William P. Genovese, Jr. will be in jail for the next two years. His crime – downloading a file from a P2P app and selling it for $20.
<p>Through a novel application of an obscure law, Mr. Genovese, a screw-up by most measures, took a plea bargain at the behest of his public defender for two years in the lock-up and three years of probation after offering a stupid defense in court.</p>
<p>Apparently, when the corpus of Windows 2000 source code was stolen a while back, he pulled a copy off of the web site it was posted to and offered people FTP access to it. Then a Microsoft PI tried to get him to sell it on disc, which he stupidly did to try to make a quick buck, then the PI bought some porn from him, and again contacted him for another copy of the source, apparently in cooperation with the FBI.</p>
<p>Arstechnica has a <a href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060130-6075.html">balanced article</a> on the matter, the MSM has their <a href="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&ncl=http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70106-0.html%3Ftw%3Dwn_technology_1&filter=0">Microsoft Hacker Apprehended</a> stories, and Mr. Genovese has <a href="http://illmob.org/">his story</a>.</p>
<p>In related news, Microsoft is actively pushing its <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/licensingbasics/sharedsourcelicenses.mspx">Shared Source Initiative</a> to let absolutely anybody get access to the same or updated source code.