Where's the kid rotting in federal prison for downloading a mp3? Does the music/movie industry not have good enough lobbyists to make an example of a torrenter?
Capital Records vs Jamie Thomas where Capital Records was awarded around 2 million in damages and Sony vs Joel Tenenbaum. These cases are not uncommon.
Those cases are extremely uncommon. In nearly every case what happened was:
1. The RIAA sent a letter telling how many songs you were distributing and offering a settlement of around $2-5 per song. Most people at this point realized that they were in fact guilty and that the RIAA had enough evidence to prove it in court and agreed to settle.
2. A small fraction ignored this or refused to settle. The RIAA then files lawsuits in some of those cases, typically over a small number of the songs that the person was distributing rather than over all the songs being distributed.
At this point most defendants would get a lawyer and be told that they will almost certainly lose and advised to settle.
3. A handful of people ignored their lawyers (or had crappy lawyers) and plowed on. Their extraordinarily bad decision making often continued during their trial. Thomas for instance lied in court and tried to destroy evidence.
This is not wise since in these suits the plaintiff is asking for statutory damages, which is a minimum of $750 per song (not per download--if you were offering 2 songs for download and they were each download 1000 times the minimum is 2 x $750, not 2000 x $750) but can go up to $30000, and it is the jury that determines the amount in that range. You really want the jury to find you sympathetic, and lying and trying to destroy evidence doesn't help with that.
4. After the inevitable victory in most cases that got far the RIAA would again offer to settle for an amount much lower than the damages awarded by the court, although higher than their original settlement offer.
I don't know how many reached this stage, but if many did most of them came to their senses and realized that appealing would probably only make it worse.
The very small number that didn't are the ones that ended up like the two cases you cited.
You want federal then take a step out and look at all the people who got 10-15 years for carrying an quarter ounce of weed. Sentencing is very selective based on who they want to make an example of and when.
Which isn't applicable to the law being proposed. Moreover if the idea is "threaten them with the full 20 years to serve as an example", then the mandatory minimum kinda works against that? If you catch some guy and then he serves 10 years, you haven't really proven much. You're just acting in line with expectations.
>You want federal then take a step out and look at all the people who got 10-15 years for carrying an quarter ounce of weed.
Source? My impression is that in basically all of those cases, it's either because:
1. the guy is a repeat offender and/or on probation
2. the guy decided to wanted to fight to the bitter end and they threw the book at them
I'm not saying either are justified, but the implication that someone will get 20 years just because he downloaded deepseek through ollama or whatever is still false.
I finally got around to watching "The Internet's Own Boy" the other day. He told his girlfriend as they were driving by the Whitehouse that didn't want to accept the plea deal and plead guilty "because felons can't work in that building" [the Whitehouse]. Oh, man, how times have changed.
Thanks for proving my point. Schwartz was offered 6 months in a minimum security prison, but he declined it because he specifically wanted a trial. Moreover that was for effectively DoSing JSTOR, a much more serious crime than some guy using a vpn to download an AI model. I don't think 6 months was justified, nor the string of crimes he was charged with, but OP's assertion that "You get less jail time for committing 34 felonies" is still false.
>During plea negotiations with Swartz's attorneys, the prosecutors offered to recommend a sentence of six months in a low-security prison if Swartz pled guilty to 13 federal crimes. Swartz and his lead attorney rejected the deal, opting instead for a trial where prosecutors would be forced to justify their pursuit of him.
It's a shame Swartz was downloading JSTOR articles to share. He could have DoS'd half the internet and gotten away scot-free if he'd been training an ML system instead.
Last time I checked, entering an (unlocked) IT closet, using it to DoS a site and continuing to do so despite being IP banned a few times is slightly more serious than "some kid downloading a model".
Yes, but all the way back to the top of this specific thread was 34 felonies got 0 months. You're now comparing 6 months against a hypothetical where nothing has actually happened.
I think the issue under discussion is whether or not this kind of law is applied gently and with consideration to seriousness, or whether it tends to be used as a club to make an example of people. I think Swartz is seen as an example of it being used as a club to make an example of people.
>I think the issue under discussion is whether or not this kind of law is applied gently and with consideration to seriousness, or whether it tends to be used as a club to make an example of people.
I'm not sure how you got that impression from the original exchange of:
>>[...] You get less jail time for committing 34 felonies.
>up to 20 years. Realistically some kid downloading a model would get probation [...]
I didn't get that impression from the original exchange, I got it from the thread I am responding to involving Aaron Swartz being given as a counter-example to the last point, and inferring why somebody would use Aaron Swartz as a counter-example.
Seems I was right in that inference, given other responses to the thread since.
I think it's not about examples. Every attorney graduating with a quarter million in student debt that gets a low pay government job is trying to punch a lot of notches in their belt so that they can be picked up by a major law firm with a pretty paycheck. They'd be stupid or magnanimous to look the other way on easy wins.
This is a good point. If one thing didn’t happen then a different unrelated thing cannot happen. You would think that the reason for nobody being in jail for downloading mp3s would be that there is no criminal law against downloading mp3s but actu
Pirating is not a criminal offense in America. It is in other parts of the world, like Japan, which, tangentially, is why Japanese piracy is so underground and tends to use different software stacks to the norm, cf. Perfect Dark (the filesharing program, not the game).
