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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...
They're not the only ones going after porn on Bittorrent; it's very popular.
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.
Cool, let's take every tired Slashdot argument about piracy and make it topical!
If they made better pornos with hotter girls (like they did when I was 13), people would pay for them, especially if they had a fair price, say $2 each. ... really.
Haven't they heard of "Try before you buy"? I download porn all the time and also own 2,000 porno DVDs. In fact I just purchased the collectors edition of Asian Cumholes 8.
Most porno is downloaded by "collectors" who would never buy the porn and don't even masturbate. They just want to fill up their harddrives and empty lives!
How many innocent victims are being accidentally prosecuted by the PornIAA? I meant to download a Linux distro
Or they realized that if they hit 10,000 people with a $1,000 settlement, they could easily $10,000,000 without having to do a whole lot. Especially if it's a film with a very raunchy sounding title. Most people would gladly pay $1,000 to avoid having that information become public. They probably won't even have to go to court for most of the cases. Then they can use that $10,000,000 to make 2000 more pornos and sue another 10,000 people for copyright infringement.
Reminds me of a scene from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels: (Quote taken from IMDB)
Tom: Listen to this one then; you open a company called the Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club. You take an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos, sell it a bit with, er... I dunno, "does what no other dildo can do until now", latest and greatest in sexual technology. Guaranteed results or money back, all that bollocks. These dills cost twenty-five each; a snip for all the pleasure they are going to give the recipients. They send a cheque to the company name, nothing offensive, er, Bobbie's Bits or something, for twenty-five. You put these in the bank for two weeks and let them clear. Now this is the clever bit. Then you send back the cheques for twenty-five pounds from the real company name, Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club, saying sorry, we couldn't get the supply from America, they have sold out. Now you see how many of the people cash those cheques; not a single soul, because who wants his bank manager to know he tickles arses when he is not paying in cheques!
There are always ways to exchange data secretly.
The problem comes when you want to both exchange data secretly and do it with anyone that asks. Bittorrent was never good for this. Private trackers offer at least some sort of protection I suppose, but it's not an ideal solution by any means.
What we need is for home users to start having a decent upload speed, so that a multihop, friend-to-friend network can spring up, such that you only ever exchange data with people you know, and they do with people they know until the whole world is joined...
That needs a lot of bandwidth, a lot of otherwise unnecessary bandwidth, but is feasible. I know there are some projects (OneSwarm) and some mature networking tools (I2P) out there that can already help.
Or you could just stop ripping stuff off. Just sayin'
...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.
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.
I always wondered why they didn't go after companies such as rapidshare. Surely it should be easier to take down a centralised system? It's almost as bad as the old FTP sites (in fact it's worse, FTP sites generally were not indexed by search engines). These companies should be easy pickings as far as lawsuits are concerned. What am I missing?
DMCA safe haven, thats what. Its the same that keeps youtube "floating". If rapidshare is notified, they will remove a download. And as long as they do, they can't be closed down completely. But as the upload is more or less anonymous, the uploader can just upload the file again when he notices that it has been removed.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
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.
Certain pornographers like Max Hardcore are in prison for distributing obscenity, so I hardly think the courts can collect money for him.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
DMCA safe haven, thats what. Its the same that keeps youtube "floating".
True enough, but even if an infringing download is not removed, you still have to go to court, and win. You can't pull RIAA-style courtroom shenanigans with an outfit that has lawyers who charge just as much per hour as yours do. It's much more profitable (and provides much better PR, if you can call it that) if you just attack individual infringers with default judgments and threaten their livelihoods unless they cough up some dough and settle out of court.
Face it, the content industry is owned and operated by people with a gangster mentality, otherwise the RIAA would never have been funded to the level that permitted their lawsuit mill to go forward. Ditto for the MPAA. Remember, those two groups are not exactly autonomous: they have masters they serve, and whose marching orders they follow.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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
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!
My mates all do this already anyway. Whenever we transfer money to each other via electronic banking, (say for footy tipping competitions or the like) we add a description line such as "Big black anal dildos."
The poor guy who ran our last footy tipping competition had to show up at with his bank statements for a loan he was applying for. Of course his statement was full of payments for dildos, gay sex, escorting etc etc...
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
Porn is neither, no matter how much some would wish it was so.
Umm what exactly do you think it is then? Prostitution? Because then it would be illegal.
You may not think it qualifies as art, but that is just your misinformed opinion. Just because I don't consider Uwe Boll movies art doesn't mean they aren't treated as such and protected by copyright. You're wrong.
You think that's bad? A guy I know ran one of those, and had to get a loan from an American bank. And you know what everyone put in the memo line? "Footy-tipping competition", that's what.