New Round of Lawsuits in Preparation for Oscars

An anonymous reader wrote to mention CNNMoney's coverage of the latest round of MPAA lawsuits targeting end users. From the article: "The civil suits against unnamed "John Doe" defendants seek up to $150,000 per downloaded digital file and come as the film industry prepares for its annual Oscar telecast in Hollywood where awards for top films and stars are given out."

Comments

Nothing Worth Downloading Anyways

[gadlaw]

I think they are trying to disguise the fact that there aren't any good movies to download these days. Who the heck wants to see Million Dollar Baby or Ray or that one about some dude testing wine. I mean really, folks should be punished for sending those over the internet. Bad taste alone.

Re:150K per file?

[DarkEdgeX]

That damn government, giving people full rights over their own creations. I wish we lived in an anarchy where I could take someone else's movie that they'd paid millions to make, then run an empire of shops nationwide selling the DVD for a tenth of the normal cost.

Nah. Instead of people creating art like it was a commodity worth trading, people would create art for the sheer joy of it. Technology would still continue to be both profitable and innovative since patents would still exist presumably. (And those are at least half-way reasonable, lasting only, IIRC, 11 years or something. Copyright's up to, what, life of the author + 70 years? How's the public good served by that?).

This should be completely legal, otherwise my rights are being violated.

In a way they are-- you're being told you can't do something with your own bandwidth and computer that you paid for. You're not going out and shooting someone with a gun. You're not walking into a Best Buy or a Wal-Mart and walking out with merchandise. You're taking ideas, thoughts, art and moving it about in a digital fashion. Why should that be illegal?

The paradigm behind copyright law is antiquated and needs to be abandoned, or, severly curtailed. Laws like the DMCA are just desperate attempts to maintain the status quo in the face of technological innovation that makes copyright irrelevant.