*whew!* Good thing Immigration is catching Interwebnet thieves and not us ee-lee-gals... :grin: StupidMoniker????
....the potential 5 yrs in prison seems excessive. No? If they want to shut down the site -- fine. Sic the IRS on him if he didn't report income -- fair game. But criminal charges and prison time? The full weight of federal prosecutors from NY, ICE and HSE? For $90k in revenue over 5 yrs? That's when you compare to other shenanigans...
Wasn't channelsurfing free? (yeah, I know, some ad revenue) Anyway, no matter the legality - but why homeland security? Boggles the mind.
Isn't there a cable or pay-per-view rule that bars and clubs and such places must pay a per-seat pay-per-view price for the fight? That buddy of his would get money for each TV tray a'la Simpsons style...
That Houston Press article isn't very clear, but I'm fairly sure that they're talking about Deer Park, New York in case anyone is wondering if the guy who runs channelsurfing lives down the road from them...
Hmm apparently I spoke too soon. After a little bit of searching, it does appear that this was in TX. Maybe this guy does live just down the road. [Note: I would've edited my original knee-jerk post, but I don't believe I have reached such glorious levels of power yet...]
Wow, this is unfortunate. The thadeus is right, the govt has bigger fish to fry and they go after this man for 5 yrs of prison.. disgusting. Even more, I heard about this website from people who worked in Chicago and New York, and all this time it was some guy on the other side of Houston.
the beauty is that the site has virtually no server costs though, all he posts are links to other websites where the streams are hosted.
I find that hard to believe. I am not choosing sides here, but only pointing out that taking a moralistic, better than thou, stand(do you really wanna go down that road, when every time an mma fight card you have numerous people begging for links) let's not blow smoke, streaming illegal feeds of sporting events were probably 90 percent of channelsurfings' traffic. Should it be illegal? That's a whole other issue. I don't like paying taxes, paying to register a car and any number of other things, but I do it, because if I don't i cause myself more problems than it is worth not to.
90K in 5 years, 18K per year, 1.5K per month these same offshore gambling/credit fraud advertisers don't advertise on google?
Wait a minute.....He didn't even host the streams? Really? So all he did was provide links to streams hosted by others. Quite a few legit -- Yahoo/NBC etc. And he made money (NEARLY $20,000 A YEAR WORKING FROM HOME!!!!) by selling advertising on a page summarizing links to other sites. Isn't this Google's business plan? FWIW, I found HIS site through Google. Just how far up the chain should we go....
Maybe I'm missing something, but the $90,000 apparently was his profits, wasn't it? That doesn't mean that's how much "damage" he cost, right? If so, then to say that the crime was "only $90,000" is a bit off, no? As for "why can't they go find something more serious crime to go after?". Next time somebody vandalizes your house or car, don't call the cops - they should have more serious crimes to go after, right? Oh, of course not - once it affects you, then you'll think it's serious enough to go after the perpetrators.
You make it sound like he was making a ton of money. He probably couldn't even live off that income. Maintaining that website/updating links etc, was probably something he did throughout the day. I'd imagine it was tedious, mindless work.
