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Federal Judge Dismisses Movie Piracy Complaint
cluedweasel writes "A Federal judge in Medford, OR has dismissed a piracy case lodged against 34 Oregonians. Judge Ann Aiken ruled that Voltage Pictures LLC unfairly lumped the defendants into what she called a 'reverse class action suit' to save on legal expenses and possibly to intimidate them into paying thousands of dollars for viewing a movie that could be bought or rented for less than $10."
The judge was not enthused that they offered to settle for $7500 while noting that potential penalties could be as much as $150,000.
It's about time the court system grow a backbone and say something to these wankers. What really needs to happen is a lawsuit filed for intimidation by the defendants.
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I come here for the love
It's about time judges start to see these campaigns as the mass extortion cases that they are. If this was being done by anyone else there would have been RICO charges filed long ago. These cases have nothing to do with preserving copyright and everything to do with extorting the public. A $7500 settlement instead of a $150,000 for a $10 movie, how on earth can this possibly be anything other than sheer extortion?
But seriously though. I'm happy to see judges starting to take a stand and putting the corps in their place. We need more judges like this and the judge that tried putting Prenda in its place!
The movie title says it all! Voltage was just looking for Maximum Conviction.
Can their settlement offers not be used as leverage to show that their actual damage claims are way out of line?
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
If judgments only made me pay for what I stole, there'd be no incentive NOT to steal! It would become a "catch me if you can, then I'll make good" game.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
"... the manner in which plaintiff is pursuing the Doe defendants has resulted in $123,850 savings in filing fees alone."
So... they only paid for a single instance of the lawsuit, then unfairly duplicated it, when they should have paid for each individual instance of the lawsuit?
That's lawsuit piracy! Think of all the lawyers who could have been employed had they filed individuals lawsuits.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
How is this different han what DA's do with the accused?
If I was convicted of watching a Steven Seagal movie, I'd ask for at least $10,000 in restitution!
Voltage Pictures (who are these guys?) are doing the same thing in Canada, according to this article at Torrent Freak. Makes a good read. Basically, in Canada, the ISP Tek Savvy is not standing up to Voltage, however they have delayed proceedings for a month to notify their users. Here's a question for you Slashdotters: if a person removes all evidence of downloaded movies from their computer and denies downloading anything or ever possessing any "pirated" material can they still be found guilty? I know that there may be a record someplace of the bits having transited the Net to a particular IP address, but is this enough for a conviction? If there "is no body", i.e. no "pirated" file as evidence, how can anything be proven? Same for broadcast material? If I "accidentally" capture some radio waves from a private network and watch a pay-for-view show, then the show is over, how can anything be proven that a show was "pirated"?
What if they did it "the slow way" and spent the extra $6K or so per defendant in filing fees and sent non-extortion-type letters simply saying "you are being sued for copyright infringement. Please appear at this court on this date or, if you wish to negotiate a settlement, contact us at our business office by __DEADLINE__."
Then "offer" a settlement in the tens of thousands of dollars range ($7.5K as "target profit," plus sunk costs + their pro-rated estimated costs for cases they think they might lose + their pro-rated estimated costs for cases where they think they might "win" but will recover less than $7.5K plus costs).
How would a judge handle that strategy? Would a single judge even notice?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It occurs to me that the movie industry could change its approach here. Why not work with streaming companies and send these people a letter with some choices. Pay for the movie at its real costs, purchase a streaming service, pay a fine, or prove you already have done so. If the government worked with them to make a resonable but annoying fine linked to their taxes so they have to otherwise pay it, the vast majority of people would buy the film or the service. Why not, you get out of trouble but the fine is sane so you feel you have some choice. The industry gets its money, a small amount of which goes to pay the government's costs. The government is happy as fine based systems are vastly cheaper if not profitable for them. Everybody wins.
A person who represents himself has a fool for a client.
- paraphrase of a well known quote whose origins I've forgotten
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
we also don't put a kid in jail for 30 years for stealing ... a piece of candy.
No, you give them 5 years for stealing a loaf of bread.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Done right, an "Alford Plea" and "no contest" please would amount to "I'll do the crime, but I won't carry any public record, and the charges will be completely dismissed the day my prison/parole/probation is ended and all fines are paid."
Now, I would go along with a recommendation that for any crime with a legal record that won't go away after a year or two (i.e. anything worse than a traffic ticket, jaywalking, stealing a piece of candy, etc.), an Alfred Plea or a straight-up guilty plea be accepted only after the prosecution has proven their case to a judge by preponderance of the evidence, and that all such pleas include automatic leave to re-open the case if new evidence appears AND a judge rules that the new evidence, plus the old evidence, would result in a rejection of the guilty plea because the total evidence no longer tilts towards guilt.
For traffic tickets, I have no problem with people just pleading no contest and paying the fine. In jurisdictions where the police get ticket-happy the media usually does their job and shines a light on the problem, eventually.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Happened to me...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If people really wanted to stop this, all they would have to do is get congress to repeal the No Electronic Theft Act.
I'd say you haven't made your offer any more appealing than an offer to fuck a dumpster, which are a lot more common in my neighbourhood than you are.
cluedweasel says in the parent post:
"The judge was not enthused that they offered to settle for $7500 while noting that potential penalties could be as much as $150,000."
While technically accurate, it's extremely misleading. That makes it sound like the judge got angry that they were letting people off the hook for "only" $7500 when they could have asked for more. In fact, the judge's point was that a movie that could be legally purchased on Amazon as a disc ($9) or a rental ($3,.99) should not have a settlement offer of $7500. The $150,000 issue wasn't made by the judge and is in fact essentially irrelevant to the ruling. Once again the person who posts something interesting on Slashdot icnorrectly seizes on a relatively minor point as being the key issue of the post.
In some US states, moving-violation traffic tickets are the lowest level of criminal offenses. In those states most job applications say "except minor traffic violations" when they ask about criminal history.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
or don't follow procedures, and the opposition will use that to vacate your defence and you lose.
Not to mention your boss won't let you take your time off to go to court, and you'll have to do all your own investigation into the law and procedures (and the problems with the prosecution's case) on your own time, most of the information being unavailable out of work hours, so even more time off work. And now your boss is looking at your "right to work" statutes...
So 750x the cost of a case times the number of extra people on the docket, FOR EACH PERSON on the docket.
Remember: when they sue one person for "making available 100,000 times", they will ALSO include the 99,999 others who did the same P2P seeding, if they catch them.
5 grand per case, 10 people on the docket instead of 10 dockets, that makes it 450 grand in damages.
Or, for a source that doesn't blank the whole screen with a meta refresh and demand you enable javascript before it will let you read the article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/us-judge-in-ore-dismisses-movie-pirating-lawsuit-calling-it-unfair-reverse-class-action/2013/05/14/74ca6946-bcde-11e2-b537-ab47f0325f7c_story.html
It should be a fine, like $100, that can be charged to the owner of the IP, a lot like automated speeding tickets. Enough to be a deterrent, but not enough to ruin anyone's life. Like speeding, we know that it is technically wrong, but sometimes we want to do it anyway and run the risk of getting caught. And like speeding, piracy will never be eliminated.
The other thing it would do is eliminate these type of shakedowns. Because there is the risk that one day it is a not so sensible judge, and people's lives are ruined because one time they downloaded a Steven Seagal movie or Paul Blart Mall Cop.
IAAL (but IANYL). I represented several people in this case. We put up a strong defense, and I'm disappointed that Judge Aiken simply dismissed everyone except Doe #1. Voltage should not have been in court in the first place, and they should have been held to account for their false statements. To the extent that this makes Oregon a bad place for trolls to run their scam, it's a tolerable result, but Voltage still skips out with tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars. (They're running the same scam in Washington now, btw. Donate to the EFF or provide tech help to your local defense lawyers. It's the only way to shut this shit down.)
Oregon - where the government actually does what's right. Other than letting the feds spy on hippies who did nothing wrong.
The 16,666 times increase is to deter other filthy criminals... Seems reasonable.
i take it then the judge was not in Medford?
What say you? What say you? What say you?
Chris Dodd is that you?
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
Local area RedBox offers rentals for a buck and a quarter (U.S. Currency), all 11 could have chipped in a few nickles and dimes, rented it once, watched it together.
I'm sure RedBox doesn't pay full retail cost for the dvds and blu-rays.
The plaintiff might have seen 20 cents of that buck and a quarter.
So 20 cents vs 150,000 dollars... nuff said
The issue I have is the discrepancy in amounts. $7500 is targeted to make it just cheaper than dealing with a lawyer. The $150k is statutory damages designed to deal with commercial infringement.
To quote Wikipedia:
It seems to me that suits on torrent-distributed "pirate copies" need to make a distinction between seeders and others in the network.
A torrent is a tree distribution. When it's working as intended:
- The person who seeded the torrent committed a deliberate action that made the work available to everybody in the network who eventually made a copy.
- The others in the network, on the average, only hosted the down load of one copy. For every person (including the seeder) who hosts the download of one copy, there is one person who didn't host any actual downloads at all, for every person who hosted two downloads there are two who didn't host any, and so on. Sure the early players host a few more downloads - but the late players download none and the average is still one per participant. (That's what makes torrents useful despite the slow upload speeds of most home internet connections.)
Granted it's hard to tell how many downloads any given network participant actually hosted. But if he had not chosen to join the network and download a copy for himself (with software that also made downloads available), the remaining participants would have still gotten their copies. The number of infringing copies made would be reduced by only one. (On the other hand, if a seeder had not seeded, there would be no infringing copies.)
So it seems to me that, by the internal logic of the "statutory damages" law, it could certainly be argued that the seeder enabled some unknown large number of copies, and thus appropriate to apply the high-end damages on the seede. But to apply that to the other participants in the tree - who averaged one copy (effectively: their own) apiece - would be coming to the well repeatedly. The right penalty for the other participants would be the statutory minimum - or even less, because you can show that, with an average enabling of one copy, they don't fit the "unknowable but large number" model that the "statutory damages" legislation contemplates.
Of course there's also the issue of the torrent NOT working as intended: It's possible to configure a client in a "leach" mode, where it only downloads, and this means non-leaching participants host an extra download for each "leach", who doesn't host his "average of one".
But the default configuration is non-leach. How many participants change that (or are otherwise unable to host)? If it's half, the average for the remainder is still only two hosted downloads. If it's 75% they're hosting four. With a statutory minimum penalty of $750 and a $10/copy work you'd have to have 87% leaches to cross break-even. (Aren't there studies of the leach ratio? This is a civil trial under a "preponderance" standard so IMHO such studies should be admissible.) Meanwhile, for every two non-leaches there'd be 13 who could truthfully claim "I didn't host ANY downloads. I shouldn't even be in court."
IANAL. But I'd love to see how a judge would handle a claim that seeders might be due the maximum penalty but every other participant either the minimum or perhaps three times the retail price.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
when we people learn that hollywood movie are not very good and not at all worth the trouble of watching them? Freely available content is getting better and better and doesnt come with all the legal ramifications of having to watch it in the cold manner someone else forces you to do it and under threat of legal lawsuits at bankrupting expense. The answer to hollywood is to actively ignore hollywood. Take a moral stand for yourself and your children. Stop watching movies at the theatre and do not allow yourself to be enticed by the advertising by stealing it. You want to watch movies at home, on your own schedule and for free. Well dont look to hollywood. They are simply too far behind to match the manner in which we all consume content. And they make you a criminal for behaving in a purely natural, modern and comfortable way. If we all just ignored them, maybe we will get lucky and they will go away.. or maybe they will fix their issue with limiting our media consumption. Downloading "real" movies is not a crime. Downloading hollywood movies is stupid and immoral because it plays into the myth that doing so is a crime. Take a stand and stop paying for the crap they put in the theatres. We all know that the best part of a hollywood movie is the tv commercial you can access online for free. Watch that alone and be satisfied, because we all know the movie wont be half of what they show you in the ads.