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Uwe Boll, Other Filmmakers Sue Thousands of Movie Pirates
linzeal writes "Directors whose films have done poorly at the box office are increasingly being solicited by high-powered law firms to file lawsuits with offers of settlement. This practice, which the EFF has been calling extortive and 'mafia-like', has resulted in courts starting to rule in favor of the consumer, and in some cases throwing out the lawsuits. This is all fine and dandy, however, when you are considered the world's worst director and you largely finance films through your own holding company. At that point, the rhetoric and ridicule gets ratcheted up rather quickly."
Are they seriously trying to convince me that someone would want to pirate Uwe Boll's movies?
You'd have to sue me to download this guys stuff.
Now we have "You pirated my movie!" trolls.
Can we get back to dealing with real criminals?
None of these people are proven to be pirates. Uwe Boll claims they are. But that doesn't mean you get to report that they are. The headline should be "Uwe Boll, Other Flimmakers Sue Thousands of People".
Slashdot could be sued for this headline.
These ludicrous lawsuits are already in jeopardy, as the judge has ruled they have to prove a valid legal reason to roll up all these John/Jane Does in one lawsuit. Rightfully so. I have no problem with them suing these people, but trying to roll them up into single lawsuits so that their filing costs and complexity remain low is abuse of the justice system.
Living With a Nerd
Sure fire 100% guaranteed way
...to not get sued for pirating movies.
Don't pirate movies.
Actually, you are wrong, I can sue you for just about anything I want, but that doesn't mean the courts are going to rule in my favour, or even have the lawsuit at all, they could just through it away, like they are doing now.
But all in all, there is no way sure fire way to not get sued.
I'll ignore the whole bit about pirating movies and why some people do it, that's a broken record that can be found on about 10% of slashdot articles.
Sorry, but your expectation rest on the assumption that politicians gives a flying f_ck, and that somehow common sense would prevail in a system where every politician is bought and paid for by special interest groups.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I hereby declare that on July 1st through July 4th we will celebrate the Independence of these United States by having a four day hunting season on trial lawyers. No bag limit! We do need certain rules to ensure fair chase:
1. No hunting within 200 feet of an Ambulance.
2. No standing on a corner yelling "Free Scotch".
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
There's multiple problems:
1) The software they use to determine who is downloading a movie may not give accurate results. This was particularly true with Kazza Lite. You could ask it for a list of IPs of people on a share and it would return incorrect results. So, maybe your IP got reported incorrectly.
2) Your ISP could give them incorrect information. Perhaps their logs of who had the IP at a given time were incorrect. Let's not pretend like software never fucks up. Perhaps they got tampered with (it is just text files after all). Maybe one of their admins was doing the downloading and falsified the logs to cover his tracks.
3) Your net connection could have been used without your knowledge. Unless you are really serious about wireless security, someone could have used it. Many people run open APs or WEP and that can easily be bypassed. So it is perfectly possible for someone to have used your connection to download.
That is one of the many problems with lawsuits like these. You really can't be sure that the people being sued are the people who did the downloading. So not doing it is NOT good enough to prevent you from getting sued. You could still find yourself hit with a lawsuit. You claim "But I didn't do it!" and they say "Ya right, pay us the extortion money or we take you to court."
From the article I linked to:
"A brief entry in the official court docket lays out the order. "MINUTE ORDER requiring Plaintiff to show cause in writing no later than June 21, 2010 why Doe Defendants 2 through 2000 should not be dismissed for misjoinder under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 20," wrote the judge in The Steam Experiment case. The same order was repeated in a separate case targeting 4,577 users alleged to have shared the film Far Cry."
Let's take a look at Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 20:
"Persons may join in one action as plaintiffs if:
(A) they assert any right to relief jointly, severally, or in the alternative with respect to or arising out of the same transaction, occurrence, or series of transactions or occurrences; and
(B) any question of law or fact common to all plaintiffs will arise in the action. "
Unless all of these people were a part of some vast conspiracy to download the same movie from the same source en mass, they can't be joined together in a single lawsuit. Explain how my post is wrong, based on the entry in the court docket and Procedure 20.
Living With a Nerd
Let's play "who's a bigger threat to society"
On the one hand, we have internet pirates. They click buttons in the privacy of their own homes, and watch movies for free.
On the other hand, we have you, who seems to think getting raped in the ass is a just consequence for copying bits.
So, America. Who would you feel safer living next to?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You already responded to a post where I put up a link, but just in case others miss it and are curious, Ars had the story a few days ago.
Living With a Nerd
...to not get sued for pirating movies.
Don't pirate movies.
Also a sure fire 100% guaranteed way to get modded into oblivion I'm sure, but whatever. I just have to ask though: Who the fuck is pirating a Uwe Boll movie? You deserve to get sued morons.
Actually, you're going to (or should) get modded down because this is flamebait. "If you don't want to get sued for doing X, don't do X" is an extremely shallow, closed-minded and unintelligent oversimplification that assumes people should be able to be sued for doing X in the first place.
Actually, given the number of people who have been sued, the well-known cases of them suing innocents, and the number of people likely to be downloading movies...
I'd say you are just about as likely to be sued if you pirate as if you don't. The average chance of being sued is near-zero, really, and the chances of them making an error are high enough that the difference between the two likelihoods is statistical noise.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
On the other hand, it's a valid point.
The law is pretty clear on whether copyright violation is legal or not.
Using the "I'm not likely to be one of the people they choose to pursue action against" strategy seems, as time goes on, to be a less-than-optimal one.
But since we're commenting on flamebait mods... the whole article is flamebait for slashdot. The only reason this is newsworthy is because it includes Uwe Boll, make of some of the most nerd-despised movies on the planet. It's no longer news when a media rights holder pursues action against infringers -- the only reason this article made the main page is so we can flame (1) entities that pursue enforcement of their IP rights and (2) that director of tripe, Uwe Boll.
Seriously, it's hard to complain about flamebait posts when that's the very nature of the article.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Are they seriously trying to convince me that someone would want to pirate Uwe Boll's movies?
I sure as Hell wouldn't *PAY* for a copy...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Shouldn't Boll be PAYING people to download his films? What Ed Wood have done?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Wrong.
Not doing something doesn't stop you from getting accused of doing it, and a lawsuit is, after all, just a very formal accusation.
Specifically relevant to copyright and P2P, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the history of Media Sentry and Media Defender.
Wrong.
If it is illegal, you can be sued for doing it, whether or not you actually have done it.
A major purpose of the trial -- which comes after you have been sued -- is to determine whether or not you did what you were sued for doing. If there was away to assure you were guilty before you were sued, we wouldn't need trials.
What does people joining together as plaintiffs (Procedure 20) have to do with joining defendants together in court motions?
Your supporting quote is not relevant, whether or not your point is correct.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
From Uwe Boll's wikipedia entry (this is priceless): "Another reviewer wrote that Alone in the Dark was "so poorly built, so horribly acted and so sloppily stitched together that it's not even at the straight-to-DVD level."[16] For example, in one scene a character who was "killed" can visibly be seen getting up as the actor prematurely made the move to get off the set."
GAH!
Thanks for pointing that out. here is the relevant portion, from the same link:
Persons -- as well as a vessel, cargo, or other property subject to admiralty process in rem -- may be joined in one action as defendants if:
(A) any right to relief is asserted against them jointly, severally, or in the alternative with respect to or arising out of the same transaction, occurrence, or series of transactions or occurrences; and
(B) any question of law or fact common to all defendants will arise in the action.
Living With a Nerd
I disagree. I had never heard of Uwe Boll until he started his lawsuit campaign. The reason this issue gets under my skin is the egregious abuse of copyright and the court system, not because of the person doing it.
Saying that "it's no longer news when a media rights holder pursues action against infringers" is dangerous- do you want such actions to become the accepted norm?
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
100% sure fire way of not getting sued for pirating movies...
move to Canada. Or most European countries. or other places where corporations don't control the government nearly as much.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
It doesn't bother me one way or the other. I don't knowingly violate copyright. If copyright law gets changed, then my actions may change. Until then, I buy the media I choose to consume, and if I don't think the price is right -- I do without.
The key reason the pursuit of action against violators is not newsworthy is that we know it happens frequently. This is nothing new. What would be more newsworthy are articles about how enforcement is changing, or articles about how the law itself is changing. Yet another copyright holder suing due to infringement just isn't news anymore.
One other note:
You must be new here :) . Luckily for us, since Germany (and other countries) closed the tax loophole investors in his films were taking advantage of, he hasn't been getting a lot of work. The tax loophole is what made his bombs profitable despite their dismal ratings.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
got a torrent?
On the one hand, we have people who copy data without paying the creator. They have a small impact on the creators' financial incentive to create, and potentially reduce the cultural output.
On the other hand, we have Uwe Boll, who produces films that are so mind shatteringly bad that people need weeks of expensive therapy after watching them, taking money away from competent film makers and causing an entire generation to lose respect for the cinematic medium.
Finally, we have people who pirate Uwe Boll movies, intentionally spreading them to a large unsuspecting population.
People in category one are selfish. The person in category two is unfortunate. The people in category three are dangerous sociopaths.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It doesn't bother me one way or the other. I don't knowingly violate copyright. If copyright law gets changed, then my actions may change. Until then, I buy the media I choose to consume, and if I don't think the price is right -- I do without.
Wow, someone with a grown-up attitude on this topic, posting on /. Thank you.
Sure fire 100% guaranteed way to not get sued for pirating movies.
Don't pirate movies.
Hhhm, tell that to the printer at UW that got literally hundreds of DMCA notices.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I don't think it's masochism. Sometimes I just want to watch a laughably bad movie. I don't know why, I just do. When I was a kid, I used to love those Saturday afternoon kung fu movies on our local independent station. I didn't just go to see Battlefield Earth, I actually paid good money to see it in a theater. Not even as a matinee. To this day, I'll often watch whatever crapbomb is on Syfy on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. If you think Uwe Boll is bad, try watching Atomic Twister sometime.
I dunno, it's just fun to sit there and watch a movie thinking, "Whoa, that's three miles past bad." It's also fun to talk about them with my friends. "Oh yeah? You thought that was bad? Let me tell you what I saw last Saturday!"
By the way, I don't know why you lumped Mortal Kombat with those types of movies. Did it win an Oscar? Hell no, but it was still actually kind of neat and exciting to watch. It actually had some redeeming qualities to it. The fight scene with Subzero was awesome. I thought Linden Ashby's (Johnny Cage) fight with Goro was cool, too. The start of it was hilarious. Anyway, there's a difference between mindless fun action and just plain bad. It was Mortal Kombat. What exactly were you expecting?
That was a pretty good summary of the civil court system. :) But you left out the part that you (the plaintiff) may still will in court on an unjustified lawsuit. A lot of it has to do with how good the lawyers are for both sides. If there is a jury involved, it's all showmanship. Whoever puts on the best show wins.
Plaintiff with a big budget versus defendant who can barely afford to keep his Internet connection, I'd wager on the plaintiff.
The only sure way not to get sued is to not be on record anywhere, and never have contact of any sort with anyone. If no one knows who you are, and no one finds out about you, then you're almost safe. That is becoming harder and harder to do though.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
"I've got mine, screw you Jack" is a grown-up attitude?
We need a culling program for sociopaths, and we need it now.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Illegal? Few people contest that copyright infringement is against the law. But immoral? Morality is subjective. Piracy isn't automatically immoral simply because you say it is, basing your assertion on your beliefs about copyright law. Simply because noncommercial copyright infringement is illegal does not automatically make it wrong, and if you believe otherwise, there is no way to have a rational argument with you.
Before people choose sides in the War on Piracy, they ought to be required to have a basic understanding of copyright law. This lets them have at least a slight grasp on the issue instead of just mindlessly yammering about something they don't understand. And I would personally add that those evil pirates are much harder to demonize when you understand what a clusterfuck modern copyright law is and how it is abused by large corporations.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
I have abandoned movies and TV as a source of entertainment anyway. I have better things to do with 2 hours of my life. Besides, I sit in front of monitors all day, why would I want to sit in front of stupid programming with mandatory ads on another monitor anyway?
I built a race car instead. Now I have no end of things to do with my time and money. Plus the fun of DIY engineering, and the reward of getting to race against others.
So why again did I want to sit in front of a TV, or watch their ridiculous crap?
You think that's my attitude? You're far from accurate.
Since you seem to be a little dense, let me explain my position in full:
In a market-based system, actors in the system make choices that depend on information.
If I were to pirate an album, or a movie, the information I'm giving to the rights holder of that IP is that I want their product, but I'm not going to pay for it because I can get it for free. Their options are then to compete on price (by giving it away for free or nearly free, a losing proposition for them) or to lean on government to enforce and/or change the law re: copyright infringement.
Pirating goods actually makes copyright law *worse*. It is the justification media companies use to get legislatures to pass laws that make punishments for copyright violation harsher. It is a justification media companies use to overprice their goods for people who purchase the goods legally. It is the justification used to lean on governments to sign ridiculous over-the-top IP treaties.
My attitude has nothing to do with "I've got mine, screw you Jack". I honestly cannot comprehend how you would read that attitude from my post.
I think our copyright laws are ridiculous -- not in principle, in my case, but in terms of the punishments for violating them, and in the duration of the copyrights. I would like it very much if the laws changed to make them more reasonable. But I'm convinced that piracy on my part would contribute to making things worse for me, worse for you, worse for everyone.
"I've got mine, screw you Jack" applies much more to the people who pirate goods, that justify the media companies in getting laws and treaties passed that firther restrict *my* ability to enjoy media. The selfish asses who pirate everything under the sun because it's free to them are the ones who have the selfish attitude you wrongly assign to me.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
And that is why it is such a problem. Given that they can show up with some pretty shoddy evidence and your only way to defend yourself is to mount a defense more expensive than paying their extortion fee, you more or less have to pay the fee even if you are innocent.
The idea that you can be sued, successfully, for six figures for supposedly downloading a movie on very weak evidence is a problem. More or less there is no reason for them to try and make sure the suits are legit since people are forced to settle or have their lives ruined.
If this was something like a civil traffic ticket, where you are being charged a hundred bucks and you can defend yourself without drastically increasing the amount, I'd be ok with it. You don't need a massive amount of evidence in that case. However here people are being sued for many orders of magnitude over the actual value of the product on weak evidence, and have to settle for thousands, even if they are innocent.
You could literally shoplift the same movie, a crime which causes actual harm, and be given better representation and face far less sanctions if found guilty. A first offense shoplifting charge here for low values of merchandise will get you a fine of $250 plus the value of the merchandise and probation. That is for a crime where actual harm is caused (the store loses the value of the item you stole) not one with just theoretical harm (in a download, they theoretically lost a sale, but in many cases actually did not).
Lower the fine to a level reasonable with the nature of the crime (victimless crimes like speeding or jaywalking) and allow people to defend themselves in a civil court like traffic court and I'm ok with it. Keep lawsuits in the 6 figure range, and I cannot support something on so flimsy an evidence.
The issue here is not about whether downloading movies should is illegal. The issue is that the plaintiffs cannot provide any tangible evidence that a movie was actually downloaded by the person they are accusing, because they have no control nor dominion over any of the computers and networks involved in the transaction.
They get logs from an ISP which they do not own nor manage, produced by software written by a third party, yielding IP addresses allegedly caught transmitting "illegal bits".
The whole enchilada is circumstantial evidence to the Nth degree because every step of the evidence collection is flagged with a "maybe". Maybe the ISP's logs were tampered (or redacted), maybe the software throws false positives (hint: it does), maybe you can't track an IP address to a specific person, maybe 20% of all computers are infected with malware that proxies these illegal bits via unsuspecting users, maybe those zeroes and ones actually make up a picture of my scrotum that just happens to look like Alone In The Dark 1 and 2.
There is a very plain reason why the film companies settle with the defendants: they know full well that their court game is weak, and the threat of financial intimidation is far more chilling than a fair fight in front of a jury of "small people" who just might sympathize with the defendant. The MPAA knows this far too well, and are careful to steer clear of such risky assaults. After all, if they could prove your guilt without question, they wouldn't need a trial.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I, on the other hand, hear far too many cries and justifications (from copyright holders) for being paid without repeatedly producing.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
I am not embarrassed at all regarding Rampage. I was pleasantly surprised and I sincerely think that anybody interested in a study of the origins of violence should give it a try.
Any citizen who has experienced violence first hand (and not just through the media) will find the scenario quite realistic and an objective profile of a non-ideology, non-politics driven unstable zero-the-hero who flips out and becomes obsessed with cleaning up the mess.
The main character is played by an inexplicably good actor. Maybe he draws his performance by externalising the little Zorro or Superman hiding inside all of us. His parents are the real horror. If we were also offered a peek at his school life, the portrayal would have been complete.
Finally, the cinematography is not that bad. I've seen much worse van Damme and Seagull films.
In a lot of cases, the only real way to get a law changed is to ignore it on a very wide scale. Even then it takes a lot of time, but it does work-right now, the marijuana laws are being changed, not on the principle that it's more against the public interest to outlaw marijuana than to legalize and regulate it (though a strong case may be made that this is true), but because it's impossible to realistically do so.
I think the same may be true for copyright. Only the "industries" who produce imaginary property (commonly known as IP) can buy Congresspeople to pretend that shit they make up is not only real but is "property" of some kind. Copyright etc. was never intended as a property right, at least not in the US-the Constitution states not only that it may be taken away after a specified time period, but that it must be. Contrast that with its treatment of real property, where it may never be taken away without just compensation. Its purpose was also clearly specified-"To promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts." Not to pay anyone, not to protect or establish a property right, not to advance anyone's private interest. Only to advance a public interest-promotion of science and art. If science and art would be best served with no copyright or patent law, this clause would not only allow but mandate that these laws be repealed at once.
I'm not sure that's true. I'd support a genuinely limited time (no longer than 10 years), commercial-use-only copyright, in the interest of said promotion of science and art. On the other hand, suing people for making a remix of a song or movie scene does not advance science or art, it diminishes it. Copyright terms so long that they exceed a normal lifespan do not promote science and art, but diminish it. Ridiculous scope of patentability, from software to genes, does not advance science and art, it diminishes it.
And at this point, no one's around to throw as many bribes, erm, excuse me, "free speech contributions" at reducing the excesses of these laws as at making them worse. The only real chance at reform is to make them untenable and unenforceable, and the only way I can see to do that is to ignore them. By all means, be smart about it-use a VPN, use encryption, use smaller trackers. But the only way I'll voluntarily comply with copyright law is when it comes within reason. I already do that where individuals choose to exercise reasonable terms-I'm happy to pay for music at Magnatune or donate to open source projects. For anything else, you betcha I'll download it, and not feel a single twinge of guilt. If you're going to attempt ridiculous terms and artificial scarcity, I don't feel in the slightest bad about subverting you. Quite, in fact, the opposite.
And to answer an argument so common it's nearly inevitable anymore, such a universe may mean that some business models go obsolete. But if that's the case, they already are obsolete, and we're just propping them up with laws pretending they're not. C'est la vie, so to speak-business models go obsolete all the time. We shouldn't force everyone to pretend the world works in a way it no longer does to prop up an outdated model, we should find new ones that work with the new technology and reality. If that means the end of certain video games, or Hollywood movies, or what have you, well, somehow, the human race survived without those for some time. And it's not like our desire for such things will go away-someone will find a workable way to do them, whether that's raising funds in advance, doing them collaboratively, or what have you, and those who are aficionados will likely pay or participate. If not, they die out, and so their time came like so many things before them.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
The real news (and injustice) in TFA is this:
His production company, Boll KG, exploits a German tax loophole, so even when he films an English-language movie in Canada ... his financiers get a fat write-off from the German government.
So German taxpayers are funding Uwe Boll's movies? Shouldn't we petition Germany to stop that crime against humanity?
You've hit on an important point, but at the same time, I am left wondering if you understand copyright law yourself. And if you think you do, where did you get that understanding from (that's a general question for everybody reading)? Did you read the Berne Convention, or have you had to work with it on a professional level? Or have you been reading RIAA news articles?
And, for that matter, what branch of media are you dealing with? They're not all the same - the music industry is known for abusing creative artists and short circuiting the daylights out of the letter and spirit of copyright law. The book industry, on the other hand, is far better behaved.
I'm a published and agented author, as well as the owner and operator of a publishing company. I've worked with big New York publishers, and I've worked with both new and experienced authors. In most of the discussions here, I see a lot of people making impassioned arguments about copyright that have little or no basis in reality. Sometimes they're actually talking about patent law (which, in the U.S., at least, is badly broken in a lot of ways), or trademark law. Sometimes they're attributing an abuse of the law - or even somebody breaking it - to the law itself. For that matter, copyright law is often made out to be far more powerful and totalitarian than it actually is.
(Lawrence Lessig gets quoted a lot, and I really wish that his "Free Culture" book would just vanish. I've tried to read it at least three times, and every single time I've been stopped cold by massive leaps of logic that make little or no sense, and an apparent lack of understanding of the differences between derivative works and plagiarism. Copyright has complicated issues that are best understood for discussion, but I think his book is like trying to understand ancient culture by reading "Chariots of the Gods." And, as far as I can tell, he's the main source for most of the misunderstandings around the American CTEA, which had far more to do with what Europe was doing - and planning to do - than it did with Mickey Mouse.)
Now, taking what isn't yours to take is wrong, no matter what form it takes. Free swag is nice, but it's a bonus, not a right, and certainly not an entitlement. If you're getting away with piracy, then you've got a bonus - but there's no way piracy of a movie, song, game, or book, puts you into the right. It's entertainment, not a cure for cancer. And piracy isn't a protest - writing letters, organizing sit-ins, THOSE are protests.
So, you're right that for the most part pirates aren't evil (with some notable exceptions) - but they are freeloaders, and that's all they are...and it is important to understand that.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive