[Inquisitor]

Question: What are the criminal penalties for a DMCA 1201 violation?


Answer: If the circumvention violations are determined to be willful and for commercial or private financial gain, first time offenders may be fined up to $500,000, imprisoned for five years, or both. For repeat offenders, the maximum penalty increases to a fine of $1,000,000, imprisonment for up to ten years, or both. Criminal penalties are not applicable to nonprofit libraries, archives, and educational institutions.

Yes, you can be arrested. The LEO likely to arrest you are probably federal. FBI, enforcement agents for the FTC, etc, which implies lengthy investigations. You can't just call the Fairbanks PD and tell them to go arrest S-99 for being a pirate (well you can, but I'd bet money they'd tell you to get wet).

Most of the real penalties are civil.

[Flaser]

Wait, arrested?
You can get arrested for this in the USA?
I know that it's only a civil matter here, and the criminal code doesn't say anything about it.
Copyright infringement can get you sued, but it's not an offence, or at least so I thought.

In the USA you can be arrested for badmouthing agri-corps, since they pushed through to make it a felony. Watch Food Inc.

...or watch this:

The World According to Monsanto

[Colonol Dekker]

What film are we talking about here?

[Flaser]

What film are we talking about here?

It's only tangetial to the theme of the thread. The documentary "Food Inc." deals with how the agricultural industry works in the USA today and how big capital has come to dominate it - their tactics of fear, lawsuits and burying you under propaganda are very reminiscent of how the record industry operates.

[S-99]

Wait, arrested?
You can get arrested for this in the USA?
I know that it's only a civil matter here, and the criminal code doesn't say anything about it.
Copyright infringement can get you sued, but it's not an offence, or at least so I thought.

Software patents is just a ridiculous idea. Software licensing can be equally as retarded. If it's illegal to play a dvd movie with whatever media player you want implementing it's own way to decrypt CSS then it's illegal because it wasn't licensed by the people who license stuff like powerdvd for legal dvd movie playability.

This is one of the reasons why linux doesn't include any codecs for anything other than opensource codecs like ogg/vorbis. For years the only way to play a dvd was with libdvdcss (you can guess unlicensed, it's also part of vlc), and to get codecs for divx, mp4, mp3, xvid (you can probably also guess unlicensed) and so on was through a similar way. The only reason windows plays mp3's right off the bat is because microsoft has a license for mp3.

Idk about arrested per se, but i do know that at least get sued for having pirated stuff and get a massive fine. Ideally when i have to play a dvd in linux i just install the ****ing codecs and libdvdcss and just don't worry about it. Having an illegal codec is different than having pirated works, but you get the idea, it's an offense. Screw software patents, **** DMCA, the MPAA, the RIAA, and so on.