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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.
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
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.
Rapist sand murderers? My, America is worse than I thought.
You know, using P2P is not illegal, and has many non-copyright infringing uses...
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.
Great. Clog up the exit nodes of I2P and TOR so that users with a real political need can't access the web.
At least get a VPN that terminates in Scandinavia.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Rapists and murders don't effect the media giant's revenue stream. In fact they enhance it due to 'made for TV movies' and pseudo 'news commentatry' shows that come out of the drawn out court cases.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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"