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More Popcorn Time Users Sued
An anonymous reader writes: The torrent-based video streaming software Popcorn Time has been in the news lately as multiple entities have initiated legal action over its use. Now, 16 Oregon-based Comcast subscribers have been targeted for their torrenting of the movie Survivor. The attorney who filed the lawsuit (PDF) says his client, Survivor Productions Inc., doesn't plan to seek any more than the minimum $750 fine, and that their goal is to "deter infringement." The lawsuit against these Popcorn Time users was accompanied by 12 other lawsuits targeting individuals who acquired copies of the movie using more typical torrenting practices.
Hold the fucking phone. They're seeking damages that won't financially ruin entire families, and whose effects won't be felt generations down the line?
What the fuck?
Then they should leave Popcorn Time users alone. That app does more to deter infringement than anyone.
I paid a fee to a cable company which gives me the right to watch any movie they are currently playing.
It should not matter where I get it from.
I don't think it works that way...
The goal is to deter infringement
and avoid judicial scrutiny. The RIAA for example has long had an infringement website where you can "pay" your "settlement" should you receive one and dont wish to be burdened by your constitutional right to a trial by jury for what --unless all those DVD warnings are wrong-- is a federal felony.
the problem is if this becomes a federal trial, media companies and their attorneys have to do things like disclose evidence. depending on the nature, and how far down the rabbit hole defense wants to go, media companies understand they can eventually begin to risk the legality or constitutionality of the DMCA itself. They can call severe attention to the disparaging, clandestine, and overzealous nature of copyright itself and in turn through a simple federal case could open the door to the possibility of copyright reform. In some cases, like the well published instances where media companies file lawsuits totalling in the millions against child plaintiffs or single mothers, the damages can be knocked down to a fraction of what it costs them to prosecute something like this or worse, thrown out entirely.
Good people go to bed earlier.
should be fine as long as you didn't torrent it, because that would mean you giving slices of it to others as you obtained it
They're finding them the same way they find people on normal torrents - Popcorn Time is basically a torrent client with streaming video built in. They have one of those "piracy protection" firms sit on the torrent and gather IPs, then subpoena the ISPs to find out who had the offending IP address at the time they saw it in the swarm for the torrent. From there, all it takes is a few threatening letters and a legal team backed by the deep pockets of Big Media.
16 x $750 = $12K. You would think the lawyer fees would be at least that when it's all said and done. And like this is going to "deter infringement" for the masses...
Karma: Bad
Use a VPN, there's even one built in. Just need to sign up.
Trolling is a art,
so you are saying that popcorn time does not provide a vpn (or even instruct people that vpn is the key to safety; the right vpn, of course)?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
We're not taking questions from the audience
Why not?
i am no friend of the idea of intellectual property, but it doesn't help to be delusional about how law works
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
First of all if you're torrenting it then it's basically out there for the world to download from your machine - so you're at least enabling infringement. Second, your viewing of any particular media may be subject to other requirements such as submitting to periodic advertising. Shifting media would allow you to skirt around those secondary provisions. We can pretend these things aren't our problem but the final price they're offering factors in all of their rights, licenses, and third-party advertising dealings. They're obliged to honor their contracts and so are we.
Not that this is right, but it's law. The system is set up to throw you just enough peanuts that you won't get pissed off. I gave up on media a long time ago just because it's all crippled crapware these days. Even the adverts are interrupted with adverts. My PC is hobbled to near-uselessness with crapware installed by Lenovo so I just work on Mac.
Knowingly receiving infringing content is also considered copyright infringement in many jurisdictions.
If you want to try and make a case for not knowing that the content you were torrenting was infringing, well.... good luck to you.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Over 400,000 federal laws and regulations (even government agencies can't come up with a solid number). Then there are the state, county, and municipal laws. It's a common joke in law school that ever person over the age of 18 is guilty of some federal crime. This is why the NSA mass data gathering and archival is an issue, out of control legislators have created a joke of a legal system, representative of anything but a free society, wherein a database of everything on a person can probably produce something to threaten them with if they become interesting.
vi? Who's that?
look, if you want to act like wesley snipes and put your faith in some completely made up bullshit, have fun. but stop trying to sell insane here, nobody is buying it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Drinking out of the wrong water fountain used to be illegal, too. The law is essentially constructed to benefit some people at the expense of others.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Courts have been ruling that use of the term "piracy" is inadmissible obfuscation. Simply copying and assisting in copying data does not involve raping or pillaging anybody and is not theft.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
They installed software to stream movies not share them. There is a major difference in use, the software is sharing in the background without the seeming activity of the user and the user has no way of knowing whether the content, the specific copy they are watching is legal or not. This is being prosecuted in the US because no loser pay laws (so the defendants lose either way, either pay for their legal defence or pay the privately instituted fine with the power of corrupt government), in other countries with loser pays laws because lawyers wanting to make a name for themselves would take on the case with the aim of winning and making the claimants pay when they fail to prove their case against the actual individuals rather than an arbitrary IP address.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
My PC is hobbled to near-uselessness with crapware installed by Lenovo
We've recently purchased some Lenovo machines, and yes, they came with a metric assload of shitty software that nobody could possibly use or want, and that soaked up RAM and CPU like a drunk in a vineyard. But you do know you're allowed to uninstall all that shovel-ware, right? And if you don't know what to remove or how to uninstall them yourself, a useful tool is the PC Decrapifier, which is so simple anyone can run it.
The Decrapifier is not perfect, though, as the authors seem to be dodging some legal lines by not being particularly aggressive in what they recommend you remove. And it won't get everything. My sister asked me to help her as her machine had slowed to the point of unusability. At some point her machine had become infested by some particularly nasty McAfee "free" malware that required a ludicrous amount of effort to destroy. It took me far too long to discover I had to surf to their site to download a custom uninstall tool. I think I spent almost two hours downloading updates and scrubbing the malware from three machines simultaneously. But once all the crapware was gone, and they had current patches, they actually became some decent machines. (Then I had to go home and take a shower, because that McAfee software made me feel filthy.)
I consider that wasted time as an expense that jacked up the cost of owning the machines by a couple hundred dollars. It would not be worth the investment on a cheap Lenovo, which I would never recommend unless you have the nothing but time to waste, but as I was getting a big SSD, fast CPU, hi res screen, and lots of RAM, I overlooked it. But I'm not forgetting it.
Lenovo, if you're reading this, know that I'm the senior buyer for all computer and electronic equipment purchased by my two extended families, and that $20 in kickbacks you got for installing the shitware on my machine will never recoup the costs of even one of the never-buy-Lenovo recommendations I've been handing out. Multiply that by the thousands of nerds who feel like I do, and that's millions of units you're not selling because of your own stupidity.
John
Or better yet, go to the library, check out a good book, and read it.
But you do know you're allowed to uninstall all that shovel-ware, right?
Lenovo bakes shit into their ROM chips so BIOS/UEFI reinfects Windows machines with their shit every time you boot.
There have been a slew of stories about it lately.
Even more interesting is the attorney who's pursuing this. Carl Crowell (based out of Salem, IIRC) is pretty damned prolific about this - enough that he has a rather slick operation (see article) that chews through a lot of these each month. I find it interesting that they're willing to settle for $750/ea (though IMHO that's still a bit too high), while most settlements average $5k-$7.5k or so.
Like most copyright suits, he almost always gets the money via settlement. It all still hinges on IP addresses, the ISP, and how well they keep records, though. I'm guessing that Popcorn Time likely blares your IP addy out nice and loud for the world to see by other torrenters, though one would wonder about sharing a movie in order to sue other sharers over the same movie...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?