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Hurt Locker File-Sharing Subpoenas Begin
In May we discussed news that producers of the film The Hurt Locker filed a lawsuit against 5,000 John Does, known only by their IP addresses at the time, for sharing the movie over peer-to-peer sites. Now, reader suraj.sun notes that subpoenas for the lawsuit are finally going out.
"Qwest Communications on Monday notified a customer in Denver that the Internet service provider has received a subpoena from lawyers representing Voltage Pictures, the production company that made The Hurt Locker. ... In legal documents, Voltage Pictures has blamed the movie's relatively poor domestic performance on illegal file sharing. As of March 21, the movie had grossed $16 million domestically, but took in $40 million overall. According to reports, the film's production budget was $15 million. The film leaked to the Web five months before the movie's US debut. ... For allegedly downloading The Hurt Locker, DGW told the Qwest customer from Denver that settling the case early would cost $2,900, according to documents reviewed by CNET."
What's most funny about these people is that the "information just wants to be free" or the "copyright is bad meme" only applies to proprietary software or music, movies, etc that you have to pay for. On the other hand, don't dare infringe the copyright on even a single line of GPLed code or else you face a shitstorm of biblical proportions. Hypocrisy, lol.
Okay, okay, good. We're making some progress here. We're making progress.
So you're at the point where you understand why the penalty for wronging someone has to be *worse* than just the cost of undoing that wrong. Alright, I'll take that, that's definitely more progress than I had hoped for.
Now, you're still having a little trouble on admitting any level of similarity between copyright infringement and theft because you can think of one difference, which gives you enough intellectual "covering fire" to make the claim with a straight face. We're going to have to work on that some more.
Also, we're going to need to pencil in some time to talk about red herrings so you can understand why people might cringe at "There's no loss of bits to the owner" -- which, indeed, is also true in shoplifting.
But frankly, I'm proud enough of the progress we've made. You'll still forget it by the next discussion, but this gives me a little hope.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Ditto.
I bet that's why the movie failed at the box office. People saw it, thought 'this isn't that great', and stayed home. If it had been something people wanted to see like Avatar or Harry Potter, the early leak would not have mattered. People would have been willing to pay to see it a second time on the big screen, or on a high-quality DVD/bluray release.
Per usual the creator is pointing the finger at everyone else, but not himself - the general population just didn't like it Bud.
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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall