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

nice while it lasted

[Pres. Ronald Reagan]

If only there were other sites to use. Oh well, BitTorrent was good while it lasted.

Congrats MPAA...

[Anonymous Coward]

You won $110 million from a site that doesn't even exist anymore.

Re:Congrats MPAA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet Money FTW!

Re:Congrats MPAA...

[Anonymous Coward]

So they just absorbed any liability I have for infringement for using their site. If 4 people rob me, and steal $100, can I get verdicts against *each* of them for $100?

Re:Congrats MPAA...

[jimicus]

And, according to Microsoft, the customer as well. Not sure how well that stands up in case law... Which has always struck me as a rather mob-handed way to do business.

"Buy our product or we'll sue you!".

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

[JFitzsimmons]

They didn't host them; they indexed other sites that did.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

If he tries to move into the wilderness to live off the land, the MPAA will follow him and send an accountant to keep track of the value of each handful of berries and mushrooms in $USD, two security guards, a lackey for the accountant with a clipboard, a fifth guy trained to take the guy's stash of food and leave little sticky notes informing him of how much debt he's paid off, and a sixth guy to drive the mini-van and operate the cameras.

Re:LOL

[geniusj]

This really shouldn't be all that crippling for the individuals involved. It appears that it was a corporation. The corporation is therefore liable, not the individuals involved. Corp goes bankrupt, liquidates, and everyone goes on with their lives. It's not a financial death sentence for the officers, etc.

Re:LOL

[fishbowl]

>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.

Re:LOL

[arkhan_jg]

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.

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

[DAldredge]

That isn't the complete picture as you most likely know. "WASHINGTON (AFP) -- The White House said Wednesday that Myanmar had still not answered its offers of aid for cyclone-ravaged areas, and warned that such a silence risked hampering relief efforts. "Everybody can understand that there is no substitute for being there on the ground to help people directly and trying to do so remotely is going to be impossible," said spokeswoman Dana Perino. "Our understanding is, not only have we not heard anything about our disaster team being allowed to go in to implement the help we have offered, but no one has been granted access to go in," she said. The United States has asked Myanmar to grant visas to a US disaster relief team now in neighboring Thailand, so that they can come in and assess aid needs, with about 60,000 people dead or missing in a tropical cyclone's wake. "We are increasingly concerned about the desperate situation that many people are facing there after the cyclone and we stand ready to help," Perino told reporters. "And we will try to help as best we can if we can't get into the country, but not being able to be there to help directly is going to hinder our efforts to help," she added. The White House announced Tuesday that it was offering three million dollars more in aid to the secretive and impoverished country, on top of an initial emergency allocation of 250,000 dollars. It also said that it was prepared to send four US Navy ships, laden with emergency relief supplies like blankets and water purification tablets, to Myanmar. The vessels were off Thailand's coast in a disaster-response exercise. "

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

[Lumpy]

$3m to Burma will feed everyone and build them all new houses.

$110m to the RIAA/MPAA is caviar lunch on thursday.

Re:Perspective

[Lemmy Caution]

The point is how ridiculously inflated the award is, not how meager aid to Myanmar is, you bilious twat.

Re:Perspective

[NewsWatcher]

Your caricature of third world life is laughable.

I have travelled extensively through poor African and Pacific nations. I have dressed in many different ways, although usually in clothing similar to what I wear down the street in the first world nation I live in.

Not only have the people in the ghettos valued human life highly, they are not afraid to show it.

I have epilepsy and after having a seizure at a slum in Nairobi I found that while unconscious I had been collected, taken to a taxi and the fare paid to take me to a hospital. My passport, wallet etc was safe and sound.

If you are too scared to explore some of these countries yourself, I don't think you should paint their people as blood-thirsty tyrants.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

the US thinks the people of Burma are worth $30 per person

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.

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

[rhakka]

I was walking down the street today and I had skipped lunch. That hobo I passed that didn't buy me a sandwich was a real asshole, eh?

Now that would be an appropriate analogy, but only if the hobo were a quadriplegic schizophrenic crack addict and if I were, say, the sole owner of ConAgra foods. And we were standing in one of my Peter Pan Peanut Butter factories.

asshole hobos.

Re:Perspective

[LonghornXtreme]

I have to disagree that there is no such thing as 'intellectual property.' There certainly is IP. However, you and I likely agree that the IP laws aren't satisfactory.

IP protection to creators and inventors are important because of the need to balance creation with production. In an ideal world, IP laws would only allow the creators enough protection to produce enough (or sell enough software if you don't consider duplicating software as production) product to recoup the costs of creating the success, the costs of creating previous and future failures and make some damn profit.

Without IP laws preventing a 3rd party from immediately taking a creators idea and producing it, you would have little incentive to create because you couldn't make any money off of it. Not only that, you'd find that the most powerful companies would merely be copy cat manufacturers without RnD budgets that would beat the little guy with their economies of scale.

I think copyright should be until the creator's death, and maybe a +10 years from creator's death for creator's assigns. Not this in perpetuity crap.

I think the patent durations might be a touch too long however, the real issue is the frivolity of many patents, not their durations.

Re:Perspective

[dangitman]

I was reading along, came across your post and thought; "Hey, why is this guy injecting a non-sequitur post about copyright infringement into a discussion about Burma?" but then I remembered to look at my browser window's title bar.

Re:Perspective

[WeirdJohn]

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

Re:Perspective

[Trogre]

Your analogy might have made sense, if the hobo was a crazed military dictator. And your factory was on fire.

Re:Perspective

[fishbowl]

>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.

*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*

[InlawBiker]

It only shut down when the legal threats began. Meanwhile how many new torrent trackers have popped up? This is the definition of "hollow victory."

Re:*shrug*

[Anonymous Coward]

No not fool, because now they have a judgement on record that is stupidly broad in the favour in defining 'infringement'.

They've made INDEXING files illegal, please note they got nailed despite setting up services that let copyright holders take down stuff they owned.

The Legal team over at google is looking at this and going 'oh fuck no'.

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:*shrug*

[xenobyte]

The Legal team over at google is looking at this and going 'oh fuck no'.

Exactly, and yet no. Google is simply too big for MPAA/RIAA to go after. Googles lawyers can keep a case like this tied up in courts for decades and the MAFIAA knows this.

But in reality it is exactly the same thing. The court actually said that despite efforts to remove copyrighted materials, despite inplementing a tool that made it easy for rights owners to remove their IP, TorrentSpy are still liable for the stuff they index. Google indexes millions of pages containing illegal stuff, from kiddie porn, over terrorist manuals to IP in all its forms, and they've made no effort to make it easy to remove these things from the index (which would be censorship, but still), so if TorrentSpy is liable, so is Google and to a much higher degreee.

What is the method of determining damages?

[LockeOnLogic]

The movie companies lost money due to torrentspy's activities, but what is the basis for such a monstrous monetary judgement? Magic eight ball? Numbers out of a hat? How on earth did the movie companies prove this level of loss? Gotta love hollywood accounting, astounding how movies can make nothing and everything at the same time.

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.

How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!!

[Z-Knight]

For the love of GOD and all that is mighty how the heck is this even possible?!?!?!! Are we electing complete idiots to the courts these days?!?! Oh, wait, don't answer that one.

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.

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

[SYSS Mouse]

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

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

[Gutboy]

Except, theres no such crime as accessory to copyright infringement, or 'contributory infringement'. It doesn't exist, the RIAA/MPAA wants there to be one very badly, but such a thing doesn't exist

Time for you to read the DMCA. Contributory infringement is alive and well.

Seems like a fair judgement

[kipin]

Dr. Evil: Shit. Oh hell, let's just do what we always do. Hijack some nuclear weapons and hold the world hostage. Yeah? Good! Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that a breakaway Russian Republic called Kreplachistan will be transferring a nuclear warhead to the United Nations in a few days. Here's the plan. We get the warhead and we hold the world ransom for... ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

Number Two: Don't you think we should ask for *more* than a million dollars? A million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Virtucon alone makes over 9 billion dollars a year! Dr. Evil: Really? That's a lot of money.

[pause]

Dr. Evil: Okay then, we hold the world ransom for...

Dr. Evil: One... Hundred... BILLION DOLLARS!

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:No crime, but still punished.

[urcreepyneighbor]

For example, I can go buy books with instructions on producing illegal substances, bombs, and weapons. Delta Press? Paladin Press?

The days of Ragnar Benson have almost faded away into memory.

The companies that used to publish "action books" have almost completely abandoned that genre.

Does that make borders a criminal? You don't have to make something a "crime" to get rid of it. Read up on the Paladin Press / Hit Man incident.

Can you imagine the firestorm if a company started publishing Paladin Press-style books today? In our post-9/11 world? Ha!

Finally!

[DanWS6]

Those poor crew members will get reimbursed for the piracy that has hurt them and their families dearly. You know, the ones in the clips the theaters used to show before previews came on, where some older black guy was claiming how piracy hurts him and his family and every one involved in making a movie. It's quite possible they still show that clip but I wouldn't know since I stopped going to the theater last year because I was tired of the ridiculous ticket prices and lack of original movies the past few years.

Re:Future News, MPAA raids isoHunt

[Shadow-isoHunt]

That'd not be a good idea on their part. isoHunt is hosted in Toronto right now, and Gary's a Canadian citizen that'd battle it out in a Canadian court(possibly while relocating to another country). We also comply with DMCA takedown notices(even though we don't have to) - assuming they follow our copyright policy - and current legal proceedings in California aren't going as planned for them.

I'm guessing that...

[actionbastard]

The judge in this case, obviously, didn't have time to read this:

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2008/02/default-judgment-denied-in-atlantic-v.html

Chances of the judgement being overturned on appeal: 100%.

Re:someone forgot to tell the immigrants

[hairyfeet]

Actually, I know some of those whom you are speaking of. They live 6 to an apartment down the haul from me. Nice bunch of guys. When I asked them why they were living 6 to an apartment when they were making good money,they said "We're just going to stay here a few years and spend as little as we can while we sock our money away. Then we'll go back to Mexico and live like kings!",which is of course one of the problems we have right now. All our money is being sucked out like a black hole away from this country and without any tangible goods to sell it won't be coming back.

And as for the software programmer who posted earlier? Just because you write a program doesn't mean you should get paid for 100+ years(or whatever the copyright is right now). There are plenty of ways to make money WITHOUT needing the government to support your business model with ever more draconian and intrusive laws. You can do work for hire,you can be paid to add features or do maintenance and support,etc. There are ways to make money out of the new business economy-it just takes work and smarts. But too many businesses with really big checkbooks would rather buy our laws rather than have to actually compete and innovate. Which is why IMHO we'll end up another third world fascist state while the rest of the world passes us by. But that is my 02c,YMMV

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.

Re:They proved a point or two.

[ravenshrike]

The only reason they even got in trouble was because they started to delete the actual forum logs and such after the trial had started. At that point they were boned, seeing as it was a civil case and pretty much all the time destruction of evidence = guilt in such cases.

A wicked idea to pay them back

[Weaselmancer]

Give them three pirated Britney Spears albums. Apparently that's worth about $110 million according to the RIAA.

I can't believe that!

[jd]

The US (or any other) Government believing that people have worth? That can't be right.

And do you know *why* we're not invited?

[Weaselmancer]

Watch the video of our "offer".

Bush turned this from a humanitarian offer to help into part of his "exporting freedom" routine. He wants to have our Navy set up there. He mentions political change.

With what we've been up to lately, can you blame these people for saying no? I can't.

Re:And do you know *why* we're not invited?

[jd]

I would have to say that skepticism of the US' intent is probably well-deserved. It's probably not the whole story, but given the limited value of destroyers in preservation - guns don't save people, people do, to misquote a popular phrase - and given that the "best" exit strategy at the moment seems to be a bigger crisis somewhere else, it's probably quite sufficient to make a great many people nervous.

Re:One Hundred and Ten MILLION Dollars

[freedom_india]

Of course not one single cent would go to the arists and actors.
All the money would goto lawyers who would buy two more resorts in Panama.
And the actors and directors would be none-the-less-wiser.
I say the actors guild should sue the MPAA now and ask the Judge to hold the money in an Escrow account until accounting is resolved.

move to a foreign country?

[Travoltus]

If they did that, the US would somehow find Al Qaeda there and start bombing.

You guys should read the post above!

[mrmike37]

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."