Paramount Sues Ohio Man For $100,000

ematic writes "A hapless tech-novice finds himself in a US$100,000 lawsuit with Paramount Pictures for allegedly uploading the movie, Coach Carter, to eDonkey. Paramount had the police seize his four computers, but nothing was found. The tech-novice maintains his innocence, and contends that he is a victim of a drive-by upload. According to the ChannelCincinnati story, the victim 'is either a slick film pirate or an unwitting victim of someone who fits that description.'"

Comments

Re:Motive?

[TheLink]

I do zero out unused blocks on some of my drives from time to time.

This is especially when I am about to make full image backups of my drives. If you zero out the unused regions the drive image compresses much better.

Otherwise you end up using space to backup up deleted data. In some cases you do want to do that, but not always.

Re:2 things:

[cpt kangarooski]

What makes you think that the numbers are the product of something else? Why can't it be arbitrary?

In fact, statutory damages for copyright infringement in the US are arbitrary. They range from $750 - $30,000 ordinarily, rarely go as low as $200, and can fairly easily go as high as $150,000. And that's per work infringed, not the number of infringements (i.e. make a million copies of a movie, and it only counts once; make one copy each of two movies, and it counts twice).

Even where only the minimum amount (almost inevitably $750 per work) is claimed by the plaintiff, multiplying this by a large number of works (e.g. 100 songs is $75,000) can still be very significant to individuals.

Regarding proof, this is a civil case, not a criminal one. While the plaintiff (not prosecutor) has to prove that the defendant infringed, he merely has to show that it is more likely than not that the defendant infringed. Open WAPs aside, the person who uses your WAP most is likely to be you, especially if you don't show that it was in fact someone else, that the files were never on your system, etc. I'm plenty sympathetic here, but honestly, I think the odds are at least marginally in favor of the perpetrator not being a third party, and that's all it takes to satisfy the relevant standard.