I'm concerned our justice systems is expending enormous resources investigating and prosecuting these cases as felony crimes on behalf of the MPAA and RIAA lobbies (which have a revolving door of former fed prosecutors as employees/lobbyists). The cases are more properly pursued in civil court where the pirates should be sued for the damages they cause (not agreeing with MPAA's damage assessment, that's for the judge/jury).<p>Mis-using international racketeering laws and cooperation agreements between agencies to pursue online software pirates is not what these systems were created for. Another example is Kim Dotcom. He may indeed be liable for significant damages (I don't know) but the MPAA designed their attack knowing that the prosecution itself would inflict massive punishment (ending the company, incarcerating or confining the execs) before it ever got to court. It's a clear abuse of the global justice system and a waste of its resources.<p>And all of that is before we even get to the moral and ethical debate about the true damages from purely electronic, not-for-profit media piracy clubs. Studies have shown that frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers. And it's also been shown that the majority of users will pay reasonable prices for convenient media access via subscription or purchase (Netflix, Spotify, ITunes, etc). Despite "crying poor", the music industry is now back to making more than it ever did in the era of $18 CDs, with more (and happier) customers.
"Bridi, 50, was arrested on Sunday in Cyprus on an INTERPOL Red Notice. Correa, 36, was arrested yesterday in Olathe, Kansas, where he will appear in federal court. Ahmad, 39, was not arrested and is still at large."<p>An INTERPOL Red Notice!
You'd think these are terrorists, human traffickers or drug lords.
Nope, they share films before the films are supposed to come out.<p>I understand that one should not try to profit from piracy. I also understand that the people who are orchestrating the operations that lead to films being leaked ahead of time should indeed be stopped, but isn't this all a bit overly dramatic, when there are real problems to be dealt with in the world?
19 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the then-Attorney General appeared before the media to proudly announce the conclusion of the largest operation in DoJ history.<p>It was the destruction of a warez group.<p>In the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks, the most important thing on the DoJ agenda was not to follow up on any of the numerous intelligence leads warning that Islamist terrorists were planning to ram multiple airliners into multiple buildings, but rather to shut down an organization whose chosen line of activity has never been demonstrated to harm anyone.<p>Putting the factually contraindicated <i>feeling</i> of the software publishing cartels that they're somehow losing money above the actual lives of actual people is a very f'ed up choice of priorities.
Wow, that's a whole lot of work put into this, and I don't understand why... What do these scene members have to gain?<p>If anything, they're doing the media companies a service, free viral campaigns. Without pirated content, a lot of people would never hear or care about their movies, TV shows, music. If they can't afford it, they won't buy it anyway.<p>Microsoft and Adobe seem to have realized this, and now they're making things accessible to most people, so many ex-pirates used to their products are buying them. Not so for the media companies. Why does Netflix USA/UK/etc have different content? Why do games have region locks and ridiculous DRM?<p>All for the risk of being accused of fraud, causing "massive losses", and prison time. I guess sticking it to the MAFIAA feels nice, but is it worth the risk?
SAPRKS is a huge loss. All of the groups that were named were quite prolific and released exceptionally high-quality files, but SPARKS especially.<p>Just goes to show how utterly broken and cross-contaminated the copyright and justice systems are. These groups should be lauded as heroes, not hunted down like criminals.
There is only one reason that I've ever had to use bittorrent. It turns out that some musicals are not available through streaming because the copyright assignment wasn't set up correctly and nobody has been able to come to an agreement on how to split the revenue.<p>Movies from <i>My Fair Lady</i> to <i>Bullets Over Broadway</i> are affected. You can go onto Netflix, Amazon, and so on, and none can let you watch. They can only ship you a DVD.<p>After literally failing to find anyone who could take my money, I went to bittorrent. (And had to VPN to pretend not to be in the USA.)
Leaking pre-release movies is just a dangerous thing to do, and even a hypothetical producer/distributor's organization with the weakest stance on piracy one could imagine would go after them. Obtaining copies of unreleased media involves a direct attack to compromise people connected to a company. Even from my anti-copyright position, it's exactly the same as infiltrating a company to find out trade secrets or things that may influence future stock movements.<p>And there's no doubt it is damaging. So many movies are overbudgeted garbage, and are going to recoup as much as they are going to recoup during their first weekend, before the word gets out that the movie is terrible. All the marketing (which as a rule of thumb costs as much as the film) is focused on that weekend, including getting friendly reviews published, or deciding on a strategy of keeping the film from reviewers altogether. A credible rumor getting around a week before the release that the movie is crap means $10s of millions in losses, and layoffs.<p>I don't believe in copyright, but this is getting employees of a company (or its contractors, or those who have signed agreements with it in order to get screeners) to steal from the company. This is good when it is internal whistleblowing on crime or corruption, even better when it is government and the only reason for secrecy is to avoid embarrassment or accountability. There's very little detectable public good in exposing an X-Men movie a week before it hits the theaters.
The justice system is complete crap, the US government doesn't have the ability to deal with piracy because it is international.<p>This doesn't work the way people think it does, there is literally no justice involved. The CIA is used to using movies and television as a pathway for manipulating the American population. There is a very long history of this happening and the people they use (yes use) to do this aren't making the revenues they are used to making.<p>As a result they are resorting to ugly tactics like taking over companies to play psychological games with people in online piracy and gaslighting people who run piracy servers. Several people who run piracy sites have been gaslit to the point of suggestibility and that usually ends in the person committing suicide or dying in strange ways. Deimos (the founder of demonoid) and Aaron Swartz were targets of this kind of treatment and almost none of the people who know them are aware of this because it is all psychological.<p>The way this is handled in reality is brutal psychological operations (triggering schizophrenia, learned dependency, triggering PTSD, gaslighting, etc), never believe anything you hear about the American government prosecuting crimes like online piracy, it is not handled in the courts. When you see someone who was perfectly normal and has their life fall apart out of nowhere until they are worn down physically or psychologically it is almost always the US government in one form or another. Sometimes it is intentional and sometimes it is unintentional (i.e. some part of the government gets tricked into running a psychological operation on someone), this isn't conspiracy it is being done in broad daylight everyday all over the country because it only has meaning to the person being targeted.
Vast majority of comments here are hilarious. Piracy is a crime, deal with it. You don't have a right to content made for a profit without paying for it. If you don't agree with the price or the distribution method, don't consume the content, problem solved.<p>The argument that resources should be spent on "real crime" is equally silly. These organizations can and do put immense resources into all other forms of crime. They shouldn't choose to ignore one class of it because it's personally convenient to label it "harmless".<p>I'd suggest if you find yourself defending pirates that you actually go and create something worth pirating and see how you feel.
Is this anything other than neo-colonialism? How can the power of the US copyright lobby extend quite so completely into Europe. Imagine Norway wanted a bunch of US kids arrested due to their, or their lobbyists, pet peeve.<p>I used to be passive about it now I am anti-copyright, that has been the effect of the overreach by the copyright lobby, they have hardened me against them.
Absolutely ridiculous to spend so much time and effort prosecuting crimes that have, at most, a marginal effect on the bottom lines of AAA film studios. [1]<p>[1]: <a href="https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-study/" rel="nofollow">https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s...</a> (check the linked pdf for the full study)
To be honest, I don't feel bad for these people at all. Film studios, the MPAA, RIAA, etc. are pretty scummy, but the overwhelming majority of pirates are there to get the latest Disney / Marvel movie without having to pay. And these groups are serving that interest.<p>I'm sure there will be plenty of comments here calling out ethical gray areas or valid cases for torrenting a movie - those no longer for sale, etc. But you're kidding yourself if you think this is the motivation behind most illegal downloads.<p>At the end of the day, these studios are spending enormous sums of money to produce content and they deserve the copyright and distribution rights that are being egregiously violated. Unless you have a good reason, you should be paying it own/watch it and the government is in the right for enforcing it.
Is there substantial "no IP whatsoever" constituency somewhere? Is there a movement or party advocating this? Are there jurisdictions with essentially this framework in place?<p>I'm curious to see what it looks like.<p>I have trouble imagining the internet tolerating any other configuration 100 years from now.
Here are the direct links to the 3 indictments:<p><a href="https://torrentfreak.com/images/1-20-cr-00018-US-v-George-Bridi-SPARKS-indictment-unsealed-200108.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://torrentfreak.com/images/1-20-cr-00018-US-v-George-Br...</a>
<a href="https://torrentfreak.com/images/1-20-cr-00018-US-v-Umar-Ahmad-SPARKS-superceding-indictment-unsealed-200825.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://torrentfreak.com/images/1-20-cr-00018-US-v-Umar-Ahma...</a>
<a href="https://torrentfreak.com/images/1-20-cr-00018-US-v-Jonatan-Correa-SPARKS-superceding-indictment-unsealed-200825.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://torrentfreak.com/images/1-20-cr-00018-US-v-Jonatan-C...</a>
>Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what
>they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will
never forgive me for.
>I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all ...
>after all, we're all alike.
-The Mentor