P2P Collection Costs Man Huge Fine, Suspended Sentence
Written by enigmax on July 04, 2009A man who downloaded 12,591 music tracks, 426 movies and 16 full TV-series has been sentenced in France. The police searched the 55 year-old’s house in connection with an unrelated matter and stumbled across his collection. The man was sentenced to 33,000 euros ($46,200) in damages and a 2 month suspended jail sentence.
A 55 year old man from Vannes, France, is counting the cost after a police search on his property turned up his pirate media collection.
Back in 2006 the police, who were conducting a search linked to an unrelated fraud case, stumbled across the man’s sizable pirate media collection which included 12,591 MP3 files, 426 movies, 16 full TV-series and dozens of items of pirated software.
During the April hearing the retired IT expert said in his defense that it took him a whole year to accumulate the collection by using eMule on the eD2k network, but it was intended for private, not commercial use. He also told the court that he believed he had been acting within the law.
Unfortunately for the man, the legal system wasn’t sympathetic. A court in Vannes has just handed him a 2 month suspended jail sentence coupled with 33,000 euro (apprx $46,200) in damages.
Lawyers for 19 plaintiffs including the National Federation of Film Distributors, Sony, Paramount, Sacem and SCPP demanded between 1 and 2 euros compensation for each illicit MP3 and between 7 and 12.50 euros for each movie. It is believed that SCPP will collect the largest share of around 17,000 euros.
In a statement the man’s lawyer said: “There is stuff like this on all kids’ computers right now,” while pointing out that many of the files had been downloaded by the defendant’s children.
In January 2007, a court in Nantes also sentenced a file-sharer to two months suspended prison sentence for being caught in possession of 400 downloaded movies.
Previously: Limewire Gets More Serious About BitTorrent
Next: OpenBitTorrent Tracker Muscles In On The Old Pirate Bay
175 Responses
Damn, that’s a lot of stuff.
How does this help anyone, except fill the pockets of some fat, bald, greedy record/network company?
**boss
:P
Uh-oh. Note to self: don’t give the police a reason to investigate my apartment…that, or hide my NAS a bit better.
Tsss…
why do they claim so little money here, where there are 12000+ songs
while for 24songs they want 1mill+
@7 Quinn, this story is in France, the $1.9mill fine to Jammie for only 24 of her 1700 illegal songs was in America and handed down by a jury of 12 of her peers; the industry didn’t ask for any specific figure.
But for artists and labels this is a very good sign.
Get caught holding illegally downloaded copyrighted files?
Pay for whatever you took.
Bingo.
Perfectly fair.
All of my storage devices were intensely reviewed for an unrelated fraud case. The authorities running the investigation couldn’t have cared less about my collection which was similar to this guy’s.
This was in the US. At least it’s a civil issue here.
Luckily in most of the civilized world, file-sharing, and having those files, is not a crime. Its a civil offense, but not a crime.
They probably wont even get a percentage of the verdict against this guy.
I wish I had a collection like that dude though.
ed2k for the win
Damn, man. 12,600 songs? I don’t even have half that, and I’ve been at it for quite the while.
Anyway. At least these guys are fair compared to the RIAA charging $80,000 per music track. Sure you might say “that doesn’t change anything!”, but it’s a more progressive stance on this.
Think about it: If this guy went on RIAA’s court, he would be fined, oh, a bit more than a billion dollars. Surely this fining thing can be eliminated in Europe before it’s taken down in the US.
i just checked and I have 13,704 Mp3s 751 Xvid Movies 60 or so HD movies and 3TB of TV Shows. FUCK THE MAFIAA!
Yeah, 15,000 songs, 352 movies, and 57 TV shows. I’m glad I don’t live in France.
is there anyone who hasn’t AT LEAST 20 GB of pirated stuff on his PC ???
I have about 75 GB of music.
Fuck.
I have about 200GB, and darn proud of it.
12000 songs? has he heard all of them?
got a terabyte and a half, starting to worry! lol
FECK ‘EM
When the courts are abuse this way by corporations things like justice, freedoms, and rights are things to trampled on. For the corporations must have their billions of $$ and the power to control. It’s a sad world we live in.
this is making me sick to hear all of this stuff, i even know cops who are also dwlnd stuff on the internet , somethings has to change,i’m gonna get those program to chang my IP , hope this will help
12,591 = +- 1000 music albums, not really an exception. Even the amount of movies isn’t that large if you recon that most people delete instead of keep them.
Honestly, I don’t understand the bad thing about having a large collection of files like this? Does size make it any more significant? It’s not as if he would’ve bought everything in the first place.
Out of everything I download, with today’s prices perhaps 10% is something that I would like to pay for, if I would in the first place. And even then I would probably not have enough money available for that. That would be, of course, if I would not currently be boycotting the entertainment industry.
question is, has he heard/watched all of them? i haven’t even heard/watched half of what i have.
How did they prove it was the man who pushed the “download file” button?
I have 47,456 music files on my comp. 200GB. Not the usual kind though.
Yea, I have 200GB of pirates stuff on my computer and I can honestly say that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t pay for 99.9% of it.
What I can afford to pay for is sitting on my DVD collection shelf.
Not one copyright holder has lost a single sale off me. Nothing I have downloaded would I have paid for even if I had no other way to get it, and most of the stuff I couldn’t afford to pay for even if I did want it.
@20, I think I have more then the person mentioned in the article (don’t know exact amounts) and I remember I gave half the movies a watch and one third to half of the music a listen. It’s indeed impossible to listen to everything, but I do recognize every album and film. One problem I find with such a big collection is that if you are looking for something and can’t quite find the name, it’s troublesome to find it ;-)
Anyway, I mostly scan through my list of albums regularly and just play a random album for the heck of it. I guess another reason why I collect so much is because I like the idea of putting together a digital library/compendium of culture. The vast size of it gives one interesting perspectives on how culture and socio-cultural perception have changed over the years, and creates an interesting zeitgeist concerning society for the past century from such a cultural perspective. Anyways, I’m getting off topic :-p
i dont understand this at all if it was for personal use and not commercial and wasn’t convicted for re-distro to other filesharers i can’t get my head around why he’s been done for this.
in the uk you could have a million or more files on your pc or in your house if it’s not sold carted around and the police are not there with a warrant because of complaints they cant do anything about it, it’s civil matter
they saying it’s illegal to download now in france? i dont mean download and re-upload sharing i mean soley download no uploading involved
opz,
I better stop downloading dexter
just sad
HD movies are now my favourite downloads. I’d buy the movies but they are still way too phucking expensive in my book still.
Come on Sony. Lower the prices. We all want HD content but at reasonable prices otherwise we’ll all continue to download for free!!
@16
12000 songs? has he heard all of them?
sizable but not so surprisingly huge. How do you(@16) listen your music, “10 track long britney spears play list till the day I die?”
Why is everyone against this decision?
The man stole $46,200!
That isn’t a rounded-up figure – that’s e.x.a.c.t.l.y what he stole.
He had $46,200 in his bank account that he was *going* to spend on music, movies, and TV shows… but then someone told him about this evil eMule program he said ‘fuck you rights holders!’, spent the money on a fast car, a few hookers and some blow, and then downloaded all this content whilst laughing menicingly in his lair.
The man should be greatful that the National Federation of Film Distributors, Sony, Paramount, Sacem and SCPP all value their content so low. 1 euro a song?
Seems like even Sony know there shit is weak.
only 12.591 songs… 31.500 here… not much though… for the rest i have ehm to much to count movies, and atleast 100 full series.
So the man in the article… im not impressed.
They are doing this to show an example for us all. It’s painful to see this!
I guess they are just filling in free jail space.. And this is definitely not for the well being of society — putting people behind bars for downloading and sharing. Eh.. Crazy world.
If it was all single cd movie back up’s 426 movies would come out to 298.2GB of hard drive space. That’s a bit excessive, you can’t possibly get around to watching most of those movies again. I rather watch movies and delete them. Then in 3 months or 3 years later I just download the movie again. When you can get back a movie in less time than it takes to watch the movie don’t be afraid to delete.
@Reasoned Mind
I am not shore that it is good tactics for labels… They will need to drop it and find other solution or else…
Here in Latvia their local representative added additional taxation on CD/DVDs which ended up killing local CD/DVD sales business and boosted Flash/External HDD sales + educated people of alternative ways of information over Internet.
So I highly doubt it will help… It rather creates opportunities for web developers to create web platforms that support creative commons instead “all rights reserved” to satisfy that kind of consumption rates (12k of songs per year?!?!?)
Wait, only 46K? 15K songs = 46K. Yet in America, the RIAA sued that woman in the millions for 22(?) songs.
So much for the common retort that “only uploading is illegal”
sad…
this sh** is very scary :|
does someone knows the best way u can hide your ip from this ****?
Uhhhh ….
That stuff wasn’t within the “scope” of their investigation …
How could they prosecute anything?
france sucks
Wow! Only €30k?
Should have been at least…
Oh about…
12,000 * $80,000 = $960,000,000
Then movies are about 10 times as valuable as songs, so that’s
400 * $800,000 = $320,000,000
So in total, that’s $1,280,000,000
So that is somewhere in the region of €915,001,600 he should have been fined. Stupid French courts, don’t they know how these things work?
fuck the riaa & mpaa
If he was unlucky enough to live in the states he would be fined the equivalent of the entire GDP of the whole country.
“They will need to drop it and find other solution or else…”
Or else what? The same old crap “you can’t stop us?” Have you been reading the news lately?
And what is so wrong about paying for merchandise…..any merchandise, a product you take that the seller intends is for sale?
No one yet has ever offered a reasonable, rational, solid and moral justification for stealing digital product.
If Pirates ever grow a pair and take responsibility for their actions and invest the decades of work required to convince the world of their superior plan for humankind, I’m sure the courts will take notice. But as long as Pirates keep acting as pilfering, hypocritical sell-outs government will remove privacy protections so they can find you, try you and punish you because you are doing wrong.
And if you want this to end, then convince the world you are not doing wrong.
And good luck with that.
In France, they need to prove their innocence. So he was screwed. You can hide your ip with some anti-virus who gave you online protection. Password your hard drive,don’t burned everything and don’t have it on display like some moron.
BTjunkie hide your ip.
Not sure why this is controversial. What they fined him isn’t much more
than he would have paid if he actually paid for them honestly in the first place.
I’ve just checked and it isn’t April Fool’s day. My jaw is still on the floor. I thought the three strikes laws that Sarkosy was trying to force through was a draconian abortion. This is just unbelievable and has created a precedent that no other western country has come close to before.
Let’s watch just how emboldened the cartels get now. I’m particularly interested how the mainstream media reports on this.
The message seems to be “Watch and Delete”. Whatever you however, just don’t buy. Buying just gives money to lawyers.
Hmmm…
10.000 mp3’s, 200 movies and 5 series, glad I’m not in France either! :)
Actually, where I live it’s pretty much legal so .. go Netherlands! :D
Where I live, even modifying consoles is 100% legal. They can’t hurt you for anything, since copyright law is never enforced. Hell, it’s actually really really hard to find original legitimate DVDs you can buy, and when you find them, they’re $90+.
When prices are this high, even the government doesn’t give a shit if you pirate. Wonder why yours do!
Also, what has this terrible thing done to the latin american music industry, where pretty much all countries that conform latin america are filled with piracy?
It’s grown better than it’s ever been, and artists that crop up now are only artists for art’s sake, which raises the overall quality of all. And the movie industry? Well, we didn’t have much of one to begin with, so I haven’t noticed a change. As such, piracy can be good. So stop thinking that all it can do is absolutely wreck you. Hell, think of a world without people like Britney Spears. Wouldn’t the world be a better place?
Well, I guess my TB external filled with nothing but tv shows and I are screwed.
so does he get to keep the movies since hes paying for them?
lol I have a buddy who has over 500 Movies, around 25 newer PC Games, a crapload of console games for emulators, and about 30GB of music and some software and i dont think he has even used hardly any of it he just collects it
least the companies didnt ask for an exuberant amount for damages.. and inface imho a quite reasonable amount, given the amount of stuff he had.
Could defence lawyers in the US and others use this case as a guide in court for damages? would such an arguement work in legalese in court?
I got 3619 songs, about 80GB of pirated software (programs and games).
About 160 Movies (116GB).
291GB of various tv-shows and 457GB of anime. I havent downloaded anything else but episodes of tv-shows and anime, for several months.
Oh, if i wanted to watch tv-shows from USA legally, i would have to wait for up to a year. If i wanted to watch anime from Japan, i would have to wait from 2-7 years, and have to pay extra for alot of crappy dubs. I would never EVER buy any kind of media that got dubs. Dubbers destroys the work of the original voice-cast that might want to have their voices heard around the world. The dubingindustry is disgusting!
Just a hint if you dont want to be caught .. Buy a motorola surfboard. Mod it. Or buy a pre mod ??? profit
The problem isn’t actualy the amount of material. That was just the news guys push.
The problem is that he was fined for something that the police wasn’t investigating, and, that he considered to be legitimized because he wasn’t selling any of it.
I happen to have way more stuff then they found at this guy house, so, yeah, I’m worried. Because you never know that you are under some kind of investigation, even if completely innocent.
All it takes is for you to be related to someone that isn’t so innocent. It can be family, a friend, or even, the friend of a friend. And then… Bang… you are investigated, and your house searched, and they find your stuff. Something you never intended to sell, or make any money with.
It’s this scary.
Funny isn’t it? That that guy down on the first floor of your building has guns or drugs stached in his house, and he isn’t caught, and you are facing a fine and a jail sentence. Yeah, loads of fun, I’ll try to laugh one of this days…
1TB of porn
At least he didn’t live in the USA where the fine would probably have been something around $1.200.000.000 ($1.2 billion).
I still can’t get my head around the case a week or so ago where a woman was fined with 1.92 million for sharing 24 songs.
It’s a crazy world we live in.
Hey what do they want us to do with 2TB HDDs
hello unreasoned mind.
“pay for what you took”
you just dont seem to get it do you. no matter how many times people tell you and ill tell you again for the 10,000th time. SHARING IS NOT STEALING! nor is it fair that someone could sue a single mother with kids who supposedly downloaded 24 songs for 2 million dollars. if you really think thats fair then you are sick.
“Or else what? The same old crap “you can’t stop us?” Have you been reading the news lately?”
you and your maffia thugs seem to believe you will be able to stop us. news flash trollboy. the day is coming where you will not be able to do anything about it anymore and its coming sooner than you think.ex pirate bay decentralizing. You guys are fighting a losing battle quit while you still can.
“No one yet has ever offered a reasonable, rational, solid and moral justification for stealing digital product”
sorry but you need to go look up stealing in a dictionary. copying is NOT stealing and that is that.
“If Pirates ever grow a pair and take responsibility for their actions and invest the decades of work required to convince the world of their superior plan for humankind, I’m sure the courts will take notice. But as long as Pirates keep acting as pilfering, hypocritical sell-outs government will remove privacy protections so they can find you, try you and punish you because you are doing wrong.”
this will never work. people will always find a way to share regardless of what you thugs try to do. Nor is it wrong to share.
“And if you want this to end, then convince the world you are not doing wrong.”
we are its called the pirate party. good luck in your losing battle to control the internet ;)
and this has to make us fear the system? mhahaha, foolishnes runs wild.
hopefully a new revolution will come, and the heads of the french responsible for this unfair case among others will be cut off by special laser quillotines (in an ode to the progress of technology and the ability for people to freely enrich themselves with artly materials like movies, tv shows, games and music.)
ahhhh should such a day come, so joyfull and amused I will be.
honestly what is better to see, poor gladiators spilling each others guts, or elitist corrupt figures being chased by mobs with torches?
If you live in the United States, have at least one computer that can record S-Video. Most computers can record audio too. Have cable or satellite TV, or at least a cable box laying around that can feed audio-video into your computer. Presto, your computer, with the help of some software, has become a VCR slash tape deck. Your blank CD/DVD’s have become new age video/audio cassettes. That’s legal. Now the content can bury your cops… and they’d have a harder time proving your full of shit with out a very deep investigation.
USA: 24 songs – $1.92 million.
France: 12,591 MP3 files, 426 movies, 16 full TV-series and dozens of items of pirated software – $46,200 and a 2 month suspended jail sentence.
Spain: X MP3s, Y movies, Z software – much media hype and misinformation, legal threats by media outfits but… $0, 0 days in jail.
In Spain it’s still legal to share files as long as it’s for personal use with no profit… How long will this file-sharing haven last?
What baffles me is how they were able to prove that he actually downloaded these files. It’s perfectly reasonable for him to have ripped a bunch of DVDs that he bought, so in this case he would have a bunch of DVD files or .avi’s or whatever on his computer legally.
this makes me wonder how much i would be fined lol. a teacher of mine has TBs of music at his house
That sucks glad i don’t live in France, got about 3.8tb of pirated stuff. 179 hd movies, 468 movies, 45 complete tv shows, plus thousands of games and tons of software. Good thing its legal were I live.
That little slut Sarkozy has turned France into big brother, oh great i can’t help but feel upset at this news, hopefully the pirate party of sweden can change these things all it takes is one domino to fall, fucking mafiaa scum,
why is torrent freak censoring comments now….it makes me feel fuzzy that i have adblock plus and they don’t get a cent out of me.
I’ve got one 250gig external And one 160gig external full stuff and no worries because of a little thing called AES 256 bit. He’s was an ex IT professinal he should know better than to leave that much stuff just laying around. Esp when there are so many good and simple programs that guarentee data privacy
Bloody sony trying to go after i’ts customers. This just smeels of the RIAA. Can’t these companies stop harassing people.
How many customers can a company sue before people just get fed up with them.
Then in the long term you will just drive more people into P2P because they just don’t want to know about what you are doing to them as customers.
Customers just won’t deal with Companies like Sony to get their music.
Well eventually the people will get respective parliament officials who represent the public interest. Each day seems like a small win for the every day man even when stuff like this happens. Shows how desperate they are to keep the civilized people in line.
As for this case, does him oweing 46,200 bucks mean he gets to keep HIS copy he’s buying at the court? Or does this mean that was his viewing cost and he can STILL have the wonderful opportunity to buy this fabulous stuff at fair market value?
As for whack a mole on the torrents, gj coders and technologically advanced among us who fight for the right’s of fair use over corporate ip rights. Viewing rights superceed ip copywrong (in real life, not the law suits gaming up our court systems against the common man).
As for protecting yourself against unrelated and often illegal search and siesures, try truecrypt if you start getting over 100gb of data you’d rather not some snoop going through. Let them beat you for the password instead. Then the courts can figure out who’s wrong. Save yerself 50,000 bucks in any case.
Yer portable hd at 1,000GB? (1TB) well just encrypt the drive and leave anything of “value” on that one and a blank windows/OS one.
Sad that you’d gotta do such measures just to not get caught up in their bs but “protect yourself at all times” is rule #1.
I believe the laws will side with the people once again but until that happens it’s up to regular users to fight for themselves and their kin.
I’m sure open source voting and governance is around the corner too. Pirate Party had it right. If the laws are the problem then attack the laws /w yer own lawyers and lobyists.
Fair use Lobyists are in need of all governments around the world.
Also, I thought open source govt would be good for a “democratic” (quotes as it’s not N American culture, yet) countries but could open source government work for communist countries also? More of a people’s government?
My thoughts on this issue here.
Next election (or one after it) should be seeing more open source members of government. Open party beats even pirate party. Prob can have a better approach to civil liberties, full disclosure finances, voting for citizens online in poll form (for stats and reinforcing the public’s demands).
If you build it they will come.
mora than 2tb’s in porn :S
So now we have to arrest all man and woman who have children ?
I’v got a 1tb hdd completely full of my pirated shit. Working on another 1tb drive (currently at 102gb). And then my normal 750gb drive that houses illegal boots of vista and mac os. And of course Linux for file management and doing cool shit.
I’m thinking of making one of those Grammy copy stations like they had during the #Spectrial, where you can just plug in your usb stick and get whatever games, movies ect.. instantly and free :P
I think most people who’ve been around at least five years agree that amount is nothing.
Question:
What is determined to be downloaded? How are files deemed illegal? If there are no records of the download, only finding the materials… How do they determine its “illegal”?
Couldn’t one argue: He ripped them from CDs.
He recorded the movies of TVIO, DVR or something similar? That he subscribes to?
Oh no… I could get fined then too, acting within the legal system. I love how the corporate boys always win it seems these days.
Yet I wonder if the artists will see any of this. Trying to stop piracy is like trying to stop people from drinking alcohol. It was prohibited at one time, but failed miserably, you just cannot stop it.
2 Jul 04, 2009 at 21:28 by Anonymous
How does this help anyone, except fill the pockets of some fat, bald, greedy record/network company?
It helps us to create new shiny Police State of Europe and resource MafRIAA to work more effectively, correct?
You breathe my oxygen.
Pay me 34 billions or else.
bastard.
That pathetic country has resulted to be France.
That a waste of taxpayers money for criminalizing innocent citizens instead of using it for solving real problems.
To the president Sarkozy: Get a real job, LAZY.
I am glad of living in a country where these stupid laws that ONLY favor to USA media industry parasites don’t exist.
You know, there exist REAL PROBLEMS to solve that wasting time and taxpayers money in pursuing filesharers.
He is paying the market rate for media rather than ridiculous damages.
I can agree with this sort of ruling, but I cant agree as to how it was discovered he had the media.
The most efficient way of stopping to the entire terrorist USA entertainment industry is not buying any of its products at all. Period.
Well, according to the law of the land I reside, when police searh you for a specific offence, and they find a dead body in your house, or your computer they can’t charge you, they have to get a separate search warrant.
Regardless, this guy was packing heat – he had a fraud case up his ass.
“In a statement the man’s lawyer said: “There is stuff like this on all kids’ computers right now,” while pointing out that many of the files had been downloaded by the defendant’s children.”
——————
Exactly… ‘USA copyright law’ (which found its perfect puppet in Sarkozy) converts each citizen on the world without exception in a criminal; because is a FACT that each human being in this world has shared copyrighted material with others independently if they are aware of this or not.
‘USA copyright law’ is useless and absurd as a whole and disconnected totally of the reality.
I believe #73 mentioned this as well, but seriously if your worried about them snooping through your computer use Truecrypt. It will encrypt the drive/partition/file and still provide decent transfer speeds.
If you are still conscered then use both Truecrypt and an external HDD that you only plug in to watch movies.
Then there is also the old computer (or server) hidden in a closet or somewhere that runs linux and Truecrypt and you have to SSH in to the server to mount the truecrypt drive and then create a link to the file you want to watch and stream it over your network. Although, this may be going to far :)
Remember United States Customs STILL Seizes and searches “random” incoming Mobile Phones, Laptops, iPods, external Hard Drives and USB flash drives…
So… the idiots saying, oh he was “asking for it”… you could be next, simply because you ripped a Movie from your OWN collection into .avi format.
They do everything in their power to try to limit international travel dont’ they? to get a world perspective… ha, all in the name of “protecting America”…
So… remember, hiding the files is better choice. That way you can “comply” to get the hell out of that situation the fastest looking “Squeaky clean” while you do it.
Laws such as these, which criminalize people for simple action such as piracy and the failure of governments to assure safety and peace in people’s lives will pave way for uncontrollable criminal and even anti-human activities in future.
Once shit hits the fan, the agencies will be shit out of luck.
The world governments do not understand that their primary role is to keep their citizens content and at peace – No law can survive long enough if it does not gain the respect of people.
What we need is another French revolution – But, this time send the copyright lobbyists to the guillotine.
Wasn’t everyone else thinking that the French dude had bugger all on his HDD’s?
Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought filesharing was not illegal in France? Or anywhere else? As long as it’s not used for commercial purposes?
Made me look at my media drive to compare how many media files I have.
I’d be in for a roasting me thinks.
id3′ed sorted Music folder, 10,745 files, of which probably half I actually own/extorted/bought.
Un/tagged random music folder 5,231 files, most of which are from others sharing and caring……
Movies folder…..1,469 files, of which 200ish are TV episodes.
Tot that lot RIAA/MPAA. Yum yum.
BTW TF/Enigmax, do you log/delete IP addresses from the comments section every now and then?
Heres hoping so ;p
Are you saying I should format my 2TB HDD full of pirated stuff? NEVER!
PiRATES FTW!
And just reading #78’s comments.
I got burgled years ago and reported that 100’s of CD’s went but I had them ripped onto my PC already, so how would they prove which CD’s I’ve ripped and which I a’int??
Plausible deniability??
France the ACTA preview for your own pleasure LoL
media industry is the worst terrorist. they don’t deserve a single euro more after crushing this man. eat the rich, eat the riaa well cooked.
Copyright theft is a real crime that hurts real people. Some of our greatest idols are only on $20M a year due to the lost revenue. Please stop stealing from our idols. People like you drove MJ to his death. If you had not stolen $400M in copyrights from him perhaps he would still be with us.
See? even non well-to-do pop stars who wash out earn 20M.
Those doing more USEFUL jobs barely make 12-16K on average.
Maybe that’s why the law’s easy to BRIBE. The entertainment industry simply has too much MONEY to spare, and the guardians, unfortunately, NEVER get enough. <_<
That’s not on, it was only his personal collection, there is no evidence to show that he shared them.
@60 Bravo! You’ve won a night with Jenna.
poor guy, i got much more in better quality, this just proves how “justice” is totally corrupted by capitalists
I’ve no idea, but let me guess; The cops couldn’t find enough evidence to charge him with fraud, and so to save face, and because they didn’t much like the cunt, slapped a piracy charge on him instead.
If it was otherwise then we’d hear of people being charged for this near every single time the cops seize a personal computer. Tell me I’m wrong.
Why is everyone bragging about the number of mp3 they have? I used to have 10000 or more now I’ve trimmed it to less than 1000, and I don’t listen to 1/4 of even that regularly.
How does this differ in any way to having VHS copies of movies taped off the TV or music recorded onto tape off the radio or from borrowed records/tapes/CD’s?
Would that be a lesser crime? Or does every person in the world that has any culture stored on any sort of media around the world need to start clearing house?
Is this case biased against digital storage or would they have taken into account any “obsolete” technologies.
There are too many details missing from this article. Was it the sheer quantity which was adequate for this man’s “rightful” conviction? What number would they have turned a blind eye too? Was a confession that he used an uploading/sharing tool (Edonkey) enough for this conviction or is downloading now a crime? If so, when did mere ownership of material that has no proof of purchase become illegal and not an infringement? Is France the only country that considers this a criminal and not a civil matter, or was it a civil matter that the police tipped off the MAFIAA about? Did the police cut a deal with the accused because they wanted him badly for something else, but he ended up getting burned for what he thought was a softer option?
This raises more questions than it answers. It’s just the sort of FUD that they like to spread.
However, even Slashdot doesn’t have this news yet? Where’s the PR wagon?
seed plzzzz ;)
After reading a Babelfish translation of the original article, it appears the police informed on him and the financial damages were awarded as a civil suit against him.
Translation follows:
“Two months of suspended sentence and 33 000 € of damages for a pensioner vannetais, consuming without moderation music.
Polnareff, Celine Dion… Vannetais was interested in all the styles of music. On the whole, 12 591 musical works, 426 films and sixteen televised series in their entirety were downloaded during nearly one year, with two computers. It is into 2006 that the police force discovered this data-processing “plundering”.
“It was for a family use”
This 55 year old pensioner, specialized in data processing, was heavily condemned, yesterday, by the Court of Bankruptcy of Valves: two months of suspended sentence and 33 000 € of damages.
At the time of the audience of April 23, it ensured: “It was for a family use, not with a lucrative aim.” He affirmed not to have been informed of the illegal character of his acts.
The two months sorrow of suspended sentence had been required by the public ministry. The civil parts, which represent professionals of the disc, claimed of 1 € with 2 € of compensation by pirated music file, of 7 € with 12,50 € per film.
With the bar, the lawyers of the professionals of the disc had stressed that the turnover of this market was divided by two, these last years. They allot this tumble to the use of the software of “peer to peer” which facilitates the illegal exchange of numerical files between Net surfers.”
And how much of this goes to the “poor” artists and creators? THAT would be interesting to know…
Does anyone know what is wrong with bittorrents.ro? I thought maybe they had some down time but it has been almost 4 days since I was able to get to the site.
I think people miss the point. The real point.
Law enforcement can go after you for whatever reason and harass you and find something wrong with most people, nobody and I mean nobody on earth is capable of following all the laws that exist and that is why privacy is “very, very” important.
In an age where every corner off your life is getting lighted and every behavior scrutinized, analyzed and judge by others your rights as a person in society are at risk right now from especial interests that would have you striped of all your rights to privacy and a decent life just so they can “protect” their bottom line.
I don’t get it, isn’t a warrant in France only legaly usefull if the material found is related to search case?
I think the take-away message from this is encrypt-encrypt-encrypt!
Make sure all your HDDs are encrypted, and use hidden volumes and even hidden operating systems, for plausible deniability.
There are ways we can protect ourselves from the state and the MAFIAA, lets use them.
You might have to spend a bit of money on new hardware (bigger HDDs), and you might have to be a little inconvenienced (constructing and using very strong passwords), but it’s a lot cheaper than the alternatives.
I want to start a charity to support people who are prosecuted/fined because of file-sharing. I’d much rather give £100 to support piracy and file sharing than to support an archaic and corrupt music industry.
Anybody interested?
johnwhenry@gmail.com
This fine must be unconstitutional.
UPloading of such material is illegal.
But DOWNloading is NOT (in Europe).
Calling all hackers:
1. Locate the Sarkozy family’s luxury appartments.
2. Hack their wireless networks.
3. Download tons of material.
4. Party.
sucks to be that guy, i downloaded everything on my computer INCLUDING the operating system ;)
good thing im using a pirated version of IP hider to type this comment
I’ve just over 50k songs and around 1500 films, and I know ppl with way more than myself… but yeah, wouldn’t be a small fine for me…
More to do with the article, I reckon the fine and suspended jail term has a lot to with the way the politicians are shaping the copyright laws atm.
Its Axxo :)
@Reasoned Mind
“Or else what? The same old crap “you can’t stop us?” Have you been reading the news lately?”
Actually adding “or else” was not necessary as they are dieing. It’s not about justify who is right and who is wrong. It’s about that we don’t like old distribution model and will hardly use it.
“And what is so wrong about paying for merchandise…..any merchandise, a product you take that the seller intends is for sale?”
Tell me another thing then. Do you pay for radio? Do you pay for TV? Do you pay for viewing this site? Or some other site?
I don’t mind paying tough. I mind paying for CD(Wasted resources), old distribution network(cars, ships etc), shoppers/managers and some other middle man salaries.
“No one yet has ever offered a reasonable, rational, solid and moral justification for stealing digital product.
And if you want this to end, then convince the world you are not doing wrong.”
As for that. There are people who try to solve it this way (Pirate party? Electronic Frontier Foundation?) but I don’t think it is a right way to go. I think competing legally trough usage of alternative licenses like GPL and creative commons and building alternative cheap business and distribution models is the right way. Unfortunately this wave raises too slowly (Hobnox, New Grounds Sound portal, My space) especially in revenue sharing part and alike monetization models that still allow consumers to enjoy and share music. All that war on consumer just educates people that copyrights and old models are wrong somewhere and we should look for new ones. At least it does so for me and many my friends. It’s not about paying and not paying. It’s about what we get when we pay… Or rather how much we don’t get when we pay…
I have 55000+ MP3 files, all of which are stuff I actually listen to or intend listening to. Just in case anyone’s keeping score ;)
Over here in Australia, our primary source of up-to-date tv shows are via P2P as shows are months or even a year or more behind than the US.
I’d be screwed if i was to get caught, around 3.8tb in total, 300gb of music :)
Did they let him keep the files after charging him for what he “stole”? Because if they didn’t, this is just a fine like any other, not an attempt to recover what the record and movie companies feel they are owed.
After all the excitement here I doubt if his collection was returned so were are simply arguing whether its better to charge a small fine for downloading or a large fine for sharing.
one has to wonder if its ever a good idea to have cops in your house. If you report a robbery of a few thousand dollars and they search your home looking for drugs, porn, movies, music, games, warez, weapons, god knows what else, with the intent of dinging you for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and maybe locking you up as well, a smart guy might be better off eating the original loss. It seems we are all criminals today, its just a question of what victim-less crime we have committed, or have appeared to commit.
Of course this guy didn’t have a choice. Maybe its time to hide our dvds under the floor, just like we hid our film collections in the 70’s.
What, no 80.000 per song and i-dont-know-how-much per movie?
If it were up to RIAA, they would have presumably requested damages in excess of all money ever produced in the world. That would have been funny.
I think it was a fair fine. Yeah it was $46,200 but that beat the $1million he would have paid if he was in the United States.
At lease he paid the $1-$3 dollar per song and a couple of dollar per video.
I would be happy for this fine instead of the one that the single lady got in the united state. That was CRAZY.
But still… pretty crazy that he got cough because they were randomly looking for something else.
I wonder what will happen in Netherlands. Here downloading is LEGAL. (Uploading is not)
So, if Netherlands goes the same way as France and in a few years’ time, owning a collection like this French guy, becomes illegal: how do they determine what was downloaded BEFORE downloading became illegal?
FUCK BREIN AND RIAA/MPAA AND SARKOZY
It’s theft.
Didn’t your father ever tell you ‘Not to touch other peoples things’?
My dad did. He used to say ‘don’t touch things that don’t belong to you!’ in a powerful manner. You see I respect my father, maybe you should.
ggrrrrr
267 TB of porn
yeah Sarkozy is a bigger dumbass then Bush was , you fucking french deserve what you voted for
OUch, thats a pretty hefty fine.
RT
http://www.anonymize.tk
Wonderwhy-er at # 119 makes me laugh.
“Tell me another thing then. Do you pay for radio? Do you pay for TV? Do you pay for viewing this site? Or some other site?”
I’d imagine you are kidding, right? If you are being serious with that question, you have the cognitive abilities of a 3 year old.
All those models are advertising based including TF. Every moment you watch or read you are “paying” and if you use an adblock you are cheating the television, radio or website business model and you you have no right to be watching, listening or reading.
There will always be people who steal value, digital or otherwise, from others. Everyone in this issue understands that a distinct minority will take the steps they need to take without paying.
But as scrutiny and penalty ratchets up the vast majority will pay for what they take or live in the fear of discovery and punishment just as any lawbreaker should. At the end of the day pirates are being treated as the snotty little, selfish, thieving asswipes they truly are.
I can’t wait to see the “respect” they receive in Euro parliament. lol
It’s a sincere pleasure to see all this finally happening all over the world.
Finally.
What’s the fine for posting a stupid comment?
I read all the comments above, and I am shocked how many people are posting that don’t realize this guy was not breaking the law.
Yes, it’s illegal in some countries, but no, it’s not illegal to download in all countries.
A fair fine? Would it be fair to charge you $300 for walking on your neighbor’s lawn, when doing so was only illegal in Australia? Oh, but it’s Australian grass! Pay up, or go to jail. (Note: I am not saying there is any such law. But there could be, in some country, and there would be no way of you or I knowing it.)
Pleassssse… theft is wrong, yes. But so is making up laws.
It’s a fair fine? Do YOU have $42,000+ in the bank? No? I doubt he does either.
He’ll be paying this fine for the next 20+ years, and if he misses a payment, he goes to jail. When, in fact, what he (and his children) did was NOT illegal in his country.
yeah i have about 31gb of music n thats all i need lol, if i had a MUCH bigger external i would have ALOT more music haha
im weighing in at ~5TB of music and video files… feel my enormous e-nuts!
Well, at least this is a little bit more fair than Jammie Thomas’s trial.
And this is France, where anti-piracy paranoia is comparative to Joseph Stalin.
I won’t touch on the humanitarian issues here, but from a legal standpoint (in France) this is perfectly fine. It seems as if they were not trying to ‘make an example of him’ but carry out their stupid and quite unfair laws (again, for an unfair law this is perfectly fair).
Stupid? Yes. Excessive? Not really.
emule? all that from that network?
i should hide as ive got about 100gb of stuff on my pc. my country has already made it clear they dont like me too much.
Hey mail me your banking informations then i’ll send you a small economic help!!
I get so sad everytime fileshareres is getting busted :’(
theis8220@gmail.com
hope u see the message!
and remember: dont let ‘em bring you down, share on!!!
Remember, kids: this is why you should use TrueCrypt.
people still get murdered on our streets every day. there are drugs in every single school and people stealing real products from stores. what damage is being done if some one downloads a song that you put a value on some times as low as 69 cents in itunes. you can’t stop murder on the streets drugs in our schools and now you want to try and stop every one on the internet. your going to fail.
its illegal to have fireworks that leave the ground here in Michigan but last night (july 4th) there was for about 8 hours (till 2am) fireworks going off all around my house. 2 people on my street 4 on the street across from mine and another 5 behind and a few others spread out randomly. there was more fireworks going off in my neighborhood then some of the big firework shows. smoke so heavy in the street you almost couldn’t breath and i couldn’t see the end of my street 1/4 mile down. if you can’t stop fireworks because people want to have some fun even tho its illegal what makes you think you are going to be able to stop some one from downloading a few songs.
I’ve got 15,500 tracks of music, 250 movies, and about 700GB of HDTV. ARREST ME!
Only a few years ago, the perspective here in the uk was that if you only downloaded (leeched) files and did not share back, it was PERFECTLY LEGAL, morally reprehensible perhaps, but PERFECTLY LEGAL. so unless you actually get caught sharing, you could just claim that they were downloads only. HAS THIS CHANGED???
@ 139 and the rest of the Europ pirate….
————————
USA needs to invade Europe and sort us lot out. This is TERRORISM !! It’s a threat to US homeland security in these times of recession.
PS — There is plenty of OIL here too (North Sea)!
Obama, what r u waiting for?
[quote]the man was fined and sentenced for what, exactly? what statute/law(s) was he convicted of breaking? is downloading copyrighted material illegal in france?[/quote]
Thats what I was calling propaganda. [quote]his defense that it took him a whole year to accumulate the collection by using eMule on the eD2k network, but it was intended for private, not commercial use.[/quote]
See here: http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=47384
[quote]
In Spain, a judge has dismissed a case against a man who downloaded and shared 3322 copyrighted movies on the Internet. Despite efforts from local anti-piracy outfits, the legal system in Spain continues to stand firmly behind those who share music and movies without financial gain.
Today, the Criminal Court of Pamplona ruled that a man didn’t break any laws by downloading thousands of movies and an undetermined number of songs. The defendant was acquitted of copyright infringement charges because there was no evidence that he profited from downloading the movies and music, or sharing them with others. The judge acknowledged that the man indeed downloaded the files “without consent of the copyright holders” in 2003 and 2004, but ruled that he only did so for for “private use or sharing with other Internet users.” There was no financial gain, so no crime has been committed and the defendant walked free.
[/quote]
Of course the Cartels are behind this one after the above story broke. Hey they have the whole world to try to fuck up ya know.
[quote]Lawyers for 19 plaintiffs including the National Federation of Film Distributors, Sony, Paramount, Sacem and SCPP demanded between 1 and 2 euros compensation for each illicit MP3 and between 7 and 12.50 euros for each movie. It is believed that SCPP will collect the largest share of around 17,000 euros.[/quote]
The cartel had to have a story to counteract the one that it is legal (Spain) to download Downloading 3322 Copyrighted Movies is Okay in Spain May 29, 2009
http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=47384
I would seriously not put a dime of my pocket into the greedy nwo cartels.
From
http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=47848
Downloading tv rips aint illige, why do they produce dvd recorders?.
@126
126 Jul 05, 2009 at 15:57 by Tim Kook
I wonder what will happen in Netherlands. Here downloading is LEGAL. (Uploading is not)
So, if Netherlands goes the same way as France and in a few years’ time, owning a collection like this French guy, becomes illegal: how do they determine what was downloaded BEFORE downloading became illegal?
They could not determine and like you said, “FUCK BREIN AND RIAA/MPAA AND SARKOZY” & Cartels
135 Jul 05, 2009 at 18:52 by deadmanamerican
emule? all that from that network?
i should hide as ive got about 100gb of stuff on my pc. my country has already made it clear they dont like me too much.
=
You don’t have to hide mate, just crypt it. Problem solved.
@Reasoned Mind
Yes you are right they are :) But with digital age and distribution models advertisement(and alike monetization techniques) are only ones left that will work with digital content. Subscriptions, ads and some models that make your consumers to make work for you as they consume aether by becoming distributors or providing some services. But in the end it is still free + it gives a lot more value for a penny then DRM content ever produced or will produce.
Anyways labels are them selves at fault here as instead of turning enemies in to allies they waged war on digital freedoms undermining their own user base.
In the end it is all about value content creators produce. By locking up creations in tight copyrights and DRM and selling them at current prices they don’t produce and value for their user base. Rather they exchange values with their user base (if not taking more then it’s wroth even).
Also what do you think on creative commons? What do you think about sites that are built to leverage this “create, share, remix/remake” model based on creative commons? What do you think on stuff like “Here comes everybody” by Clay Shirky (check videos from various conferences btw)
Also are you here to discuss or to insult? Keep up calling people stupid 3 years olds, selfish, thieving asswipes and your words will be valued :D
So are you here to discuss and discover or insult and rant?
I’m actually amazed they only wanted 1-2 EUR and not fifty gazillion per MP3.
Are they actually coming off the hard drugs?
Then again – anyone can still download silly amounts onto terabyte discs while being an unemployed no good screwup..perhaps sentencing should be a bit more circumstancial than just a 1:1 fee per item, especially considering the items aren’t stolen and there’s no loss if there was no money to buy them with..
I won’t say how much I have but I’ve been downloading since ‘93 back in the ftp prog days and before and since and I am currently doing so. Thank fucking god my country isn’t doing crap like that. The entertainment industry are a bunch of spoiled rich a-holes and quite honestly they deserve us ’sharing’. I’m old for a geek and female ex-music industry (70’s – 80’s), however, I remember the day you could buy an album and not only were all the songs worth listening too but you got massive posters, lyric sheets and other cool stuff. They don’t give you diddly squat anymore, just a friggin disk with maybe two songs worth listening too. Nobody cares except the one getting paid these days. ‘Sharing is the hippie way’ back in my day. My collection would blow all of you out of the water, and yes I have listened to all my mp3’s (though not all the vid yet, saving some for a rainy day), including the ones (mp3’s) I made from my 60’s and 70’s albums that I purchased and in my opinion have the right to convert, share or whatever with as I chose. Bloody hell, it cost me nearly 4 bucks in U.S. conversion currency to purchase a double album back then. I am getting my money’s worth and so is anyone I share with. Practically everything downloadable has been purchased somewhere, and if you pay for it, you can do what you dawn well want with it. That was our motto in the early 90’s and I still say it. You kiddies and up, keep it going for us old folk that started it all. Never give up and don’t let them take your freedoms of choice away.
You all keep commenting about unfair laws and preposterous lawsuits but yet content by not doing anything about it. Just sitting behind computers and allow others to do the dirty work.
Do something about it. Go out and protest, boycott ask the government to prioritize their laws. Millions are still living in poverty, unemployed, tortured, killed, assaulted, abused. Drug cartels are still running drugs and prostitution. Civil war are still raging but yet these crooks you call government main priority is to sue and put citizens in jail for downloading 1s and 0s.
Something is not right here!
wtf? In America, that man couldn’t legally be charged for these unrelated findings, since the warrant would only include investigating for fraud-related things. Well, I guess France, with its 3-strikes pro President, does things a bit differently.
Someone downloads thousands of copyrighted things has to pay $46,200, and someone downloads 24 songs and has to pay $1.92 million. I guess that means everyone needs to start downloading more copyrighted things (from 2 separate countries, but whatever).
http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=47848
P2P Collection Costs Man Huge Fine, Suspended Sentence
http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=47848&p=524955#p524955 see Don’t know if referenced for orig message
Can he keep the files now? He kind of paid for them right?
Cool report Sister
This is why I have TrueCrypt sparesimages for all my P2P/downloaded shit. 64 random character password, and a big encryption algorithm that will take some millions of years to break.
Let the police come to my door :D
let this be a lesson to every noob here. Use True Crypt and encrypt everything.
Let nothing which you can be fined/go to jail for be unencrypted on your system.
Hahahaha
i can see it now…
all the lawyers get a million dollar bonus. The movie industrie’s managers too :P…
just cause they won 33000 whole euro’s.
Bit different that the, what was it, more than a million, for the 20 songs that american woman downloaded?
Nevertheless, i really have to congratulate all the movie studio’s and music studio’s with this fantastic victory… we are so happy for you that you have managed to get a whole 33000 euro’s… let’s say it again… 33… 1000… euro’s… so great that the poeple living on a ritirement can chip in to provide you with all that luxury… the 13 cars… the champagne every night…
The money probably went through the shredder as these people partied for having destroyed yet another life (sorry, sarcasm had to end somewhere ;)
I am pretty sure my collection is almost just as large. I’ve got almost a Terabyte of pirated stuff on my hard disk. Luckily, I live in a third world country where no one gives a damn, and pirated stuff are sold in front of the high court’s gates.
Save all download files on thr TrueCrypt partition: http://www.truecrypt.org
A bit off topic but does anyone know of any good software for windows which can have all your moives on a network drive as files with the title of the film, date released, actors etc. I want to have a DVD collection my hard drive, anyone know?
@161
There is a shit ton, check out Personal Video Database though.
I will also agree with True Crypt, I am timted to get rid of all my burt DVDs and just keep my 640gig encrypted drive.
WHAT? in america, the police cant come into your house with a warrant for one thing, nose through your shit and arrest you for something else. Like if a bloody axe and an arm were sitting on a table that would be fine, but this is so out of line.
@ossumguywill
Same thing in France. This is a condensed version of the story. They had a warrant.
This can’t possibly last long though. The french aren’t exactly fond of cops in general.
Downloading HD makes no sense unless you delete after viewing, because the hard drive space that you need to store a movie in 1080 will cost as much as a BluRay disc, or perhaps not quite as much anymore since hard drives get cheaper all the time. Still, I would rather buy the disc and be legal. The video scene lamers waste a lot of bandwidth using way too high bitrates for HD video!
“More of a people’s government?”
China is a people’s republic…
“which facilitates the illegal exchange of numerical files between Net surfers”
Yeah, peer-to-peer is illegal. The internets aren’t meant for exchanging files!
“i’m gonna get those program to chang my IP”
uh wat
“france sucks”
\o/
I use Truecrypt for all my downloads, and Portable Apps Suite for all my communications programs. All this is on a separate external hard drive. Cops could grab it, look at it, and not be able to do anything. You just keep your mouth shut. Don’t give them a yes, Don’t give them a no.
Beautiful self incrimination, guys.
Until people realize that people not paying for things and going the freeloading route hurts the industry, they will continue to victimize themselves and decry the law when it takes it’s course and people who chose to abuse society’s trust are faced with the consequences of their actions. The P2P community simply isn’t accustumed to the concept of moral and legal accountability.
Pirates claim that downloading copyrighted thins is a right… Here is the bill of human rights
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu6/2/fs2.htm
I will give you a million dollars if you can find where it it mentions not paying for things.
Savage!!!
@168
They are paying for those download!
They paid their respective ISPs, Modem companies, Telco Companies, PC companies, Software companies, Electricity companies, media companies and they pay taxes.
So with that in mind why don’t you STFU! and take your rant elsewhere.
we all have cd-roms and internet connections. we can now do the job of getting the media ourselves – so record companies services are simply not needed.
all their lawsuits are like laundresses trying to make usage of laundry machines illegal.
why should we pay to someone for a job we can do ourselves?
Not using an encryption software like TrueCrypt is the same that go to police and admit guilt.
32 Jul 04, 2009 at 23:13 by John <– do you know if he saw that on the cinema? do you know if he had the cds for part of what he had in the HD? Shut up, he stole nothing if he has bought any of that content. You don’t buy everything you download simply because it’s not worth the money. If you are a rich asshole go ahead and deposit extra money for them every time you buy a song or whatever but please… stfu.
France sucks indeed.
http://www.entertane.com – the easiest site for torrents (movies, music, software, games, xxx) – faster, simpler – and you can search all your favorite torrent sites. No registration needed.
I have a 2.2 TB Server, its around 80% full. I dont know how many songs, but around 300 movies and 150 complete series.
One day the cops actually were let in by a friend of mine for an unrelated incident, he walked in saying “the cops are here” and we all laughed until 4 of them came into the house.
My asshole had never been tighter.
………. luckily nothing happened, they realised that we were not the people they were after. Oh and we just finished a joint before they came in :D
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