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Copyright Trolls Rightscorp Are Teetering On The Verge Of Bankruptcy (arstechnica.com)
JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Rightscorp, the copyright trolls whose business model was convincing ISPs to freeze their customers' Internet access in response to unsubstantiated copyright accusations, and then ransom those connections back for $20 each, will be out of money by the end of this quarter. Despite a massive courtroom win against Cox Cable in 2015 (and a counterbalancing gigantic fine for its robocalls), the company couldn't win a technology cat-and-mouse game against its prey -- the wily file-sharers who switched to VPNs and other anonymizing technologies. For the moment, the company is teetering on the brink of financial collapse. It raised $500,000 on February 22, the company reported, but it needs another $1 million to stay afloat. It has only enough cash on hand to continue "into the second quarter of 2016," according to the company's latest financial report.
No, I don't think I have a violin small enough for this.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I'm sure part of that is trackers adding random ip's to the peer list.
Afaik they aren't verifying data is actually available.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
*downloads the Simpsons from KAT*
*Plays loops of Nelson saying "HA HA" to them via robocall.*
In the good old days when I was a lad working with IBM mainframes (ok they weren't good but they were old) there was this crazy idea that error messages were documented with reasons why they occur. In this brave new world this is too much trouble and you either have to spend hours to days figuring out what some cryptic phrase means or you can Google it and see if someone else has had the problem. I'm guessing you either get as much time as you need on your projects or else have been working on the same technology for a long time.
Because that's the only thing that makes sense with their underhanded practices. Anyone with half a clue would never put his money or personal affects behind something like that, because these scammers are basically setting themselves up for a huge lawsuit. What they do is fling poop and see what sticks and how far they can take it before they get slapped left and right. And surprisingly enough, so far there has been rather little slapping.
I fully expect this to be some kind of test balloon, with the rights holder themselves surprised it stayed afloat this long. The idea was to create a shell that goes about and violates any and all limitations of copyright law to see what can be done before someone cries bloody murder. Once the company gets countersued and there is a judge with enough sanity left to actually dock them the fine they deserve, the shell goes 'poof' and the next one emerges.
That's likely also why nobody ever bothered to drag them to court over their practices, knowing that it is futile, even if you win you'll be left with the expenses and nothing to compensate it. That shell has no money whatsoever. Never had, never will. Any money they actually make (aside of the 20 bucks pebbles) will instantly leave that husk.
Such constructs are very useful when you want to ignore laws, to say the least...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The thing is the patents and copyrights these companies hold don't go away when the company dies. Like Bilbo's ring these things just go to the next person that finds them irresistible and the cycle starts over. Even if some large company, say microsoft, scoops them up in the name of protecting themselves, eventually it becomes a cudgel again.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
In the US most ISDN service was terminated to an PRI T1. That hooked into a modem bank that would answer both ISDN and 56K calls. By that point the ISDN modems where smart enough to be able to use both 64K channels as a pair bond. It would utilize two modems at the NOC.
It was also pretty common for us to order channelized T1s for 56K applications. You could get one extra modem per T1, but we would lose the ability to get real time ANI data and ISDN.
Eventually we started having the NOC/POPs configured with a T3 and them demux it into a variety of T1s and fractional T3. For instance for a mid size POP we could have a single T3 handle both the incoming phones and the upstream data. I.e. We wanted to drop a crap ton of modems into the back room of a rural shopping mall because that was the most cost effective location based on LATA lines and what was considered the "local calling area".
A lot of the times people would claim MSN or AOL or whatever was the best service. In reality in most parts of the US all the main national services would terminate to the same place and run on the same equipment. We'd just route it differently based on the number you called.
...some lawyers say gifts of copyrights to the public domain aren't valid in the US...
Yes, lawyers certainly do have like to have fun with the words "yours" and "ours". Isn't it great how words mean whatever we want, whenever we want?