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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?
Since the court ruling of IP address != identity. I would certainly like to see said copyright group charged with extortion.
23,000 people downloaded The Expendables? Really?
And 23,000 were saved from having to ask the theater for their money back.
Work bio at MMWD
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.
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I think that really means 3,000 people wanted the movie, and 20,000 screwed up their searches and accidentally tried to download "The".
It's the only rational explanation.
John
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.
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.
As much as I hate these lawsuits, I really don't feel sorry for the people getting sued. There are plenty of ways to get movies really cheap, or even free, without getting sued. And seriously, are you really that desperate for "entertainment" (and I use that term VERY loosely) that you're downloading some shitty Sylverster Stallone movie? WTF?
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..."
That's a mighty fine straw man you've got there. It'd be a shame if somebody were to say, point out that copyright is about controlling distribution not consumption.
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.
In the law of torts, the attractive nuisance doctrine states that landowner may be held liable for injuries to children trespassing on the land if the injury is caused by a hazardous object or condition on the land that is likely to attract children who are unable to appreciate the risk posed by the object or condition. The doctrine has been applied to hold landowners liable for injuries caused by abandoned cars, piles of lumber or sand, trampolines, and swimming pools. However, it can be applied to virtually anything on the property of the landowner.
The last sentence notwithstanding, all tests against this doctrine are with regards to child trespassers.
If a child walked into a house with a loaded gun on the coffee table and popped his pal who happened to be with him, this holds merit; an adult walks in, however, grabs the gun, and goes house-to-house offing neighbours, this is completely off the table.
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
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.
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!
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.
That still doesn't get around the issue that, technically, if it's the copyright owner who is offering you the movie for free they have the right to offer it to you for free and it's no longer a breach of copyright if you accept their offer. Either they don't have the right, in which case they're liable for the breach, or they do have the right, in which case there was no breach by anyone. I can't offer to give you my phone for free and then have you arrested for stealing my phone if you accept because I have the legal right to give it away.