Better hope I’m not on the jury.
Good to see them going after the real criminals…. Back in 2002.
They’re going after Meta next for pirating terabytes of books to train their AI, right? Right??
Lol that’s hilarious if not sad.
DVD?
🎶 there goes my hero 🎶
Watch him as he goes.
YOU WOULDN'T SPIDER A MANThe 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 year is it
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.
Lol corporate enforcers paid by taxes
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.
One is running some nobodies over, the other making a rich person some pennies less rich.
Must set a precedent, y’know?
on paper
It’s making them less rich only if you assume pirated copies would’ve been sales. That’s generally not the case, and piracy can often increase sales by pirates recommending things to people who will actually buy.
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.
That depends, is the pedophile a high profile person or a creepy poor person?
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.
Goes to show, he should have made a run for it and hit a bunch of people with his car. Then he’d get a reduced sentence.
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.
stole “numerous ‘pre-release’ DVDs and Blu-rays” between February 2021 and March 2022. He then allegedly “ripped” the movies, "bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying
How? Especially pre-release bluray?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Hey, that’s the combination to my luggage!
Hex?
They should demand thorough answers from this vigilante and put them on YouTube so all the world understands not to do this!
No, i mean, bluray DRM is partly bound to keys and the player. Even blurays from 2020 often fail with libbluray and a newish player. I see no way to rip a pre-release bluray.
DVD is a bit more tame with only CSS and no BD+ VM on the drive.
For Details, look here.
I’ve never ripped BluRays but from what I’ve been told by someone who is apart of a P2P release group the jist is there’s an exploit in Intel SGX that made BluRay protection obsolete and the tools to crack BRs are practically publicly available if you search around for a bit. The funny thing is newer CPUs/mobos don’t support Intel SGX, which is one way to stop it.
MakeMKV? I don’t understand.
With libredrive flashed on your player. Let the player decrypt for you, and then copy the decrypted stream, no need to break any encryption…
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. 🙄🤮
I’m okay with going after both. This guy was enabling a Russian Hacker network.
Thankfully this monster is finally off the streets
National security priorities definitely in order.
My tax dollars at work‽
Honestly, yeah, he was enabling Russian Hackers.
Thankfully your banjo playing days are finite.
This isn’t a “piracy is bad” comment, this guy in particular was feeding media specifically to a group that repackaged malware into it.
Do you have a source for that? This article does not say that at all. It simply says that the person in question ripped Spider-Man Far From Home, that movie specifically was available from a lot of different users and locations, also had some cases where it had dangerous malware packaged, and that could have come from a Russian torrenting site. Nothing links this person directly to that malware or Russians at all.
The article says
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.
It could be that the article is misquoting people and displaying a Bias, but I wouldn’t know.
Right, but that specifically is not linking Steven Hale. So your original assertion that he is selling/supporting Russian malware is not substantiated by this article.
Exactly. That will have to be proved in court, and just making something available for anyone to use as they please is not “working with Russian hackers.” They would need to prove actual collusion to make the malware-ridden version more accessible.
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.
If you can present the law that makes it illegal to download, please do so.
The laws of the USA make it illegal to distribute, but license violations are beef between you and a company subject to civil dispute at most (which is entirely uneconomic to pursue) AND technically you haven’t violated the license, the distributor has.
In fact, Facebook downloaded millions of archived and pirated works recently but claim no wrongdoing because they didn’t seed anything.
