- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
15 years? Wow. He could have run down multiple pedestrians, killed one of them, and used a false insurance claim to try to cover it up and gotten a third of that.
Just goes to show how horrendous this sort of crime is. I hear dvd pirates are on the same cell blocks as pedophiles in prison.
What? Really? I would have thought dvd pirates would have far worse conditions than pedophiles.
One is running some nobodies over, the other making a rich guy some pennies less rich.
Must set a precedent, y’know?
on paper
It’s making them less rich only if you assume pirated copies would’ve been sales. That’s generally not the case, and piracy can often increase sales by pirates recommending things to people who will actually buy.
People generally aren’t sentenced to the maximum penalty for a crime, so it’s not very useful to compare the maximum potential sentence for a charged crime versus the actual sentence received after conviction on another crime. The Indianapolis hit and run carried potential penalties of more than 15 years. This DVD guy will probably get less than 5.
Goes to show, he should have made a run for it and hit a bunch of people with his car. Then he’d get a reduced sentence.
Yes let’s not go after the south African literally fomenting the rise of a fashist takovet. Let’s go after the guy selling bootleg DVDs.
He shoulda just said he was training an ai model!
He didn’t get arrested for theft. He got arrested for being part of a distribution network that empowered Russian hackers.
To be clear. Copying or downloading media is not illegal. Distribution is.
Downloading is absolutely illegal, it’s just not really enforced because you need to prove criminal intent. You’re still accessing copyrighted material without a license, which is a copyright violation.
Distribution has much higher penalties and is more likely to push people to buying (harder to find copies = potentially more legal sales), so that’s where enforcement is focused.
Thankfully this monster is finally off the streets
National security priorities definitely in order.
My tax dollars at work‽
Honestly, yeah, he was enabling Russian Hackers.
Thankfully your banjo playing days are finite.
This isn’t a “piracy is bad” comment, this guy in particular was feeding media specifically to a group that repackaged malware into it.
Do you have a source for that? This article does not say that at all. It simply says that the person in question ripped Spider-Man Far From Home, that movie specifically was available from a lot of different users and locations, also had some cases where it had dangerous malware packaged, and that could have come from a Russian torrenting site. Nothing links this person directly to that malware or Russians at all.
The article says
Soon it became dangerous to download the movie, though, as popular demand for the movie quickly put a target on downloaders’ backs and scammers soon planted malware in Spider-Man movie torrents that ReasonLabs reported used the movie to “lure in as many victims as possible.”
ReasonLabs said that the malware was “likely from a Russian torrenting site.” It took over the would-be Spider-Man movie watchers’ computers without setting off Windows Defender and with the goal of cryptomining in the background for the bad actors’ benefit.
It could be that the article is misquoting people and displaying a Bias, but I wouldn’t know.
Right, but that specifically is not linking Steven Hale. So your original assertion that he is selling/supporting Russian malware is not substantiated by this article.
Exactly. That will have to be proved in court, and just making something available for anyone to use as they please is not “working with Russian hackers.” They would need to prove actual collusion to make the malware-ridden version more accessible.
Glad my tax dollars aren’t going to waste /s
They are actually working as intended ie proetcting property rights of the parasite class.
Once this little nugget clicks, american regime makes a lot more sense.
Lol corporate enforcers paid by taxes
DVDs?? is this article from 2006?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say this company that makes DVDs probably also makes Blu-Ray discs.
You can just say bluray
Fails to mention he also was selling the discs online.
But they want to sentence him for 15 years for this, even though his actions likely saved lives during the height of COVID if the allegations are true; if they aren’t true, he harmed nobody because those 10 million people wouldn’t have seen the movies in theaters anyway.
They’re going after Meta next for pirating terabytes of books to train their AI, right? Right??
He really wasn’t. The media he distributed came with Russian malware.
But I collect russian malware. I was expecting that release. Where else can I find that? It’s gone now, and the collector’s value has skyrocketed.
🎶 there goes my hero 🎶
Watch him as he goes.
YOU WOULDN'T SPIDER A MAN
How “Les Misérables” of them. Jean Valjean got 19 years for stealing bread. 15 years is light in comparison.
stole “numerous ‘pre-release’ DVDs and Blu-rays” between February 2021 and March 2022. He then allegedly “ripped” the movies, "bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying
How? Especially pre-release bluray?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Hey, that’s the combination to my luggage!
They should demand thorough answers from this vigilante and put them on YouTube so all the world understands not to do this!
No, i mean, bluray DRM is partly bound to keys and the player. Even blurays from 2020 often fail with libbluray and a newish player. I see no way to rip a pre-release bluray.
DVD is a bit more tame with only (a simpler) AACS and no BD+ VM on the drive.
For Details, look here.
MakeMKV? I don’t understand.
With libredrive flashed on your player. Let the player decrypt for you, and then copy the decrypted stream, no need to break any encryption…
I wish it wasn’t so ungodly difficult to flash a drive in Linux. Proper documentation would be nice too. I do have a flashed drive however.
Good to see them going after the real criminals…. Back in 2002.