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New Copyright Lawsuits Go After Porn On Bittorrent
neoflexycurrent writes "Three adult media entertainment producers filed suit Thursday in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois alleging copyright infringement against hundreds of anonymous defendants accused of trading videos using Bittorrent. This kind of action resembles the much-criticized mass litigation undertaken by the US Copyright Group against hordes of unknown accused Bittorrent users trading movies like The Hurt Locker. In this case, the subject matter promises to be more provocative."
This is gonna be a double-whammy for /. users...
Hmm, people will definitely settle now, there won't be much sympathy as there was for Jaime Thomas. Nobody wants their name out there for having massive collection of porn, that's something you want to keep on the DL.
1. Accuse someone of having massive amounts of porn and offer to sell your silence
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
Oh, wait, step 2 IS step 1....
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
When people download porn without paying for it it ultimately hurts the working stiffs...
New Copyright Lawsuits Go After Porn On Bittorrent
There is going to be a LOT of shocked and upset mothers resulting from this scandal. As always, it is going to be the children who are going to be the ones who suffer through this (copyright) war, especially young adolescent boys.
So, they could spend $1,000,000 prosecuting a handful of anonymous users or they could make 200 more pornos. I think they've made the wrong choice. I guess their business model is starting to fail. Maybe they should move from "plotted" features with 40-year old fake women to 18-year-old gonzo.
They're not the only ones going after porn on Bittorrent; it's very popular.
Although if Abby Winters do the same then I'm fucked.
First they came for those who were sharing music, and I shrugged; I didn't care, because I wasn't sharing music.
Then they came for those who were sharing movies, and I shrugged; I didn't care, because I wasn't sharing movies.
Then they came for me, who was sharing porn. I didn't shrug, but there was nobody left to care for me.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Clearly, we need to relax copyright law in order to hurt the porn industry, for the sake of the children.
If you support strong copyright law now you hate children, right?
Sounds like an orgy of injustice to me. I can't wait to watch all those lawyers screwing everyone and everything. Wheee
Can someone explain to me how this isn't extortion?
There is a war going on for your mind.
Easy way to get them to dismiss their lawsuits.
Offer them leading roles in your new production.
A snuff film.
One of the last good reasons to use the internet is going away too now apparently... Seriously, between no porn, no warez, no muzak, no vids, constant surveillance of users by big corporations and governments... why does any one still bother?
For better or for worse, our system lets defendants get out of cases if they submit to a lesser punishment. Unless you concede that plea bargains are equally extortionist, I can't see a good, logical basis to denounce this in principle other than the fact that they haven't **yet** identified the users beyond a reasonable doubt.
"In this case, the subject matter promises to be more provocative. Plaintiff Millennium TGA is known for producing content in the “transsexual adult entertainment niche.”"
Poor bastards. First they are born in the wrong body, now they're getting a whole new kind of shaft.
There was a time when porn distribution involved a lot of P2P sharing. Now it hardly matters. Thanks to a plethora of Youtube-style porn sites, nobody needs to bother with torrents or local storage. Google <any porn term> followed by the words: video tube. In theory, these sites are only showing previews and you are supposed to click a link to pay for the full-length flick. But a surprising number of previews are actually the whole movie (or at least a complete scene). Even if the industry could stop the flow of fresh porn from being uploaded to the sites, there is a large amount of pre-existing content that will not go away easily.
...bother downloading an entire porn movie? The innumerable porn versions of youtube that are out there provide plenty of free material for, er, whatever you need it for. Whether 5 minutes or an hour, it's out there and with all the variety you've come to expect. Er, so I hear.
First, I would think slashdotter's would be for this. Remember, the GPL and other "free" or "open" licenses all get their power of enforcement from copyright law. So if you want strong open source software licenses, you need strong copyright protection.
Second, Porn sites don't cost much. A lot of them will offer a discount if you click out of the signup page. Join for a few months, download all you want high quality and DRM free, then cancel. Beats searching around through random links where you never know what will pop up.
Third, porn may be one of the last pillars we have left in this economy. When all the other businesses are starving for customers, people still want their porn. And it's the adult entertainment industry that's been on the forefront of internet and network development for years. Stuff like live chat, streaming video, secure billing.
Without porn the internet would still be a dry and barren wasteland where only the most computer savvy could tread.
The judges will HATE dealing with porno cases. They will want to make them go away. Judges can make things "go away" very easily. One erroneous fact finding can kill a case dead--permanently and totally dead. They can also cut all the legal breaks in favor of dismissing a lawsuit. We place a lot of trust in our judges and sometimes they betray us. A good example can be found in the judges in the South tasked with enforcing the "separate but equal" laws. They enforced the 'separate' part, but the 'equal' part got lost.
Even though the judges will want to make the porno cases go away, they won't be able to treat them too rudely (because the court rules and legal principles in effect are supposed to be "content neutral"). This tension might manifest itself in the porno cases in cool and interesting ways.
Porno is the big sleeping giant that the big media ignores. If they behave like pricks (or like the RIAA), the judges are going to go all hairy on their ass. When mainstream media comes around and tries to do the same bad things that the porno media wasn't allowed to do, the Courts will be hamstrung by their need to appear consistent. This presents some pretty cool ideas.
If you want to support internet freedom, support the Larry Flynts of the world in their efforts to protect their ultra-gross porno copyrights. You want them to be mean and brutal in the glorious tradition of the RIAA. Support them on appeal--all the way to the bitter end. This would be a legal version of a sapping attack. The judges will cut the filth-purveyors the absolute least slack possible. This will make for a better and more fair copyright law--and will have the humorous by product of watching the RIAA support the filthiest porn purveyors in the appellate courts.
It could get pretty absurd.
And I'm sure they will... ahem.
Anyway, porn is NOT art so it is not entitled to copyright protection.
Good luck trying to convince a jury, let alone a judge, that "Tranny Butt Spelunker 24" is art.
The big players like P***boy and P***house and so on usually try to work in a story in their porn to try and confuse anyone having to look in to determine the copyright status as to whether it is art or not.
It sometimes works. But for "oh here's the plumber, let's drop our pants 2 seconds in" scenarios I don't think so.
Perhaps the ultimate goal of these lawsuits is not to actually recoup losses or find new modes of profit, but rather to kill any system in which commoners are not reliant on some corporation to provide service for them. You know, scare people away from P2P and toward service providers like Rapidshare, scare municipalities away from providing Internet access and toward favorable deals for broadband providers. In the end, everyone except for the People will win; the copyright holders can go back to arguing with other companies about licensing fees, rather than worrying that millions upon millions of people will stop relying on them, and they can open new deals with various service providers instead of having to try to work with municipal governments (i.e. which may actually care about the interests of their citizens).
Palm trees and 8
A colleague of mine had a cable modem. For a number of reasons, he just happened to be aware of his IP address. It was DHCP assigned, but essentially a static assignment because it never changed. Then one day, there was a technical problem. Whatever the problem was, the cable company's solution consisted of changing his IP address. Great! New IP address! Problem solved.
A few months later, he gets a nastygram from the cable ISP. "Your IP address x.x.x.x was used for illegal file sharing activity on $DATE, and your contact information been supplied to the copyright holder pursuant to a subpeona..." One TINY little problem. The address in question was his NEW IP address and the date in question was BEFORE THE ADDRESS WAS ASSIGNED TO HIM! It seems the ISP looked up the IP address in question and identified the CURRENT user, with no consideration about who was using it at the time!
It gets better. The colleague in question has a lot of money, lawyers, and the willingness to use them. The cable clowns got spanked big-time. I have reason to believe they paid a substantial settlement to avoid a defamation suit. And of course, the process of identifying users by IP address has now been proven to be error-prone. Reasonable doubt for everyone!
In addition to incompetent ISP research, there are a number of ways for a user to hijack your IP address, which I won't go into here. But trust me, it's possible. More reasonable doubt.
It's one thing to accuse someone of sharing "The Sound of Music" and say "oops" when the user in question turns out to deaf and clueless about P2P. But when the movie is "Debbie Does Detroit", the reputation of the defendant is damaged. That's a BIG problem if the user identification process is flawed (as described above). Sooner or later, the plaintiffs are going to go to court armed with bad information and all hell will break loose.
Yes, porn is an industry. Yes, they have a lobby. But the porn lobby is not as effective as other industries because politicians cannot be seen openly supporting the porn industry.
Some examples: The tobacco lobby buys politicians who represent tobacco growing states. Big pharma buys politicians from states that have big pharma R&D centers. The farm lobby buys politicians from big farming states. None of these politicians has any problem with policies that help their benefactors at the expense of the country in general.
Although porn is a big industry, you won't find many politicians lining up to vote for the "Porn Assistance and Encouragement Act". The closest you will get to a pure copyright politician is Fritz Hollings, formerly the senator from Disney. But these copyright politicians are a tricky bunch. Most are extremely anti-porn or at least they like to be seen that way. As a result, the porn industry lobby fights mostly defensive battles, trying to save itself from being censored or legislated out of existence.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
someone who is knowledgeable about copyright and who you have probably heard of, but I don't know if it's ok to quote him by name, so I'll leave that out.
My question was, the Miller obscenity test (to suppress publication of something because it's obscene) has three prongs, of which all three have to be met for suppression. One of the three prongs is that the material has no redeeming social value, and for better or worse there are already many legal findings that porn meets that prong. Porn (other than extreme or child porn) is usually not suppressed (any more) because it doesn't meet the other two prongs, even if courts find (which they do) that it has no redeeming value. The First Amendment recognizes a right to publish stuff whether it has redeeming social value or not.
Copyright exists for a different purpose: to promote progress in science and the useful arts, under a now very broad interpretation of "progress" etc. So I asked the lawyer, if there's already a legal finding that a particular work (i.e. a piece of porn) has no redeeming value, how can extending copyright to it promote progress? Obviously people should be free to publish it (freedom of press) but it shouldn't be copyrightable. Public domain porn for the win.
The lawyer said that argument had already been tried in court, and the ruling was that porn was copyrightable.
If you are worried, here are the IP addresses: http://www.mediafire.com/file/ks31ib61whkbacw/harddrive_ips.pdf http://www.mediafire.com/file/45brgysw5scc55h/lightspeed_ips.pdf http://www.mediafire.com/file/0hy9eh8z2loue5x/Millenium_ips.pdf
Lets hear it for freedom and capitalization!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Make that freedom and capitalism -- *sigh*
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Will everyone go back to. It will become about impossible to catch anyone doing anything as all that is being taught is 'you better hide what you are doing', no matter what it is, for tomorrow what you do may be illegal too and we keep records forever.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They are forgetting that 2 large industries (music and mainstream movies) with more money and clout than even the porno industry has, have both failed to make ANY money on their lawsuits, AND failed to stop or even slow down filesharing!
FTP sites generally were not indexed by search engines
Sure FTP servers were indexed and searched. Archie indexed FTP archives starting in 1990. And Jughead and Veronica searched Gopherspace. At one tyme or another I used all of them.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
People will just download foreign porn instead. There seems to be enough of it all on the Intertubes as it is. I'm sure some vile canabalistic retard.... err lawyer will now explain how IP saved the USA. I mean, look at how well these laws have functioned so far.
P.S. I have now patented the functionality of breathing air. Good luck on that prior art challenge.
And especially please no viral licenses.
sadly, I live in Indiana, and the only chicks I meet through dating sites are fat, ugly, and often missing teeth.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.