Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
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
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.
This argument comes up a lot in discussions of copyright law, but it's just a specious "gotcha." The F/OSS movement exists as a response to the increasingly Draconian nature of copyright, and it's a clever hack, but hacking the system does not mean approval of the system. The ideal situation would simply be for open source licenses to be unnecessary. Instead, as the copyright lobby pushes for ever-increasing restrictions on the dissemination of information, F/OSS advocates have to work harder to keep the system from being quite as awful as it could be.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
The intent of the media cartels is to eliminate any and all technologies which can be used to distribute content outside of cartel-owned channels, regardless of any consequences to individuals or society at large. Period. End of statement. If these bastards could have assassinated the original DoD working group that developed TCP/IP and the principles of packet routing they would have done so in a heartbeat. But that would have required the ability to look further than the end of their own collective nose. Forward thinking is not a specialty of monopolies or cartels.
Honest to God, look at the history of the motion picture industry, especially their take on home video recording. Remember Jack "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone" Valenti? Maybe you don't, but if not, remember than the VCR eventually resulted in billions of dollars of revenue that would never have been realized if their shortsighted attempts to have it banned in the U.S. had been successful. The music industry is no better: they successfully killed off DAT (a nifty technology) and even managed to get a tax levied on blank media sold in the U.S. You know, to compensate the "artists" for their presumed losses due to (ahem!) "piracy", regardless of whether that media was used to illegally copy anything whatsoever. They then reneged on that deal (.e.g, the Audio Home Recording Act), and started suing people for fun and profit anyway. Fuckers, all of them. Personally, I think law enforcement dollars would be much better spent investigating the largely foreign-owned corporations that comprise the so-called content industry, and protecting citizens from the depredations of their pressure groups than, say, all the grandstanding going on around Google.
I have no respect at all for these people (and I use the term loosely) since most of their problems are due to a sociopathic need to control, and a complete inability to understand that the world is a very different place now that the Internet is here. They could and should be making more money than every before using new technologies and opportunities afforded by the Internet age, just as they made billions by selling VHS tapes. But they can't see that: all they want is to control distribution so they can charge whatever they believe we'll cough up. Competition be damned. I suppose it doesn't hurt that the RIAA proved that racketeering, frivolous lawsuits, perjury, forced settlements, intimidation and destroyed families can be so darn profitable.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.