A software pirate is being punished by being made to star in an anti-piracy video - and to reach 200,000 views - or he will be forced to shell out a huge fine.
The software pirate known as Jakub F, who lives in the Czech Republic, lost in a copyright infringement case filed against him by an anti-piracy group. In September, the court handed him a three-year suspended sentence. His external hard drive, computer and DVDs were also confiscated.
He was also told to pay a whopping 5.7 million Czech crowns, or around $223,000, in damages to software makers. The companies that were affected by the piracy and were involved in the lawsuit included HBO, Sony Music, Microsoft and Twentieth Century Fox. Jakub could hardly pay the damages, though.
The Business Software Alliance then helped Jakub to reach an out-of-court settlement with rightsholders. The agreement allowed Jakub to pay a smaller fine and serve the rest of his "alternative sentence" as the star in a piracy awareness video in which he talks about his life as a pirate.
If the video doesn't reach 200,000 hits on YouTube, Jakub will be compelled to pay the huge fine as punishment for sharing illegal copies of copyrighted software, which include Microsoft's Windows.
For quite a few years, the pirate uploaded links on several community forums that provided other folks the opportunity to download the content via file-hosting websites.
"I thought that I wasn't doing anything wrong. I thought that it didn't hurt the big companies. I didn't even do it for the money, I did it for fun," says Jakub in the video (translated by TorrentFreak).
"I felt in the warez community that I meant something. I was convinced that I was too small a fish for someone to get to me. But eventually, they got me. Even for me, the investigators came to work," Jakub adds.
The video, billed "The Story of My Piracy," eventually made the rounds online and currently notched 677,482 views as of press time, which signifies that he already managed to reach the goal more than three times over.
You may want to watch the video below, which is promoted at morjepiratstvi.czi.
