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."

Comments

LOL

[afxgrin]

What're they going to do? Confiscate their pencils and sell them on eBay for 5 cents?

I'm sure the defendants have no where near $110 million, and if they have to keep paying it out of income they receive in the future, what's the point of even working?

Might as well squat an abandoned building in New Orleans instead. Move to some remote wilderness area and live off the land. Sounds like much better options than paying that kind of debt down.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

And the $110,000,000 is just for infringements on movies belonging to 5 MPAA members.

Wait until the lawsuits roll in from every other movie studio, tv producer, music studio and porn maker that they held torrents for. They're going to end up owing more than the GDP of the world as a whole.

Re:LOL

[Paradise Pete]

And one might argue that the world would be a slightly better place to live in if it was not so... Imagine. A company actually taking responsibility for its actions.

What would happen is that nobody would be willing to go into anything but the most mundane businesses. Who in the world would put their entire life's assets constantly at risk, especially in the Sue S.A., where misfortune is looked upon as a stroke of good luck.

For example, I was witness to this conversation:

Person #1: "...and they had to amputate his arm."
Person #2: "Oh man he's going to get millions! I'd let them chop off my arm for a million."

Also, the corporate shield is not magically impenetrable. If there's gross negligence, for instance, or fraud.

Perspective

[abscissa]

To put this is some perspective, the US has offered Burma (Myanmar) $3m in aid.

Re:Perspective

[icedevil]

TFA mentions that the MPAA was awarded $30,000 per infringement. So following your lead the US thinks the people of Burma are worth $30 per person (assuming the 100,000 figure is somewhat accurate.)

Re:Perspective

[Original Replica]

the US has offered Burma (Myanmar) $3m in aid.

To put that into perspective, that is about 24 minutes worth of war in Iraq.

Re:Perspective

[Anpheus]

The era of perpetual copyright was brought on by a few individuals that refused to invent and create any longer, and instead sought to make money indefinitely off the nostalgic value of their works.

I'm looking at you, Disney.

And to you, c6gunner, I'm not saying that copyright shouldn't exist, but perhaps... the original 14 year timeframe was adequate. The film, Iron Man, made $100,000,000 in three days of sales, in 14, 50, or well over one hundred years can Hollywood justify why it needs to retain the sole distribution rights to something that was envisioned by someone who has already died? (Referring to the 100+ year copyright terms most countries have these days.)

Re:Perspective

[Archonoid]

Copyright laws help bring about all the things in life which you take for granted. Take a look around your room - I guarantee that every item you see at least partly owes it's existence to intellectual property laws. Those laws helped encourage people to invent and create, which in turn enriched out culture and our society. Without them, chances are that you wouldn't give a damn about the "value" of human life. You'd be too worried about where your next meal would come from.

Bullshit. The printing press wasn't created with intellectual property laws. The wheel wasn't created to be patented. Houses were not created with IP. The greatest poems, stories, and music in history were created by authors with no concept of copyright. Medical and scientific breakthroughs - penicillin, radiation, relativity, electromagnetism, chemistry, gravitation - were not made for IP, but for the use of all - the exact opposite of IP. Man's greatest achievement, his ascent to the moon - and the myriad technologies that quest created - was not fueled by a search for patents.

What keeps me safe and secure is not copyright, it is the society I live in and the value placed on human life and liberty by those who surround me, along with the willingness of the government to protect me with police and military force. What allows me to make money and provide for myself and my family is my intelligence, education and ability to solve problems that people want solved, not laws about what I can or can't do with knowledge and information.

Copyright has jack shit to do with how I am able to secure my lifestyle, except insofar as it prevents me from fully enjoying the cultural heritage that has been created over the last 70 years. The other major form of IP, patents, have encouraged some people to create some things - and at the same time have locked away the best technologies of the century behind proprietary bars, in many cases not even being used by the companies that "invented" them, and have wasted countless time and money from government, corporations and individuals that have to deal with the bureaucratic abomination of the patent system.

Re:Perspective

[jd]

I was unaware that ethics()-class functions were tail-recursive and could not be called from outside. How do you bootstrap them?

Re:Perspective

[WeirdJohn]

In other words, Ford did for the car industry what Bit Torrent did for electronic Media...

*shrug*

[Anonymous Coward]

they've spent a fortune on litigation, to obtain a judgement they can't collect on & a worthless injunction, against a site that was never any good in the first place and shut down a few month ago anyway.

More fool them.

Re:*shrug*

[DesScorp]

they've spent a fortune on litigation, to obtain a judgement they can't collect on & a worthless injunction, against a site that was never any good in the first place and shut down a few month ago anyway.

More fool them. They never expected to collect any money. This was all about sending a message to other Torrent sites and P2P networks. "We've got legal precedent and unlimited resources. We're coming after you."

Re:How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!!

[SYSS Mouse]

Exactly, Google index Pirate Bay results. Is the MAFIAA going to sue Google?

Re:No crime, but still punished.

[joocemann]

So if you ask me where to buy a gun, I say "go to walmart". You go to walmart buy it, then kill someone.... That means I coordinated the murder?

And people wonder...

[hairyfeet]

Why the USA is looked at as total idiots. Betting the entire economy on imaginary property that can be easily copied for $0 while gutting our factories and even outsourcing our jobs at home through H1-B visas. Hmmm-I wonder where the flaw in THAT plan is? The simple fact is just as the automobile has forced those in the horse buggy business to adapt or die so will ever more powerful broadband and MP3 players force software and music companies to change or die. Instead of seeing that change is a part of progress and looking for ways to make capital on this new business model the *.AA along with their lackeys in congress will try to put the genie back in the bottle with ever more draconian laws.

Meanwhile the rest of the world will adapt while we sink further and further into a third world fascist state. While I really hope that we'll see the writing on the wall and our leaders will realize granting themselves and their big business buddies ever more increasing powers over our lives is a dead end road, after watching this march as it continues its dance of failure for the past 20+ years I sincerely doubt we're in for anything other than more of the same: More of the same bad leadership, more of the same bad laws,and more of the same police state crap to protect us "from terrorists and those evil child predators" which is of course a smokescreen for more business and government control over our lives. But that is my 02c,YMMV

Re:What is the method of determining damages?

[Gewalt]

The only way to semi-accurately calculate their losses is to look at their declining profits year to year, which I would consider a real value partially accountable to piracy. But... Their profits have been rising... Year over year, their blockbusters are increasingly more profitable. And its the blockbusters that get pirated the most. So by your logic (and most sane peoples logic), piracy is actually helping their sales. What's killing their profits is the movies they produce that aren't any good.

They proved a point or two.

[gnutoo]

You can't do business in the US because there is no free press there. It's the Napster case all over again and the courts have learned nothing in the last decade. Their lust to protect what they perceive as a big US business interest has them reaching these absurd rulings for tenuous secondary encouragement of copyright infringement. The fact that it's impossible for anyone to tell who "owns" a digital file is reason to rethink copyright not destroy people's ability to share things they have every right to share. Decisions like this will leave the US a broadcast backwater in a world that's bursting with free culture.