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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?
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.
The issue is that if any of those 23,000 people didn't do it, then we've chucked our values down the toilet to bend over for corporate greed. If they've got the goods fine, but they should have to go through the process of filing separate suits for each and every one of those people, unless they can demonstrate that the IPs belong to the same person or they're acting together.
Filing suit is their right, but it isn't their right to do it in such an economical way, make them pay for all the suits necessary and see if they still feel that this is a valuable use of the court's time.
What's more, I doubt very much that all those addresses really correspond to people for which that one court has jurisdiction.
If they put it there, then they are guilty of copyright violation: illegally distributing the work.
If they did not put it there, then they are still guilty of copyright violation, because in order to find out who is downloading a file, they have to have a copy of the file for comparison! This issue has been brought up before: they cannot use illegal means to pursue legal "solutions" to their piracy problem.
Remember that in the past, their means of detecting who was violating copyright (I won't say "pirating", because a pirate has to distribute, not just copy) was itself accused of being illegal. Frankly, I don't see how they could devise a legal means to do it.
Honestly, I think these cases are dead in the water. I don't think they'll go anywhere anymore. Too many judges have become aware of how this all works. Or doesn't work, as the case may be.