Another Shot Across Bows For Piracy As Market Trader Jailed

[wraggster]

A market trader who made a living selling illegally copied games worth thousands of pounds at a Wolverhampton market has been jailed for eight months.

Christopher Charles Jones, 40, of Century Court, Edlington, Doncaster was sentenced on Friday 30th November at Wolverhampton Magistrates Court to eight months imprisonment for having sold illegally copied games – most notably single discs containing 400 games for Sony’s PlayStation®Portable (PSP®) console, among others. The combined value of each individual PSP game on the disc has been estimated to be “in the thousands”, but Jones was selling each one for just £5.

Mr Jones was initially arrested following a raid executed by West Midlands Police and Wolverhapton City Council Trading Standards on 11th April 2006. He had been under surveillance for some time by ELSPA (the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association) investigators, who had been secretly filming his criminal activity and making test purchases.

During his first court appearance on Tuesday 27th November, Jones admitted 21 charges relating to copyright breaches after the raid at the North Computer market at Wolverhampton’s Dunstall Racecourse, before being charged and jailed for eight months on 30th November before a bench of three magistrates.

Peter Calvert, Wolverhampton City Council Trading Standards Manager, said: “This prosecution underlines the City Council’s commitment to fighting the scourge of counterfeiting. Selling fake items is designed to dupe innocent consumers, harm the livelihoods of honest businesses and line the pockets of the greedy. The City Council will continue to deal robustly with those involved in this trade in Wolverhampton.”

Michael Rawlinson, managing director of ELSPA commented: “It’s clear from the recent successes in bringing to justice those who think they can get away with illegally copying games and profiting from their sale that piracy and counterfeiting doesn’t pay. This case only goes to prove that through patience and diligence Trading Standards, local police and the anti-piracy investigators are making it harder than ever for criminals to operate.”


400 Games on one Disc- how big was the ruddy disc :P (gotta be emulators)

[cloud_952]

<_<;; And.. where could one purchase this disk?

Purely hypothetically, of course. ^_-

[JKKDARK]

mm eight months is not enough :mad:

[Qmark]

Is it even possible to stuff 400 PSP games on one disk?
Do 400 PSP games even exist?

[Murdock]

Is it even possible to stuff 400 PSP games on one disk?
Do 400 PSP games even exist?

Yes, 400 PSP games exist ... :D but noooo ... the author of this article OR the police/officials are presumably lying ... it is just impossible to get 400 PSP games onto one single disc ... excepting ...

... it's been all ripped titles without any music, movies, etc. ... then it might work, if u can get the games smaller than ~ 11 MB :D not very likely! OR another question: Who's gonna buy Midnight Club 3 DUB if all the cars & Cities were ripped except of one :D I'd kick this pirates ASS if he had sold me such a crap :o hahahaha! :rofl:

... in fact these DVDs contained ROMs ... then you can fit much more on one disc.

... if he sold them on Blue-Rays or HD-DVDs ... then every game may have been about ~120 MB ... more likely than 11 MB per game .. but still kinda unlikely! :rofl:


So I think this is one of those made up "facts" a fat donut-eating policeman in his 50s with a knowledge about technology tending towards 0 has given to the news reporters ... and those don't seem to know much more about tech specs of optical volumes than the cop ... :p

I love such reports! They show how little those "good" anti-piracy idiots understand of technology ...

No wonder they are never really gonna stop illegal file sharing and game copies ... they arrest 1 guy ... the other day there are two others at exactly the same place, selling the same stuff ...

[lachek]

That's about 10MB per game, if it's a single-layer DVD.
And no, 400 PSP games that are 10MB or less do not exist.
Yes, he probably sold ROMS and emulators. Also illegal, of course, but worth "thousands of pounds"? Come on.

[cloud_952]

O_O Of course it's worth thousands of pounds. We all know that not only is ToeJam and Earl still available for the Genesis, but also continues to sell for the original MSRP...

=p Right?

[Flaco_Guey]

In my Opinion i think the author meant to put 40 games that seems more likely than 400

[lachek]

Flaco, that would also that the "thousands of pounds" figure is wrong, too - unless a PSP game sells for 50 pounds and up in the UK, which seems unlikely.
No, the 400 games / disc figure is surely correct. It's the idea that they're PSP games that are not, and that they are actually worth the "thousands of pounds" of damages per disc they charged this guy for in order to give him 8 months in the pen.

Did he have a right to sell these games? No.
Would every person who bought a disc from him have paid "thousands of pounds" to Nintendo, Atari and Sega for 10 to 15 year old games, had they only not been enticed by this corrupter of youth? Certainly not.
So, was he judged fairly based on the detrimental financial impact he caused the aforementioned companies? Not even close.

8 months in prison for selling Bomberman and Galaga to kids who'd otherwise never have heard of them? Yeah, that sounds fair. Glad to hear these hardened criminals are kept off the street.

[Murdock]

In my Opinion i think the author meant to put 40 games that seems more likely than 400

May I ask u where u are from? Do u guys have elementary schools there? And do u learn how to multiply there? ... :o

Sorry, but 40 games would still be pretty unlikely, since every damn game then may only have about 100 MB ... I mean there are several pretty small games, especially if they are cso'ed, but come on! Who's gonna buy 100 MB games, not to speak of 40?! To get 40 games at ~ 100 MB you have to rip them ... and u have to rip a lot of content out of a game ... who seriously wants to buy such games? I guess no1 ...

Anyway ... the fact that he only got 8 months hints to the fact that the "damage" should not have been that high ... therefore, one disc should not really have had a "value" of several 1000 Dollars/Pounds ... then he should have caused a damage of probably more than half a million bucks ... VERY unlikely that you only get 8 months for this :D

[lachek]

Murdock, the way it works is this:

ELSPA grossly overestimates the damages caused and tries to have the guy beheaded or put away for a million years.
The judge says "No way! He just sold some discs with pirated stuff on it! No way I'm putting this guy away for a million years!"
In the end, they're usually put away for the lowest amount of time that can possibly be given based on the damage they have supposedly caused.

Not saying this was the case here, but it's usually how it works, in a nutshell. It is not at all inconceivable that the charge laid on him was that he caused the assorted game publishers half a million dollars of damages. To give a comparison figure, according to the RIAA a person sharing about 10GB worth of MP3s over P2P are causing the record companies a financial loss of about 4 to 5 million dollars.