Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

23,000 File Sharers Targeted In Latest Lawsuit

Posted by Soulskill on from the go-big-or-go-home dept.

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."

16 of 386 comments (clear)

  1. Busy Work... by yeshuawatso · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Busy Work... by Aryden · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I can't wait till a few Governors, Congressmen, Senators, Justices get hit because their kids downloaded content.

    2. Re:Busy Work... by mug+funky · · Score: 5, Insightful

      i have no doubt in my mind that there is a "safe" list of IPs that will never receive a subpoena. i'm sure getting added is just an embarrassing phone call away.

    3. Re:Busy Work... by feedayeen · · Score: 4, Informative

      I can't wait till a few Governors, Congressmen, Senators, Justices get hit because their kids downloaded content.

      There are about a thousand individuals in the US with enough political power to get the ball rolling for change in this matter. Of them, their demographics put them with an average age of upper 40's to lower 50's making well over a million each year. Among those who still have kids living at home, to most of them, their thousand dollar settlements is chump change.

      Given a US Internet population of about 200 million, and the assumption that 50 thousand will face legal action of similar nature, statistically, there is not even a 1% chance that someone with political sway has dealt with this.

    4. Re:Busy Work... by SuricouRaven · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A safe list of IPs wouldn't be practical. It'll be rather less hi-tech than that. When the subpoena results come back, someone is just going to be given the task of reading them all, running a quick google on each name, and striking off the list anyone they find who might pose a problem.

    5. Re:Busy Work... by JWSmythe · · Score: 4, Informative

      But....

      They aren't paid per rental. Video stores (if they still exist) buy videos licensed for rental use. They're a bit more expensive, but the individual payments go to the store, not to the studio.

      From what I understand, the licensing for a new-release DVD for rental is higher than a new-release DVD for retail. But companies who do bulk purchases also enjoy price breaks.

      Then the math gets fuzzy. How much was lost between the pirates, purchase DVD's and rentals?

      Say the movie cost $29.99 retail (I didn't bother to check the price). 23,000 * 29.99 = $689,770. Oohhh, over half a million dollars lost.

      But what if they were all renters? We can assume not everyone watches the movie in the same night. Say 500 DVDs were purchased, at a rental-licensed rate of $35.00 (again, arbitrary number), and all the customers rented it over the next month and a half. 500 * $35.00 = $17,500. And then your number comes into play. Assuming $5/ea for video rentals, the rental companies took in $115,000, so after the cost of the DVDs, the rental companies made $97,500.

      So exactly who lost out there? The MPAA, or the local rental stores? Well, the MPAA likely still made exactly what they would have before, as the stores still needed to stock their stores. If I was a rental store, and I lost $97,500 because of piracy, I may be a bit miffed.

      But...

      Not all of those 23,000 are going to buy it, nor rent it.

      [cue soothing music]

      [In a Mr. Rogers-like voice]

      Long ago, it was a simpler time... People had just discovered the wonders of indoor plumbing, microwave ovens, color television, and then the home video cassette player. This was long before most of you were born. A video cassette, in simple terms, was a box roughly twice the size of a netbook, which could hold up to 90 minutes of low quality analog video with two channel sound. This wonderful innovation allowed you to view movies in the pleasure of your own home.

      This was before "The Internet", Netflix, Redbox, Hulu, YouTube, or BitTorrent ever existed, so what was this simple culture to do? They would get into their cars, and drive to local video stores to rent movies... But they cost approximately $5/day to rent. Lets not forget that this was during the era of Reagan Economics, so that was roughly equal to the monthly income for a family of 4 hard working Americans. Not everyone could afford a video cassette player, nor the cost of the rental of the video cassettes. Friends and family would get together to watch movies on home video cassette players, and promptly rewind and return the video cassette to the rental establishment.

      Then the evils of piracy was invented by evil one eyed people who lived on ships and sang drinking songs before looting and pillaging.

      ok, I'm making myself nauseous with the sarcasm now, so I'll stop.

      23,000 people downloading does not equal 23,000 purchases, nor 23,000 rentals.. Assuming all 23,000 people were interested in viewing the movie if there was a cost associated with it, they may watch in groups of 2 to 10 (we'll say 5 for comfortable seating). That's 4,600 rentals or purchases. And lets not forget that those who purchase are likely to lend out movies to friends, which would lower the number even more. Say 75% of the original set would be willing to spend a few bucks on a rental or borrow it from a friend. That brings the number down to 17,250 people intending to watch. At an average of 5 viewers a session, that lowers the number down to 3,450, which could still be comfortably managed by movie rentals rather than movie purchases, which means the original price paid to the studios for rental movies is still $17,500, which is pretty close to breaking even for the video stores. Luckily,

      --
      Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
    6. Re:Busy Work... by SuricouRaven · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The courts wouldn't see 23,000 cases. The usual procedure here is settlement. The copyright holder just has to make an offer that cannot be refused: Either settle for $7,000 or so, or go to court and face tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees even if you win.

      As for the ISPs, I imagine the **IAs would love to see them inconvenienced even further by piracy. It means more of an incentive to put in place technological measures to stop piracy like blocking popular trackers, traffic shaping and tiny usage quotas.

  2. Questionable Legality by TemperedAlchemist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Since the court ruling of IP address != identity. I would certainly like to see said copyright group charged with extortion.

  3. I wonder what would happen... by Sparx139 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:I wonder what would happen... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      What if all 23,000 file sharers each ponied up $50 dollars to make the problem go away? And by make the problem go away I mean hire some professional hit men to brutally kill a bunch of the lawyers who thought suing 23,000 people would be a good idea. I reckon that for 11.5 million dollars you could buy yourself a great big heap of dead lawyers.

  4. In response by Ghjnut · · Score: 5, Funny

    They should countersue for the time they lost watching the movie.

    --
    MouseClass extends ScrollClass, which extends TabClass, which extends SidebarClass, which extends PowerClass, w
  5. Re:This can't be right. by plover · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  6. UNLICENSED Private Investigators by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Revenue Stream by drmofe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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..."

  8. Re:MAFIAA at it again by hedwards · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:What really irks me.. by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.