Man gets 7 years for software piracy | CNET News.com

Nathan Peterson, 27, of Los Angeles, sold copyrighted software at a huge discount on his site, iBackups.net, prosecutors said. The FBI began investigating the site in 2003 and shut it down in February 2005. U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III on Friday ordered Peterson to pay restitution of more than $5.4 million. Peterson pleaded guilty in December in Alexandria, Va., to two counts of copyright infringement for illegally copying and selling more than $20 million in software.

In another recent case quoted, a man got 6 years. Given that the average US prison sentence for rape fluctuates around 10 years (“Violent Felons in Large Urban Counties”) and that figure doesn’t even take into account those who are not sentenced to prison or parole discounts (many rape perpetrators serve only months with over 10% serving no time whatsoever). Surprisingly the sentences are even smaller for those who abuse children. What sort of message is being sent out? I don’t like the way in which everything has been criminalised with penalties that are way out of whack with the actual damage suffered.

The most popular software manufacturers (and thus the main targets of infringements) are companies like Adobe and Microsoft. I hardly see them suffering, I don’t see their employees’ lives ruined. In fact they seem to be doing pretty alright.

Software lobby groups like the the Business Software Alliance Software will trot out figures like “Software piracy resulted in a loss of $34 billion worldwide in 2005, a $1.6 billion increase over 2004″ (in studies commissioned by them, surprise surprise). Due to these dubious studies, governments have been convinced to act as
policers of what should be, and used to be, civil matters. After all if
you think that you’re losing billions of dollars each year, that makes it a pressing national issue.

But much like the music industry when it does its studies, it supposes that non-authorised copies of software = lost sales. In some cases, that might be true, but for the majority, they wouldn’t have purchased the software in the first place and either suffered productivity losses or would have been forced to find alternative lower priced software (or both).

I would love to see a study that properly examined the benefits of software piracy to both the economy (increased productivity due to availability of the software and the effect of reduced start up costs for businesses) and to the involved software companies. As the music industry seems to be destroying key avenues for viral marketing (ironically at a time when companies can’t throw enough money at it), the mix tape/cd after all should have been a record company’s pr dream, the software industry seems to stupidly blind to the effect piracy has on entrenching their software as the industry norm. It allows for cheap access where trial versions are inadequate and allows a program to insinuate its way into being essential and thereby setting up a repeat customer for the life of its product.

One also wonders, when all these new “crimes” are being created through political lobbying, and there is not a proportionate increase in the resources of policing staff, is general policing of real crimes suffering?

Edit: Though this data is from the impact on public safety due to increases in drug imprisonments, it has implications on the impact of increasing criminalisation of non-violent crimes on the actual served sentences of violent criminals: Prison Blues: How America’s Foolish Sentencing Policies Endanger Public Safety

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