prison for tax dodging, it's not like one person not paying taxes is going to change anyone's life.
(Keeping in mind for the rich, a lot of tax dodging is legal, like non-dom status, so...)
But, if you never really go to prison for not paying taxes because there isn't really a direct victim, why would you bother paying the back taxes or the fines levied? Like, if all that'll happen is they'll assess more fines, and the penalty for not paying the fines is they'll assess more fines, why bother paying any at all?
> if you never really go to prison
Yeah, I didn't say "never".
> a simple question: did they ruin anyone's life? If no, the system shouldn't ruin their lives either.
So not paying the fine being a separate crime doesn't really matter. The rubrik proposed is "is it ruining someone's life" which you'd have a hard time pointing to any particular individual directly harmed by someone not paying a fine. So then why would it be OK to jail someone for not paying the fine levied on not paying their taxes, but its not OK to jail someone for deliberately not paying their taxes? Both instances have the same theoretical victim of all people who receive benefit from the government. It seems to me if you're willing to jail someone for not paying fines you should really be fine with jailing someone for willfully not paying their taxes. Its ultimately the same theoretical victim having the same theoretical harm done to them, less potential revenue for the state to do its thing.
Putting people in prison when other remedies exist is not cost-effective. Unless you run inhumane, hell-hole prisons (not saying the UK ones are great, but there's worse). Eventually, yes, prison is the last option (again, in the UK).
So is putting an IPTV pirate in prison for 14 years a good solution? Just from a tax-payer perspective, that seems dumb to me. Similarly, is putting a tax evader in prison a good solution? Not initially, no.
Separately, we can also ask whether it's just for an IPTV pirate to get a higher prison sentence than e.g. most of the perpetrators in the Rochdale child sex abuse ring. For one of these crimes, the wronged party can be made "whole" with money. For the other, not so much. I believe this is what OP is driving at.
I don't think prosecution of capitalism is uncalled for here.
Punishing people? That's literally unscientific and automatically socially damaging.
I'd do the time and keep the cash.
Plus you get released around half way through (or less) so that like ends up being almost £300k a year. Seems like an easy choice.
You've been for an extended period in the UK prison system before?
If not, I don't think your comment carries much value.
And when told to pay 5% of it back, HN erupts into "the warezer told me this is the little guy being punished, let's try to whatabout this into other crimes, capitalism is evil"
I can't believe HN is so blindly anti-capitalist these days. Really wish I could use some laughing emoji
I get putting away those guilty of violent crime, but for what amounts to a crime with no real victims (yes there are technically victims, but not victims like there are in a rape/murder case). I wonder if he will have the case heard by a higher court and have the sentence reduced, because 7-14 years is bananas.
I think the sentence is way too extreme, but we're talking about a bit more than "pirating a stream". They ran a for-profit piracy operation for over 10 years, selling subscriptions to "more than 1,000 pubs, clubs and homes throughout England and Wales".
It's the difference between someone copying some photo you took and posting it on twitter as 'theirs' vs setting up a business selling t-shirts, notebooks and iPhone cases with your picture on.
14 years might still be bananas, but let's not imply he just pirated some steam for a little illegal personal watching.
Cry me a river, Sky Sports, but the harm caused by these men is barely a blip on your bottom line.
Nope. But that is what you might believe if you try to turn to Kim Dot Com of a warezing empire to understand this.
As if the thieves make reliable news, y'know?
I’m wrong. Debtor’s prisons were abolished in 1833. This way. The ACLU is worried about the effective debtor prison of arresting people for failure to show up at hearings about their debt is what the ACLU is worried about here.