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Movie Industry to sue File Sharers
Wack Valenti writes "SiliconValley.com reports that the motion picture industry, taking a cue from the RIAA, is planning to file copyright infringement lawsuits against file sharers it says are illegally distributing movies online. The first suits could be filed as early as tomorrow."
I got a warning letter from my friends at MGM and bay TSP about illegally sharing my 2 episodes of stargate atlantis. I thought, hey, they are tv shows, and they arent on dvd... why would they care. Well, they did care, and they sent me a letter. And you know what? because of that letter, I havent used a p2p app since. I think that if they just focused on scaring people with letters, they would get the job done just as well, without looking evil like the RIAA
this comes right after bush gets re-elected.
seriously though, it is kinda interesting that after a couple years of wait and see, they've suddenly decided to file these suits after bush (friend of corporations, etc) is firmly back in power
mod me down as flame-bait if you want, I just find it an interesting point, not conspiracy but it makes sense; they waited until they knew the party that would support them was going to be in power for a while before they moved.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
It wasn't all that long ago that the EFF suggested that the entertainment industry should be suing infringers.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
If you are at a school that is an Internet 2 node,get on i2hub. It's only open to schools on I2, so the MPAA cannot get on to see what's going on. Additionally, d/l speeds are icredible, at about 300-400KB/sec.
I have fully moved to private networks like this, and my University's DC++ hub. I was shocked when i saw all these people at school using public networks like Kazaa (corrupted now) and Ares and BT.
I was told I was actually a target, by our dean of men here at my college. I have no idea why - I wasn't downloading or sharing any movies, nor could I even CONNECT to p2p networks because of the filtering systems in place (I use p2p to share security docs and my own music I have written). Yup. He said the MPAA had contacted the school and was prepared to sue if it was in necessary, or something like that. I guess I'll find out tomorrow if he was full of crap or not, won't I? :)
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
I always wondered why USENET is not targetted.
From the article:
"The movie industry has also tried to battle piracy by running ads in movie theaters and elsewhere designed to dissuade people from file-sharing films by stressing the risks of identity theft and liability."
How the hell is identity theft involved?
It's not _exactly_ the first time.
The MPAA has been doing this for quite a while.
I remember when they sent a C&D letter to Pirate Bay, a filesharing site in Sweden for putting up the sound-track of Shrek on Torrent.
Ofcourse, the response was even better - classic Fuck You.
And I'm sure we all remember the fiasco of movie premiers being up on filesharing networks, and how the MPAA raised a ruckus.
Definitely not the first time, I guess they're just going to intensify their efforts more.
Then why are people breaking the law by downloading the stuff?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Dear MPAA, My ipaddress is 199.2.120.89. My slashdot username is my real name. I download most of my movies off suprnova.org. Oh yea, and I'm not afraid.
mount
Fill me in here in case I missed something, but how are the movie theaters stealing money from anyone? I mean, at least you can claim (however implausibly) that stealing music is okay because the companies make rediculous margins and rip off the artists. That doesn't even remotely apply to movie studios though, it's not like actors are underpaid (in fact, I understand they have a very strong union), and the amount they charge customers is far less relatively speaking. I mean, paying a few bucks to see a $200million movie isn't a bad deal.
So to reiterate my question, how are the movie companies stealing your money?
So now the RIAA are going to go after people for violating copyright law and screwing them out of their profit. *Sigh* Not that it's the same people in charge now... but still. Anyone want to vote hypocritical bastards?
Interesting... my ISP just forwarded a C&D email from the MPAA aimed at my IP address. I'll be curious (an understatement!) to see if they are successful in getting my snail mail address out of my ISP after the Verison decision.
/had/ a wireless router running to provide access to anyone in range (it'll be back up after I get around to blocking off everything but 80 and 25, i guess), but I'm assuming that the whole "common carrier" exemption to network traffic only applies to corporations large enough to buy their own congressman.
I
So... is this the end of offering open access to your neighborhood? I have no interest in monitoring traffic over my network, but it looks like the buck stops at the little guy (as usual).
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Just a thought for consideration.
Perhaps the RIAA's actions are objectionable not because they are protecting Intellectual Property rights, but because they are using illegal search techniques and shotgun accusation techniques in a clumbsy attempt to do so.
I for one would have no objection to the MPAA suing people whom they have determined are offering copyrighted material for download based upon public web pages or other public directories. And where they have actually downloaded enough of the file to verify that it is indeed the copyrighted material and not just a matching file name.
Probably because hard disks capacities are so large and DVD burners are now pretty much standard equipment on PCs. There must be a corresponding increase in movie pirating, critical mass must have been reached.
Me, I wish they had a "burn on demand" (BOD) model where you pay a minimal fee (think rental cost, ideally cheaper) and get to burn a movie on DVD. No case, no extras, just the movie.... I guess video-on-demand is almost the same...
Speaking of lawyers: Vioxx is Prozac for lawyersActually if you look at inflation films have barely kept pace. Remember the old quote from Hardware Wars? The one about kissing three bucks good bye? Well that was over twenty five years ago. Gas was around $.75 a gallon and dinner out for two would run around $10. You could rent an apartment in LA for a couple of hundred and a small two bedroom house with a pool for around $450, I looked at several in the early 80s for that much. Now gas is $220, dinner out will easily set you back $25 or $30, or much more, and a cheap house in LA will run $1,200 to $1,500 if you can find it. At the same time film budgets have gone from moderately high budgets of 8 or 9 mill, the budgets of Star Wars and Alien, to 80 to 250 mill. Given the fact the budgets alone have increased 10x to 30X one would expect a greater increase than 3x. The increase does reflect inflation. The only reason costs haven't gone up more is new markets. A growing foreign market and video and cable sales have offset the increased budgets. If piracy becomes a serious issue that offset will be largely gone and films will no longer be profitable. Translated few will be made. Or costs will go up.
Also as a side note to the victimless crime defense for downloading, wages haven't really gone up in the film industry since the late 1980s. Union rates have increased some but nonunion rates have been flat. At the same time inflation has gone up considerably. I've seen rent alone double in that time. People are desperately trying to make a living and downloading isn't helping. It's just becoming another reason to go out of country as profits drop and margins tighten. It hurts people.
I actually got a letter from my ISP for p2ping a episode of a tv show. Now this is getting extreme.
One way to fight the movie industry is to use freeway blogging. The movie industry is different from the music industry. A lot of their revenue comes from concentrated sources--namely these huge cineplexes that are frequently located near high traffic areas such as freeways. You could hurt them and cost them some money by placing signs on these high traffic roads near the cineplexes. The signs would tell people about the lawsuits.
More on Freeway Blogging.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
No. Consumer DVD burners cannot burn the CSS key data required by the studios.
Yeah, but I wish you could. Or somebody could. I mean, when you go to BlockBuster and they're out of the movie you want, why can't they just burn a new copy on the spot for you to rent?
EricHow to Detect Firefox
Does anyone know which networks the RIAA and MPAA are generally monitoring so I know to stay away? I DC++ is a pretty safe bet, but what networks are "lawsuit-safe"?
TerraIM - my pet AIM client project.
Am I the only one who is spooked by the number of posts here that claim that gee whiz, "we got a letter from the MPAA or RIAA, or just plain got scared of getting arrested, and now we have completely stopped filesharing"? And don't we feel so much cleaner?
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Three Squirrels
And if the govt. of Sweden is convinced, it is their own stupidity, don't blame some kid in Europe trying to protect his rights.
If Iran sent me a notice saying that I'm violating so shariat laws, I'd send an equally vocal and Fuck-you letter to them.
Your argument tries to shift the blame on the people responding, rather than the industry and the government that actually supports these laws.
Blame the RIAA and MPAA and our government - do not blame some guy in Europe for retorting back. If anything, we need more people like this, who can show how ridiculous this whole thing is.
Ok, maybe I'm being a bit naive, but are you people who are getting C&D letters using SafePeer or an equivalent? And if not, why not?
Or is SafePeer just proving to be ineffective?
-- Gary F.
Um..no?
/mnt/movies/
Seriously though, vobcopy -l -o
Thats what big drives are for (I really only hoard a few movies at any given time..)!
Quack, quack.
Sometimes I have to ask myself, what do I get out of copyright as it stands today? Public domain is stale with little adding to it while production of copyrighted works and profit from them is at an all time high. The works I want aren't (legaly) avainlable here anyway, not to mention insane prices compared to typical income. What do I get? Marketing to get me excited over things I can't buy, thank you copyright!
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
how many copyright infringement lawsuits are carried out in asia where pirating has been going on for years? could it be that asian organized crime is to powerful to mess with while us normal people are easier to pick on. is the peer to peer pirating far more harmful that the organized pirating that goes on all over the world. or is it a loss that the entertainment companies have the guts to go after. can u imagine the entertainment lawyers insisting on going after pirating operations in let's say....north korea, how about nigeria,serbia, armenia, burma or china! yeah right. it's alot easier to go after mom and pop on the cox network for the songs their kids are down-loading.
Again, completely wrong. Patents give monopolies, copyrights don't.
There's nothing stopping you going out and making another movie about the Titanic, another war movie, another cop movie, another really bad Hugh Grant chick flick, or any other kind of movie you want. Sure, you can't copy the exact movie, but that's simply because in essence that would be like stealing the ice cream itself, skipping the entire cost and effort required to produce it in the first place. No matter how you put it, there's nothing stopping you from going and making your own near-identical movie (within reason), so there certainly isn't a monopoly by any margin.
It's far from certain that the MPAA and its sister organizations can strangle the entire planet at once, thereby sidestepping market forces altogether.
I, personally, don't pirate because of my desire to save money. I pirate because I am viciously opposed to the tactics of the RIAA and MPAA: price fixing, suing their customer base, standing in the way of P2P technology, buying politicians, etc...
I cannot, in good faith, give money to their organizations, and I feel absolutely no shame in stealing from them, given how they're nothing but a bunch of management swine who price fix and steal from those that work for them.
I think a company that's largely honest breeds honest customers. I, for instance, would never pay for a piece of Microsoft software on purpose. In good faith, I could not do so, because their new licensing schemes, etc... make me feel sick, and I do not want to show my support for such things. You might tell me not to use MS products then, but the reality of the situation is that in many cases, you *need* Office to get by. OpenOffice might be decent, but at least on OS X, it's ugly as sin and I'm not convinced that it's fully interoperable with MS Office.
On the other hand, I feel compelled to pay for my Apple software, because I believe that it's reasonably cheap and that Apple cares about their customer base. I feel the same way about the independent artists I listen to, and usually buy their CDs. I'm all for supporting the little guy and very much want to do so; I just feel no qualms stealing from a filthy rich megacorporation who doesn't care about me in the slightest.
When you can walk into a store, pay $16.99 for a DVD, new release, or less for an older movie, and you get not just the movie, but trailers (who watches these?), commentary, featurettes, and subtitles, I think this is a reasonable price to pay for a DVD. I see no reason to share these movies with strangers.
Now, paying $16.99 or more for a CD with 10-12 songs, 9 of which I couldn't care less about, that's another story. While I haven't and won't share, I can certainly understand the argument.
So I don't really have a problem with MPAA doing this, as long as the prices stay where they are as a result.
Are there any P2P clients out there that are effective in hiding your identity as a sharer? I know I read that when the RIAA started suing people that it was just a matter of time before someone invented a client that protects those who are sharing files, but I wonder if it's even technically possible. The Gnutella protocol effectively made SEARCHING for files anonymous, but actually transferring a file establishes a connection to the IP address, which can always be traced. Any ideas for accomplishing something like this? Is it technically possible? I am familiar with the freenet project, but to my understanding this isn't really for large file sharing. Any thoughts?
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Hehe, that was my own little usage. There was a big push for "African-American" a few years ago, and it's still used in a lot of formal situations --but I think pretty much everyone now thinks that's both unwieldy and sort of inaccurate (What about white South-Africans? People with Arab backgrounds?)
"Black" is pretty much the standard--in fact, here-- "brown" is often used for and by the Latino/Hispanic/ (people who speak Spanish but aren't from Spain, basically) community. (which further illustrates the silliness of "race," since Hispanic people do come in all colors,even moreso than us "descendants of African slaves." )
"Colored" also sounds very old-school here, but some people do use "People of Color." Like you'd call a tall person a "Person of Height." HA.
it's all silly, what can ya do....