Cooperative porno copyright troll gets 5 years in prison, while his co-conspirator got 14 years

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/12/rot-you-bastard.html

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Steele deserved a significant prison term. However, his cooperation and genuine remorse should be taken into account.

I can’t say i believe the remorse part, i would presume its just the fear of the punishment really vs actual genuine remorse. But either way reducing it to 5 years seems fair to me

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I wouldn’t trust that anything Steele expresses is genuine or sincere. I’ve been reading this story on Techdirt for something like seven years and all Steele’s pleadings and lawsuits and arguments and forgeries and Russian nesting doll company tricks indicate he’s a pure sociopathic asshole who thought he could get away with anything. 5 years doesn’t seem like enough to me.

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It’s the prisoner’s dilemma, quite literally. If anything by cooperating with the government it makes me think Steele is the more anti-social of the two.

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I can’t say that’s a commonly applied attribute of pornography.

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What could be eye-watering about smut - close-quarters farting? :crying_cat_face:

Maybe porn that fills you with longing and melancholy?

That sounds pretty good, actually.

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Of course the remorse is fake, still it makes sense for prosecutors to reward cooperation. It saves time and helps convict the other, more stupid crooks. Next time, when they don’t have enough evidence for a sure conviction, they can bluff and point to these two crooks to convince their target to cooperate for a more lenient sentence.

As long as you only do it too this kind of white collar criminals with knowledge and money it’s OK IMHO. When police blackmail street level criminals or entirely innocent people to confess it’s abuse of power.

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One of them had incomplete information, though, because the result is neither the globally optimal corner nor the Nash equilibrium corner…

Now I’m waiting for Prenda Law - The Musical.

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But it all works our, because the state claiming to care about remorse is also fake. But it serves the purpose of adding a public-palatable rationale for plea deals to keep the cost of prosecution down and the conviction rate up.

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