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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.
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!
Like with most direct to video releases, the quality is so bad, shouldnt they be paying the people that actually sat and watched it?
Oooo! Oooo! Me... I'll shoot a lobbyist! We should declare a season... find someone who'll stuff and mount them for our living rooms!!! Why yes, I bagged this fine specimen wandering the hall right around Speaker Boehner's office. He tried to scrabble down a stairway and boom! Funny thing is he's lobbying for the NRA!
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 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.
Oops... did I say "shot"? I meant "should have cat urine poured down their throats". Seriously, I've never seen another institution meant for the citizens to petition government be abused so much. All lobbying (even the anti-gun lobby) will be at risk eventually when enough people decide enough is enough. At the moment, they're distracted by *idol shows to give a damn, but just wait and see.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
While we're making up random stuff, you owe me a cookie for writing about EULAs in breach of my asserted writes over that business area.
...Or you could just stick with writing dystopian fiction.
Find me a case where one of these copyright demand letters was sent to binding arbitration. Go ahead, I'll wait.
+1 Disagree
Nah you first idea was better, you could offer tags good for one lobbyist each, help pay down the debt while making the world a better place, sounds like a win/win in my book.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Perfect - she's already done that! What's the next step for her now?
+1 Disagree
I believe it's "???" and then "Profit!"
May Peace Prevail On Earth
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
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.
I met one of those. People who work out how to tune an engine so it uses almost no fuel at idle but can't understand that engines are tuned to use as little fuel as possible when under load instead, so they think it's some huge conspiracy that every engineer is part of. They are still around despite fuel injection being the norm.
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.
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.
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.