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Federal Court Pulls Plug On Porn Copyright Shakedown
netbuzz writes: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling it a 'crushing blow for copyright trolls.' A federal appeals court today has for the first time ruled against what critics call a shakedown scheme aimed at pornography downloaders and practiced by the likes of AF Holdings, an arm of notorious copyright troll Prenda Law. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit called the lawsuit 'a quintessential example of Prenda Law's modus operandi' in reversing a lower court ruling that would have forced a half-dozen ISPs to identify account holders associated with 1,058 IP addresses."
All other related issues are just symptoms.
Nobody -- nobody -- wants it to be easy to identify and publicly excoriate those whom have downloaded pornography.
Can this be used as precedent to dismiss all the pending RIAA and MPAA lawsuits? What about reversing past suits whose victims are already in the body count?
I was just torrenting Game of Bones: Winter is Cumming for the articles........?
Could anything more blatantly sexual be inserted in the headline?
Most slashdot commenters have never had anyone steal their intellectual property and give it away to others thereby destroying considerable portion of the value.
I have. Yes, I sell porn -- legal niche / specialty content. A small producer where every dollar counts who has no money neither for lawyers nor the more suitable hitman. A user named Larry Lackey signed up with a fake / stolen credit card to my site. Either he himself or someone he traded to then posted the most popular, best selling, video I ever made on a file sharing site where others propagated this to other filesharing sites. DMCA takedown notices only work if the file sharing site is in the US or feeling responsible. Either way it is a game of whack-a-mole -- and if I ever catch Larry Lackey, I will whack *him*. Not only did he steal my video, *I* had to pay for his evil deed with a chargeback penalty (I don't control fraud scrubbing, that's what I thought I was supposed to get by paying merchant processing fees)
You want free stuff? Go for all the stuff the amateurs give away because they want to , the teasers and samples from producers that give it away to show you their wares. Don't steal. Trading passwords and content is stealing as much as shoplifting in the physical world. When you steal content, you are taking money from people / businesses beyond just the producer such as web hosts and ISPs not to mention the trickle-down to all those companies like camera manufacturers and lighting equipment and of course computer hardware and software vendors.
Yes, it is a bunch of stupid lawyers at Prenda who should pay for some extra technical analysis of their hoard of IP addresses so they can figure out which IP address belongs to which ISP. It's not exactly hidden but they're just the lawyer version of script kiddies using tools that they know nothing about.
The Larry Lackeys and other pirates of the digital age should do hard time not face copyright infringement penalty. They DO act in concert, they are part of loosely-organized conspiracies which use various IRC channels and web forums to coordinate their thefts and trade the property they have stolen. The web forums that profit from these trades should be charged as at least accessories if not co-conspirators. Of course, throwing people in jail doesn't get money for the plaintiff's bar.
The courts have already ruled the same thing against the RIAA and MPAA in other cases.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
This isn't RIAA/MPAA. It's the Prendateers.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I can haz pr0n?
The ruling is the same: Copyright holders cannot file lawsuits en masse like this. They have to file individual suits to go after individuals.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
...is that P0rn, in the U. S. of A. is not copyright-able!
What the crap is this posting saying?? Without knowing the full back-story, it is completely incomprehensible.
Idiot. A copyright troll is a company that uses copyright law in ridiculous ways to try to make money off of lawsuits, sue people en masse so people don't have a chance to defend themselves, generally abuses copyright law in ways that it wasn't intended to be used, or some combination of those.
Conversely, if a party doesn't actually create an artistic work, then it doesn't have any copyright to assert.
People sign away their copyrights to scumbag companies all the time.
The EFF once again demonstrates its ineptitude in understanding the basics of intellectual property law.
"intellectual property" is a propaganda term designed to confuse people by lumping together completely different concepts like copyright, patents, and trademarks.
...there might be a judge who knows how to torrent.
They used to send twenty to thirty emails to support a month. They would call and tell me I was required to deliver them to our customers. I told them fine as long as they were willing to pay fifty dollars a truck roll we would hand deliver their emails to our customers. They never called back.
This would be made complicated by staff lawyers - many larger companies have staffs of lawyers in house.
I don't read AC A human right
In general governments and "well-thinking" pressure groups don't like porn. It seems to me that a perfect and easy way to give that industry a heavy blow is to rule that porn cannot be copyrighted. So why is this not done?
copyright is, by definition, narrow. If no one actually copied the artistic work attached to the copyright, then there's no infringement.
It might not be as narrow as one might naively think, especially when the copyright-owning plaintiff claims nonliteral similarity.
After reading the ruling (amazing right?), why can't the court just immediately recommend disbarment of the lawyers that brought the case? From the ruling it certainly appears that there has been repeated abuse of the system and likely real harm done. Instead it appears that this is just a "nope, you can't do that". I really don't see the significant ramifications, especially since it would appear the costs of this case were fairly low for the plaintiffs (based in part on the mention of $15 million in profit). Any lawyers or judges out there that can explain how this is a true "win" against trolls?
of poiticians that were in possesion of some porn or maybe just one powerfull one?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Instead of loser pays or, worse, having the government decide on damage caps, I would eliminate the special lawyer-enriching set of privileges the civil legal system enjoys by making it operate by the same stringent rules as criminal procedure. I would put civil plaintiffs in the same legal position as criminal prosecutors: they would have to win cases on a unanimous jury vote, rather than a majority, and using a 'beyond a reasonable doubt' evidence standard, rather than 'preponderance of evidence'. The junk forms of evidence allowable in civil cases, such as hearsay, would also get chucked in favor of criminal-quality standards. Doing this would cause huge wads of junk torts to simply never get filed.
The problem is 2 fold. 1) the law is made to be as complex as possible so the lawyers can talk about small points of the issues.
2) Voir Dire - Jury Selection - is designed to get the stupidest dozen people in the county onto the jury. If you know anything about the issues involved, you are out.
If you have any kind technical knowledge or skill at understanding complex issues, you are out. The lawyers want it to be about who has the best law team.
Jury select should be only a few questions - Do you know these people personally?, Do you have a direct financial interest in the outcome of this case?
Maybe a couple others, then the first dozen that pass is your jury. How uninformed did someone have to be to get on the O.J. jury?
-- Loser pays, actually helps the small guy. If you are poor and lose, you go bankrupt and walk away. If you spend a huge amount to sue a rich guy, your bill could be for more than the damages.
What of those claiming copyright on incredibly short pieces that could turn up again without any copying? I'd count them as trolls.
A cynic might argue that the key difference in this case was that, for a change, the ISP's, and not merely defendants, were challenging the subpoenas; but of course we all know that justice is 'blind'.
:)
An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?
A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.
And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher.
Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Can this be used as precedent to dismiss all the pending RIAA and MPAA lawsuits? What about reversing past suits whose victims are already in the body count?
Don't I wish.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful