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."

Comments

Culprit ?

[dargaud]

The film leaked to the Web five months before the movie's US debut

Looking for a culprit ? The guy who decided to sit on the movie for months while the marketing campaign was already on. When people want to see something and it is available, albeit illegally, they will.

Re:Culprit ?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Devil's Advocate here, but does that mean they shouldn't be sued for their infringement?

I paid to see the film at the cinema. I feel ripped off twice over; I paid for something I could have received for free, and the film wasn't all that great anyway. I can't get a refund from the movie company or the cinema, but I can still be peeved at the folks who leaked it. IMHO, by the way, it's the leak who should be sued, not the consumers.

Re:Culprit ?

[garcia]

The culprit was that the movie sucked plain and simple. I mean it was quite possibly one of the worst movies I have seen in the last 5 years and I just watched Repo Men. The movie was slow, it was repetitive and the only possible redeeming quality it possessed was that it was rah rah US military and how could you possibly hate on the US military right unless you're a terrorist, right?

In addition to that, there is a recession. I haven't been to a movie in the theater in a long time because I simply do not have the money due to a new baby and a SAHM. Redbox's $1 rentals and Hulu's documentaries have filled the void. Why would I ever spend $20 (for two) to go to see a movie when I can spend $1 instead?

Enough of blaming file sharing this is plain and simple a shitty and overhyped movie which was better watched from the comfort of your own home for 1/20th the cost.

Re:Culprit ?

[Xest]

Saying filesharers caused the lacklustre sales makes no sense either, as other films are breaking records all the time- Avatar, Toy Story 3 etc. broke new records this year but also similarly suffer the piracy problem.

As you say, there was more to this films poor sales than simply filesharing, see my other post in this thread for one possible reason, your point is also a good reason.

Really this film had such a poor financial showing because of management mistakes, it's as simple as that. Sure piracy problem does take a chunk out of film profits, but nowhere near enough to cause too many problems else if it did the afformentioned films such as Avatar and Toy Story 3 would never have been able to break the box office records they did compared to previous all time record breakers like Titanic that came around before filesharing movie piracy was even a problem.

Let's be honest, the executives responsible for the management fuckups behind this films lacklustre profits know full well they fucked up, these lawsuits are just about ass-covering so that these execs can fool some other gullable film maker into running the business end of their production in future. "Oh, yeah, the Hurt Locker, it wasn't abysmal marketing that led to it's poor showing, it was the file sharers. Honest.".

Re:Culprit ?

[jdpars]

No, the culprit here is the guy on the production team who leaked it. That's who these people need to go after. This smells of lawyers trying to keep their clients from realizing how totally unnecessary they are. How much will 5000 trials cost the people paying for these lawyers, and how much will that cost the taxpayers? We ought to be in a riot that people are abusing our legal system like this.

Re:Culprit ?

[cHiphead]

I'm not military and even I saw the movie as complete bullshit. And I wanted to like it. Just too many little bs things added up to ruin it for me. Hey I'm a bomb tech and I'm gonna walk up and cowboy the shit out of every bomb I come across, not to save some children, but to just act like a badass. Quick, let's go outside our operating zone and SPLIT UP!

That and the fact that the Nesquik cereal he is looking at near the end of the movie is not distributed in the US anymore. That was the most significant portion of the movie for me.

Re:Culprit ?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Mine doesn't. I show my lack of support by not using any product requiring HDCP.

Re:Culprit ?

[mlts]

The lawyers are not trying to get 5000 trials. They are trying to do one trial with 5000 defendants. And so far, they just might be successful at this.

Re:Culprit ?

[ginbot462]

Devil's Advocate was OK, almost not worth pirating, but certainly not worth buying.

Re:Culprit ?

[hedwards]

Well, to be fair, they may have a point. As soon as people started watching it, I'm sure that word of mouth started to circulate about the quality of the film. Personally, I haven't seen it, but I take it that it wasn't a very good movie. And in this day and age, a bad movie might only get one day before it's outed on the web for being a bad film. Which makes it very hard to make money if it sucks as people know better pretty quickly, unlike in the past where they might get a couple weeks.

Re:Culprit ?

[Amouth]

Sued for the act of infringeing - yea sure

Suing for lost, imagined profits? Eh no...

Re:Culprit ?

[Artifakt]

The film owners still have a legal right to sue for infringement, and there's some pretty good arguments for a moral right, BUT ...

The industry is claiming they need very high statutory damages to make up for the tremendous losses they say 'piracy' produces.
If those losses are really so high in part because of cases where the industry itself screws up, then the industry doesn't really deserve especially high statutory damages, AND giving those to the industry may encourage their incompetence rather than them reformulating their business models to make 'piracy' less attractive. Metaphorically, the punishment for auto theft should not be made so attractive to the victim that he or she deliberately doesn't lock his or her car in a known bad neighborhood. Running up demand when you are not prepared to meet it, and delaying consumer gratification while the product is hot, are simply bad business models.

The industry is also claiming they have a special need for taxpayers to foot more of the costs of them filing these lawsuits. If that same industry isn't bothering to do simple things they reasonably can to make those lawsuits unnecessary, then they themselves are the ones manufacturing that special need. That's one reason I qualified the part about moral rights, above - The industry has been claiming that the 'pirates' are solely responsible for creating that special need. If the industry itself is denying its own share of the responsibility, that undercuts their moral position. Going back to the metaphor I used, having your car stolen gives you no moral right to deliberately lie to the judge (and through him, the taxpayers paying the costs of a criminal prosecution) about whether you locked the doors or not.

Re:Culprit ?

[xtracto]

They wont get 5000 trials... if you read the summary they are offering to settle for $2,900.

Assuming that 80% of the people choose to "settle" soon... they will have gained $11,600,000 ... assuming EVERYBODY settle, they would have recouped more than the cost of the film.

So I definitely think this is their new business model.

Re:Culprit ?

[the_fat_kid]

devil this.
Who ever leaked this only caused "harm" to the box office take by letting people know just how bad this movie sucked.
That would seem to be the studio's problem with it. They wanted to FOOL people into thinking it was a good movie. Word of mouth sunk the movie first. Try again.
Save your peeve for the people who palmed off this turd on you.

Re:Culprit ?

[TheLink]

Yep. The most likely reason the movie didn't do that well was because most people didn't want to watch it. Or they were told not to bother from those who watched it.

I wonder if those 5000 John Does are actually the total number of those who pirated the movie - which would be a rather embarrassingly small figure :). From what I hear, I wouldn't bother wasting my bandwidth downloading Hurt Locker, and I doubt I'd bother popping down the local pirate shop to get a copy.

If filmmakers wanted to make more money they should make movies that millions of people will want to watch, and make it easy for them to pay and watch it.

FWIW, I paid to watch Avatar in the cinema. And it was worth my money, nice graphics and all that. Even my mom paid to watch it with one of her friends and they both liked it too. Surprise surprise, my mom doesn't always like the same movies I like. My dad didn't want to watch it - he said it was too long. IIRC he watched LoTR, and I think that did well by most sane estimates.

But despite that, somehow LOTR allegedly didn't make enough money for some crooks to pay Peter Jackson his fair share, and apparently Return of the Jedi never made money ( http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6024677.ece). "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" lost money too: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml

So guess who I think are the real thieves and crooks in the movie and music industry? It's not those file sharers.

Makes you wonder how they stay in business. Perhaps the Government should shut them down and put them out of their misery.

Re:Culprit ?

[truthsearch]

If they can show that they caused damages even close to $2,900? Perhaps then.

I don't see how the damages can be more than the price of a movie ticket per person.

Re:Culprit ?

[loafula]

I was Army and when I watched it, I couldn't get past the fact it took place in 2004 and not only was someone playing an Xbox 360 on a 32" LCD TV, they were playing Gears of War (released 2007). That and the fact everybody was wearing the ACUs (Army Combat Uniform-the grey pixelly one) and not the DCUs (Desert Combat Uniform), which were not all that common until 2005. Didn't notice the cereal though!

Re:Culprit ?

[andymadigan]

The definition of copyright infringement as theft is completely contrived. If I steal your car, take it for a joy ride and return it, have I caused you harm? Yes, you lost the use of your car for some period of time, in addition to gas in the tank and wear and tear on the car. If I go to the library and borrow a book written by you, have I stolen? No, because the law says I haven't. Intellectual property is something created solely through law, it has no basis in nature. This by necessity means that it might be defined too broadly or too narrowly. You can make the argument that these people broke the law and ought to be punished. You cannot validly make the argument that they caused a measurable loss to the IP "owner" since the owner lacked natural right to the IP in the first place.

Note that I am not advocating the abolition of all IP law. I am simply stating the fact that the law does not define morality.

By the way, your claim that "making your own currency is stealing" is obviously false. Passing off the currency is fraud, not theft. Same goes for stock. However, sending someone a copy of a movie without making any claim that it is legally licensed for such distribution is not fraud. Making your own U.S. currency would certainly be illegal, but the definition of the crime and the reasoning behind it is nowhere near theft.

Re:Culprit ?

[Haffner]

There was some movie exec who talked about how the current model is unsustainable, mainly because it involves the film industry repeatedly lying to consumers by saying "This movie is gonna be good!" and having it be crap, and then doing it again and again and again. As a result, he said, people will stop trusting advertising and won't even go to see the good movies before they've been out for a while, which will kill sales. Honestly, I think the best thing for studies to do would be to have smaller budgets on films that don't need huge budgets, and if a film is going to suck, they should advertise it but portray it honestly (not "This movie sucks!" but more "Cheesy romantic comedy with subpar dialogue!").

Re:Culprit ?

[sixteenbitsamurai]

And the DRM makes them a more attractive choice than the Blu-Ray discs or HD cable

What makes them more attractive is that they don't cost $30 a pop. Having no DRM is a bonus, for sure, but really it comes down to HD movies being a horrible value. Most people outside the slashdot crew don't know what DRM is. Hell, most of them don't even know what a browser is. The bottom line is most people don't want to spend that kind of money on a Blu-ray when you can get two or three DVD's for the same price or just download them for free.

Re:Culprit ?

[Score Whore]

I disagree. The price is an unlimited distribution license of the movie, not a copy of the movie or a trip to the movie. The damages should be about $5,000,000 for that license. Oh wait, an Oscar-winning, critically acclaimed film? $25,000,000. So $2,900 doesn't seem too bad really.

You know what you should do if you don't like copyright? You should create content and give it away for free and if you're right and copyright is a blight on society and only holds back the advancement of the arts and science, then you'll become very successful in your model. Then you might have a case for advocating for the elimination or major reform of existing copyright law. But as long as the people bitching about copyright are 99.99% non-creators, all anybody hears is "gimme gimme gimme... i want free shit..."

Re:Culprit ?

[orgelspieler]

You know what you should do if you don't like copyright? You should create content and give it away for free and if you're right and copyright is a blight on society and only holds back the advancement of the arts and science, then you'll become very successful in your model. Then you might have a case for advocating for the elimination or major reform of existing copyright law. But as long as the people bitching about copyright are 99.99% non-creators, all anybody hears is "gimme gimme gimme... i want free shit..."

We're all "content creators" now. You just created content. I just "consumed" it for free. So your argument that 99.99% of the complainers are non-contributors is not quite viable. By making a complaint on a blog or the like, they are actually creating content.

I'll go one further: I am an engineer who happens to compose music on the side. I give my music away for free to anybody who wants to perform it. I don't make a dime off of it, yet I still make about one piece a year. I also have quite a few pictures on flickr that are CC-BY-SA. These photos have been used on several blogs, including some big professional ones. I have no beef with that. I've even had people offer to pay me a nominal fee for the use even though they don't have to. You'll find several e-book authors who give away their stuff, too. Granted it's mostly crap (no doubt my music and photos are as well), but so is most of the stuff we pay for.

Re:Culprit ?

[uniquename72]

I happily obey a copyright term of 7 years in order to reward innovation, creativity, and production of things I enjoy. Anything older than that is fair game.

Extortion

[theskunkmonkey]

When are they going to make extortion illegal?

Oh wait...

Re:Extortion

[Haedrian]

When it stops being so profitable.

Maths ?

[daveime]

So they want 5000 filesharers to pay the ENTIRE production cost of the movie (5000 * 3000) = 15m, then the 40m is clear profit ?

So, you payda money and maybya dont fall down da stairs ? Bunch of corrupt bastards. Sorry, bunch of government santioned bastards.

Re:Maths ?

[Joce640k]

This will be the new Hollywood business model.

a) Make movie
b) Hype it
c) Release it on P2P
d) Wait six moths, release in theaters
e) When it bombs, sue 10,000 John Does because you know they can't afford to defend themselves.
f) Profit!

Anybody see a flaw?

Re:Maths ?

[The Moof]

then the 40m is clear profit?

You're neglecting Hollywood accounting when you think about this. On paper, I'm sure this movie lost the studio billions somehow.

Re:Maths ?

[Haedrian]

Its a very viable plan, the only thing you lose is some public respect.

But as the past has shown, the 'general public' is a bunch of morons who don't mind if you put rootkits in their cds or bankrupt college students for a few songs.

Great

[rshxd]

My Tor exit node is probably going to get DMCA takedown requests. I got one for "CSI: Miami Season 4" and CERT Malaysia said I was launching an attack against XXX.XXX.XXX but won't provide me an IP address or range to block. Silly DMCA folks!!!!

Marketing fail.

[Xest]

First I heard of this film was when it won it's Oscars, by which point it'd been out 6 - 9 months, and seeing as most cinemas drop films after a couple of months then there's no wonder it got poor showing.

Perhaps if people actually knew the film existed, it'd have done better at the box office. Not advertising the existence of a film whatsoever then wondering why the hell no one went to watch it, despite it being popular post-Oscars is the real reason this film did so miserably financially.

Blaming file sharers wont fix a marketing mistake, and by the time they've gone through the courts, dealt with the claims they're entirely unable to prove, it'll probably have cost them far more in man hours than they can expect to earn back through strong arming people with settlement threats.

Ugh.

[Pojut]

Look...I understand that piracy is wrong, and if something can be legally obtained it should be.

That being said, this is freakin' insane. All 5,000 Does rolled up into one case? A case filed in Washington, DC...where almost none (if any) of the Does live? Fining these people so much money that the entire movie's budget is literally payed for by SUING people?

If this isn't abusing the justice system, I don't know what is.

Re:Ugh.

[Kjella]

Well hopefully it will get broken up into separate actions. I mean, the alleged wrongdoing and the alleged proof may be similar, but the defenses will vary wildly from plain denial to family, tenants, guests, open wifi, trojans and so on. I don't see how one judge could possibly make the decision they're all guilty or not guilty, and so it doesn't fit as a class action the way I think of it. But I imagine for most it's about the fear and collecting settlements, if everyone simply said no and asked for their day in court this would stop. Even if you just showed up yourself and gave your layman "I have no idea what they're talking about" defense. If you just keep the spending at an absolute minimum and assume you'll lose, I doubt you'll be out more than $2500 anyway. The statutory minimum is $750, and if you don't piss off the judge or jury you'll likely to get that.

Re:Ugh.

[betterunixthanunix]

Look...I understand that piracy is wrong, and if something can be legally obtained it should be.

Basing a moral argument on what the law says is probably not the best strategy, especially considering that the relevant law in this case constantly changes (usually to subvert the interests of commoners and to favor the interests of corporations).

I would like to perform poorly

[pspahn]

Voltage Pictures has blamed the movie's relatively poor domestic performance on illegal file sharing.

...took in $40 million overall. According to reports, the film's production budget was $15 million.

They made $25 million and are blaming file sharing because it performed poorly? I think that possibly their standards are a bit skewed because they have been gluttonous bastards for so long. In the REAL WORLD, if a product's return is more than twice what it cost them, I'd say they are doing pretty good.

Avatar

[Joce640k]

The Avatar DVD is currently #51 in the Amazon sales charts despite being released in April. I bet it was way more pirated than The Hurt Locker will ever be.

#6 in the Amazon sales charts is a movie made in the 1960s that has been available for piracy for many years.

Occam's Razor: The movie isn't as good as they think it is.

Re:Avatar

[rotide]

I _highly_ doubt they don't realize the truth. Suing everyone and basically having your own "war on piracy" probably provides far better revenue and/or chances to grab power than just sitting there collecting sales revenue. People aren't stopping buying their movies (well, I have, but I'm sure I'm in a minority) but they sure as hell stand to make _thousands_ of dollars off each person they can pin down on a piracy charge. "Oh we see you were probably never going to buy our movie, well, you owe us $2k+ now, thanks for "purchasing" our non-DRM version of [movie]!"

Re:Barely heard of it...

[Jaysyn]

The Hurt Locker was an amazingly good movie.
Intense, interesting.

Well, this vet says it's crap.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/02/23/when-cin-ma-v-rit-isn-t.html

I'll go with the vet.

Seems to me, they're spending too much!

[King_TJ]

Regardless of whether or not someone leaked out a copy of the movie months before its release, the *real* problem seems to be that they're spending WAY too much to make a movie, and then complaining when their return on investment isn't what they hoped for!

The average motion picture is roughly 2 hours long, right? (Often shorter, and sometimes a few minutes longer, but let's just say 2 hours for the sake of picking a number.) That appears to be about $125,000 per MINUTE they spent to make it, given a $15 million budget!

I haven't even watched Hurt Locker yet, but as I understand it, it's a contemporary movie about the war we're STILL fighting right now! It's definitely not a film that required a lot of painstaking effort to accurately re-create events of the distant past. All the costuming, props, etc. should have been readily available. So WHY can't this type of story be told for FAR less money?

Personally, if I was producing a movie in Hollywood today, I'd pass on any of the "big name" actors and actresses that demand huge salaries, and concentrate instead on having a really good script. Then I'd find some talented but under-appreciated/utilized actors/actresses and see what I could do with them instead. In the last 5 years or so, I've seen much more "in depth" and interesting stories coming out of foreign films with exponentially lower production budgets than the garbage we keep cranking out here in the USA. It's time for Hollywood to rethink how they do business ... not to blame file-sharers for their problems and try to continue the status-quo!

Re:Barely heard of it...

[cHiphead]

No, it fucking wasn't. And I watch a LOT of movies. A LOT. Especially crappy movies. And it was definitely in the nonsense bullshit category. Black Hawk Down was a good military movie. The Hurt Locker was ruined by DUMB fucking plot line twists. And I mean REALLY REALLY FUCKING DUMB.

Men Who Stare At Goats was more accurate portrayal of military life than Hurt Locker.

Re:Worst Part

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst part, in my opinion, is that this isn't even a good movie to pirate. I mean, it was okay to watch on Netflix, but there's no excuse for pirating such a mediocre film. Yea, it won an Oscar, but it was basically just Minesweeper: The Movie.

If this had been over Inception or another really great film, I could understand better. This? Please.

FTFM.

The real reason ...

[tgd]

Academy masturbation aside "zomg, a WOMAN made a WAR movie about IRAQ!!!", the real reason it had a poor box office showing was that the movie, frankly, sucked.

The people who downloaded it were the lucky ones.