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.
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.
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.
Fails to mention he also was selling the discs online.
But they want to sentence him for 15 years for this, even though his actions likely saved lives during the height of COVID if the allegations are true; if they aren’t true, he harmed nobody because those 10 million people wouldn’t have seen the movies in theaters anyway.
The 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.
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
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.