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23,000 File Sharers Targeted In Latest Lawsuit
wiedzmin writes "Subpoenas are expected to go out to ISPs this week in what could be the biggest BitTorrent downloading case in US history. At least 23,000 file sharers are being targeted by the US Copyright Group for downloading The Expendables. The Copyright Group appears to have adopted Righthaven's strategy in blanket-suing large numbers of defendants and offering an option to quickly settle online for a moderate payment. The IP addresses of defendants have allegedly been collected by paid snoops capturing lists of all peers who were downloading or seeding Sylvester Stallone's flick last year. I am curious to see how this will tie into the BitTorrent case ruling made earlier this month indicating that an IP address does not uniquely identify the person behind it."
Comcast and Time Warner are going to be busy. Just IDing and notifying the downloaders is going to be a pain in the ass, and God forbid the customer moved, switch, and/or can't be found. As a manager, I would file a motion to stop this just to keep my cost down. Furthermore, this is a witch hunt and the sitting Judge needs to step down for being incompetent. While I may not have a JD, any rational person can see that the company is just trying to start a legal phishing scheme.
What really irks me, is that they'll try to sue these people into paying rather than engaging them as customers. MPAA, here's an idea, instead of sending notices to ISPs about someone stealing a movie, how about you work with ISPs to send the downloader a link to pay for the movie instead. Give the option to rent or buy it, and play with the price until you find a sweet spot these el cheapo's are willing to fork over. Threatening them with lawsuits because it seems like a great way to set an example hasn't worked thus far, why keep beating this dead horse then?
23,000 people downloaded The Expendables? Really?
Since the court ruling of IP address != identity. I would certainly like to see said copyright group charged with extortion.
If all 23,000 customers refused to settle. Would the Copyright Group drop the charges, or would they take them all to court?
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
They should countersue for the time they lost watching the movie.
MouseClass extends ScrollClass, which extends TabClass, which extends SidebarClass, which extends PowerClass, w
How often is the average american sued?
That 23,000 people downloaded that movie intentionally.
I feel sorry for the poor folk who wasted drive space on that piece of crap.
Linux computers, watercooled, photography
how it'll tie in. If you've got the resources to fight it they'll probably drop it fast and move onto easier pickings...
The only real question is, will they ever attack enough people to result in real copyright reform? I doubt it. The judges have been careful to keep this under control, and that's probably why...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I am curious to see how this will tie into the BitTorrent case ruling made earlier this month indicating that an IP address does not uniquely identify the person behind it."
Why did it require a visit to the court system in order to establish this 'obvious' fact?
The IP in my opinion only identifies a service/hardware to which it's tied. Not a human being. Seems obvious to me.
You coming for me?
I'll be waiting, bitches!
Be seeing you...
...for me to expand my list of artists to avoid supporting financially. Too bad; I kinda liked tuning in for the last 5 minutes of Rocky whatever.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Rent movies cheaply (ie Redbox for $1), Rip to HDD, return movie, then encode to DivX or other bitrate-efficient codec. Only costs $1 per movie, and is 100% offline and thus untraceable.
Another round of shakedowns by corporate America. The only sane reaction would be for them to be laughed out of the court room for even suggesting something this absurd. You can gauge how free your country is by how much action the government takes in stopping this type of behavior.
USA! We're number #1! (in extorting our citizens for corporate greed)
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
...is the great possibility that a U.S. Copyright Group stooge put the movie out there in the first place.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
It sucked.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: All of these cases are based on the work of unlicensed private investigators, working behind closed doors, doing who-knows-what. There is absolutely no proof that ANY of their "evidence" is real. These "investigators" and their shyster lawyer accomplices are the real criminals. They are the ones who should be fined and imprisoned. And given a good flogging.
(well, mostly, at least more free than USA), and torrenting movies and music is legal, and free.
Is this to get around Peer Blocking software?
The movie grossed $103 million at the US box office
Assuming a movie ticket price of $20, this means that 5.3 million people saw the movie in theatres. These guys are suing 23222 people, or about 230 times fewer
At $150K per defendant, the potential works out to $3.48billion or roughly 33 times the US gross (and $700million more than the highest grossing movie ever - Avatar
My business pitch to the movie studios would be: "Straight to torrent then litigate - that's where the money is..."
They would have us believe 23000 people took the time to download a Sylvester Stallone flick?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I recommend everyone leech their torrents to remain legal.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Or a random block of data....
If I didn't download the movie 100% than I didn't download the movie because it won't play or behave as a movie.
It still identifies the account holders with the ISP, who can, quite reasonably, be held accountable for damages caused through their accounts, unless any of the subscribers can provide further assistance to identify the actual parties who should be sued, I can see no reason why they should not have to pay damages here.
Maybe when people realize they can be civilly liable for damages if they don't properly secure their network access, people will actually start practicing respectable security policies at home, resulting in a safer Internet for everybody.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The X makes it sound cool. But it's still a crime.
Unless you're a big company i guess.
Lots of good comments here I'd love to mod up, but alas.. I got them on a weekend when the stories sucked. Typical.
At least 23,000 file sharers are being targeted by the US Copyright Group for downloading The Expendables. My ass, this movie just sucked.
I clicked on this because I thought it might have been something relevant but generally disapproved of. I was greeted with my speakers blaring the meatspin song and my monitor spinning the meatspin dicks. At work.
To the poster: fuck you. To the cowardly moderator who used overrated: fuck you much, much more.
To download the torrent now, then show up in court with the copy I bought like 3 months ago. Actually won't be a bad idea to try and push the trademark, pirating, owning, multiple copy, whatever else ideas they try into court. Probably too expensive though, since it wouldn't fall under "frivolous" or "malicious," and wouldn't be able to recoup lawyer costs.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Wasn't there a story on slashdot last time a company tried to do this, that the judge threw it out and told them if they wanted to sue several thousand people, they'd have to file one case per defendant?
I modded that meatspin link troll (go check, it is modded troll. Slashdot just doesn't like to display the name after only 1 single mod). Your damn fault for clicking a shortened link, especially at WORK. It could have been a fucking virus (0 day exploits still happen).
To you: you REALLY clicked a shortened link, in a /. comment, with no real description of what it is/was, while AT WORK?
You were pretty much ASKING for that.
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
What happened to Copyright being between the artist/developer and the customer. How is it right to have these a "Copyright group"? If someone has breached copyright on a particular product, it should be up to the original developer of that product to sue them.
I went and downloaded The Expendibles out of spite after reading that. Via newsgroup. And SSL. Behind a proxy. Even though I already paid to see it at the cinema.
Since the court ruling of IP address != identity. I would certainly like to see said copyright group charged with extortion.
The rulings of a single district court judge counts for damn little in the American federal system.
Tracing an IP address stands a pretty good chance of leading yoiu to the primary account owner.
The legally responsible adult, if you like.
It isn't perfect. But nothing in the law has to be perfect. Least of all in the earliest stages of civil litigation.
That a plaintiff disagrees with a lower court judge in Texas on the law of evidence does not make the offer of a settlement in New York or California extortion.
Easy! From now on, only IP addresses can be sued for infringement. If one of them loses, it goes straight back into the ICANN IPv4 pool. That way, not only do the lawyers get to sue a number of IP, but the movie pirates get to save the internet without all this complicated IPv6 nonsense!
IP != person in logic. An IP refers to an access point. It very well may be a personal access point, but since most private wireless networks can be broken into easily by any competent person with google, it stands to reason that assuming that IP = person is a logical fallacy. A "snapshot" of your IP address only proves that your access point was used to download copyrighted material. If there were a connection that you are, in fact, the only person to use this access point, then the conclusion may be made that one is guilty.
However, it is possible and even common for other computers to be used as proxies through the use of malware without the owner knowing. It's innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. To jump through the constructive syllogism and reach the tasty conclusion you must establish that the suspect was the only one using it. Which is up to the accuser to prove, not the defendant.
Can someone riddle me this, but is there any way to conclusively prove that you don't own the DVD and that the torrented version was your backup/alternative form, or are you only permitted your *own* backup if you do it yourself? Can you not walk into a Walmart and purchase the DVDs and claim that you were simply using a more accessible form because say, perhaps, your Blu-Ray Disc player didn't play nicely with your disc, and that you had owned it prior to the infraction?
Just wondering if all the accused defendants are from the US or other countries too? I don't think subpoenaing an ISP in a place like India is gonna do any good.. Reminds me of a friend of mine in NCSU... downloaded a primus album.. raided next day and had to pay a 500$ fine.. But $150K... lol.. comeon! Get your head out of your ass! Companies asking for such unreasonable fines or compensation should be declared mentally unstable and banned from the courts! With $150K, the defendant could make a better movie himself.. be it an indie flick. It still would anyday be better than a Stallone flick! For gods sake, get the fucking steroids out of your mouth before you talk!
The last person to mod me down is a rotten egg..... there.. that should do it..
US Court: Give us the identities of these ips.. Indian ISP: GTFOML US Court: We have a subpoena. Indian ISP: So shove it. US Court: This is not cool. You will be an accomplice! Indian ISP: So sue me! US Court: Okay here's 100$.. Indian ISP: Now you're talking.. take whatever you want... Seriously, thats the way it would go down if it ever came up!
The last person to mod me down is a rotten egg..... there.. that should do it..
People voluntarily watch Sylvester Stallone movies? Have they no shame? They should be taken to the cleaners for everything they have.
I'd like to see them come find me here in Korea, where even the police use pirated Windows.
You can have your movie back guys- it was rubbish anyway...
Downloading the movie or having bad enough taste to download the movie?
Take it one step further. With Bittorrent you're rarely in a position to transfer the entire file to one person, especially on popular torrents like newly released movies. What you're really doing is uploading small chunks of the film to different people, something that everyone here has no trouble understanding but seems to be a hopelessly complicated concept for much of the older generation.
Now the question is, what does copyright apply to? The entire film or all the little bits that make up the film? I don't think any sane person could claim it's the latter, because practically that would make every sequence of bits someone's intellectual property. Even if we couple that idea with a context how do we legally define the context? The name of the file those bits are a part of? And what happens if I encrypt or compress those bits? What if I mix them with bits from other sources? There's just no way to make this definition work. So if I'm not distributing the film in its entirety, if I'm not even distributing large parts of it to the same people, then I think you could argue that distributing it over Bittorrent doesn't violate any IP laws.
Lets say I have a counterfeit bag, some expensive designer one. If I sell that bag to someone, or even give it to someone, I've distributed counterfeit goods. But if I cut that bag up into hundreds of little pieces of fabric, then distribute those pieces to hundreds of different people, have I broken a law? What if I do this 10 times with 10 bags, over thousands of people, have I distributed 10 bags to people? I don't think so. Even if you could reassemble those pieces into an original bag I still haven't given a bag to any one person.
Even the law itself defines infringement to be "any secondary transmission by a cable system that embodies a performance or a display of a work which is actionable as an act of infringement". How can anyone claim a small segment of the billions of bits that make up a movie embodies it? Without the rest of it, they're nothing. Even if you argue that a person could extract a single frame from them, then a simple encryption pass would turn them into truly random noise. At least, until you have the whole file to decrypt.
Sure it's all technicalities, but isn't that what law is?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Is to get on your torrents early, the dates in the list of IP's are all in March and April, that torrent hit months ago.
.. is that 23000 people were actually willing to download this for free. You'd have to pay ME to watch that piece of dreck.
Let's say filing fee was $200 a suit, then they spent another $100 to pay someone to serve each defendant.
That's $6,900,000 before they even get to court. What if they spent $2000 per defendant in prosecution? That's $55,200,000 in court costs altogether, for a movie that netted $190 million. Even if every single one of the defendants bought the damn blu-ray and the studio got $20 for every copy sold, that's still only $460,000 in total revenues. This is an obvious shakedown; get more money hoping for settlements than actually prosecuting. I hope all their lawyers get disbarred as a lesson.
And other stuff thats illegal for normal SERFS, but ok and legal for all rich pricks with a suitcase of cash.
Yeah $5000 fine for downloading a movie.
But buying $5000 of cocaine, totally legal for the elite such as 90% of musicians and movie actors.
I 100% condone pirating Mick Jaggers music, since its 100% proceeds of crime, ie drug taking.
Scums, you're rich now, we can pirate all we like.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I've mentioned this several times over the last five years or so, but every time I do, I get mauled by idiots and whiners.
That is, that there should be a "download only" option on all torrent programs so that you can manually have the option of not uploading at all and thereby be immune to the whole legal issue presented by the RIAA and similar groups. But there is currently none, and people then complain at me that it's unfair and not right and so on to leech. And also how it would break the whole process. .
But we need a legal way to force the companies to no longer go after individuals (as opposed to actual copying rings and career criminals, which there are thousands around the world to go after, even outside of China)). If they have an issue with distribution, then fine - we don't distribute. Then they only can go after the 200 or so people who are deciding to manually seed the torrent. If nobody is seeding after such a change, well, then, they got their wish. The movie isn't "available". So sorry, don't do things you're not supposed to do. Legitimate uses would be unaffected.
oh - and watch the hate and flak I take for even suggesting this, despite the fact that it would keep people from being sued and also drastically lower the number of copies of most films and music out there. It kind of makes you wonder what's the real motivation of the programmers who make these programs.
Like around the WHOLE WORLD??
Is that all it'd take to sweep this under the rug? If you could provide your dvd as proof you paid the devil? I also saw it in the theater, with my pops. Would this matter at all? Seriously curious.
Do you think they are monitoring demonoid?
See, they should sue all the people who didn't download THE EXPENDABLES. I'd be happy to settle out of court, for a modest settlement, in order to avoid watching that movie.
*runs off to my favorite torrent site giggling insanely*
I wanna be sued by those fags too, I need some good entertainment...ENTERTAIN ME RIAA! I COMMAND YOU!
I downloaded a copy, but I also bought it in store and wouldn't work in my older than shit Blu-ray player.
Whatever happened to copyRIGHT.
What an unbelievably stupid strategy, Go after people who downloaded a bad Hollywood movie and you'll end up radicalizing a bunch of average folks. This kind of strategy will do nothing to the most active (or most political( file sharers out there.
If these people think that the mass lawsuits will deter other people from downloading movies, then they don't understand that the RIAA has been pursuing that strategy for years without success. In fact, internally at the RIAA around 8 years ago, they had decided to pursue the mass lawsuit strategy as a last ditch tactic in a war they knew they had lost. They also had to go through the motions in order to show their clients that "they were doing something." They understood that the file-sharing wars were over and industry had lost.
The RIAA was hoping that the news media would cover the lawsuits and this coverage would scare average users into not file sharing. This approach may have worked back in the 1980s with cassette taping, but that was only because most people got their news from a few sources. These days, large segments of the population don't even follow the news. The RIAA lawsuits might get a story here or there on some TV news, but few people watch any of those news reports. And the average viewer of traditional network news is an older person and more likely not to be involved with file sharing.
That you KNOW it's a piece of "dreck" even though you imply you haven't watched it. This isn't to say that it isn't, but dude... logic?
"Don't download flop movies that are desperately trying to recover their costs"
I was subpoenaed in The Hurt Locker case, but luckily got out of it from this recent ruling. My ISP never gave up my information because I wasn't in the original list of 687 addresses. (Also why I'm posting anonymously!)
All of these cases are just infeasible, economically. I think the judges are starting to figure out these guys are just trying to use the court system to scare people and run phishing schemes. The only advice I can give if you're one with a subpoena: wait it out. Don't call these jackasses and start forking over cash. That just encourages them.
Sylvester - Hey we did not make what we expected on this movie.
Frank - I know lets sue the people that illegally downloaded it.
Tammy - I hear you can get $3k per pop.
Sylvester - Great idea, that will put our profits over the margin to do a sequel.
Someone make a computer virus that downloads popular movies without the victim knowing. Then their list of copyright violators can no longer be reliable.
Is there anyone out there who has had past experiences with these kind of subpoenas? (i.e. "The Hurt Locker" lawsuits)
What has the aftermath been like?
In case you were thinking to yourself "boy, I could really use a list of those IP addresses."
https://gist.github.com/964790
BitTorrent should support a "random assist" mode. Clients (even if idle) announce they want to assist. The tracker selects an active torrent randomly or based on need and returns a peer list.
The client doesn't have the .torrent, so it doesn't know what the files or piece hashes are. It simply requests peers give it random pieces, then shares the pieces it receives with anyone that needs them.
After a random amount of time the client leaves the swarm, and securely deletes the torrent and any data from it.
The reasoning behind this is that you cannot determine if anyone on an infringing torrent had any intent to infringe. It could just be their client assisting the swarm. Even if the peer downloaded every piece of the torrent, it could be their client randomly decided to assist for a long time.
A beneficial side effect of this is that all swarms will get more peers.
This company "US Copyright Group"-
Does anyone have a concise list of investors, affiliates and partners? Anyone involved with this guys should have their activities very publicly documented.
Seriously, these people already spent time finding & downloading the film, and possibly the even watched it. Haven't they suffered enough already?
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
IANAL - How is this discovery valid? It seems to me that unless they do a seizure of the computer and then a forensic examination of the hard drive to prove that the movie is on there, they should not have a case.
I would think that the legal defense to this would be as simple as the defendant's lawyer saying, "Your honor, the plaintiff has failed to do proper discovery and furthermore has no proof that my client has the material in their possession."
> Only if we schmear lamb's blood on our doorposts.
Jeez, I thought suing your customers was bad... and now you want to ritually sacrifice them????
All I have to say about it. Blackmail`ing The act or practice of extorting money by exciting fears.
So some entities who are paid to deliver lists of IP addresses and date-times do what they were paid to do. What does that prove? They could choose them at random from major ISP dynamic IP blocks and assign random date-times to all of them (a statistical study of their data might be very interesting). Even if the snoops are honest, it's so incredibly easy to make a typo or minor logic error when processing large data sets that their data could be completely wrong. It's also trivial to tamper with it at any step along the way, right up to the time it's presented in court (perhaps even afterwards, depending on who works behind the scenes at the court).
I wonder what the motivation of these snoops is. I wonder if they are paid more for providing larger lists.
Even if an IP address could be linked conclusively to one person, their data proves nothing more than "some guy said he saw this IP address in a list a year ago." If that stands up in court, that court has a pathetically low standard for evidence.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
What, are you new here? Variants of this "prank" have been standard Slashdot fare probably since the beginning. Certainly since I first discovered this site 12 or 13 years ago (long before URL shorteners).
NEVER click on a shortened Slashdot link and NEVER click on a link from any commenter modded 0 or -1 unless you can tell it's safe.
I know Slashdot doesn't want to censor anything, but they really should make shortened links unclickable. That preserves free speech and makes incidents like this less likely (especially because some people have to compulsively click on any link they see).
that movie sucked, i would download it even if there were no possible repercussions, why do they not go after some thing that had real appeal to people.