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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.
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.
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.
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