Charged in April 2005 for illegally uploading the movies “Daredevil,” “Miss Congeniality,” and “Red Planet” to BitTorrent tracker sites without a licence, he was originally sentenced to 3 months in jail.
Using the screen name “Big Crook,” which probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do if one plans on keeping a low cover as they use P2P or file-sharing programs, Chan Nai-ming was the world’s first person to be convicted for using BitTorrent to illegally distribute copyrighted material.
He was sentenced to 3 months jail, which he he has yet to serve while he remains free on bail pending the outcome of his lawyer’s appeals. Though, considering we’ve seen sentences for as much as 7 years here in the United States, 3 months seems like a walk in the park.
“Big Crook’s” lawyer said Chan only uploaded the movies without distributing them, and that even if there was any act of distribution, it was done on the part of the downloaders who initiated the process.
Today he and his lawyer will appear before Hong Kong’s highest court to make one final appeal to set aside his conviction.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens but, personally I think he deserves 3 months in jail just for spreading such terrible works like “Daredevil” let alone “Miss Congeniality”(yuck), don’t you agree?
What’s also crazy to note in all of this is all the money they probably wasted on busting this guy, I mean I doubt it had any lasting tangible effect on piracy whatsoever except for making people more careful and more discreet.
Operation D-Elite here in the US probably cost tens of millions of dollars and for what? They’ve managed to bust a whole 6 people over a period of like 3 years, and basically caused everybody to move their servers overseas meaning the Feds can kiss any future server busts goodbye. Now there’s more BitTorrent trackers sites than ever and the number of BitTorrent users has skyrocketed, especially with the increasing availability of broadband internet connections.
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