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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.
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?
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.
I am going to refrain from comment.
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.
Perfect - she's already done that! What's the next step for her now?
+1 Disagree
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.
The mouth breathers are going after IP addresses to sue from an ISP with dynamic IP hosting. What you do has nothing to do anymore with someone who wants to sue you for deeds done on an IP address that may or may not have anything to do with you on the date of the infraction. The bottom line is that they are not interested in justice, this is rape pure and simple.
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.
I believe it's "???" and then "Profit!"
May Peace Prevail On Earth
So you are saying that IP addresses are *not* globally unique, and 4.2.2.2 is an unknown address that we can neither determine who owns it, nor where the responding systems exist. Got it. Thanks for your brilliant technical insight.
Learn to love Alaska
or example a car license plate is not a unique ID of the driver but apparently you still have to pay a ticket for running a red light with a red light camera
At least in my country/state while the registered owner of the vehicle is issued the infringement notice they can then trivially reply identifying the individual that was driving the car: i.e. hubby, little Johnny, the local mechanic etc. The fine/penalty demerit points are then applied to the driver (with some scrutiny for obvious abuses). There is always recourse to a Magistrates Court. In some cases the camera picks up the face of the driver and this is used in court.
Granny has no hope of identifying the actual user(s) of that IP address at the specified time to summarily dismiss this.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
some guy on my network 127.0.0.1 is sharing a bunch of really dorky stuff
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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!!!
So you are saying that the IP *DOES* uniquely identify "something" even if not a person, thus proving the original AC to be an idiot, which was my point.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
Guy on 127.0.0.1? That guy has the best taste in porn, music, and movies. Problem is, it's all a bunch of stuff I already have.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Uhhh...not really. I mean didn't you ever ask how Uwe boll kept making movies? He used a German law that gave a bunch of tax breaks to support German cinema and so he got people to invest as a tax shelter. they all KNEW it was gonna be crap that didn't make money, that didn't matter, what mattered was this law made making shitty films a great tax dodge. I heard they changed the law which is probably why we haven't seen any Uwe Boll stinkbombs in a while.
From the guy selling fake leather jackets to get The Room made, to Franchise pictures, which used star's egos (and a LOT of fraud from what I've read) to get shit like Battlefield Earth made, its really not that hard to get up enough dough to make a movie, especially if you are using a D-List hasbeen actor and shooting in some place like Romania where you can hire an entire film crew for less than the cost of catering in Canada which is what it sounds like they did with this flick.
So I seriously doubt it would take much to make this into a viable business model, plenty of actors you've heard of that have careers on the skids (Jeffery Jones and Nick Nolte come to mind) that with a little bullshit and some creative accounting you could get a direct to DVD movie made without costing you anything out of pocket. Hell go to one of the smaller countries and tell them you want to make a movie about one of their historical figures and they'd probably pay you to make it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You in fact lied. A registration plate and a vehicle matching the details on the registration plate are required and the owner can contest the penalty if they can provide evidence of the vehicle being elsewhere at the time. In the case of the IP address, an agent acting for the copyright holders, who gets paid per claim, makes a claim of infringement against an IP address at a particular time. This in turn is sent to an ISP who then sends their internal details of the accounting relatively matching to the use of the IP address at the time with no guarantee of accuracy ie should it be incorrect they do not indemnify the person named for all losses and psychological harm. Now that pretty much worthless circumstantial evidence for a "SEVEN THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR PENALTY". Which in a criminal court would require substantive evidence.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
AC actually has a point (crazy times we're livin in)
The company knows that someone downloaded their movie. And so someone has to pay the piper. The company doesn't care if they're playing Russian Roulette and just accusing people at random. They're putting the onus on every random old lady to prove that they didn't download this tripe.
Guilty until proven innocent.
This signature is false.
So you are saying that the IP *DOES* uniquely identify "something" even if not a person, thus proving the original AC to be an idiot, which was my point.
The IP identifies a communication end-point on the ISP's network, but unless the ISP has allocated that as a static IP address, the allocation is done on a DNCP basis and is time-sensitive.
If you want to put this in terms of physical locations, that DHCP address is like saying that a bomb was mailed from a particular hotel room, and the hotel has given the authorities a list of the people who booked that room during the period in which the bomb might have been posted. The authorities then go and charge all of those people with a terrorist offence, rather than finding out which of them actually did it.
A copyright infringement shakedown to all of those individuals takes much less effort and will probably get better results than actually going through the process of determining which specific individual was responsible for the offence. In fact, I would not be surprised if there are a few trolls out there with teams cruising neighbourhoods for open wifi hotspots, who stop for an hour to leech that wifi connection, so that the troll can generate addittional "infringers" - they can probably find 8-10 open wifi hotspots per team member per day, and at the low low price of $7500 per infringement to make the problem go away, $60-75k per person per day is quite a good profit, even with lawyers fees. Not that I am saying Voltage Pictures are pulling that one... but I am not the world's most paranoid conspiracy theorist so I am fairly sure that someone has come up with that as a business model.
The IP identifies a communication end-point on the ISP's network, but unless the ISP has allocated that as a static IP address, the allocation is done on a DNCP basis and is time-sensitive.
When subpoenas are issued for a DNCP address, they specify they want the "owner" at that point in time. If the ISP lies to the FBI, that's hardly the FBI's fault, is it? Which is all a distraction from my statements, that the AC is an idiot. An IP address does identify "something" even if we don't agree on what that something is.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
He said:
"An IP address does NOT constitute unique identification."
He's right. Although a public internet facing IP address will normally uniquely identify some attached device you can't preclude the fact that some network along the way will be misconfigured to route an IP to the wrong place.
Consider the scenario where this person's ISP's DHCP server has assigned her a new IP and the logs updated as such, but a faulty or misconfigured router has cached assignment of her IP to the destination of the previous owner for some period such that any attempts to communicate with the new owner instead remain routed to the previous owner.
In this case who does the IP identify? the person it's actually assigned to or the person it's routed to?
What if some network along the way outright has a system with a duplicate IP setup, perhaps even internally due to bad network design/setup? What if the ISPs DHCP provider is just faulty and assigns a duplicate?
There are still many things that can go wrong along the way such that an IP cannot be guaranteed to correctly identify the owner of a net facing device at a certain point in time.
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.
It doesn't matter, since the strategy is to sue regardless of whether anyone downloaded it or not.
"An IP address does NOT constitute unique identification."
He's right. Although a public internet facing IP address will normally uniquely identify some attached device you can't preclude the fact that some network along the way will be misconfigured to route an IP to the wrong place.
He doesn't identify what is "NOT uniquely identified". As such, I pointed out that it uniquely identifies *something*, much like a license plate will uniquely identify a car it was issued to. That doesn't "prove" the car wasn't stolen, or the plates stolen off it, or that it was being driven by someone else. But it does "prove" something.
In this case who does the IP identify?
Why must it be a "who?" In some places, the owner of the Internet service is liable for the use of it, in which case it does uniquely identify the responsible party, even if that responsible party did not do the act in question.
What if some network along the way outright has a system with a duplicate IP setup, perhaps even internally due to bad network design/setup? What if the ISPs DHCP provider is just faulty and assigns a duplicate?
In practice, neither service will work, and the "crime" would not have taken place. You might as well have said "What happens if aliens come down from space and alter the ISP's logs?"
Learn to love Alaska
"Why must it be a "who?" In some places, the owner of the Internet service is liable for the use of it, in which case it does uniquely identify the responsible party, even if that responsible party did not do the act in question."
You've completely and utterly dodged the question here, I'll assume that's because you misunderstood or misread the situation, rather than simply because you don't want to admit to being wrong and will explain it again. If an IP is assigned to one system by a DHCP server, let's call it system A and the logs show it as being assigned as such, but in practice it's being routed to another system which we'll call system B, then which one does it "uniquely" identify? The DHCP assignment logs say it identifies A, but the router is passing data to and from B, which is correct? This isn't unique identification as it's subjective as to which source you check as to what it identifies.
"In practice, neither service will work, and the "crime" would not have taken place. You might as well have said "What happens if aliens come down from space and alter the ISP's logs?""
This is completely false, if you think either of these scenarios would stop both systems working then you clearly have very little networking experience. Things like IP conflicts do not tend to cause both systems to fail, only one, and the outcome of that is mostly determined by the ARP records stored on switches and routers on the network, something that's often not recoverable after the fact.
You've completely and utterly dodged the question here, I'll assume that's because you misunderstood or misread the situation, rather than simply because you don't want to admit to being wrong and will explain it again. If an IP is assigned to one system by a DHCP server, let's call it system A and the logs show it as being assigned as such, but in practice it's being routed to another system which we'll call system B, then which one does it "uniquely" identify? The DHCP assignment logs say it identifies A, but the router is passing data to and from B, which is correct? This isn't unique identification as it's subjective as to which source you check as to what it identifies.
I've not missed anything. I know more about DHCP than you. Yes, I realize that I'm saying that on a tech site. The IP identifies the object with that IP assigned to it. You are apparently equating my lack of opinionated rambling about that as lack of knowledge about it. Those are not related.
This is completely false, if you think either of these scenarios would stop both systems working then you clearly have very little networking experience. Things like IP conflicts do not tend to cause both systems to fail, only one, and the outcome of that is mostly determined by the ARP records stored on switches and routers on the network, something that's often not recoverable after the fact.
Usually the ARP tables of multiple routers are not in sync. One will see one from one location, and the other from the other. Thus, you can get loops, network crashes, or neither working.
Yes, when the extent of your experience is one "server" (a 10 year old Compaq desktop running Linux) and 5 workstations plugged into a single hub, yes, you are right. One day, when you grow up, maybe you'll work on more complex networks and learn what really happens.
Learn to love Alaska
"I've not missed anything. I know more about DHCP than you."
Yet you simultaneously keep proving you know very little by making incorrect statements, or are you saying you're simply lying because you do in fact refuse to accept you were wrong? I mean which is it? You either don't know what you're on about or you can't admit you're wrong, you can't have it both ways- you can't say things that are wrong and then pretend you're still right, it has to be one or the other.
"The IP identifies the object with that IP assigned to it."
I'm glad you've given an answer, so you're saying DHCP logs have ultimate authority, and the actual state of the network beyond that is of no relevance, interesting to say the least, hopefully you'll never have any influence on law enforcement resulting in innocent people getting jailed.
"Usually the ARP tables of multiple routers are not in sync. One will see one from one location, and the other from the other. Thus, you can get loops, network crashes, or neither working.
Yes, when the extent of your experience is one "server" (a 10 year old Compaq desktop running Linux) and 5 workstations plugged into a single hub, yes, you are right. One day, when you grow up, maybe you'll work on more complex networks and learn what really happens."
This is awesome, on one hand you're accusing me of having only worked with toy equipment, and on the other you're simultaneously showing a complete lack of understanding of the way ARP caching works, describing scenarios that would only arise with toy equipment given the mechanisms that carrier grade (and to be honest, even down to much modern consumer) equipment has to deal with such situations, showing what is quite possible a complete lack of understanding of internet related network topology, and showing a clear lack of understanding of faults that can arise within networks to cause scenarios previously described. Irony at it's finest.
For what it's worth I'm not saying that in most normal circumstances an IP wouldn't be uniquely assigned and wouldn't uniquely identify, but to pretend that's always guaranteed to be the case is completely wrong for the aforementioned reason there are many circumstances under which that will not remain the case.
Still it's obvious you're not going to admit that your pedanticism was misplaced and that there are indeed circumstances where an IP will not be a genuinely unique identifier, and that's okay, if you're happy to be wrong without admitting it, even if you don't realise it then that's your choice I guess, so have fun with that.
If the write fails, I need the program to go belly up. I see no issue here...
+1 Disagree