E-waste recycler loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve prison term • Hacker News Board

Re: E-waste recycler loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve prison term

#151

Post by RIMR » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

usaphp wrote: post #132

DoctorOetker wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whats next? "Diet coach Daisy, sent to jail as McDonalds loses customers" "CPU designer Claire, sent to jail as its optimized caching algorithm lowers demand for RAM sales" "Louis Pasteur, unearthed from the grave, incarcerated as milk sales fall due to longer shelf-life"

None of your examples actually use intellectual property of McDonald’s, ram or milk products. It’s like selling your own burgers with less calories and calling them Big Macs and selling them next door from McDonald’s store. You can’t do that according to law

I don't see your point. You can't use the disks without already possessing a license to use the disks. Without a license, the disks are useless - unless you buy a license.

It's not like he was giving people keygens and cracks. He was just giving them the disc, burned from an ISO available for free on Microsoft's website, for the price of the blank medium used - and then giving people the information they needed to use their existing license rather than purchase a new one.

His crime appears to have been limiting Microsoft's ability to get people to pay for excessive licenses.

Re: E-waste recycler loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve prison term

#152

Post by djrogers » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #54

monocasa wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The .iso was available for free off of their website.

Off of their website. It might be free, but Microsoft is still the only party who can legally distribute it (or OEMs that have been granted that right from Microsoft). Just because it’s free doesn’t mean the owner doesn’t have rights. (This is also the basis of the GPL.)

No, but the value of the disks is directly linked to sentencing - since the value was determined to be $25/ea, the sentence was very stiff. If the value had been determined to be closer to $0, it could have been a small fine, probation, time served etc.

Re: E-waste recycler loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve prison term

#153

Post by balls187 » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #111

onli wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no law violated here.

Most copyright jursidictions make a difference for non-commercial copyrigth infringement and commercial copyright infringement. Most of them put commercial copyright infringement in the criminal offence category.

The law violation is akin to being ticketed for jaywalking across an empty road.

The court ignored expert witness testimony that the disks were useless without a valid license and came up with a ludicrous amount.

The defendants belief was that many customers weren't knowledgeable enough to download restore images from the internet. He was selling them to used computer shops so they could provide them to their customers as a courtesy.

He charged $0.25 per disc, and had 28,000. So his total would have been $7k? He eventually sold them for less than $5k. Not any kind of windfall profit.

Given you can download those restore images for free, what exactly was the copy right infringement?

Re: E-waste recycler loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve prison term

#154

Post by blhack » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

This is horrifying, and sounds like something out of a story warning about government overreach.

1 YEAR and three months in federal prison? That's not a short amount of time for something that this guy had a reasonable expectation wasn't illegal.

Re: E-waste recycler loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve prison term

#155

Post by jonathankoren » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 4:17 PM UTC

usaphp wrote: post #132

DoctorOetker wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whats next? "Diet coach Daisy, sent to jail as McDonalds loses customers" "CPU designer Claire, sent to jail as its optimized caching algorithm lowers demand for RAM sales" "Louis Pasteur, unearthed from the grave, incarcerated as milk sales fall due to longer shelf-life"

None of your examples actually use intellectual property of McDonald’s, ram or milk products. It’s like selling your own burgers with less calories and calling them Big Macs and selling them next door from McDonald’s store. You can’t do that according to law

But your example also isn’t what happened. A more accurate Big Mac example would be McDonald’s is giving away Big Macs, so you go and get a free Big Mac, and then give that Big Mac to your friend. At that point McDonald’s cries that you’re giving away counterfeit Big Macs.

Re: E-waste recycler loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve prison term

#156

Post by DmenshunlAnlsis » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 4:17 PM UTC

shaki-dora wrote: post #147

DoctorOetker wrote: post #55

what makes it legal for an ISP (on behalf of an end-user) to request a microsoft server for the recovery disc download and then send this stream of bits to the end-user, but then illegal for Lundgren (also on behalf of an end-user) to request a microsoft server for the recovery disc download and then send a disc of those bts to the end-user? Is it because Lundgren is no ISP, or is it because the disc is considered a…

Law isn’t an incredibly stupid set of rigid rules thst are easily overcome by being grade-school clever.

I’ve noticed that a lot of programmers I’ve met on and offline seem to think that it is, and often those kind of shallow perspectives are the basis of thought in the world of cryptocurrency as well. Is it the result of how computers and programs work, inasmuch as they just do precisely what they’re told? I’ve had to explain to so many friends that unlike the world of computers, laws are interpreted, and adapt. You can’t just find a bug and “win” because it will come back and bite you.

Re: E-waste recycler loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve prison term

#157

Post by RIMR » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 4:18 PM UTC

pweissbrod wrote: post #44

Hasz wrote: post #14

From the article "“These sales of counterfeit operating systems,” Microsoft lawyer Bonnie MacNaughton wrote to the judge, “displaced Microsoft’s potential sales of genuine operating systems.” But Lundgren’s disks had no licenses and were intended for computers that already had licenses." and even worse, "Hurley decided Lundgren’s 28,000 restore disks had a value of $700,000, and that dollar amount qualified Lundgren…

I dont quite understand the basic legal details behind this. Say I buy a computer with windows pre-installed that means the OS license cost is bundled in to the price of the machine. Say I have a computer without windows, or maybe an older cheaper version of windows. Is it correct that these restore disks arent a utility to get a free new copy of windows? Just trying to understand

Correct. If you were to build a computer from scratch and try to use one of these disks, it would not work. You would either need a standalone license key, or a computer with an OEM license attached to the motherboard.

The only way to turn that disk into an actual counterfeit OS would be to crack the activation or use a keygen.

Re: E-waste recycler loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve prison term

#158

Post by Dystopian » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #121

Hasz wrote: post #14

From the article "“These sales of counterfeit operating systems,” Microsoft lawyer Bonnie MacNaughton wrote to the judge, “displaced Microsoft’s potential sales of genuine operating systems.” But Lundgren’s disks had no licenses and were intended for computers that already had licenses." and even worse, "Hurley decided Lundgren’s 28,000 restore disks had a value of $700,000, and that dollar amount qualified Lundgren…

How does Lundgren's restore disk work? Most restore disks I've used from OEMs have an OEM Key hardcoded on the disk so the user doesn't have to type in the license key on the side of their machine. These Restore Disks are permitted if the OEM is a Licensed Distributor, Lundgren was not a licensed distributor. The ISO files that Microsoft distributes require the user to input a key. His whole argument is questionable:…

> Microsoft's media creation tool is dead simple, you run it and tell it where to create the media.

As long as you have a computer. Best answer for this is households who only have 1 functioning computer. Usually low-income households.

One of my first jobs was working at a computer repair store. Customer would come in looking for a reformat and we'd give them a few options.

- We'll restore (pay an hour or so of our time).

- Buy a new licence (since we didn't stock restore disks and weren't going to spend time making them).

- Buy a new computer - with the advent of dirt cheap computers a lot of the time this was a viable solution.

These disks definitely fill a hole of having something you could give to clients and they could do the DIY route.

Re: E-waste recycler loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve prison term

#159

Post by adrr » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #86

reimertz wrote: post #30

As a CEO, you can have a business model that is ethically and morally wrong without getting into jail. As a CEO, you can ignore obvious security flaws leading to 100 million social security numbers getting leaked without getting into jail. As a CEO, you can sexually harass your employees without getting into jail. Try and save the world by repurpose old computers, causing one of the biggest companies in the world to…

> you can have a business model that is ethically and morally wrong without getting into jail Rule of law. You go to jail for breaking the law, not for being unethical or immoral. Societies which forget this distinction fall fast. (Legislation, turning morals and ethics into laws, is the intermediating process your complaint more properly addresses.)

Wells Fargo CEO defrauded millions of people and didn't go to jail.

Re: E-waste recycler loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve prison term

#160

Post by cptskippy » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

NiceGuy_Ty wrote: post #141

cptskippy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is an unabashedly sinister misinformation campaign by someone who didn't read the article or understand what this guy was doing. He wasn't distributing restore disks with refurbished PCs. He manufactured 28000 Restore Disks containing Microsoft Windows and was selling them. He justified his actions by saying they were only to be used on licensed machines. That's like me selling a backup copy of your Book and…

You can't just use a windows restore disk to get a new windows installation. When installed, it will ask you for your license key, and will not function fully until you have done so. The only thing this guy was doing was making it so customers don't have to download the iso on a USB or CD themselves, and recycling e-waste in the process.

> You can't just use a windows restore disk to get a new windows installation. When installed, it will ask you for your license key, and will not function fully until you have done so.

The restore discs usually don't prompt for a key. It's either stored on a recovery partition on your disk, in the bios, or hardcoded in the disc media.

It doesn't say how his disc worked but at a minimum he was still acting as an unlicensed distributor. Microsoft grants end users the right to download and create media. It requires distributors to be licensed.