[LINK] DrinkorDie warez leader jailed for 51 months

[Adam Todd]

At 10:17 PM 23/06/2007, Kim Holburn wrote:
>What a complicated story: a British National living in Australia gets
>extradited to the US for acts committed in Australia.  It's a bit sad
>to hear a US Attorney referring to copyright infringement as theft
>but since it appears that most of the US attorneys are compromised by
>the White House shenanigans I guess it's not so surprising.
>
><http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/06/23/ drink_or_die_ringleader_jailed/>
>
>>imprisonment will be deducted from his sentence. We suspect not -
>>judging by the extreme lengths to which America is prepared to go
>>to stamp out copyright theft.

Yep, you are right.  It's not THEFT, it's copyright infringement.

However, THEFT might be applied by the terms of trade, that is he 
sold unlawful counterfeit copies of the software and therefor STOLE 
revenue from the legitimate sales avenues.

However as "warez" are rarely paid for and are given away free, it's 
hard to imagine he profited or "stole" anything, and at the end of 
the process anyway, he's probably out of pocket for the cost of 
running his next of servers, hosting, bandwidth, connectivity not to 
mention the time and effort to crack the software.

If he was selling cracked code, then he should go to jail, for a 
really long time.  If he wasn't selling it, then he's made no profit 
and not affected any sales because anyone who wants to use software 
WILL in fact buy it.

There is nothing worse than not having reference manuals and support 
on most software today, and you WILL need it :)