Feds Score First Criminal Conviction in Peer-to-Peer   - 2,241 Views, 1 Comment

Summary: William R. Trowbridge, of New York, and Michael Chicoine, of Texas, will be going from file sharing to cell sharing following their guilty pleas to Federal charges of using a peer-to-peer network. Oops, Aunty means of violating copyrights on peer-to-peer networks. ...

Previous Article « When Spammers Sue the Spammed
Read Next Article » German Court Does Not Rule Email Blocking ‘Illegal’

  Follow Anne on Twitter


William R. Trowbridge, of New York, and Michael Chicoine, of Texas, will be going from file sharing to cell sharing following their guilty pleas to Federal charges of using a peer-to-peer network. Oops, Aunty means of violating copyrights on peer-to-peer networks. Because of course just using a peer-to-peer network is not illegal, so long as you use it for legal purposes.

According to the Justice Department, Trowbridge and Chicoine were each part of the Underground Network, a file-sharing community in which each of the defendants alledgedly operated hubs.

The charges, resulting from an undercover sting operation which was, according to at least one account, “prompted in part by pressure from the major movie studios and record companies”, carry fines of up to $250,000 and penalties of up to 5 years in Federal prison.

Scheduled to be sentenced on April 29th, neither man could be reached for comment. They were too busy downloading music to carry them through those lonely times in prison.

Feds Score First Criminal Conviction in Peer-to-Peer

 Follow Anne on Twitter

 Twitter Explained in Plain English

 Friend Anne on Facebook

Previous Article « When Spammers Sue the Spammed
Read Next Article » German Court Does Not Rule Email Blocking ‘Illegal’

Read more:

»  Double Whammy for Peer-to-Peer Creators and First Uploaders

»  MSN Blocks Porn Better Than Google and Yahoo

»  Is Your ISP Interfering with Your Downloading and Bandwith Use? Ask Switzerland and the EFF

»  Newsflash! Federal Court to RIAA: No, You CAN’T Have that Peer-to-Peer User’s Information!

For additional similar stories check out our archives on File Sharing & P2P, Internet Law, Music Download, Pirates

NOTE: We never, ever, ever will recommend any product or service on this site that we have not regularly used ourselves and do not wholeheartedly believe in. That said, in some cases after being very pleased with a product or service, we may enter into a relationship with the provider of that product or service such that if someone purchases that product or service based on our recommendation, we may get a small payment. Such payments go towards the upkeep of the Internet Patrol.

 

1 Comment »

  1. You are a mother fucker for leaving the comments that you just left about MC. He wasn’t even sharing any files…ever! He merely had an open chat room (with about 80 people max) that did what they wanted to do. I understand that this is bad, but you talk about the smallest fish that they could have targeted. Achenon’s Alley was a very small time operation and did not have the means to perform large file sharing processes. I know first hand of this as I was one of the people involved. I really don’t appreciate your Kich comments about cell sharing and too busy to be reached for comment becasue they were downloading music. You are very ignorant and you should really stay that way.

    Fucker!

    Comment by Fuck You — 4/13/2007 @ 9:26 am

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Warning! All comments which contain URLs and are clearly just spam to generate a link back to the URL will be deleted on sight. Don't bother wasting your time!

If you are going to include a URL in your comment,
please keep it under 25 characters in length,
or use TinyURL to shorten it before including it in your comment.

Line and paragraph breaks are automatic, your email address is never displayed.
HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)


If you have not posted a comment here before, we apologize for having to ask you to enter the letters and numbers you see in the image above to validate your comment, but we are being attacked by thousands of comment form spams every day! You only need to do this once; once you have successfuly posted a comment here you will not be asked to do this again. Thank you for your understanding!

 
 This article first appeared on 1/20/2005
The Internet Patrol
Patrolling the Internet for You!