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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.
I found this on the topic: the actual settlement form. Read it all at http://www.copyrightsettlement.info/wfesettlement.pdf
Payment. You shall pay to the Company the total, lump sum of Two Thousand Five Dollars (US $2,500) by cashier’s check or credit card with no charge back or check cancellation.
Confidentiality. You agree that the terms of this Agreement shall remain STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL and MAY NOT be disclosed to any other party including but not limited to internet or on-line forums.
So don't go post this on slashdot or you'll owe this lawfirm $15,000!
--
The Founder Conference'2010
I submitted this same exact story referencing the same exact Slashdot article on the Hurt Locker this morning around 7am and it instantly went to being the lowest color any of my submissions have ever been at (jet black). So I was pretty sure I had done something wrong enough to attract the attention of an editor. When I submit stories I check for the story in firehose and by google searching Slashdot and this wasn't there. I didn't get the popup for duplicate URL submission either ... I guess Jamie or someone just really wanted to claim the scoop on this story. What's even more bizarre is that the summary seems to be misdirected at Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver when it's actually a larger set of plaintiffs composing the US Copyright Group. That's who is listed as behind the ~15,000 lawsuits. Oh well ...
My work here is dung.
In the case of The Hurt Locker, when you stand to make almost as much money suing 5,000 people for "stealing" your movie as it did at the box office, maybe you should have made a better movie.
Living With a Nerd
Don't download Indie movies anymore. I am sure word of mouth will still spread on how great those movies are...right?
Seriously, when is something going to be done about these guys? Their business model is built on "it costs more in legal fees for people to fight these accusations than to settle with us out of court so they'll just pay up" which, really, amounts to extortion. I cannot, for the life of me, understand how they are being allowed to get away with this shit. In a sane, logical world, somebody (the feds, the bar, whomever) would come down on them like a ton of bricks. Sadly, I don't think we live in a sane world any more...
At this point, I think I'm just holding out hope that a competing law firm will think things through and decide they can make money by suing these vulture law firms for harassment and whatever else they can drum up. After all, if those firms can make money just suing at random, surely another law firm can also make money counter-suing, right? Well, where is our white knight law firm who's eager to make a name for themselves? If the feds won't put a stop to it, maybe a last-to-sue war between legal firms can put a stop to it.
It seems as though they have found that splitting the file, whoops, lawsuit up into many pieces that can be individually downloaded, whoops dealt with in no particular order is a more efficient protocol, whoops, business model. What will they think of next?!
sig loading.......
RIAA and MPAA were limiting themselves so that they wouldn't have the publicity generated by suing over a thousand defendants at once. They must have known that that looked just a bit like extortion.
Anyway, I'm glad they did this, now the country can decide whether they want to spend their time on federal lawsuits of importance, like civil rights, or on this bullshit.
Unfortunately I'm also convinced that the answer is the latter.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
In other news today, a group of 14,000 bittorrent users who have downloaded movies are suing the studios who produced those movies. The downloaders say the movies were deceptively marketed as being good, and that they were duped into wasting their time and bandwidth by downloading and watching them. The downloaders are asking for a collective total of 38 years wasted time and 448 terabits of wasted bandwidth, plus an unspecified amount for mental and emotional damages.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
* 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?
I know you are just being overly sarcastic and trying to get karma or something, but it just doesn't apply here. Why are you getting modded up for an unfunny, non-insightful comment that is flat out wrong? The Hurt Locker won the academy award this past year. I personally feel it rightfully deserved it, it was a fantastic movie! Light years better than Avatar, which had huge sales, and probably huge downloads as well.
Perhaps more people downloaded The Hurt Locker because they heard about it from the academy awards but it wasn't in most mainstream movie theaters? Perhaps the RIAA distribution model favors huge Avatar style blockbusters that appeal to the masses rather than well crafted intelligent works of art? Perhaps Hurt Locker didn't have the huge media blitz and the money to promote it that Avatar did?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Washington, D.C.-- Super Lawyers Duenlap, Grubb and Beaver declared today that they had been able to save the ailing film industry via a new, innovative IP-chasing strategy. "It's really simple," declared Duenlap. "You just put a really shitty film on the internet," said Grubb. "And then you wait for peoples' cousins dogs to come download five minutes from the honeypot, and SUE everyone in their zip code," said Ms. Beaver.
Due to this innovation, Hollywood stars will continue to be able to walk the red carpet with millions in diamonds and rubies, instead of being reduced to begging at soup kitchens, said Duenlap, Grubb and Beaver.
CNET news attempted to contact the IP addresses involved in this article but ping requests were not returned.
So don't settle -- their model depends on collecting smaller amounts from lot's of victims, so they'll ignore you for not paying up, or they'll loose money in an individual lawsuit. Bonus: if enough people stick together and refuse to settle their "business model" won't work at all.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Today, without major restructuring of the Internet at large, it can be assumed that within a few days of release of a DVD that the movie content will be ripped and made available online.
If an Internet user has the knowledge to access these "available" movies, they can be downloaded and viewed with little or no risk to the downloader. This may require some fancy work to prevent the content from being redistributed and if you do not know how to do this you are certainly exposing yourself to redistribution and the legal penalties that come from that.
If someone does not have this knowledge, they have to buy their content. Because of this we are rapidly approaching a two-class environment: some people know how to get content for free while others have to pay for it. Right now, the division between these classes is also enforced by lack of broadband capacity - if your connection is dial-up or a weak DSL link you can't download free content no matter what you know.
Today it is possible for content providers to still make money from the 2nd class "payers", but this is going to change rapidly. I don't see any possibility for stopping this movement, no matter how many lawsuits are filed. The penalty is just too remote a possibility and too far removed from the act of redistribution. You get a notice in the mail six months after doing something and you are supposed to remember doing it? Worse, there is a trial over something that occurred two years before. It is like getting a speeding ticket from a state you used to live in and six months after you sold the car. There just isn't any connection between the act and the penalty for it to seem real and not arbitrary.
I'd say the content providers are going to see their revenue shrink rapidly as more and more of the "payers" die off and are replaced by well-educated (in the Internet black arts) younger people with better Internet connections. They might be able to replace the direct sales revenue (which retailers share in) with some kind of ad-supported content in the future - but retailers will not be sharing in that at all. This puts WalMart as a content retailer out of the business entirely, as it does with Amazon and anyone else that would consider themselves a "retailer".
Oh well. I think it plain to say "Piracy Rules!" If your business model depends on people paying for digital content, someone out there is going to ruin your day.
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.)