Slashdot Mirror
Patent and Copyright Wars Gone Wild
snydeq writes "While Apple and Samsung fight over patents and prototypes, other copyright trolls are waging an X-rated battle on innocent users, as lawyers representing some adult movie companies are sending letters accusing users of illegally downloading their movies and saying that, for a price, they can make the charges go away. 'Cases like this, usually involving pornographic content, are very common,' Mitch Stoltz, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation said. At least 250,000 individuals have been named in group lawsuits over the last few years. There's a very common belief that if someone pirates your Wi-Fi connection or uses your computer without your permission, you are responsible for illegal downloads of copyrighted material. That's not true, says Stoltz; the law is quite clear. However, the lawyers who bring those cases use that misperception to convince innocent people that they had better pay up. Since $3,500 is just a fraction of the money it would take to fight a case in court, most people simply settle."
Fuck You.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I mean, really, who wants to be named on court documents for allegedly pirating porn?
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
IAAL, and I've worked on a bunch of these cases. The real problem is, it's almost always cheaper to settle than to fight. This is what we call a "cost of defense" shakedown: if it would cost $5k to fight, then it makes sense to pay $3k to make it go away. However, there are a few things to keep in mind:
* The trolls are very unlikely to go after any individual, no matter how much they huff and puff. The reason is, if they have 1000 Does in a complaint, and they start going against one of them, that Doe will (eventually) get copies of the evidence against him. If it's sh!t (and I believe it will probably turn out to be) then the other 999 Does will see that, and no longer be willing to pay.
* The insurance industry had a problem with cost-of-defense complaints: crappy auto accidents that weren't worth more than a few grand in damages. But they banded together and fought every single one of them (paying just the actual damages & medical, and fighting almost every "pain & suffering" claim). And now, you can hardly find a PI lawyer to take a small case -- they know there's no money in it. So the insurance companies don't have to fight any more, and they don't even consider paying anything you can't produce a receipt for.
The only way to clean up these trolls is if some Does sack up and fight, or if the courts stop going along with the shakedown.
And the courts weren't happy about it. The wording of the letter has to be extremely precise and boils down to:
We think you've been downloading porn, but we can't prove it. We'd like you to pay us some protection money, but legally we can't force you to without you agreeing to show us what's on your hard drive.
So, there's no onus on you to pay up whatsoever. Remember that IP addresses are still not considered solid evidence in most countries. To the extent that if your laptop gets stolen and you have an IP address and a GPS fix on the crook's address, the police often refuse to go round and batter the door down because it's they need more proof.
"There's a very common belief that if someone pirates your Wi-Fi connection or uses your computer without your permission, you are responsible for illegal downloads of copyrighted material." Thanks to the NZ government bending over for special interests, you are responsible in NZ. The punishment for being **alleged** to having your WiFi security violated three times is disconnection.
I am not just going to agree with the popular view. In other words I have bad Karma.
While China and America vie for Gold in London, other copyright trolls are waging an X-rated battle...
While the Horde and Alliance battle in the Outlands, other copyright trolls are waging an X-rated battle...
While McDonalds and Burger King fight over the best fries, other copyright trolls are waging an X-rated battle...
While sensationalist submitters and editors figh- oh, wait, they're in total agreement.
I'd like to propose a little civil disobedience. Copyright terms are insane and have been continually extended by copyright maximalists for years now. I think sane copyright terms are 20 years for everything but software and 10 years for software as it changes so fast.
I will separate my downloads out into two categories: older than the above terms and younger than those terms. If I ever have the misfortune to be dragged into court over my downloads the older ones I will plead no contest to with a submission that I am not accepting Hollywood's forever copyright, and anything newer than those terms I will have to plead guilty of copyright infringement for.
20 years is long enough for copyright - maximalists are holding our culture hostage by pushing for anything longer.
The Public Domain
Is anyone ACTUALLY under the delusion that these people didn't actually download the material in question?
According to Wikipedia, Elegant Angel Productions (the plaintiff in this case) is "one of the early pioneers of Gonzo pornography". I think it's quite likely that the thirtyish mother shown in the Tucson news report did not download this file. She's hardly in the prime demographic for this sort of stuff. It seems much more probable that her Wi-Fi was open to the public and was used by someone else.
When people see high profile corporations like Apple go around and sue others, and see them succeed often enough, it gives lots of people precedent to think about doing exactly the same.
Before Apple, the phone manufacturers would imitate/copy or license any new idea or technology, everyone contributed (some a bit more, some less), everyone gained. When the first "camera phones" came out they got smiles due to crappy resolution pictures, some companies didn't bother and considered it feature bloat (which was one of the reasons Siemens' phone unit went under, even though the created quality phones), others would simple create "camera phones" from that point on.
When one manufacturer started making "flip-phones" it didn't sue everybody else into oblivion for attempting to do the same, that was simply not the culture and modus operandi of the mobile phone world in those days. Manufacturers simply implemented ideas from others and added their own sometimes creating completely new use cases and device categories (just think of the Nokia 770). This was a culture that acknowledged and allowed progress.
Then the new player Apple enters and does essentially the same - use others years of research and technology and add some of their own ideas, granted it was a very polished even ground-breaking implementation, they created a new category "smart phones"; but then they turn around and say "We legally goto access to your technology (because you allowed it), but we are not willing to share our ideas on the same basis and we will sue anyone who tries to implement any of them." - Most of their patents are basically "X on a smart phone.", where "X" is something somebody else has already done on a non-"smart phone" (multi touch, pinch zoom, curved rectangle chassis etc.).
This didn't happen immediately and only recently have the litigation reached these epic proportions, while we're seeing a decline in real technological innovation on Apple's side.
I'm not saying good ideas shouldn't be rewarded, but seeing the millions and millions Apple has already raked in I think they have been adequately compensated and should continue focusing on innovating and churning out new ideas to keep the cash flow going instead of stifling competition through lawsuits.
'Cause a lotta bad things can happen to dat nice Linux box, you know what I mean? Like, uh, accidents. We wouldn't want anything, you know, bad to happen, would we?
You are welcome on my lawn.
a bad system doesn't excuse bad actors
you fix the system AND you punish the bad actors
and will also oftentimes find that the bad system continues to exist the way it does precisely because of efforts by the bad actors. such as professional groups and business consortia giving money to politicians
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In no small part because there's no such thing as a perfect system. If you demand a perfect legal system you'll never have one. Part of what leads to shitloads of convoluted laws is assholes that exploit the system, requiring legislation to deal with them.
I had a microcosm of that on a forum I admin. Asshole line-steppers who were always seeking to cause trouble and just skirt the rules. I kept piling on rules and more rules which just made things worse. Finally I replaced it with "Don't be a dick." They whined because it was vague, and got banned for violating it later, but everyone else was quite happy.
So yes you can get mad at assholes that abuse the system. Not saying the system doesn't need to be fixed but that doesn't mean that the abusers don't deserve to get set on fire.
If your network is left open or hacked into why are you not considered an ISP? If you provide free wifi to people near your house or around your small business you are an ISP. A larger ISP is not punished for it's customers; libraries and other institutions which provide free internet to "customers" are not viewed as ISPs but they are.
If there is an exemption for ISPs who are just carriers than how does one get that legal status as well? Surely, it must be made available to small businesses as well which is your loophole to get some people an ability to be exempt from being liable for what their users do over their network.
Mesh networks will make this more interesting.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This kind of fraud should be classified as mail fraud, and the perpetrators charged accordingly.
it'll take a lawyer and thousands of dollars and time to defend
For many people it would require two lawyers. One to defend you against charges of downloading copyrighted porn, and one to handle your divorce. I think a desire to avoid the divorce case will motivate many people to quietly settle the copyright case. Looks like a lucrative racket to me.
Show us your tits!
Uh, actually no. Please don't.
Facebook is the new AOL
The porn case mentioned in TFA was again based on abusing bittorrent to reveal the IP of someone downloading something, which in itself is a double fail.
First, the rights granted to the users of bittorrent explicitly forbids using it for law enforcement purposes and also forbids reverse engineering of applications and protocol (which the DMCA also forbids), so using it to reveal IPs of individual users with the purpose of suing or prosecuting them, is clearly illegal.in itself. So here we have someone claiming to protect one piece of intellectual property by violating another... Fail.
Second, it has been proven time and time again that 1 IP != 1 person. A single IP can represent anything from 1 person to thousands, and any number of these may be unknown, regardless of whether open Wifi exists or not. Protected Wifi can be broken. Rogue cables can be plugged into the cabled local network. And everything can be removed between abuse and discovery, leaving no trace. Fail again.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
... that any lawyer seeking payment through deceptive tactics be disbarred and imprisoned. Period.
I'm not really up with the current BS IP/copyright/etc laws, but if the porno guy came at you with what is basically a BS claim, wouldn't counter-suing him be a good option? May need to take out a loan, but since the article says it's established law that an IP address isn't enough for a suit, wouldn't that be something like a frivolous suit?
Please correct me if I'm incorrect.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I'm amazed by how many people, who would otherwise completely ignore an unsolicited email from a random person, will suddenly start to tremble if the email sounds like it comes from a lawyer. I guess the endless stories of patent trolls and copyright suits have got people pretty scared.
Unless the demand comes in a registered letter to my home or business address, it goes in the spam folder where it belongs.
For goodness sake, if you're going to try to extort thousands of dollars from me, at least have the courtesy to fork out for some stationery and a postage stamp, you know?