Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.