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Hurt Locker Studio Begins Requesting Canadian ISP's Subscriber Info
New submitter Nerdolicious writes "Ars Technica reports that Voltage Pictures, the studio behind the infamous Hurt Locker debacle, has requested subscriber information for thousands of TekSavvy customers in relation to alleged copyright infringements. In their official blog, TekSavvy clarifies the situation and provides further reassurance that they will not release any private customer information without a court order. They have also posted the legal documents containing both the official notice and list of films that are the subjects of the alleged infringements. However, several questions remain to be answered: will Canadian courts be amicable to these tactics after changes to copyright law were made specifically to prevent the predatory legal entanglement of Canadian citizens? Will the studio actually attempt to pursue the situation beyond the proliferation of threatening extortion letters? How would the already-clogged courts react to what amounts to denial-of-service attack on the judicial system?"
I am not a movie pirate and I have never seen this movie, but this bullshit makes me not want to see it. Fuck the Hurt Locker.
I paid money to watch Hurt Locker at the movies. Two hours of my life I'll never get back.
with a letter stating that you are paying the requested amount in order to protect yourself from being sued but the Rights Holder as stated in the original notice. Then charge them with extortion.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
will Canadian courts be amicable to these tactics after changes to copyright law were made specifically to prevent the predatory legal entanglement of Canadian citizens? Will the studio actually attempt to pursue the situation beyond the proliferation of threatening extortion letters? How would the already-clogged courts react to what amounts to denial-of-service attack on the judicial system?"
The better question is: What incentive is there for the industry to stop? The United States has proved militarily, economically, and in many other ways that shock and awe are a powerful combination to ensure compliance. Not that they're the first -- the Romans did the same thing, as did many cultures before them as well. The fact is, the only thing they're losing is a tiny amount of money and they're getting huge amounts of press out of it.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that the laws and lawyers and letters and posturing isn't meant to actually have an impact? Statistically, it can't. If right now, today, everyone who was sharing files just for today was dragged into a court action, our justice system would be busy for the next ten years clearing the backlog for just today's infractions. By itself, there's no way that any law, legal action, or technical solution, can even scratch the surface. But what if the point is publicity? A shock and awe campaign that uses lawsuits instead of bombs. The more outrageous, the more press, and the more press, the more people become fearful. Have you noticed that these press releases, actions, and articles, occur on a fairly consistent tick-tock cycle of about three months? It has been going on for years.
This is a public relations campaign... and whenever you're asking how X will react to Y, you're playing right into it. X and Y don't matter. No, honestly, they don't: Statistically, you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than getting in trouble for file sharing. My service provider is one of those who promised to impliment the new "six strikes" policy, to much hoopla in the press. That was six months ago. Every month since then, I've downloaded an average of 960GB of pirated material, a lot of it on the "Top 100" list off The Pirate Bay. No letter. No e-mail. Not even a peep about the bandwidth being used. I'm supposed to be in that "top 1%" that they insist they're pursuing all possible legal actions against. No knocks on the door. No black helicopters. My life has continued just as it has before. And I've been doing this for over a decade. I'm not hiding behind proxies, or encrypting my traffic, or doing anything special really at all. It's all right there for anyone to look at.
Nobody has. Even with all the automation, all the legal power, all of the everything that you've heard about... there are still hundreds of millions of people just like me worldwide. Statistics are not in their favor here guys. So the question isn't how Canada will react... the question is: How will you? Because that's the goal of all of this -- it's changing your behavior through fear and doubt. It's an appeal to your emotions -- visions of going to jail and losing everything you ever owned and loved while they parade you out in front of the media. That's the big sell.
So... are you buying?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Considering the new law limits non-commercial infringement to $5,000 per person, what would be the point of pursuing non-commercial infringers? Lawyers fees just to prepare and set out the the threatening letters will likely eat up a fair chunk of that, a one day of examination will likely eat up the rest.
Basically, the Tories, whether they intended to or not, have made pursuit of non-commercial infringers a no-win scenario. The likelihood is that every Canadian who illegally downloaded the Hurt Locker will probably not be liable for more than a few hundred bucks in damages, and if any of them pay a hundred bucks for a lawyer to write a nasty retort to the Hurt Locker's lawyers nasty letter, it's likely the Hurt Locker's lawyers will just abandon it entirely.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That would be $5,069.75 US.
Oh and 1992 called, they want their joke back.
It's worth noting that Hurt Locker is not one of the films that Voltage Pictures is threatening to sue TekSavvy customers over. I'm not sure why nobody else has picked up on this.
When Canada was reforming it's copyright laws it got a specific commitment from the movie industry that they were not interested in mass john-doe lawsuits against consumers. The copyright law was reformed to reflect that. Maximum penalty for _all_ infringements is as much as $5K or as little as $100 and judges are instructed by the law to keep the penalty proportionate to the damages and to consider the hardship of the penalty against the defendant.
Now here we are, the movie studio have proven themselves to be bald-faced liars and are going after consumers in mass john-doe lawsuits.
My hope is that Canadians don't allow themselves to be bullied by these copyright trolls and each and every one of them takes the matter to court. Further, my hope, wish, and desire is that the judges that see these cases see the movie industry for the liars that they are and punish them by awarding the minimum $100 fines.
TekSavvy is one of Canada's smallest ISP's. Large telcos like Telus are required by the CRTC to allow little guys like TekSavvy access to their copper in order to foster some competition in the industry. The big guys dislike companies like TekSavvy because they sell unlimited data plans, and they've been fighting for some time to impose surcharges based on data useage.
When I hear that copyright enforcers are going after a little player like TekSavvy, I can't help but wonder if the larger ISP's are in collusion.
You're totally entitled to your opinion.
However, "It sucks" isn't a persuasive argument. Congratulations on the "waste of electricity" crack, you must be Really Smart, but that doesn't make your case either.
It's almost as if people don't even want to talk about the movie, they just want to use an opinion of it to signal their peer group inclusion or something. NAH, that can't be it.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Well, I did not enjoy Hurt Locker, much for the same reasons as that reviewer you were mentioning earlier, and that doesn't lead me to believe I would enjoy Zero Dark Thirty, but none of that (on anybody's part) is really relevant to the topic at hand (Voltage Pictures attempting mass lawsuits in Canada).
It's an interesting scenario. The Canadian government has indicated that it crafted our new copyright laws (which just entered into effect) specifically to discourage exactly what Voltage Pictures is attempting to do. There's also the question of if the alleged infringement would fall under the old law or the new law, since the law went into effect only a few days ago. Voltage Pictures' claims indicate they're seeking damages far in excess of what is allowable under the law, so that would seem to indicate that they're either intending to try to get damages under the old law, or that they're going to try to claim the alleged infringement was commercial rather than personal (different limits, above what Voltage Pictures is threatening, apply to commercial infringement under the new laws).
Nobody on any side really knows what's going to happen (because Canada's new copyright law is only days old), so this really is virgin territory in every respect.
It doesn't really piss us off; it's just more fodder for stuff like this.
I believe this is called the Tinkerbell Effect.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
First of all, it never questions the reasons of the war.
From the very beginning it pushes the audience towards sympathy for the American soldier, as in displaying apparently innocuous Iraqi men detonating IEDs and so on, giving a ready justification to any psychopathic behaviour of the soldiers because "the enemy is everywhere".
In a complete reversal of moral values than in say, horror movies, the audience is pushed to stand on the hunter side instead of the hunted, to worry about the danger that Baghdad's alleys pose for the soldiers instead of the danger that the soldiers pose for anyone else around them. Ultimately, the audience is led to identify itself with the soldier about to shoot someone out of stress induced paranoia, rather than with his victims.
While I can understand that the director wanted to point out the state of mental stress of the soldiers in a war zone, a whole movie exclusively about that comes out as unbelievably American-centric in the eyes of the whole conflict.
Ask yourself: do you remember the name of a single Iraqi character in the movie?
Sure. Canadians don't really pay much more than those in the US do (I would know, I just moved to the US and am now paying US income tax). However, for that little bit extra, Canadians get good health care, great public schools and substantially better social programs. For example, my wife can actually take 10 months off after having a baby and not have to worry about money.
Really? I paid 14% taxes last year and that was on $84k. For this year I think it will be in the low 20's.
Explain that one. Our taxes are higher than the states but you need to be making a buttload to get high percentages and at that point you probably need to hire an accountant to keep track of everything.
At least one U.S. judge thinks it actually is extortion: at http://fightcopyrighttrolls.com/2012/07/04/judge-wright-is-so-right-copyright-trolling-is-essentially-an-extortion-scheme/ Judge Otis D. Wright writes:
They've asked for $10,000 per person in punitive damages, twice what the current law allows, so they either to think the old rules apply, or they're just trying to scare people into settling out of court.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Why? It still gets Canadians all pissed off when you use it. Doesn't matter if its true or not, they still throw a little hissy fit ...
Heh, are you saying that you enjoy reminding people that a CDN dollar was once around 60 cents in US money, and now a CDN dollar is worth more than a US dollar? And you think that pisses off Canadians? Man, I *LOVE* being reminded that my savings have effectively doubled compared to the average American. I *LOVE* hearing that our little country is actually doing better than the sputtering mega-economy on our southern border. So if this is your idea of pissing off Canadians, keep it coming!