FBI nabs worker at DVD company for ripping prerelease blockbusters
Accused DVD thief faces up to 15 years for online piracy if convicted.
Good to see them going after the real criminals…. Back in 2002.
Better hope I'm not on the jury.
They're going after Meta next for pirating terabytes of books to train their AI, right? Right??
Do as I say. Not as I do.
Lol that's hilarious if not sad.
🎶 there goes my hero 🎶
Watch him as he goes.
YOU
WOULDN'T
SPIDER A
MAN
DVD?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How does a video file contain malware. Or are people running exe files to watch a video?
If they're being shared as disk images, basically every Blu-Ray has an embedded Java program, also
Some players might have vulnerabilities that people exploit; but honestly it's very rare, especially with most people auto updating their programs.
Most of the time it is indeed "download spider man no virus no survey 2023 free download.exe"
tldr: people using Windows can get duped into running what is basically a Powershell / Shortcut to pwn themselves
I cock blocked them with Qbit even though I don't use Windows
tldr: people using Windows can get duped
Truth.
The video itself is a set of instructions, and when a video player interprets those instructions there is a window of opportunity.
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.
DVDs?? is this article from 2006?
Weirdly enough, DVDs are still by far the most popular physical format.
Well, they're often cheaper and easier to rip. I ha e a bluray reader w/ Libredrive flashed, but not everyone has that.
I still buy them, but I prefer when it's a dvd/blueray/3D (if available) combo pack.
How "Les Misérables" of them. Jean Valjean got 19 years for stealing bread. 15 years is light in comparison.
Thankfully, no crime was committed
I knew they were going to start cracking down on piracy. They'll use it as an excuse to make vpns illegal.
Shhhhh, don't give them ideas!