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.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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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.
Don't let it fool you. Serial pirates are the biggest enemy of mankind. We should strive together to make sure they get the penalty they deserve.
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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.
Thankfully this monster is finally off the streets
National security priorities definitely in order.
My tax dollars at work‽
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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.
Just started to say I'm glad they're focusing on the important things. 🙄🤮
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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.
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Lol corporate enforcers paid by taxes
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.
They're going after Meta next for pirating terabytes of books to train their AI, right? Right??
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DVDs?? is this article from 2006?
Weirdly enough, DVDs are still by far the most popular physical format.
I still buy them, but I prefer when it's a dvd/blueray/3D (if available) combo pack.
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I'm going to go out on a limb and say this company that makes DVDs probably also makes Blu-Ray discs.
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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.
The comments (and maybe the article too, I didn’t read to the bottom) are misinformation. This guy isn’t enabling Russian hacker groups. What happened is he ripped the BluRay and posted it online. Since it got a lot of hype Russian hackers decided to use that opportunity and ship a similar file ending in .exe instead of the usual Matroska format (.mkv) you see usually with ripped BluRays. If you were around torrent communities back then you know this to be false. These are your tax dollars at work, potentially jailing someone up to 15 years for ripping a BluRay.
what kinda 2009 headline is this?
police also confiscated 50 pairs of counterfit ray-ban sunglasses and 20 lbs of zippo lighters
Plot twist. It was 1 zippo lighter, but it was a comically large one. It just weighs 20 lbs.
At that point wouldn't it just be a really shitty flamethrower?
It could be a good one, you don't know the details.
Well, it could be a flamethrower wit ha novelty zippo style casing, but if it's simply an upscaled zippo it's going to lack the pressure feed mechanism a flamethrower has to cause the fuel to 'throw' out and instead would just be a fairly sizeable flame at the opening.
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.
How does a video file contain malware. Or are people running exe files to watch a video?
If they're being shared as disk images, basically every Blu-Ray has an embedded Java program, also
tldr: people using Windows can get duped into running what is basically a Powershell / Shortcut to pwn themselves
I cock blocked them with Qbit even though I don't use Windows
tldr: people using Windows can get duped
Truth.
The video itself is a set of instructions, and when a video player interprets those instructions there is a window of opportunity.
Thankfully, no crime was committed
How "Les Misérables" of them. Jean Valjean got 19 years for stealing bread. 15 years is light in comparison.
🎶 there goes my hero 🎶
Watch him as he goes.
I knew they were going to start cracking down on piracy. They'll use it as an excuse to make vpns illegal.
Shhhhh, don't give them ideas!
Good to see them going after the real criminals…. Back in 2002.
YOU
WOULDN'T
SPIDER A
MAN
DVD?
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