US Court Gives 15 Months' Jail, $415,900 Fine For Game Piracy 525
An anonymous reader writes "A Florida man has been sentenced to 15 months in prison and ordered to pay US$415,900 in restitution for selling video game systems that were preloaded with more than 75 pirated copies of games." If that fine sounds a bit steep, note that his profits on the devices "exceeded $390,000."
Re:Term? (Score:4, Informative)
They would have gotten at least extended to 28 years. Hell, Nintendo is STILL selling them. People are STILL buying them. IMO they deserve those sales when they manage to make something that stays relevant for such a long time. Most games just fade into obscurity within maybe 3 years.
Besides, if they were really free for everyone it wouldn't be a selling point to pre-load them on a console.
Re:Term? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm just sayin...
Re:For artworks, a copyright can be held for 70 ye (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry but that's some bullshit argument.
Look at the artists that DO in fact still perform after more than 20 years (which aren't that many) and look at how they make their cash. Take The Rolling Stones for example. They wrote a great deal of songs but only a few of them were actual "hits". If their music became public domain, like say, every kid that picks up a guitar learns how to play one or two of them, their business model should be fucked.
But instead their popularity is unbroken and people pay hundreds of dollars for concert tickets to see them live. I bet the "Running Noses" cover band doesn't make millions of dollars just because they now could legally perform any old song.
You've been braindwashed by the shit definition of what performance and "business" means for the music industry. All these guys care about is to acquire rights to something, lock it away in a drawer and let it collect money for them. That's about the whole "business model" of the industry.
Meanwhile, some people have realized that music is intrinsically connected with the person playing it, people want to see Mick fucking Jagger sing on stage in "The Mummy 4" and not to some stupid kid that knows how to play Jumpin Jack flash half way through.
If you are actually the composer of a piece of music then I would assume that you are a talented musician and that you should be able to defend your work artistically against copiers. If you are not that talented and can't keep making better music than people trying to copy your stuff
End of story, no musician needs to collect royalties for a song they wrote 70 years ago. Usually they are dead by then. Copyright lawyers and relatives on the other hand do want copyright terms to be as long as possible, of course. If you sat in one place, never doing anything but you had that slip of paper in the drawer that guaranteed you money
Bullshit I tell you, Bullshit I say. Wake up.
Good day, fine sir.
Re:I'm okay with this. (Score:2, Informative)
no in retail profit is a percentage of the sale price, not the purchase price, so that would be 50% profit
Re:For artworks, a copyright can be held for 70 ye (Score:2, Informative)
You forget that the music industry is nothing more than a giant, steaming pile of shit. Let's assume for a second that most of the people who perform songs are actually the ones who composed them. People want to see Mick fucking Jagger play/sing/whateverhedoes "his" songs, yes, but, more importantly, Mick fucking Jagger wants to see Mick fucking Jagger doing that.
A long time ago, when music was actually good and thought-provoking, nothing brought a composer more joy than to hear other people performing his/her works, adding their own subtleties and nuances to the interpretation of the pieces. Copyrighting with respect to music, I'm assuming, was initially supposed to help protect that intangible thing we call "creation." Now copyrighting seems to be promoting a ruthless selfishness in the music industry by discouraging even the performance of another person's works.
Obviously, this is not a cut-and-dried issue, and you'll find various exceptions to musicians' views on copyrighting, but I seem to find that performances of others' works (not so much in the performing arts, but more in the world of "bands" who play "concerts" with "tickets" involved) is viewed as some sort of infringement of copyright.
I find it hilarious, personally, because 99% of songs written in the past 40+ years are so mind-numbingly shallow -- both musically and emotionally -- that they're not worth all the trouble musicians go through to make sure that their name is definitely associated with those songs.
An aside on fonts (Score:3, Informative)
This is somewhat off-topic, but since you brought it up:
... go to any of the font collection websites, and you'll find all their fonts are free.
Well, no. The likes of Linotype and Adobe charge significant amounts for their fonts, and the major font collection web sites usually have deals with these big names. You can often buy the fonts cheaper through a reseller than direct, but it's still not free of charge.
These guys are in business, and as anyone who has ever tried it can testify, making a good font is a lot of hard work that a professional font designer usually expects to be paid for. On the other hand, the fonts from these sources are so much better than the cheaposoft offerings that make up the freebie font sites that serious font users are willing to pay for them. There is the occasional rare gem that someone is kind enough to give away for free, but rare is the correct word.
Actually, fonts are an interesting area in terms of IP rights. Some places, including the US, explicitly do not permit reserving certain types of rights in connection with the design of a font, on the basis that there is a risk of impairing communication if that approach is taken to its logical conclusion and that is too high a price to pay just to incentivise creation of new fonts. But copyright normally still applies to a font file itself, so if you want to create a clone of some commercial font you can do it (at least in the US) but you basically have to redo all the hard work from scratch. That seems fair enough, given the immense amount of time and effort by highly skilled people that goes into producing even a single professional grade font.