Eric Lundren has been imprisonned!

BlueSwordM

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So, guys, do you know Eric Lundren?

He's a good friend of Jehu Garcia, which together, they made the longest distance electric car on the planet.

Now, he is a recycler at heart. He helped recycle 10s of thousands of PCs, preventing them from going to trash

And since companies, especially Microsoft, don't like recycling, guess what happened to him?

MICROSOFT SUED HIM ON SHITTY GROUNDS. AND MICROSOFT WON, AND ERIC IS GOING TO PRISON.

See the video about it from him for more details:



TLDR: DUCK Microsoft. I'm not buying anything from them every again.
 
mike said:
Not saying I agree with the decision, but he made tends of thousands of copies of copyrighted material and even printed the Windows and Dell logos on the discs...

But that's not the reason why they prosecuted him. The reason was they he was selling counterfeit copies of windows. Even though he was downloading the software directly from MS or Dell's web site.
Soooo, with that logic, the data he downloaded was counterfeit to begin with. :s
 
The real issue may have been more to do with the logo on the discs. If they were plain / marked recovery disk only rather than trying to look like MS or Dell original discs the case would have been quite different or likely not existed in the first place...

It is also to prevents cases of install disks with pre-loaded malware/backdoors from being sent into the market, like the old dropped USB stick attacks. Give them away for free and hijack the machines.

The case was not just about the use of the software and it was just an unfortunate instance as to who was made the example.....
 
From all the videos I've seen on the subject, the case is about piracy and about MS loosing out on sales. No where was a logo copywrite brought up in the mix.

I think what it was probably really, was that he made 28000 copies of those discs, instead of just making a few at a time. That's probably where/why it all happened.
 
It's very interesting to see how this story is getting a spin.

He was found guilty about a year ago and even pleaded guilty himself. He admitted that he knew what he was doing back in 2011 and that it was a mistake. Stupid even. Obviously it is against the law to sell something that you aren't allowed to sell and to use copyrighted material and trademarks of others in the process. Back in 2017 it was pretty much obvious and nothing has changed since then. He appealed to the court that this was a long time ago and that he is running ITAP now which has nothing to do with it. Which is correct but it doesn't make him personally less guilty.

But now it's all over the media that this was basically done with good intentions which is obviously wrong. Not true at all. It was an illegal act from start to finish and he got punished for it. This is no different from any other case of illegal activity. But now seemingly everyone is trying to spin the story so that he is the good guy that gets punished for being a hero by the big corporate giant Microsoft. This whole point of enabling people to use their computers longer is just bullshit. Such a poor try. It has NOTHING to do with it. There is no technical, factual connection between the two.

If you think that what is happening here is just unjustified and unfair then you are as wrong as you can just be. Just because this is a likeable guy who is running a company that does an important job at recycling stuff it doesn't mean that he is standing above the law. He now has to pay for his wrongdoings of the past.
 
@DarkRaven: Please explain what was illegal? I admit I haven't been following the case from day one, so I may have missed something. From my understanding he downloaded the ISO from Dell of their copy of MS Windows. Then he made 28000 copies. He sold them only for about $0.25USD to help fix aging systems and restore them to original condition.
The only thing I have seen is that MS is claiming that act of copying those ISO's was the same a pirated software and that he was distributing counterfeit copies. I haven't seen/heard anything about copywrite or trademark infringement. It was about the lost sales to MS due to pirated OS.

If you can download the ISO from MS or other distributers sites (like Dell) for free (even without an account with them), then why is it illegal to do so and make copies to give to people who want/need to redo their computer?
 
Just because its free to download on person basis you are not allowed to make your own copies and give out. What he did was not allowed based on the law and I dont see that why otherwise would be the case. He did wrong in that sense and was found guilty as he was.

When you generally do download a "free" copy you also agree to not distribute it for instance.
 
Thanks mike. That did clear up some questions.
 
When ever there is a situation where its not likely you'll get caught, and it's obvious that nobody will be harmed...most people "bend" the laws, especially stupid ones. The national speed limit for electric bikes is 20-MPH, and I ride around 28-MPH frequently, right past police officers. As long as I'm riding safely, nobody seems to care. I can legally ride at 28-MPH by pedaling-only (no motor) but...as soon as I do that with an electric motor, it'sillegal?

Remember Napster? the first "big" downloading website, making it easy to just click and download. Their biggest enemy was the band Metallica, who were outraged that college students were getting Metallica's music for free. However, the statistics told a different story. Once college students could "sample" Metallicas music for free...they frequently went out and bought their CD. Sales had actually went up after Napster. But...it didn't matter. It was the principle of the thing. Of course after Napster was shut down, the genie was out of the bottle, and there was recently a popular site called Pirate Bay. If PB is shut down, there will be another, it's unstoppable.

The problem isn't that Metallica would have made several more millions than they actually did, if downloading wasn't available, many college students simply wouldn't have even tried to buy a Metallica CD. It's not like food or water, you can live without a Metallica CD. And if a poor college student has to choose between buying some beer or a CD of a band they are not really sure about? guess who wins...the beer always wins.

Fast forward to Microsoft. I accidentally dodged a few of the stumbles. I was happy with Win95, but eventually I needed to upgrade to use my new digital camera, so at the time, WinXP just came out. It wasn't bad. I would still be happy with WinXP, but...I was forced to upgrade to the latest, and my computer didn't have the memory or speed to handle the latest WinFart, so Microsoft forced me to buy a new computer with the newest WinFart.

My current back-up laptop is a Dell with Linux Ubuntu. When my Toshiba finally dies, my relationship with Windows dies with it. When Lundgren gets out of prison, he will be a martyr for corporatist oppression of common consumers.
 
@Korishan

Like daromer said, there are always strings attached, even if it is "free". Free to download doesn't mean free to do anything you want with it. Even free software comes with a license agreement. There are several well known licenses especially for free software to make sure that the free software you are offering is used in the intended way.

In general these licenses allow for the personal use only. No modification, no redistribuition, no sale and so on. Some allow some activities beyond personal use under certain aspects, for example in case of open source software, but mass reproduction, redistribution, sale and any commercial use in general is almost never allowed.

The talk about potential losses is just a way to measure the scale of the action and the resulting sentence. Just because some illegal activity doesn't directly have a financial impact (not even sure about it, didn't it?) it doesn't mean it will stay unpunished. And for a proper punishment in accordance with the law you have to assess the value of the claim.

The only valid argument would now be that the value was set too high. Not sure if it was, I'm not judging here. But as it stands for now I think it's not completely unreasonable for 28.000 cases, i.e. commercial scale.
 
Adding my reply from another discussion:

Korishan - From Discord said:
Emails from/to Lundren: https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/2LUNDGREN6.pdf
I hadn't heard all the information and it was new info to me. thats why I was sorta one sided
but after reading some of those emails, I can see the other side
according to the emails, it does sound like he was purposefully trying to make a profit off of distributing the cd's. even making them look identical. so, yeah, that'd be counterfeit. The software isnt, but the medium it's transported on is
had he put on the labels stating they were copies from MS, then he may not have gotten in trouble. or at least smaller penalties
 
Hmmmm perhaps I should not have posted this out of rage.
 
BlueSwordM said:
Hmmmm perhaps I should not have posted this out of rage.

Nah, it's kewl. In the end, we learned more about the situation than when we first started. So we all get a bit more educated ;)
 
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