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Woman Who Sold Access to Pirated Books on Dropbox Handed Suspended Sentence:
Pirated textbooks are relatively easy to find on the open web and via dedicated pirate sites. However, some people are creating their own libraries in an effort to make money, offering online access to such material in exchange for a fee.
[...] According to the [Rights Alliance (Rettighedsalliancen)] group, which acts on behalf of a wide range of copyright holders, publishers included, routine monitoring for pirated content drew its attention to an advert placed on Den Blå Avis (The Blue Newspaper), Denmark's largest buying and selling site.
For a fee of 20 kronor (US$2.91) it offered access to 115 digital copies of books usually sold by publishers including Gyldendal, Lindhardt and Ringhof, University of Southern Denmark, and Social Literature. The books were conveniently stored on Dropbox, with customers able to download them with minimum fuss. With assistance from local police, Rights Alliance was able to have the advert quickly removed but also managed to identify the seller, a woman from the Vanløse district of Copenhagen. The group said that the woman admitted to the unlawful distribution of the content, which included books dedicated to physiotherapy.
This week her fate was decided by a court in Nykøbing Falster, which reopened for business on Monday after a closure due to the coronavirus pandemic. Following a guilty plea, the court handed down a suspended sentence of 20 days in prison accompanied by a financial confiscation order.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Freeman on Tuesday May 05 2020, @09:21PM (14 children)
Goes to show how screwed up our copyright system is when something like this comes up. Suspended sentence of 20 days in prison and confiscation of ill-gotten gains. Whereas in the USA, they'd be trying you for stupid amounts of money and you'd be lucky, if it wasn't decades in prison.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2020, @09:27PM (1 child)
It's a function of what Sweden's copyright material is worth compared to America's: nolla.
(Score: 4, Touché) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday May 05 2020, @10:48PM
It's been a while since Denmark was part of Sweden.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 05 2020, @10:22PM (10 children)
The thing I hate the most about U.S. "justice" is that everybody gets away with everything, until they don't, and then when you manage to end up on the wrong side the fines are excessive, the jail sentences are inhumane, and the court costs are astronomical.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday May 05 2020, @10:50PM (7 children)
The thing that gets me (apart from your points) is that I have never heard any good argument for why copyright infringement is a criminal offense at all.
It ought to be a civil matter surely.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 05 2020, @11:34PM (3 children)
No, it shouldn't. Copyright infringement means that politically-connected corporations (the "copyright cartel" if you will) might make less money, and this is unacceptable in America, so these companies paid good money to the legislators in Congress to criminalize these actions and enact enormous penalties to deter people from committing them.
The system is working as designed, and that's why this should be a criminal matter.
(Score: 5, Touché) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday May 05 2020, @11:41PM (2 children)
Ah. Right.
So, the TL;DR might be: If you don't like it, buy your own congress.
(Score: 4, Funny) by darkfeline on Wednesday May 06 2020, @02:59AM (1 child)
I don't think I can afford a congress, can I pirate one instead?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday May 06 2020, @05:04AM
You wouldn't download a congress would you? [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday May 06 2020, @04:44PM (1 child)
Until you mention CHINA, then suddenly intellectual property rights become super important....
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday May 06 2020, @07:49PM
China is going to use our own IP laws against us. Especially patents.
We will come to regret our attempts to make China abide by our IP insanity. Especially software patents.
Would a Dyson sphere [soylentnews.org] actually work?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2020, @05:36PM
Then surely all matters at law are only civil and not criminal. As all such distinctions are arbitrary, based upon what society as a whole chooses (or tolerates) to make lawful or not.
(Score: 3, Touché) by JombieMan on Wednesday May 06 2020, @12:53AM (1 child)
It all depends on your place in society. If your white collar, wealthy and connected you steal millions and walk away. If your blue or no collar, poor and alone you do prison time for stealing food from a dumpster.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TrentDavey on Wednesday May 06 2020, @09:52PM
you are = you're ≠ your
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Wednesday May 06 2020, @05:14AM
If only the Aaron Swartz case had been handled like this.
(Score: 3, Informative) by anubi on Tuesday May 05 2020, @09:42PM (4 children)
It's one thing to share information for the benefit of the masses.
To me, charging for it is wrong. Just flat wrong.
Charging implies account credentials. Revealing account credentials is risky on the web, when so many internet businesses require agreement to pages of onerous "terms and conditions" in order to do business.
This is not sharing, at least not which I was taught in Bible School. When we were taught to share what we had, and others share with me. Nah, this is another business leeching off of someone else.
The legal risk I take by clicking "I agree" is usually enough to make me look elsewhere.
I give wide berth in my support of "piracy" in order to "protect the rights" of businesses to require onerous "terms and conditions" from those who still believe bending over and taking whatever comes is acceptable.
We had the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but have yet to see the Digital Millennium Accountability Act, which would enforce refunds. Remember the pet feeders here a couple of days ago? Law is in place to protect IP holders, while all the people who bought the thing are left holding the bag. Circuit City taught me that lesson. Once you surrender a charge number, you take the risk. The law simply has not kept up with internet chicanery.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2020, @10:09PM (2 children)
So your objection is not that she was taking other people's copyright material and selling it for her own profit (and I thought here you were going to make a statement about how you'd be ok with her giving it away because "information wants to be free" and all of that), but your only issue with it is the payment system that she accepts?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Tuesday May 05 2020, @10:43PM
Yeh..the fact of requiring payment at all. I abhor the "ownership" of knowledge. To me, it's a public good.
If you want to have a trade secret, fine, don't display it in public and expect everyone else not to look.
This is why we have underwear. We all have trade secrets. Don't display in public and think laws are gonna keep cameras at bay.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 05 2020, @10:56PM
"Information wants to be free" is the wrong, and pejorative, phrase for what's really going on. A better phrase is "copying belongs to the masses now". Copyright is dead, and what we have now is zombie copyright, still shambling confusedly along. Publishers must come to accept that that business model is history, and turn to others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2020, @05:39PM
Yeah. I should be allowed to walk into your house and take anything I want off your shelves, because you should have to share with me.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 05 2020, @10:40PM (4 children)
The real crime is the mulcting of students with the typical educational textbook racket. Whenever I could, I always bought my textbooks used. This case is another one of those in which the little person gets punished, while the big and powerful are not only allowed to run rackets with impunity, but shown a sickening level of deference.
That anyone is able to make money by undercutting is merely a message that the system itself is broken. Academic publishing of research is an even worse racket. At upwards of $2000, the "author pays" fees are outrageous. Never mind that it is the author who should be receiving money, not paying it. They ask so much money that a fair number of con artists have taken note and set up their own fraudulent research journals solely for the purpose of collecting those fees, offering a substantial discount to lure researchers in. Might ask "only" $200. They might well accept every submission, rejecting only if there's a need to do so for show. Why not? And laugh all the way to the bank.
But I don't blame them so much as I blame the publishers and academics for having created this golden opportunity for exploitation. Bring on Plan-S!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday May 06 2020, @07:26AM (2 children)
They'll close that loophole when all textbooks will only be available digitally.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday May 06 2020, @03:50PM
They wish! Can't be done. DRM simply does not work. Enforcing artificial scarcity through the law is also hopeless. Only thing that props copyright up now is the public's wishes that artists not starve, and a bit of inertia. Publishers have come close to losing that good will, with the RIAA pulling those stupid terrorism campaigns, and things such as the wiping out of music, movie, and book collections at a stroke because the DRM was online and the service that does the checking was shut down. In addition to raising questions about copyright itself, such dirty dealing fans the flames of anti-intellectualism.
Just your fear talking.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday May 06 2020, @08:01PM
The primary reason for textbooks to be available digitally is to keep them up to date. Printed textbooks, especially used ancient books from last semester, are too outdated to be suitable for use in education.
Imagine the pandemonium if textbooks are not updated:
Please don't support people re-using ancient text books from the previous semester or school year. They are full of misleading obsolete information.
This message is a public service of academic text publishers everywhere.
Would a Dyson sphere [soylentnews.org] actually work?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 06 2020, @10:12PM
That's so 2000s. Now every student has a PDF from somewhere. Sometimes for nostalgia, I'll still buy a dead-tree version. New ones aren't around $200 like they were when I was an undergrad 25 years ago, more like around $70, but I'll buy a used copy for $15.
When I saw some textbooks during my professor's office hours that I thought were useful for our class, I found full PDFs that our library system was providing, and put links on our Piazza site.
Of course, the yearly fee the library system pays to the content mafia for flat rate access is concerning. Physical books are disappearing from libraries all over, replaced with student cafés and makerspaces, but from what I heard Cornell pays $100m a year to have access to digital content.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 06 2020, @02:22AM
That's the real issue they have right there.