Is Running a Pirate Site Worse Than Stealing £8.5m From a Bank?

[Batu69]

This week an Irish man was handed a four-year sentence for running a pirate linking site. The Court accepted that he led no lavish lifestyle. In contrast, a man who stole almost £9m from a bank and bought homes worth £1.4m, three Bentleys, three Aston Martins, a Porsche 911 and a Rolls Royce, was also jailed. He received just 3.5 years. Fair?

This week Paul Mahoney, the former operator of streaming links site FastPassTV and discussion and linking forum BedroomMedia, was sentenced to jail by Judge Philip Babington.

According to figures provided by the prosecution, Mahoney ‘could’ have cost the movie industry £120m in lost revenue. Ultimately, however, the claims of a film industry out for blood ended up somewhat watered down.

In the cold light of day the court accepted a figure closer to £12m – quite an ‘achievement’ for a “partially blind recluse” who lived in a bedroom in his parents’ particularly modest home.

Given the tendency of the prosecution in these cases to blow losses figures wildly out of proportion, it’s perhaps more prudent to look at numbers backed up by evidence.

It doesn’t appear to be in question that Mahoney made £280,000 in advertising revenue from his sites and he was found in possession of £82,390 in cash when he was raided. That’s a decent amount by almost anyone’s standards and was never likely to be looked upon lightly by the court.

So, on the basis that Mahoney made large sums of money illegally it should come as no surprise that having pleaded guilty to substantial fraud he should’ve expected a custodial sentence this week. Such is the current climate in the UK and few people watching the case expected anything different.

But while some might argue that the term should have been limited to a few weeks or a handful of months, on Thursday the court handed Mahoney a four-year sentence, one of the toughest in UK pirate prosecution history.

For someone of Mahoney’s standing that term seems overly cruel and it appears that Mahoney’s lawyers feel so too. On Thursday they announced that the 29-year-old will be mounting an appeal, presumably to ensure that any punishment received fits the crime.

As we wait for the legal basis of that appeal to be made public, readers might be interested to hear of another fraud case that was concluded this week.

It involved businessman Nicholas Marcou from London, who used his legitimate businesses and contracts with supermarkets such as Aldi, Lidl, Sainsbury’s and Asda to fraudulently obtain millions from Barclays Bank.

According to figures provided by City of London Police, actual losses to Barclays Bank (versus the hypothetical losses conjured up in the Mahoney case) were £8,576,811.

Unlike Mahoney, who appears to have spent most of his adult life in a bedroom at his parents’ house, Marcou enjoyed ‘his’ money. According to a local news report he bought two homes worth more than £1.4m and £650,000 worth of cars including three Bentleys, three Aston Martins, a Porsche 911, and a Rolls Royce Silver Spirit.

While Marcou appears to have been driven by greed, Mahoney appears to have given much of his money away. According to a court report he “did not exhibit any of the features of a lavish lifestyle and his spending was concerned only to paying employees, running the site and accessing adult websites.”

It’s also worth bearing in mind that even if we take the previously mentioned £12m figure as accurate, those presumed losses were racked up by users of Mahoney’s site, not Mahoney himself. Site users were the ones who turned up and clicked ‘play’ and didn’t pay for whatever it was they watched. Although he clearly played a part, Mahoney didn’t take that money from the studio’s pockets, the public did. Marcou alone took the money from the bank.

Finger pointing aside, Mahoney ended up with a four-year sentence. For the record, Marcou the bank defrauder received just 3.5 years.

While anti-piracy groups such as FACT, who investigated the case, view Mahoney’s actions as extremely serious, something feels fundamentally wrong here.

Make no mistake, Mahoney should receive some punishment, if only because he knowingly and deliberately broke laws he knew could get him into serious trouble.

But should this man living on the fringes of society be given a more punishing sentence than a man who systematically stole £8.5m in cash from a bank in order to fund a dream lifestyle?

Perhaps in due course Mahoney’s defense team will raise the same questions. Until then he remains behind bars.

Source

[dMog]

depends did tou steal more than 8.5 million worth of stuff off the internet :lol:

[David]

very interesting indeed

this guy only tried to profit from internet...

i realy dont understand 12 million mark but ok... we already know that most of the time the people wouldnt have money to buy the dvd bluray of the movie

[jbleck]

nasty sentence :(

i don't get how they came to that number either... 12 million... these statistics people are really dumb in many cases... they are like the weather people, only that they are taken seriously by the authorities.

even if that site got visited by millions of users, it's not like those would've paid otherwise for what they viewed there... many alternatives are available and the movie industry wouldn't be richer if that site wouldn't have existed.

[steven36]

. many alternatives are available and the movie industry wouldn't be richer if that site wouldn't have existed.

The whole downfall of the movie industry was the invention of the internet were every thing is readily made available at fast speed. Back in the old days when everyone was still on dialup you would had never attempted to download or stream a movie . You would had went to a rental shop and rented the movie through legal means even if you copied it to DVD they got there rental fee . They keep blaming it on pirates were really its technology as a whole at fault . ;)

[Enigmatism]

Is Owning a bank franchise worse than being a Politician? Thats the next question needed.

[funkyy]

First of all, there is no "downfall of the movie industry"...the box office figures destroy that conception. Second, 40 years ago the movie industry relied totally on one source of income, the bums on seats in the cinema. Then along came VHS & Betamax, where they mined a new source of income for the same product that was shown in the cinema. They really couldn't produce enough versions to sell to the public i.e. The xxth Anniversary Edition, The Uncut Edition, The Director's Cut etc. They of course had to live with the fact that people could buy a set of audio-video leads and hook up two video players and make copies (Oh, and the same companies that were complaining were raking in a nice amount of money by being part of the video tape sales business).

Third, along comes the Digital Age and the Internet...the part that they like? They now sell the same "special editions" of movies mentioned above and as the digital age advances through the years they are able to add "Anniversary Editions"...and double up the earnings by issuing them on DVD and on BluRay and BluRay 3D......with an eye on what they will be able to put the same product on next, maybe 4k Discs? It seems there are innumerable ways to sell the same cow...if you're a "Company". They don't like the idea that any cent, penny, peso is "lost" ("lost" = "not going into our pocket").

They deliberately ignore the facts, which have been spoken about here many times, and instead harp on and on in their insatiable greed to try to criminalize people. They ignore the free publicity that their product gets every minute of every day. They wear a bag (of dollars) over their heads and insanely try to control the progress of the Digital Age...they have as much chance as the guys fighting with weapons made of bronze in the Bronze Age coming up against armies wielding weapons made of iron as the Iron Age dawned.

If they have their way, you'll get more prison time for "piracy" than for murder...seriously!!

Here endeth the ramble!!! :D :huh: :D

[dMog]

very good ramble...don't let it end tho...shout it from the mountain top :D

[steven36]

Its not going to go away I'm afraid and this person was not 1st to go jail for this sort of thing. This person is not a mortar he made money uploading stuff the scene and p2p groups do for free .

People now days have no values or respect they have file sharing contused with people who generate a profit from warez . Its not the same thing if you're crazy enough to upload in public for money sooner or latter you most likely will get caught .

If you do the crime you should be willing to do the time. This is one of the reasons I got out of uploading it stopped being about sharing and about making money. All most everyone who gets caught is because they done it to make money. I dont fell sorry for them at all. they are the very people who ruin fileshareing and made it have a bad sigma like it has today.

There are some good sites like Nsane who has rules against this sort of thing but this is hard to find now days.

[elJay]

If they have their way, you'll get more prison time for "piracy" than for murder...seriously!!

:guns:

[212eta]

If they have their way,

you'll get more prison time for "piracy" than for murder...seriously!!

Definitely. :yes:

[Cereberus]

....this picture sums it up...

This is one of the reasons I got out of uploading it stopped being about sharing and about making money.

i actually did my part in the anime fansub scene (this is a grey area because fans want to watch anime, but it hasn't been licensed yet so no english fansubs... so there was a unsaid understanding that it was okay to share fansubs as long as it was not licensed for most part), but with no goal intended to make profit at all.

my group paid out of our own pocket to operate the server ;_; (and i can tell you it's not cheap)

so i did my part :/ but yes i too have now stopped from the uploading scene. the environment now is way stricter than it was before.

[Cereberus]

. many alternatives are available and the movie industry wouldn't be richer if that site wouldn't have existed.

The whole downfall of the movie industry was the invention of the internet were every thing is readily made available at fast speed. Back in the old days when everyone was still on dialup you would had never attempted to download or stream a movie . You would had went to a rental shop and rented the movie through legal means even if you copied it to DVD they got there rental fee . They keep blaming it on pirates were really its technology as a whole at fault . ;)

in the UK they legalized dvd/bluray writers for copying original discs. then they banned it again .....

and the lobbyists also forced these disc writer manufacturers to gimp their writting speeds for disc optical writers to further slow down the rate of copying from discs to make physical copies, or even virtual files e.g. mkvs.

i'm personally using a WH16NS40 which when using with anydvd and makemkw, i can get a decent read/write speed compared to most writers that have been gimped thx to the lobbyists :x

and speaking of internet, netflix was what everyone wanted (reasonably priced, and tons of content, this pretty much threatened the cable companies). but even then they had their silly regional restrictions. they wanted to milk us for all we were worth few times over. so then people resorted to the more readily available version, aka popcorn ;_; not necessarily because it was free, but also because it was the only option available because netflix was not yet in their country. not to mention australia netflix was not the same rich content as US netflix ....

[VileTouch]

On 14/9/2015 at 10:55 PM, steven36 said:

The whole downfall of the movie industry was the invention of the internet were every thing is readily made available at fast speed. Back in the old days when everyone was still on dialup you would had never attempted to download or stream a movie . You would had went to a rental shop and rented the movie through legal means even if you copied it to DVD they got there rental fee . They keep blaming it on pirates were really its technology as a whole at fault .

it was the downfall of video rental shops as well, who doesn't remember that infamous backroom covered by a courtain...

 

i mean...as a kid i always wondered what was inside and the guys came...out of it with these strange looks and a mysterious paper bag