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IsoHunt Settles With MPAA, Will Shut Down And Pay Up to $110 Million
hypnosec writes "The MPAA and Gary Fung, owner of IsoHunt.com, have settled their case out of court, with the torrent indexing site closing as part of the deal. The judge presiding over the MPAA vs. IsoHunt.com case, Jacqueline Chooljian, canceled the hearing which was planned after she was informed that both the parties have settled outside court. 'The website isoHunt.com today agreed to halt all operations worldwide in connection with a settlement of the major movie studios' landmark copyright lawsuit against the site and its operator Gary Fung' reads the press release."
Only a few days after the MPAA was accosted by the judge for seeking damages several times the total worth of isoHunt: "But if you strip him of all his assets — and you’re suggesting that a much lesser number of copyright infringements would accomplish that, where is the deterrence by telling the world that you took someone’s resources away because of illegal conduct entirely or 50 times over?" Still, the settlement seems unfair: The MPAA has asked the court for $110 million, when the MPAA itself admitted that isoHunt only has $5 or $6 million. So much for the optimism for isoHunt's successor.
The more will slip through your fingers.
The best torrent search engine ever will never bow to this kind of bullying crap. Long live Google!
That certainly was a very confusing farewell message...
And that is why you go for fully decentralized services, kids.
Ezekiel 23:20
MPAA demanding money for imaginary damage done to imaginery property? Pay them with monopoly money.
110 million might never be paid out, but I'm sure the MPAA will use it as a PR move. They will spin it as "If you run a site, you will owe 100's of millions". I'm not sure I support either side in this. As cliche as it sounds two wrongs don't make a right. We have copyright laws and whether they are ridiculous or not if you break them there's a chance you will have to pay. I'd much rather see true discussion and debate on the topic than the constant one side or the other won the battle argument. If this continues this way it will be like the war on drugs. Each side wins battles and neither wins the war.
Sent from my TARDIS
TOR is a poor choice for media sharing as it's not P2P. Freenet was written as secure P2P from the ground up, and has had plenty of security review. While I don't trust anything to be safe from the NSA, the known attacks require far more resources than the *AA will ever use.
I doubt it's any faster than TOR, but being P2P if people actually started using it instead of open torrents, it would be.
The problem of course is "network effect". There's no content because no one uses it and vice versa. But it is the correct technical solution, with years in the field and years of security review.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Still, the settlement seems unfair: The MPAA has asked the court for $110 million, when the MPAA itself admitted that isoHunt only has $5 or $6 million.
The legal system does not hand out punishment on the basis of whether or not the defendant can pay for it; It hands it out on the basis of how much harm was done. If you run someone over and they're a cripple for the rest of their life, the Judge doesn't say "Well, you only got $20 and a cracker... so give me the $20 and we're even." You are fined and jailed on the basis of how much pain and suffering that person endured.
Unfortunately, the law says that every time you share an MP3, god kills $150,000 worth of kittens. Statutory damages don't allow for any discretion on the part of the judge. Thank Congress for that.
And the argument can also be made that proportional damages levied against very wealthy individuals or corporations is good practice, though it doesn't often happen. Fining people for dumping millions of gallons of toxic waste into the ocean the maximum $50,000 per infraction means they just video tape the whole thing, send in the tape and a check for $50,000 because it's cheaper than going to court, and much, much cheaper than disposing of the waste properly. But alas, that is not how the law is written.
The system is totally broken, but let's endeavor to be specific in our criticism of it... rather than simply saying "Oh that's unfair!" ... Fairness is relative. Justice shouldn't be.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
some technical fault in Tor
That technical fault is called "PRISM". When you have the "metadata" of all the packets on the internet, you can watch the packet leave your computer, bounce around all the tor routers, arrive at the "hidden" service and the response packet come back without needing to know what's in it. Have your guy sit there and hit reload on silk road enough times and all the other packets become background noise. Tor openly admits it has a timing attack problem, and that's exactly what the government has been doing. They don't need to know what's in your packet, they can go to the silk road website themselves and guess. Same with the kiddy porn sites.
From there, it's just a matter of sending some guy to canada to mail a bunch of fake IDs to the guy and letting canadian post know that they should open the box with the red sticker on it, and suddenly you have a real case against the guy and don't have to mention anything to anyone about how you really found him.
Freedom Hosting's downfall was running tormail. All the pedos that got swept up was just icing on the cake to distract everyone from the real target. Weeks later Lavabit goes down, then Silent Circle.
That might kind of work. Another method that's proven to work is called "Netflix", aka "Amazon Prime". You want them to spend a few million dollars making something cool for you to watch, you pony up ninety-nine cents. You get what you want, the costs are covered and everyone is happy.
Except for the little detail that the most popular stuff that gets torrented is point blank not available from those sources.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Do you think people who use an antenna are also free loading scumbags?
and then there is this:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
99 cents per episode for a tv series is outrages.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
ISOhunt had 5-6 million dollars - presumably from hosting ads along with links?
That makes the "we weren't hosting any infringing content ourselves" defense, which I've always been sympathetic toward, somewhat inconsequential.
The fact that the site (owners) profited to the tune of multiple millions of dollars by facilitating copyright infringement kind of rubs me the wrong way. Had they done it for not much more than hosting fees I'd be more aligned with them receiving a "shut down, now" penalty.
And before I'm called a corporate shill, I fight the mess that copyright laws have become by boycotting the big content producers. They haven't made one single cent from me in many years, nor have I pirated any of their content. I've learned that I just don't need what they're selling.
Unfortunately, the law says that every time you share an MP3, god kills $150,000 worth of kittens. Statutory damages don't allow for any discretion on the part of the judge. Thank Congress for that.
Not true. 17 USC 504(c):
Statutory Damages.— ... [T]he copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just...
(1)
(2) In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000. In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200....
Correct me if I'm wrong but settlements outside of court cannot be converted to wage garnishments, right?
Not true. But hopefully IsoHunt was a corporation, not an individual proprietorship or partnership. Part of the purpose of a corporation's "legal personhood" is that wrongdoing on the part of the corporation cannot be transferred to the people who worked there or owned it. Of course, a corporation won't stop individuals for being charged with crimes, but a lawsuit settlement that bankrupts a company should not then bankrupt the individuals behind that corporation assuming they set things up properly.
This corporate protection from individual liability works for the bad guys, it works for good guys, it works for everyone.
"95% of all Slashdot
I'd happily pay 99 cents for an unencumbered 720p or 1080p mkv file for a great many shows. Unfortunately (for them) I can't.
99 cents per episode for a tv series is outrages.
Especially if you consider that [monthly cable bill / ({# of channels * 24} / amount of hours show X is on per month)] is a helluva lot less than $0.99.
Assuming a $60/mo cable bill with 80 channels, the value to the subscriber for an hour-long show that runs once a week would be about 12.5 cents... presuming I didn't bork the math, which is quite probable.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Actually, Netflix and Amazon Prime don't really work that well, because they only have a limited selection. If the program you want to watch is on there, then great; Netflix is only $8/month for unlimited online viewing. But if the program you want isn't on there and requires you to get both a cable subcription and an HBO subscription, well, Torrenting is the only feasible and affordable alternative. And, MythTV doesn't work for shows like that, because of the cable+HBO deal, but also because last I heard, MythTV doesn't work for premium cable channels, so you have to spend even more money for some shitty cableco-provided DVR box that doesn't work right.
If the content companies just put all their stuff on Netflix and Amazon Prime, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all, and not many people would bother with torrenting.
They may work in the US but try in my country and you don't get to even see that they exist.
Ever notice that Cobra Commander sounds an awful lot like Star scream?
That just takes me to the home page. Perhaps because Netflix detects I'm in .nl, realizes that it's not part of their offer in .nl, and so just dumps me to the main page.
The other two work fine, but I think you took 'most popular' a bit too literal, and perhaps a bit too narrow.
Since Netflix doesn't seem to actually allow you to see their full library unless you log in (I can see a small selection - this alone is a good reason to give Netflix a thumbs down over torrents), perhaps we could give the 'Top 10 this week' from torrentfreak a try through http://www.flicksery.com/ ?
http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-movies-of-the-week-131014/
1-10. no.
Or, if you want to stay on the legal avenue, the top 10 of 2012 according to imdb, rather than just the #1 slot?
http://www.imdb.com/year/2012/
1. Avengers - yes
2. Pitch Perfect - no
3. The Hunger Games - yes
4. The Dark Knight Rises - no
5. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - no
6. Argo - no
7. Django Unchained - no
8. The Place Beyond the Pines - no
9. Spring Breakers - no
10. The Motel Life - no
2013, according to box office*, then?
( * because new releases are heavily skewed toward high scores on imdb, and via box office we get to the same #1 for 2013 so far, Iron Man 3 )
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_us&title_type=feature&year=2013,2013
1. Iron Man 3 - no? Weird - though after some googling, perhaps it's only available from Netflix in DVD form, rather than streaming - canistream.it seems to suggests so as well? Perhaps you could clarify that one.
2-10. - no
Don't get me wrong, Netflix is a wonderful service and people who just want to watch whatever movies or TV shows will find more material there than they can watch in a year. But it's not all going to be material they want to watch, the material they want to watch may not be on there, and overall it's just a poor comparison - gets even worse when you're in .nl ;)
a corporation won't stop individuals for being charged with crimes
Unless it's a really big corporation.
OK, that's a bunch of nonsense. Look, copyright infringement for media has always been a case of mismatched perceptions of value.
The producers are thinking the rights to watch that DVD at-will should be worth about $19.99, to the 'pirate' that same privilege is worth about $.99. We saw this with the music industry around 1999. If those 'scumbag' 'pirates' (calling downloading a movie/song without permission piracy or theft is absurd, and frames the entire debate around those loaded terms) were simply freeloaders, iTunes would not have succeeded the way it has. Netflix would have flopped, and Redbox would not exist. People want to pay for entertainment, the failure is on the content makers to judge their market.
Further, "piracy" usually leads to a superior product, less hassle, more freedom of use. Case in point, i love Office Space. I own the "special collector's edition" watching the DVD requires me sit through about 7 minutes of anti-piracy propaganda, FBI Warnings, previews etc. The DVD rip i can download for free in 20 seconds? none of that useless garbage. I'm all for supporting the makers of entertainment, but they need to bring something to the table in terms of value. They do not get to make an inferior product (compared to "piracy"), charge 20x what their customers are willing to pay, and then complain about 'pirates'. (or worse/worst use the legal system as a cudgel to try to prop up their severe lack of business acumen).
The worst logic though is assuming that if someone downloads something, that's automatically lost revenue. The wife and I were having awful movie night, and "Simon Sez" was the chosen movie (Dennis Rodman is a noted thespian). Does downloading this movie constitute any lost revenue for the studio? I'm not depriving them of selling it to someone else, I definitely wasn't going to buy it -- so they aren't losing any revenue, and bitorrent handled the distribution... show me the victim? (other than myself for sitting through it.)
Same here, I would also happily pay 99c to watch a movie etc. But I can't. I would also not mind waiting for DVD releases of my favourite series, but then I would have to import them since they are unlikely to end up on any store shelves here, which basically doubles the cost.
So, I pirate them.
I would also like to mention that in my country the internet is slow and expensive, so I download low res versions which sucks ass on a big screen.
Actually now that I think about it, streaming a movie from Netflix to here would be like watching a stop motion movie. So even if it was available outside the US it would not be practical.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.