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New Round of P2P Lawsuits from Hollywood

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the at-it-again dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There is a new story on ZDNet about more lawsuits against P2P file sharers. The catch is that Hollywood is using the log files off Bit Torrent sites like Suprnova and LokiTorrent."

17 of 442 comments (clear)

  1. Oh goody. by DMouse · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Let's sue the customers. Because that so worked for the music industry. Instead of accepting that networked transfer of information is the new reality and going with it. There are so many ways of making money here. But no, have to defend the old way. Man, they have NO VISION. No wonder Hollywood is addicted to creating formulaic movies. Risk aversion is fatal in creative industries, ya'know.

    *face desk*

    1. Re:Oh goody. by DMouse · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yes. Because the world is neatly dividable into those good people who buy everything, and the bad people who pirate everything. Yes. Really. The world is that simple.

      Did I mention that the last three computer books I have purchased, I read a chunk of them online before hand? Or that I buy cds based on what i have listened to off the web? Or that the movies I go to in the cinema are influenced by the recomendations of my friends, some of whom are downloaders?

      Moron.

    2. Re:Oh goody. by LiquidHAL · · Score: 3, Interesting

      the movie industry has few methods other than movie sales to generate a profit that would be correct if only they didn't make huge amounts of cash on DVDs, soundtracks, merchandising, promotional tie-ins, and TV/Cable showings. there is simply no evidence to correlate a decrease in theater tickets sold to pirating. There are too many unmentioned variables to consider.

    3. Re:Oh goody. by Seumas · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'll tell you a business model that works.

      I'm not willing to pay $16.99 for a CD in a store.
      I'm not willing to pay $99/track via iTunes.
      I'm willing to pay ~$1.00/CD for tracks from mp3search.ru

      What does this say? Well, I (and many other people) are not willing to pay what the RIAA or Apple say music is worth, but I'm willing to pay something - even though it seems an insigificant amount - rather than wasting my time downloading off of p2p.

      An artist could charge $1/album if they released them online and that would be about as much (or more) than they would have gotten through the traditional industry distribution and production channels. Granted, there's a good chance most of us wouldn't know who they were without the pumping done by their RIAA masters, but that's a little bit beside the point.

      I'm not willing to pay $5 parking, $20 for two tickets and spend several hours of my time round trip to go see a movie that may end up being complete crap in a theater with a sticky floor, shifty seats and annoying audiences. I'm not willing to pay $25 or $30 for a DVD, either. Especially since I'm only going to watch it one time.

      But you know what? Give me a site that I can download any movie from as soon as it is released into theaters (including all of your back-archive) for $3 each in high quality with DRM - but capable of being viewed on whatever hardware I want to for up to, say, 72 hours - and you'll have yourself a happy, frequent customer.

      For the record, I also don't buy books anymore unless I have to. I can't find the justification in charging $10 for a flimsy PAPERBACK *FICTION* book that will give me all of a few hours entertainment.

      On the other hand, with rare exception, I'm willing to pay $40 to $50 for a videogame, because I'll get plenty of use out of it and I'll have a VERY good time in the process. Of course, I have a mac now, so that's kind of a moot point. But... I sure kick ass at multi-player-text-editing!!!

    4. Re:Oh goody. by Guspaz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      These people did not.

      That's the problem, though, isn't it? I'm going to totally ignore any ethical questions and look at this from a technological standpoint: torrent site log files are not proof of infringement.

      The MPAA has a bunch of IPs that they identified via the log files as downloading the torrent files. The problem is that the torrent files are just metadata, they don't have any copyright content in them. Downloading such a file doesn't mean a user committed copyright infringement, only that they might have. Certainly users may have downloaded a torrent file but never did anything with it. That is, just left it sitting around or deleted it.

      Normally in a court case this might not be a problem. But the MPAA isn't sueing people, they're sueing john does. They have the IP addresses, and they are sueing the people behind those IP addresses. The MPAA needs to prove to the court that these IP addresses commited copyright infringement in order to get the names of the people out of the ISPs via a court order. But since the only information they have is that the IPs downloaded torrent files, they have no direct proof.

      IIRC, in Canada it was ruled that such things were NOT enough to force the ISPs to give up customer/IP matches. I wouldn't be surprised if the courts in the US denied the MPAA's requests to get these IPs turned into names either.

      Am I saying it's impossible? Well, no, the US courts have a tendency to not rule logically when it comes to such issues, as the cases often go before judges that really have no idea what is going on. Why is this the case? I don't know, it could be any number of reasons, but my bet is that either the US court system is overburdened and these types of cases can't get assigned to the proper judges because there aren't enough judges, or that the MPAA chooses their judges carefully.

    5. Re:Oh goody. by Danathar · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Doing something illegal does not mean it's wrong. It' JUST means it's illegal.

      Your morals don't HAVE to coinside identically with what society deems is right via Law. If you decide to do something that you believe is right and it happens to be illegal then the only thing you need to understand it the consequences for your actions (possible imprisonment).

      There are some Laws that I disagree with, but am definitely not going to risk imprisonment. There are other laws that I might think of violating because I don't believe in their moral correctness AND decide to actually commit because the risk seems low (like say...purchasing something after pirating it)

      [disclamer] Of course my morals are in complete agreement with ALL the laws in my country and I would NEVER think of breaking ANY of them.

  2. I hate to say this about IP lawsuits... by amalcon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    GOOD!

    BitTorrent is all but DESIGNED to be traceable. Maybe this will make people finally notice. That would (hopefully) do a lot to legitimize it.

    --
    -Amalcon
  3. Legal? by wlan0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In what ways is it legal for them to use the logs of Suprnova and Lokitorrent?

    1. Re:Legal? by Muerte23 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      One thing though, would this be admissible with regards to hearsay laws?

      If I make a list of random IP addresses and add random movie titles, can I be subpoenaed and those logs used to sue people?

      It's not like the police came to someone's house and found a movie on their computer - an internet lowlife had that person's IP address on their server. Was it created by a bot?

      Where's the proof? Does there need to be any? I understand that civil cases have a lower standard of guilt, but does anyone know for sure?

      m

  4. A few points by the_macman · · Score: 5, Interesting


    From TFA: Hollywood lawyers are hoping that the fear of exposure will dissuade more people from trying to download movies for free online. "Internet movie thieves be warned: You have no friends in the online community when you are engaging in copyright theft,"

    I love how the MPAA resorts to terrorism to get it's point across.
    Terrorism - n. The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.

    As with previous lawsuits filed by the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of America, this round of cases is aimed at anonymous "John Does" identified only by their Internet addresses. The defendants' true identities will be sought through a later court process.

    Translation: We really have no proof of who downloaded the material but we're gonna goto court anyways

  5. Maximum age for logfiles 24h ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How about the logfiles, are they really there,
    and how old were they ? 24h, 2d or what.

    Dear former admins of supr.nova or else who got raided,

    please publish your policy how you dealt with the logs, and even if they really exist,

    so that your former users can start saving money for a good lawyer or spend the money for a glass of champagne.

  6. Lawsuits by erica_ann · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So let's see here...
    Guns kill people, we sue the gun maker

    The coffee is too hot, we sue McDonalds

    We eat at fast food and we sue the fast food chains for making us fat.

    We record music off the radio onto a cassette tape, it is ok to listen to in the car.
    We download it off the internet, we get sued.

    We watch a movie off a DVD and resell the DVD a place that sells used DVD's we get our money back from buying it and the Motion picture people don't get a second dime.
    We download it and we get sued

    So, does that mean that the ISP's connection we used should get sued too since we used that ISP's connection to get to the internet to Download what someone else put up there?

    Does that mean we should sue Microsoft for making a majority of the operating systems used to DL the files we get sued for?

    Does it ever end or have we just turned into a lawsuit happy world?

  7. A way out? by gaurzilla · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You could download the torrents from a public computer (no login) at your school/library, and then actually perform the downloading at home. How can that be traced back to you?

  8. Walk softly and carry a big lawyer by imunfair · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't think the issue for them is the file sharing anymore - they've just figured out that it's a cash cow to go around suing people who most likely can't/won't mount a successful defense.

    I wonder if someone could counter-sue them for defamation of character or whatever if they were mistakenly sued by the RIAA...

    I bet they'd think twice if they started losing money on suing people. I think if they do goof up they should have to award the person 100 times as much as the person would have had to pay them. You'd see them get real careful about who they sued real fast.

    They don't really have anything to worry about except making money anymore, the government is doing all the dirty work running around strong-arming other countries into cracking down on piracy (Don't crack down.. we won't trade with you...) ... sorry just had to throw that in :)

  9. knowledge is power by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Interesting

    here's circletimessquare's method for defeating riaa/ mpaa AND be an upstanding member of the p2p world:

    caveat emptor: this recipe assumes you are in a jurisdiction and dealing with content that is only illegal to UPLOAD (music files, for example, in the usa)

    1. use emule, great program
    2. load it up with porn, gigs of it. you don't even have to look at it. the point is to have something, anything, lots of it, that other people want to download and that you won't get in trouble for sharing (heh, sorry porn makers)
    3. share the porn all the time. you'll have hundreds downloading from you in no time and be greatly appreciated
    4. now, you've suddenly found a strange desire to download hillary duff (!?), so go ahead, search for it (assume you're getting it from someone in sweden and not hurting whoever is making it available)
    4. find the the hillary duff file with the most sources (for quick download)
    5. stop all of your other downloads
    6. suck down hillary duff in a minute or two (heh)
    7. get it out of your shared file immediately

    why does this work?

    the file you are snarfing is so fleeting, and you've crowded it out with a long queue of people waiting to download jenna jameson gone wild volume 2 and other such sleaze, that you're simply never going to wind up being the source for anything on the mpaa/ riaa's radar. it's a drop in a sea of masking porn

    knowledge is power, use it wisely

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  10. Betrayal by Kaorimoch · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The ultimate betrayal. First Lokitorrent collects donations for a legal defense fund, then rolls over for the MPAA and contributes all the logs to them for downloaders. His idiocy costs the community even today. I must admit, its enough to scare people using current sites away if they think they are getting logged for later. Anyway, I hope all the other sites keep NO logs after this event.

  11. I call BS on the "suprnova logs" claim with reason by plasmacutter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Suprnova closed down on it's own. The MPAA/RIAA were never involved. No law in it's hosted nation at the time allowed any of these organizations to lay hands on the logs. The admins responsible destroyed the site and began working on exeem.

    Any questions or comments?

    --
    VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!