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How a Virginia Law Firm Outpaces the MPAA at Suing Over Movie Downloads
Jamie points out this Ars Technica piece on a series of suits brought by the Virginia law firm of Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver against users they accuse of illegally downloading movies. The firm has an interesting business model in these suits; sue enough users in a DC Federal court to be worth splitting the sum of many small settlement offers (generally $1,500-2,500 apiece) with the filmmakers, rather than rely on winning after trial a small number of larger judgments. Most people settle, and Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver has so far named more than 14,000 "Does" — as in John Doe — including, as mentioned a few days ago, 5,000 who downloaded The Hurt Locker.
So don't go post this on slashdot or you'll owe this lawfirm $15,000!
That's not true. If you post about this on Slashdot, you just cannot automatically opt for the settlement. You still have the option to fight this in a court of law if you feel that you are innocent and publicize that as much as you desire. Once you go public though, you cannot select that settlement option. Also I think the plaintiff would aim a court decision more between $150,000 or $1.5 million though from what we've seen with prior cases that go to court where the individual is found guilty.
My work here is dung.
* Dunlap, Thomas M - tdunlap@dglegal.com vcard
* Dureska, Geoffrey M. - gdureska@dglegal.com
* Grubb, Daniel L. - dgrubb@dglegal.com
* Ludwig, David - dludwig@dglegal.comvcard
* Kurtz, Nicholas A. - nkurtz@dglegal.com
* Novel, Sur - snovel@dglegal.com
* Policasti, Eugene - epolicasti@dglegal.com
* Tate, Christopher F. - ctate@dglegal.com
* Weaver, Jeffrey William - jweaver@dglegal.com
* Whitticar, Michael C. - mwhitticar@dglegal.com
* Gurganous, Tom - tgurganous@dglegal.com
Someone want to get home addresses, phone #s, list of first-born children?
Yeah, and who hires the lawyers? The bigger the business, the more lawyers you can afford, and the more you can pervert the justice system.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Don't be a smartass without looking up the numbers:
- Hurt locker box office: $ 16,4 million domestic (box office numbers)
- Hurt locker extortion: $ 12,5 million (2500 × 5000 and counting...)
I'd say that's a fairly significant amount of money, and should not be discarded as motive for this scam. If they are true artists they would not participate in this witch-hunt-for-pay against their own biggest fans.
You've changed insurance companies, right? I do know that 21st Century fights rather than pays. So that's who I picked after a similar thing happened to me.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
With this in mind, how could this law firm prove that it was me that actually downloaded the movie? What with wifi and all them nasty stealers of bandwidth, exactly how could you prove to even a preponderance standard (the civil standard) that it was me who did the deed?
Same way they always prove it, by filing a discovery motion to have all mass storage devices (e.g. computer hard drives, external hard drives, flash drives, tapes, etc.) turned over to a third party for expert examination. If the files are there, you did it. If the files were deleted, but still on drive, you did it.
FYI: You don't have have to overwrite data 7 times or even 30 times to erase on today's drives. Once is enough. The original recommendations were based on 1980s technology with large magnetic domains and inaccurate servos. At today's densities, the slop you were trying to overwrite just doesn't happen.
(And yes, I did get this information from an known expert in computer forensics.)