Put today's lack of posts (a) to staying up half the night to watch the election and (b) to the fact that I've been out much of the day at the Old Bailey, where four of the DrinkOrDie pirates were today convicted:
Alex Bell, 29, and three others ran the UK end of DrinkorDie - an international code-cracking group - and thought of themselves as modern-day Robin Hoods, the Old Bailey was told.
The court heard they were not in it for the money but the thrill of being able to crack security codes and release free software on to the internet.
I hadn't followed the case extremely closely, but it was important and interesting: the quartet were all found guilty (two entered guilty pleas, two were tried) in what was in essence a precedent-making trial.
Alex Bell, mentioned above, received the longest sentence: two-and-a-half years. The other got between 18 months and two years. One had his sentence suspended.
Judge Paul Focke, presiding, told the defendants that their activities "struck at the very heart of software trading. The loss of software to owners through piracy is staggering... The only way of dealing with you is the imposition of a perison sentence: other people must be deterred."
The judge dismissed claims of entrapment by some of the defendants, and said that although they did not sell the cracked software for profit, they may have acted illegally in order "to enhance your personal reputations, or for the thrill". Their sentences were exacerbated by the distribution of illegally-obtained credit card numbers that the gang used to buy original copies of the software.
It all marks a part conclusion of "Operation Blossom", a five-year international investigation led by the FBI in the United States and involving Britain's cybercrime task force, the National High-Tech Crime Unit.
The NHTCU released a public statement saying that "internet piracy is a growing problem, with organised crime now moving into this space and defrauding the individual, business and governments of millions of pounds."
Privately, investigators expressed mixed feelings about the length of sentences, although they all said the results marked a strong marker for future prosecution of software pirates.
There were clearly some strong feelings about the sentences from the friends and family gathered in the court today, and some will feel that the judge should have been more lenient.
But this sets the standard for future sentences for this kind of crime: did they get it right?
