Slashdot Mirror
$1,500,000 Fine For Sharing 10 Movies On BitTorrent
another random user writes with news that a Virginia man, Kywan Fisher, has been ordered to pay $1,500,000 to porn-maker Flava Works for sharing ten of the company's films over BitTorrent. "The huge total was reached through penalties of $150,000 per movie, the maximum possible statutory damages under U.S. copyright law." The man did not make any defense in federal court to Flava Works' copyright infringement claims, so the judge handed down a default judgement.
"In 2011 Fisher and several other defendants were sued by adult entertainment company Flava Works. The case in question differs from the so-called 'John Doe' lawsuits as the copyright holder had detailed information on the defendants who had paid accounts on the company’s movie portal. For Fisher the trouble started when instead of just viewing the films for personal entertainment, he allegedly went on to share copies on BitTorrent. These illicit copies were traced directly back to his account through a code embedded in the videos. ... The verdict will be welcomed by Flava and the many other copyright holders involved in BitTorrent lawsuits in the United States. DieTrollDie, a close follower and critic of these cases, points out that it will be widely cited in settlement letters to other defendants, but that the case itself is notably different. 'This was not the normal Copyright Troll case – there was some actual evidence beyond a public IP address. Not a smoking gun by far, but certainly enough to show a preponderance of evidence,' DTD writes.
Yeah, we just watch them for the hidden codes, it's what turns us on.
They probably did a steganography on some key frames in the movie.
That REALLY sucks...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
After all, this will clearly be a deterrent. Or he clearly caused millions of dollars in damage while he was playing with himself. Or something like that. Logic is not actually relevant when it comes to copyrights.
Palm trees and 8
The problem is not Bittorrent. The problem is what you use Bittorent for.
I I use Bittorent almost exclusivly for down/uploading Linux iso's so I think I'm pretty safe.
Or to download them illegally to begin with, instead of actually paying for watermarked movies.
Play the video on the screen and record it with your camcorder before you share it. The analog-HOLE will save you from detection.... Unless they do the punched hole technique that Hollywood does on some frames in a movie.... Then you are hosed....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So did the judge watch all of the evidence?
i blame tcp/ip. hacker protocol.
Speaking as someone who writes and self publishes books for a living (see sig), this is an insane judgement. $150,000 per movie? Ten movies?
I don't know how this could possibly be considered fair. Even if the guy 100% did everything that he is accused of, what's the real cost of his actions? If each film is, say, $10, then this means he cost the porno company 15,000 sales, per movie.
The problem is it just doesn't add up. Something free isn't the same value as something paid. I've given away approximately 20,000 books on Amazon, but I've sold about 1,000. I didn't lose 19,000 sales.
Every retailer knows if you give away free samples or even free products you're encouraging people to come back. To buy your new offerings. People are creatures of habit and once we like something we want more of it. This massive giveaway probably did wonders for their signup rates.
But I understand that putting *every* piece of your product online is bad, and making them permanently and easily available is damaging to sales especially in the short term.
But that much damage? 1.5 million bucks total? This is ludicrous. It's insane. There are punishments for real, genuine crimes with real, lasting harm to a person that are less than that. How is he supposed to pay?
So as a media producer, I think that bankrupting someone for sharing ten films online is completely immoral. It's just wrong.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
As this one was caught via user-specific codes (Something practical only in online distribution, no good on pressed discs), none of that would have helped.
What useful arts and sciences does it promote? And then, why isn't the penalty declared unconstitutional, it is obvious the penalty exceeds the harm done many times over.
"[porn distributor] had detailed information on the defendants who had paid accounts on the company’s movie portal"
Look, anybody who voluntarily surrenders *their own credit card details with their real name on it* to an internet porn distributor just asks for trouble.
The quoted story sounds like it's full of spin. The way I read the story from the BBC was that there were several defendants, most got thrown out of court due to there being no actual evidence of guilt (IP addresses anyone?) and this guy was found against because he didn't bother turning up. Maybe I misread it though.
Korma: Good
The problem is not Bittorrent. The problem is what you use Bittorent for.
I I use Bittorent almost exclusivly for down/uploading Linux iso's so I think I'm pretty safe.
No, for the particular use case this guy (and the GP) are talking about, Bittorrent is, in fact, a dumb solution. The downloading isn't the problem, the sharing back of data you didn't originate is.
And more generically, you're wrong anyway. If someone rooted one of the seeds of your Linux ISO and stuck a bunch of child porn in it, you're guilty of both downloading and distributing child pornography at that point. It doesn't matter what you say you were doing, or that you didn't produce the ISO. And you can't really detect there's a problem until you've already downloaded the whole ISO so you can hash the file. Now, maybe you get your .torrent files from somewhere secure, but people get onto distro servers with some regularity.
So, the GP is absolutely right -- using Bittorrent to download and re-seed anything you didn't explicitly produce yourself is, in fact, unsafe, and doing so with content you know is illegal is just plain stupid.
We mainly just put them in jail and punish them for the addiction.
Because unlike all those commie socialist countries in Europe, that actually works. (Or so my Republican candidate for senate tells me).
So what Flava Works is saying here is that Kywan Fisher would have been better off had he never paid for his Flava Works pornography in the first place. After all, if he hadn't done the right thing and supported the studio, they never would have had his credit card details to begin with, unless his credit card info was stolen...
To those of you who think purchasing Flava Works's "works" is a good idea, let this be a less to you and torrent their content. What if your computer get stolen and the thief takes your porn collection and posts it to bittorrent sites? What if you get a virus and your porn files leak? What if you share a Flava Works file accidentally? I realize that that's a little hard to do with bittorrent, but you get the idea.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
This logic gets silly, though. The same could happen if I buy a magazine which somebody has for some reason taped child porn inside, and, say, lend it to a friend or something. Same as how somebody hiding something stolen in my car doesn't make me guilty of handling stolen goods unless I was provably aware of it.
If you are going to sign in to something in a way that can identify you, and then share possibly watermarked files, it doesn't matter what you use to share the files. The files can be traced back to you. Of course you could say you were hacked if the files were not shared from an IP associated with you. I'd say the two - your ip, and the watermark are enough to say it was probably you. Though if you have others in your family, it could have been them. For instance what could they do to two roommates that share a computer? Each could say it was the other one who shared the file.
...
The only thing stupid here is your entire argument. If the distro box got rooted, they could start seeding child porn ANYWAY. They don't need torrents to do it either, they could just start up Apache serve it up on port 80 over HTTP.
This is just thinly veiled FUD to try to stop people from downloading and hosting files from the internet. Well, fuck that. That is the whole POINT of the internet, it is how webservers work, it is how mail servers work, it is how chat servers work (streams instead of files though), and people caving to fear that assholes like you spread only hurts it. OH NO! SOMEONE MIGHT ROOT MY BOX AND START HOSTING ILLEGAL MATERIAL!
Get. The. Fuck. Off. The. Internet.
Interesting notions but you assume that the lawmakers actually care about common sense.
They don't. They care about keeping their palms greased.
No you aren't. You only need to provide an offer, good for 3 years, to provide the source code for a nominal fee. If you are distributing the source code unmodified, then you can provide a copy of the offer that you received from upstream[1]. Any Linux ISO that you download will also contain this offer, so by passing it on unmodified you are not violating the GPL.
[1] This actually provides a fairly simple loophole if you're willing to wait three years: take some GPL code, modify it, and give it to a third party. They then sit on it for three years and then sell it as a binary-only product. They pass on your (now expired) offer, and no one has the right to demand the source code from you.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Interesting notions but you assume that the lawmakers actually care about common sense.
They don't. They care about keeping their palms greased.
WRONG metaphor to use with this story, now it will take a few strong drinks to get that mental image out of my head...
Most kiddie-porn statutes do not require ANY intent, just simple possession is enough to get you busted.
It's not about the money so much as deterring others. Seeing someone get slapped with a charge they have no way of paying off will probably scare a few people straight.
8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
Hmm... don't see any exceptions for "making an example" out of someone... I fact, I would contend, knowing the Founders' feeling about debtors prisons and such, that imposing outrageous fines for the purpose of deterrence is very much an unconstitutional, and thus illegal, act.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Not true. It's rare for child pornography statutes to have strict liability.
For example, New York State's is penal code article 263. Possession: "A person is guilty of possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child when, knowing the character and content thereof, he knowingly has in his possession or control, or knowingly accesses with intent to view, any obscene performance which includes sexual conduct by a child less than sixteen years of age."
The federal statue is what you're most likely to get prosecuted under if they can demonstrate that the material was transmitted over the Internet (and if they don't like you). This is a decent summary, but 18 USC 2252 is probably the most illustrative. Note that every statement in subsection (a) indicates "knowingly".
It is circumventable... Just like DRM. The difference is that that it does not interfere with the legal use cases of a normal user, while DRM does.
I work for a provider of digitally downloaded music, and we use watermarking.
Several years ago, we had an incident where a high-profile music score was released earlier than intended (a winner of a talent show of some sort IIRC), sold a handful of copies before realising the mistake, and then removing the track again. It popped up on piratebay shortly after, and thanks to watermarking, we were easily able to locate the exact individual who shared the track.
Turned out the marketing guys didn't wanna follow up on the case, apparently because they were afraid to lose reputation with the legit customers.
To this day, I still have this weird "What is power if you don't use it!" feeling when thinking of the case, and I'm regularly annoyed by uneducated masses who essentially doesn't believe such technology exists and can practically be applied.
Posting anonymously for probably obvious reasons.