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New Revenue Model For Low Budget Films: Lawsuits
conspirator23 writes "A 64-year-old retired English teacher is being sued by a copyright troll for illegal BitTorrent downloading of a motion picture. Perhaps it's not all that shocking in the current era. That is, until we learn that rather than protecting something like Game of Thrones, the plaintiff is accusing Emily Orlando of Estacada, Oregon of downloading Maximum Conviction, a direct-to-video action flick released earlier this year starring Steven Segal and ex-WWE wrestler Steve Austin. Voltage Pictures is demanding $7500 from Emily and 370 other defendants. If all the defendants were to pay the demands, Voltage would gross over $2.75 million, minus legal fees. Who needs Kickstarter?"
As you might expect, Mrs. Orlando had never heard of BitTorrent before receiving the legal threat, and she lives in an area with dynamic IP assignments. This is the same company who has been going after file-sharers by the thousands since 2010.
EA is only the second worst company.
Rob Thomas could've just made a Veronica Mars movie, then sued everyone that pirated it. He's got to know something about detective-work, right?
:p
Isn't this what the makers of The Hurt Locker tried to do? It was largely a critical success, but not a financial one.
Anybody who would want to watch Maximum Conviction would be a prime candidate for copyright trolls.
Get a lawyer. Countersue for $100,000 for the complainant filing false affidavits with the court. When they try to toss out the claims, say you will settle for $10,000 plus legal fees, otherwise it's off to fucking court.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Convince a good lawyer to take this as a class action. Sue for court costs, his own legal fees and emotional damages. I can't imagine jury anywhere on the planet that wouldn't give the win to the little old lady. Use this as a model for said trolls and when it becomes clear that we are hoisting these parasites on their own petards, perhaps they'll go away!
Once and for all that says IP addresses cannot be used to identify users for anything without other corroborating evidence I.E. network traffic and such, which would require the cooperation of the ISP and, ostensibly, a warrant. Of course, lobbyists would need to be shot first.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
Isn't he known for Uner Sige 2?
Like with most direct to video releases, the quality is so bad, shouldnt they be paying the people that actually sat and watched it?
An IP address does NOT constitute unique identification.
Becoming a fake police officer wasn't enough, Steven? Lightning Bolt Energy Drink couldn't satiate your thirst? Ear-fucking naive concert goers with your rhythmic sitar didn't get you off? Now you have to bring lawsuits against innocent old grannies who have never even heard of you?
If this were a limbo contest you'd be taking home the god damn gold medal, because no one is gonna get lower than you.
Defendant: "Please Mr. Segal, we don't want any trouble..."
Segal: "Well you better save your receipt. Because you just bought some."
(neck snapping ensues)
Mad tv reference: http://youtu.be/mXx3_ykUpfY
I like how the article doesn't talk to the ISP but instead relies on the technical information from an old lady. That's always the best source of technical info, especially when they don't claim to be technical in the first place.
Sounds like TI in the 80s.
You need the money to make the film so that you can later sue.
I stopped reading TFA years ago. I got tired of one site after another chopping up (maybe) one page worth of writing and spreading it across ad-filled pages.
Please submit to binding arbitration instead, Citizen.
I was under the impression that binding arbitration requirements could apply only as part of a preexisting contractual relationship between the parties. As I understand it, the recipients of these scattershot demand letters are receiving them precisely because they have no contract with the copyright owner.
... This is more newsworthy than the saga that is Prenda Law (asshats) circling the drain after straining credibility too far?
The case appears to be similar, although only at face value and without all of the juicy misconduct. (Suing for copyright infringement on the basis of shaky identification in hopes of getting default judgement or easy settlement.) However, I recommend any potential defendants visit Popehat and read about the Prenda case, as there is a lot of good information floating around relating to that particular legal scam and also pointers at other websites that can offer even more information. Heck, you might even find a lawyer that's passionate and willing to take the case to the mat in pursuit of stopping this kind of speculative invoicing based on IP addresses. (Which, it should be noted, has been ruled on in US courts more than a few times do not sufficiently identify an individual.)
I am going to refrain from comment.
Surprised no one's thought of this. Don't do illegal downloading.
While the lawsuit is silly, there is zero evidence that this was their revenue plan.
Because no one is going to waste bandwidth downloading some direct-to-video turd on purpose, and it's hard to believe 371 downloaded it by accident while looking for something good.
Either that or they were even cleverer than the article suggests and distributed malware that would download the movie.
Life immitates a Mr. Show sketch? That's never a good sign, frankly.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You know, there are enough of us now. Perhaps its time we considered a little chlorine for the shallow end of the gene pool? Ask law graduates what they think of this case. If they say, this is a travesty against humanity, they get a pass. If instead they want to know how to get a job at this law firm, we send them to the Office of Soylent Green. Figure they'll do more good as a cheap protein source for the third world. There's a kind of poetic irony to eating those who would gladly eat their own. I wonder if it would have had the same impact of Charlton Heston had yelled "Its made of Lawyers!!!" Just a thought.
Go after the company. Once anything costs this people anything they are going to stop it. They are only going to spend money when they can get more then 100% returns on the money spent.
That is what they are doing with this lawsuits today. Both patents troll and copyright trolls alike.
Or we could write about your right to write about, "Asserted writes"...
downloaded it from Mega.co.nz instead of torrenting it.
Downloading by itself only allows for very small damages so companies don't bother suing. It's the act of uploading that brings large damages... because they can claim you were distributing their copyrighted shit. And BT by its very nature means everyone downloading is also uploading.
1. Make a documentary about trolls suing people for downloading copyrighted material
2. Release the copyrighted documentary on bittorrent
3. File lawsuits against people who download it
4. Profit!!!
If the ISP is wrongly identifying her MAC address as performing the download, then they are the ones who should get sued. I assume they are even using the MAC as ID.
Funny how a lot of people here are blaming somebody who's input into the movie and what happens with it ended some years ago.
I fail to see how the concept of justice comes anywhere near making someone to pay $7,500 for "stealing" something worth $20 or so.
The MAC may be the router and that may not help? any ways was it setup to defaults? did the ISP setup / give out the router? was it set to WEP??
If the router was hacked in some way and it's a ISP router with ISP setting then the ISP needs to stand up and take the blame.
I was actually one of the first unlucky few who received notice from both my ISP and Voltage Pictures informing me that I was being sued for downloading "The Hurt Locker" via bittorrent. They sent me multiple demands of increasing value in-order to have my name removed from the suit.
I talked to others who have also received similar demands, and we all took the same action, which was to ignore them. We decided that what they were doing was really nothing more than a scare-tactic, and later-on we read that the case as thrown out by a judge because the law-firm failed to submit a full listing of names by their given due-date. I have not heard anything from them since.
Apparently, this is a common practice for Voltage Pictures (and similar companies) when their business begins to fail financially.
As I see it this type of thing is extortion plain and simple. And extortion is illegal, as is making threats. They have not shown any concrete proof that anyone downloaded the movie. Most ISPs use dynamic IP these days. And even the best secured home wireless routers can be hacked. On top of that, routers can give false MAC adresses, so why can't a hacker?
Sending these sort of extortion letters should be agressivley prosecuted by the state AG under RICO statutes! If these slimeballs really think someone downloaded their movie, their ONLY remedy should be to individually take those 370 people to court...As in 370 court cases, filed in the local jurisdiction of the accused.
PAY UP!
They are sending settlement demands for $7500? Odds are, you could hire one of the thousands of hungry lawyers out there to defend the entire case on a fixed fee for $7500 (or maybe $7499).
The whole point of copyright trolling is to set the demand at just under what you think it will cost the defendant to hire a lawyer, say $3000, that way it is more cost-effective for them to just pay you.
Among thousands of victims, there have to be more than one like Mrs. Orlando. If each of them get awarded the costs of their attorneys, that company is done for. Wipe the whole stinking industry off the map already.
EA won't stand for this. Expect the new iteration of Madden to be online 24/7 now. They must strive to be the worst!
IP doesn't identify a person, which I think is true, it does identify a connection
Except that those an eminently spoofable. Depending on your type of ISP (xDSL, cable, etc), they may not be able to truly tag a connection down to a particular customer's connection, but only to the ISP's node which hosts many customers' connections.
For your average consumer, not so easily, but MAC's are *NOT* a hard-coded unique identifier in all cases. In Unix-like OS's this is pretty easy to do, and on Windows there exist apps like "MAC Makeup"
When you start dealing with routers, it becomes even easier as almost all of them have a facility to fake the MAC of another machine. Normally this is done to make it easier for a user to switch routers etc when they have a MAC-bound DHCP address.
Many ISP's *are* using smart modem/router combo's these days, they're still fairly vulnerable in this regard.
Who watches Steven Segal movies? Unless it's to watch him run. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is funnier than seeing Steven Segal run.