Yes, the oh-so-lucrative license plate market. They are making millions hand over fist with those things.

License plates aren't made by hand any more nor are they made in prisons, however, some states do use prisoners for cheap labor doing road work and the like, but not all states.
Yes our government simply exists to throw the voting citizens into jail for no good reason. Please.

If this guy goes to trial and is convicted, I said he can get UP TO 5 years in jail, not that he would definitely get 5 years in jail. That is not the automatic sentence for the crime, that is the sentence limitation. It is up to the judge in the case to decide what the punishment actually will be. If history is any indication and if this guy is just a first offender, he's going to get hit with a pretty hefty fine and probably a few years of probation, but not actual jail time. Even if he does get jail time, he is going to be put in a federal minimum security country club, not "real jail".

The FBI has one mandate and one mandate alone: to enforce federal law. They don't get to pick and choose which violations of which laws they are going to investigate. They are not in the business of judging what is and is not of benefit to society (that is supposed to be what the politicians and judges are for). They simply investigate any and all reported violations of the law and present their findings to the prosecutors, no more, no less. The costs associated with that are really a moot point since they are simply doing their job as we gave it to them. If people don't like the FBI wasting their budget on so-called "victim-less crimes" like this, then get involved in the political process and get the law changed so that the FBI doesn't have to investigate these kinds of things when they do happen.

Of course they should. Everyone should be paying a fair amount of tax, that in turn is spent in line with the government's charter. But since the government is so incredibly, immorally, unbelievably irresponsible with the care of other people's money, and since this idiot is slipping in shit like "Given the nation's $1.6 trillion deficit, Senator Sanders suggests that the burden of deficit reduction be shared more equally" which is a nice way of saying we're fuck ups and can't be entrusted to manage money, so we'll just go ahead and try to figure out ways to steal more of it. It becomes hard to blame any citizen for trying to avoid the tens of thousands of little ways they try to get nickel and dimed and dollared to death by taxes.

They're bitching about these companies getting multi-million dollar refunds in taxes every year, and yet it is the people bitching who have allowed this kind of retarded system to happen in the first place.

I missed that detail. Nonetheless the legislation itself is unlikely to be constitutional, or at least it wouldn't be constitutional if SCOTUS wouldn't be packed with people that don't believe in it.

But regardless of that, it really isn't a legitimate use of tax payer dollars when there are other important things for the FBI to be doing. The only bright side here is that this is time and energy they don't have to violate other portions of the constitution.
Ignorance, you keep using the word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

I'm curious, which studio is it that you're paid to shill for? There is no evidence that there is a one to one trade off there. If you've got some evidence, I'd love to see it, but I don't think you can produce any.
Sure they do. Certain crimes get prioritized at various points in history. You don't honestly think that white supremacist groups suddenly became a serious problem in the 90s, do you? Same goes for the DoJ, whether or not that's right, it's not accurate to say that they investigate all crimes that come under their jurisdiction equally.

What you're saying is that the FBI has to vigorously investigate every crime for which they have jurisdiction no matter how minor, simply because they have jurisdiction. I'm not away of any law enforcement agency that works like that. Simply because there are not sufficient resources to investigate everything which may or may not provide for a successful investigation.

I know what dramatic irony is too. See if you can spot it.

I never once said anything about giving each crime equally vigorous investigation. There's a huge difference between prioritizing some crimes due to their severity and not bothering to investigate a crime simply because some people deem it insignificant. All I said was that the FBI has no choice but to investigate all crimes reported to them, even if that investigation is simply to determine whether or not they have jurisdiction over a crime. It is pointless to complain that they could better spend their resources elsewhere when they are bound by law to investigate any and all violations of federal law reported to them, regardless of anyone's personal opinions about their severity or where their resources could be better spent.

No, it's not. If convicted and used as an example by the courts by pressure of the IP holders, he can face upwards to five years in jail. That's not including any other charges thrown against him.

Lemme tell you a story. A family member of mine (cousin in fact) was a repeat violent and drug offender. Known throughout the state, had been arrested time after time since he was a teenager, and always got the minimum sentence no matter what he did. Finally, he got high, stole a car, and then drove it inebriated before running it directly into another car. The car inside was a family of five. Every single one of them except for one of the sons was killed in the collision.

So now they have to throw the book at him, right? No. He got about fifteen years for what amounted to the murder of an entire family. Only ten years more then what this dude faces for uploading a movie. If you think that's fair or just, then I frankly want nothing to do with how you perceive the world.

No. It doesn't work that way. If you can prove it, by all means. But most not for profit pirates come from four categories: #1) The pirate who wants to get the game/movie/music early and can't wait to get it legally. They will almost always buy the product when available PROVIDED that the object isn't terrible. #2) The pirate who wants to sample before purchase. There's no way to sample movies without viewing them. The best are trailers which are lies 99.5% of the time. Games are the same way with the lack of demos in this generation. If the pirate likes it, they'll buy it. #3) The pirate who won't purchase the product under any circumstances. These people pirate out of lack of interest. You may hear a song you kinda like and decide to go download it, but you won't pay for it. If you have to pay for it, you won't get it. There's no correlation due to the fact that if the option of downloading is removed the object won't be purchased And finally we have #4) The douchebags. These are the people who pirate things they want for no other reason then to pirate it. There's no "sample" or "early get" desires. They simply grab things they like. These people are generally the idiots who then go onto official forums and try to find out why their hacked game doesn't run properly.

So it's NOT a 1:1 conversion and it never has been. Piracy is good at times as well. It helps smaller names get known, played, or heard. I for one have become a paying customer for bands that I initially pirated. Had I not pirated those songs I never would have known about the bands at all. Is it better to pirate some stuff to buy later or never buy at all? I think it's pretty obvious.

The law isn't always right. Just like how general society morality is never 100% correct. In fact, having taken law classes I can tell you straight up that the law is almost never right due to the people who interpret the law to their own goals. This isn't "standing up for the right thing" here. This is big corporations forcing their own desires upon the state using the political connections they've bought and sold. Yes, what the guy did was wrong. I'm not saying it's not. But the possible punishment for this far, far exceeds what he actually did. To put it on perspective, it only costs a few dollars to make a DVD in this era. Let's say I go out and steal something of equivalent worth. I would *not* face five years maximum, have the FBI raid my entire house, and be labeled in the media for doing so. I might get arrested, but five bucks worth of material sure as hell isn't going to net me five years in prison.

These are special rules pushed through by corporations to protect their own interests. This isn't common good or common sense. It's personal justice using what should be an impartial third party. If you like that, fine. Most do not, myself included.

I have never said that is the reason your government operates. Why would you say so?

I just pointed out that the judges are quite eager to throw people in jail.

It's clear you feel very strongly about this. That's fine, of course. Using dramatic irony, sarcasm, or exaggeration is probably a bad way to debate this kind of thing, because then you close down actual debate and end up having the conversation about your use of exaggeration or irony, or whatever instead.

This presumes you don't want to close down debate (and I actually don't believe you do), of course:)

And yes, I'm terribly aware I'm guilty of the same at times:)
Of course it's not for no reason, it's for kickbacks!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html

Yes Lukas... The point was that the jails aren't full of guys who uploaded movies. And to be certain, they aren't full of jaywalkers or litterbugs. Sadly, they are not full of corporate bankers. But you are right that they are full of minor and non-violent drug offenders and disproportionately full of minorities.

Red... Actually, it is worse than license plates... Privately contracted prisons slave out inmates to operate telemarketing call centers... among other things.

Laundry services are popular too. The real money, though, is that privately run prisons (which are almost all of them now) are allowed to make a profit, so basically they make money for every person in prison, regardless of whether they can force that person to work or not.

If you look at the sponsors for any State bill for three strikes laws or mandatory sentencing they always include corps that run private prisons and the prison guard unions. In fact, they will donate large sums of money to get these on the ballot, campaigned for, and passed.

It's not that complex. If you don't pay insurance, don't expect to be paid when your house burns down. Don't pay taxes, and don't expect to enjoy the benefits of society. It's that easy. Wishful thinking, maybe, but if I wasn't paying taxes and some burglar robbed my house, then I wouldn't feel I could demand the police to catch him.

Sure you could say they offer culture and jobs and blabla - but you can be sure that the taxes they evade amounts to billions while they whine about piracy despite most of their movies being safe crappy bets.

I agree completely with you. However just from a practical point of view: the FBI will not investigate in everything equally. They will have experts on some topics and deficits on other topics. And their resources are limited. When a new case of say child abuse occurs they will tell their agents to stop chasing that drug dealer and concentrate on the new case. There will be kind of an unofficial severity ranking, there must be. Copyright infringement would rank low on this ranking well below murder or drugs or such stuff and therefore I said that some exemplary cases might be enough for now until the FBI gets enough funding to really investigate every case properly.

It's pretty clear the penal system in the US is pretty messed up - and that's coming from someone whose country has a habit of letting prisoners go free or escape with ease. But the US is the other side of the medal and an even nastier one: the rich get off free, the poor get busted on small charges and end up making money for private companies where rehabilitation is no longer important and these companies actually want more cheap labour. It's slavery, pure and simple.

You lower the threshold (and the US has one of the lowest thresholds of any Western country despite having the highest crime rates by far so it shows it doesn't work) so you get more people in jail and this way, you can bust anyone. Make even downloading a single song or having a single copyrighted image an offense and there's not a single citizen you can't throw in jail if you wanted to. It's what the US is now doing and it's disgusting - or rather, what Bush has been doing: he introduced so many laws that gives the police the ability to arrest almost anyone, creating loopholes just to make it easier to grab terrorists while in reality, it just led to regular citizens being at the short end of the stick.