Slashdot Mirror
Nearly 100,000 P2P Users Sued In the Past Year
An anonymous reader writes "The avalanche of copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States, mainly against BitTorrent users, are about to hit a dubious milestone. In total 99,924 defendants have been sued in the last 12 months, and new cases are being filed at a rapid rate. Adult companies in particular have embraced the profitable pay-up-or-else scheme where tens of millions of dollars are at stake."
Though, as other readers point out, both judges and cable companies are getting tired of the endless subpoenas in P2P porn cases.
while rapist sand murderers wait for trials, lets think of missing children er missing tunes ya thats it.
Pr0n to Pirates.
don't be a victim. Use a proxy.
How about the rest of the relevant statistics? Ie. how many of those actually went to court, and in how many of those did the judge actually rule in benefit of the porn company? Just saying that 100,000 people got sued doesn't really tell enough.
I'm not too good with spreadsheets and I can't see such information in the article itself.
So you get an extortion note. Then what? Do you settle? If not, do you hire a lawyer? Do you do nothing and wait to see if an actual trial happens?
Who's to say that someone isn't being naughty and spoofing your address? Or perhaps someone has sniffed enough of your wireless AP traffic to divine the password and go to town downloading crap?
100,000 P2P users means that if you illegally download something you have approximately a %0.25 chance of being sued. If you're trying to deter people from a behavior, you have to increase the chance that there will be negative consequences for that behavior.
And of course it doesn't help that many of those 100,000 may well be guilty of nothing. Being sued doesn't necessarily make somebody actually liable, but the RIAA's tactics are all about making the cost of defending yourself higher than the cost of settling, as NewYorkCountryLawyer has made very clear for a while now.
I am officially gone from
Nearly 100,000 alleged P2P Users Sued In the Past Year
FTFY
I know that most cannot afford to even spend the time. But if they did, they would bankrupt these guys under a sea of legal expenses. They would be forced to respond in thousands of jurisdictions. It would be like getting devoured by fire ants. Just a thought.
This is why I now only use I2P Postman (anonymous bittorrent) for movies and games. Demonoid for books.
I2P usually takes a few days to download a 1080p movie, but it is worth the wait with the security and anonymity.
Remember saying "Napster is just a search engine, sue the users who are actually committing copyright infringement"? It's good to see the recording industry is doing that. Those who are guilty deserve to be convicted and fined. They should be fined around the $1-$10 per item cost of the materiel they're warezing, but that's a different matter.
What a milestone! It will be the first time ever that 100,000 people were sued for copyright infringement in 12.00913 months!
The U.S: government should just copyright all it's confidential documents. Then any newspaper publishing the diplomatic cables given to Wikileaks would be liable for copyright infringement. So would the thousands who download any other leaked document. And so would Wikileaks for received the documents and not destroying them right away.
Copyright law sure is awesome.
Has there actually been any evidence that any plaintiff has even made their lawyer's fees back? If not, calling it profitable is questionable
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Upload some porn material for which you own the copyright and then sue all the people that download it.
I say it's brilliant.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm one of the guys who received one of these letters over a porn torrent. It instructs me to log into their website (I haven't) to find out how much they want, offer's off the table March something yada yada. My ISP guy suggests I just lie low and ignore the thing.
What do?
Calling out bogus battery capacity claims.
Settle-or-else cases need to be made illegal.
Last year I was driving in Glasgow city centre for the first time, and I drove along an unmarked bus lane. (Signs in the wrong place, no markings on the road, etc.) Two police officers stopped me and although they knew the lane was inadequately marked, they had been told to give everyone a ticket so that's what they did. They said it would never go to court and, even if it did, I was sure to win. They were really nice about it, or so I thought at the time.
Months later I received notice of court action, with an offer to avoid court action by paying a £60 fine. That's when I spoke to a lawyer for advice. His advice with to just pay it, because the system is stacked against you.
Here's what would happen if I didn't pay:
1. I'd have to go to court TWICE in a city hundreds of miles away. Let's say £40 fuel each time. If I had to stay overnight then let's say another £40 for a hotel each time. So that's £160.
2. Courts are known for ignoring the law on bus lanes. Legally the lane must be marked in certain ways, but courts don't take that in to account. If the lane is registered with the council as bus-only then you've broken the law.
3. In the very unlikely event that you win, you can't claim back your fuel / hotel costs, or any kind of compensation.
This has been going on for decades.
All the record / movie companies are doing now is exactly what the police have been doing for a very long time. They give people two choices:
1. Pay a relatively small fee to avoid court action, or
2. Prove yourself innocent and pay more.
As much as I can see the bad side of what I'm about to say, I believe the law needs to change so that settlement offers are outlawed. Police, councils, individuals, copyright holders, or whoever, must either take you to court or leave you alone. Intimidation, which is the intent of settlement offers, should be a criminal offence.
Politiians are whores for your votes
Major copyright owners can provide more votes than concerned members of the public because major copyright owners control the major U.S. television news media. This lets major copyright owners manipulate voters' awareness of both issues and candidates.
If we had a system like in Switzerland, where any law the public does not agree with can be invalidated with a successful referendum
Then we'd have three-fourths of the states being able to pass federal laws right over the Congress's head. Such an amendment process already exists if 34 state legislatures call a convention to propose an amendment to the Constitution and 38 state legislatures ratify the amendment.
So let's say this case the movie is a $30 value
What's the market value of a copyrighted work whose copyright owner has declined to offer copies for sale to the public? Case in point: Disney's Song of the South, and Nintendo's Mother and Mother 3 outside Japan.
The vast majority of porn downloaders will be unwilling to purchase porn legally because they don't want the credit card paper trail. This is the exact same reason the vast majority will settle rather than go to court even if the evidence is too weak. So you'll never convert the downloaders to buyers and you'll lose any spillover/publicity from the p2p scene. On net, nothing will happen to your revenues. Still, it's an attractive scheme to make a lot of money in the short term.
how many of them were condemned?
Politicians are whores for corporate money. They then become johns, where they use that money to pay for advertising, rallies, and such. We are the scabies who follow around the whores and the johns. When it's all over, for some reason, the politician with the most scabies declares themselves the winner.
Oddly, most of those subpoenaed have long since gone blind.
An anonymous reader writes "The avalanche of copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States, mainly against BitTorrent users, are about to hit a dubious milestone. In total 99,924 defendants have been sued in the last 12 months, and new cases are being filed at a rapid rate. Adult companies in particular have embraced the profitable pay-up-or-else scheme where tens of millions of dollars are at stake."
What utter bullshit.
Judges are throwing aggregated lawsuits out as fast as they're being filed. Both in Britain and the U.S., they've consistently ruled that individual downloaders must be sued individually - and the D.C. judge here in the States told the pr0n asshats that they had to sue individuals in their home jurisdictions for good measure. These cases may have been filed, but NONE of them has come to trial.
And none of them will, because it simply doesn't pencil out for the law firms involved. Some shysters here and in Olde Blighty thought they saw an angle to shoot - and they've gotten shot down themselves. These weasels are no credible threat to anyone. DON'T pay their extortion demands - respond with a promise to counter-sue them for defamation of character, instead. I'll bet you a shiny, new, Ohio quarter you won't hear another peep out of them.
Check out my novel.
So, if I decide a TV program is out of the question for some reason (either because I can't receive it at all, or because I won't be there at broadcast time), then it is still a genuine crime that should be punishable by destroying my life with insane charges?
At no point does it become a criminal charge
In the US it can become a federal criminal charge - and it can escalate to a felony charge.
That has been the law since the NET (No Electronic Theft) Act of 1997.
P2P is all about "file sharing." The unlicensed wholesale re-distribution of protected works through P2P networks.
That is why statutory damages apply - and it is why the geek would be the first to scream bloody murder if his uploaded shares could be successfully watermarked and traced back to him.
Even though I am one of those who doesn't respond to commercials?
The geek is the gift of god in cross-examination.
His self-regard, and boundless sense of entitlement to a free media fix is the one message you want the jury to take away from his testimony.
It really doesn't get any better than this.
QWEST communications shut off my internet service because they received a series of complaints regarding illegal file sharing from my address. QWEST did not notify me in advance. At about 1 PM on Monday my internet was shut off while I was watching a Youtube video. I called QWEST up to ask why; at that time I was told illegal file sharing. I was also told that I would have to file a DMCA dispute. When I asked how without a carrier, QWEST turned the line back on. At that time QWEST emailed me the DMCA complaints. After reviewing the complaints, I noticed one thing that stood out: There were multiple complaints for the same file from Media Sentry, their subsequent company Peer Media, and Warner Brothers. This was not numerous instances of file sharing, but rather a single instance complained about numerous times to inflate the number of complaints. (I caught the file later that evening and shut the node down.)
In conversations with QWEST Tech. Support escalation team, QWEST told me that their system could not be infiltrated when I mentioned that all of the local email was being used to send spam. I began to dig, as a result I found reports coming from Australia, Mexico, and Chile, as well as CERT and Security Focus warnings for the modem that the CMS carrier used to update the modems was being used to hack into customer networks. This fit in with my speculations and observations. I shut off QWEST's remote management and put Wireshark on the line. There was still unexplained communication on the line. I eventually tracked the communications to the QWEST CMS carrier. After even longer, I located the URL and IP address and firewalled them. I then pulled the software off the modem, reverse engineered part of it and prohibited communication with the QUEST update server, and then reflashed the modem. After monitoring the line for a few hours, there were no more unexplained communications from the modem. There is also no more spam being sent from the local email addresses.
After this was done (20 hours later), I filed a two page DMCA dispute using, without specificity, every defense in the DMCA. Should the mafiAA's try to come after me, I did leave out that my home network had been penetrated, but I also documented every bit of the work and calls to secure my network.
What I recommend to any that are accused, or sent notice of illegal file sharing, is to file a DMCA dispute with your carrier before any negative action is taken by the carrier, if you are notified.
Part of this story is to notify others that while QWEST asserts that they do not take action against subscribers other than to send the notice, that QWEST, along with may other carriers does in fact disable service, but that they do it without notifying you at all. Also be forewarned that the IP vice president/attorney for QWEST serves on the Board of Directors for a few IP interests.
Has anyone thought of what happens when your network is compromised by an exploit that the telco's say does not exist, but of which there are CERT advisories for, and that person is then a victim of one of these frivolous lawsuits? How many others may have the skill to stop an exploit in its tracks, esp endusers? How ethical is it for a telco to place exploitable back doors, or back doors period, in modems that they have sold you? How important is carrier privacy? How ethical is it for a carrier not to inform you as soon as they receive notice of an alleged DMCA violation?
not that I've ever used any of these sits, but what about the likes of tubestack, xxhamster, and youporn, etc?? All these are straight up websites, With an infinite amount of porn, and I don't think any of it is "Public Domain Porn"
the states would be able to undo laws being passed, not necessarily pass laws themselves.
A supermajority of states can amend the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, trumping even the United States Code. How does amending the Constitution not count as passing a law?
As is so typical of the posters here,the comments are useless and miss the point
I am still waiting for the day anything here matters or has any consequences whatsoever move on kids,get a life.
For "Lawsuit Insurance". If you worry about getting nuisance suits, which is what these are, pay a small fee and be covered for them (either hiring a lawyer, or getting reimbursed for paying the demanded amount, whichever you choose). Since the odds are small that you will be sued, the fee will be small too. The insurer has an incentive to work out the best response letters, legal tactics, etc, and supply them to their customers.
Suing because your business model is no longer viable won't work in the long run. The same thing happened to newspapers.
There is no -1 Disagree.
I wonder how many of the 100,000 were using a VPN? I run a VPN (supervpn $4 a month) before downloading content. I am aware that vpn can be broken but figure they are not going to spend that resource when there are plenty of other users downloading without VPN. Is this true or am I making a bad assumption?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
> And when they promise not to support this but then do? And then you look for somebody else for the next election, and then they also promise not to but then do?
You voted for Obama, too, huh? He had some of the more clueful things about reform on his website, then went to move RIAA lawyers to top Justice Dept. positions and got ICE to start removing people's domains with no chance for those people to file a defense.
My only concern with piracy is that it is sometimes the only way to acquire certain things. I learned this early on when the emulation scene made numerous arcade games available to the public, and to this day many are still only available through emulation. Other things are only available through piracy today like Yapoo's Market and Master Of Champions. The "parent" in this post discourages us from downloading anything not available otherwise, but I have already made up my mind. We need to stand up to companies if they aren't making available what we want to purchase. We all want to see constant improvement in the world so we must fight for it by pirating what can't be purchased. However greedy self entitled downloaders who steal what is easy to acquire can be dammed by these lawsuits for all I care.
So replace "wifi" with "website" and say this to the US DoD, Fox, Copiepresse et al when they complain that their website is being accessed through HTML and that just because it was available doesn't mean they can't charge you with "theft".