Gilberto Sanchez made a mistake: he bought a movie from a street vendor, probably because he thought they were joking when they said they had “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”. Then he saw it was a preproduction cut of the movie, and uploaded it to the Internet.
Now, here’s something to ask yourself: Sanchez was quite obviously not the guy who stole the preproduction cut. He was just the guy who put it on the Internet. Obviously somebody else stole the cut. So the people who actually stole, and pirated, the movie for profit, and not the guy who uploaded it to the Internet, should be spending a year in jail, right?
Wrong, according to the U.S. government. Sanchez gets a year of jail time.
Here’s our question: the judge had to see the movie, and it didn’t occur to the court that maybe the producer should be put in jail? That thing was a crime against comics, art, good taste and possibly humanity. As long as we’re handing out jail sentences on light pretexts, let’s punish some of the genuinely guilty.
[ via the pirate hunters at Electronista ]