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MPAA is Awarded $110 Million In TorrentSpy Case
An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA was awarded a staggering judgment in its case against the BitTorrent indexing site TorrentSpy. According to Slyck.com, a judge in California rendered a $110 million victory for the MPAA, and a permanent injunction against TorrentSpy."
Torrentspy contained ZERO copyright material...ZERO, NIL, NADA, NOTHING. It contained no songs, no movies, no books, no videos, no nothing. It simply provided a search functionality that I could do on google (money grubbing bastards) today: searchword filetype:torrent
Why isn't google or microsoft or yahoo or any other site stopped from doing this...geezus krist, the Music And Film Industry Association of America (MAFIAA) can go MAFUCKthemselves.
They didn't host them; they indexed other sites that did.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
>Imagine it like giving someone more than one life term. What's up with that anyway?
1. Usually this is a result of being given separate sentences for individual counts. It means
the convict is being sentenced for each victim. If somebody kills three people and only gets one
sentence, they are getting two "free crimes" from the victim's / survivor's point of view. If the
sentence is something like a max of 20 years, and the convict does not get sentenced twice for two crimes,
which of the two victims is not getting justice?
2. A life term has eligibility for parole. Multiple sentences affect this eligibility in a profound way.
Plenty of people with life sentences are out in the world in 15-20 years on parole, sometimes less. Consecutive sentences make it much less likely to happen.
3. When multiple sentences are made, an appeal may overturn one of them, but not all of them, because an appeals court may find error in one case or problems in one jurisdiction. If a sentence is suspended while an appeal is pending, another concurrent sentence can keep the convict locked up.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
>No, the US thinks the people of Burma will cost $30 each to save. Big difference. Since many of them could be
>saved just by properly burying the dead, there is some plausibility to this low figure.
Now this is something I hear repeated after each disaster. But the biological/epidemiological basis for the claim is not there! Dead bodies, at least those killed in a natural disaster, are not inherently dangerous, and the risks of the spread of contagions is *much* higher with the living survivors than the corpses. As long as you isolate the fresh water supply from the corpses, it is better to not try to "properly bury them" right away. The labor involved in doing that can be put to far better purpose. If you hastily start burying the dead, you fail to document the victims and you make it impossible to ever get accurate counts. 24 hours after the flood or whatever, all the bodies are the same temperature as the surrounding environment, and the bodies start decaying, but the organisms that cause the decay are not really dangerous.
Unless a particular corpse was a person with a highly contagious disease to begin with, it's not really the biggest problem, and it should not be the survivor/rescue worker's first priority to try to bury the dead. And this is exactly how disaster relief personnel are trained, and I can put you in touch with professionals in health care, including several MD's and one MD/Ph.D. epidemiologist who will confirm what I'm saying in much more detail than I can.
Dead bodies smell bad and are demoralizing and frightening in a primal way, but they DO NOT inherently cause the spread of disease.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
This judgment was a SANCTION, and was not adjudicated on the merits: "having terminated this case as a sanction for Defendants' misconduct and having entered default, now renders final judgment as to all claims of Plaintiffs against Defendant Valence Media LLC."
Really, I'm not trying to be clever with my signature.
Vicarious copyright infringement is actually a specific offence of indirect copyright infringement in the US. It's where someone has a direct financial interest in the infringing actions being committed by another and has the ability to control it, even if they do not know that the infringement is taking place and do not directly take part in it.
The other form of indirect infringement, contributory infringement, requires (1) knowledge of the infringing activity and (2) a material contribution -- actual assistance or inducement -- to the alleged piracy.
These are the laws that were used to bring down napster. In the US, because of these laws, running a tracker is actually pretty illegal. It's assisting others to breach copyright even if you yourself don't, and the tracker itself has no copyrighted material.
And yes, google should be worried. By indexing the content of sites such as torrentspy, they potentially open themselves up to the same charges. They bought youtube specifically to get in on the lawsuit by viacom, so they could help affect the judgement.
Note, one of the big differences with the piratebay is that sweden does not have offences of contributary or vicarious copyright infringement, so running a tracker is legal there.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.