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?
When people download porn without paying for it it ultimately hurts the working stiffs...
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?
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!
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.
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.
Uhhh...you DO know that BOTH PeerGuardian and PeerBlock can use the same Bluetack blocklists? That is all PeerBlock is using anyway and it takes less than 5 minutes to set up PeerGuardian to do the same.
As for TFA, how do we know THEY didn't put the porn up themselves, ala Viacom and Youtube? Seems like a great way if your studio is running low on cash for blow and hookers to pump up your numbers. Just upload, sue anyone who downloads via "we know what you're doing! Give us teh monies or we put it in teh paperz!" extortion letters, and rake in the cash. Considering how fucking sleazy the lawyers are and the "investigators" like Media Defender or whatever they call themselves this week, it really wouldn't surprise me if that was the game plan.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
... rewind the boring scenes ...
You're doing it 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.