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How Seven Movie Studios Forced A Pirated Movie Site Offline (hollywoodreporter.com)
A major pirated movie site went offline last month after seven Hollywood studios won a preliminary court injunction. An anonymous reader quotes the Hollywood Reporter:
The MPAA-member studios sued the operators of PubFilm/PidTV in February, asking the court for a temporary restraining order to shut down what it described as a ring of six interconnected large-scale piracy sites. The suit was initially sealed, but was made public on Friday. Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, Universal, Disney, Paramount and Viacom are named as plaintiffs in the suit for direct and secondary copyright infringement, trademark infringement and unfair competition.
They're seeking statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement plus restitution of the sites' profits. So, depending on how many instances of infringement are discovered, the damages in this case could be astronomical. The studios claim the sites had more than 8 million visitors each month, nearly half of which were linked to IP addresses in the U.S... The sites are believed to be operated in Vietnam.
The court also ordered GoDaddy, VeriSign and Enom to disable all six domain names, to prevent the domains from being transferred, and to do it without communicating or warning the sites' owners first. In response, the defendants purchased a new domain, and then began publicizing it with ads on Google AdSense.
They're seeking statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement plus restitution of the sites' profits. So, depending on how many instances of infringement are discovered, the damages in this case could be astronomical. The studios claim the sites had more than 8 million visitors each month, nearly half of which were linked to IP addresses in the U.S... The sites are believed to be operated in Vietnam.
The court also ordered GoDaddy, VeriSign and Enom to disable all six domain names, to prevent the domains from being transferred, and to do it without communicating or warning the sites' owners first. In response, the defendants purchased a new domain, and then began publicizing it with ads on Google AdSense.
TBP is still around. So is Kickass, Demonoid, and Torrentleech.
Dunno what the websites they shut down were for, but it certainly didn't affect me, or anyone I know who regularity pirates stuff.
I guess... maybe they need to announce some sort of victory every so often? I dunno.
I'd never even heard of PubFilm until the court injunction.
Give my regards to Barbara.
Have gnu, will travel.
While I'm as libretarian as the next guy, and love "stick it to the man movements", in all fairness, these studios are trying to protect what's theirs. They are free to license the movies they make to whom they wish, in whatever manner they wish. You and I are also free to not consume their product, but it is their product. We may not agree to the regional releases, various licensing restrictions or media availability or delay dates, but stupid as we may believe their go-to-market strategy is it still is their right to execute it as they see fit. These sites are stealing the content and profiting from it; and that's just wrong.
That's okay. Going along with their concept of invented monetary damages, we simply have to invent a new MPAA crypto-currency and say each coin is worth 1 million Hollywood dollars.
#DeleteFacebook
In theory I agree with this. However since in many countries (including mine) these studios force us to pay fees on things that could theoretically be used to pirate their stuff (blank media, printers, etc), I have little respect for "what's theirs" because they take "what's mine" by force of law.
Dumbass, the constitutional reference being made is the fucking right to due process, e.g. being notified properly of legal actions taken against you. Go the fuck back to school.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
These sites are stealing the content
No. These sites acknowledge that content exists, that it's not available with adequate ease or at a reasonable price, that an unnatural monopoly has been imposed by anti-consumer laws bought by media cartels and have responded by making the content available through other means.
This content doesn't belong to the studios. It belongs to world culture.
Then you have the freedom to treat media that was created only because people were paid to make it, by other people who expected people who consumed that media to pay them, as if it never existed.
It's the "I don't believe in IP, so I'm going to download {Insert Hollywood blockbuster here}" position that's unsustainable in practice. Without IP, you wouldn't have that blockbuster, nobody's just going to throw quarter of a billion dollars (or even $60M, for less blockbustery movies) unless they think viewers will pay for it. You can very much still oppose IP, but it has to be on the understanding that available media will change, and the vast majority of the stuff being copied without permission will cease to be made.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Besides, they are NOT authors, they're middlemen who have their own interests first.
I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. They bought the rights, it belongs to them. For example: You're not a car maker, but you bought your car and now it belongs to you.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If those people want exclusive rights just to create something then I'm fine with them not creating. Paying money for something that costs nothing to replicate goes against whole reason money exist. It's equivalent to operating a money printing machine. It cost nothing just to allow someone to copy something, which is totally distinct from the act of creation and not connected to it in any way as far as economic system is concerned.
While I'm as libretarian as the next guy, and love "stick it to the man movements", in all fairness, these studios are trying to protect what's theirs. They are free to license the movies they make to whom they wish, in whatever manner they wish. You and I are also free to not consume their product, but it is their product. We may not agree to the regional releases, various licensing restrictions or media availability or delay dates, but stupid as we may believe their go-to-market strategy is it still is their right to execute it as they see fit. These sites are stealing the content and profiting from it; and that's just wrong.
The problem with that: it's not "theirs" in any direct inherent sense of the normal concept of ownership. It's "theirs" in the sense of a government-granted monopoly. This monopoly is a legal institution they have corrupted and subverted very far away from its original reasonable function (12 years copyright in the era of the Gutenberg press ... 100+ years in the era of the Internet ... really??). You can pretend like that doesn't have ramifications, like it doesn't invite an opposing reaction, but it won't help you understand that you describe the viewpoint of only one side there.
This is the context in which they operate. The moral argument of "they're stealing from us!" (forget that it's not actual larceny) hinges on the idea that "they're taking what we legitimately own!" But there are two broad parties here, the copyright holders and the people. "What we legitimately own" keeps being redefined again and again, always in the favor of just one party, decade after decade. At some point it gets hard to distinguish who is the thief and who is the victim. At some point, the other party gets tired of being walked all over and retaliates in the most obvious and available way: they stop respecting corrupt laws. The fix is to remove the corruption and restore sane, reasonable respectability to the institution of copyright. Everything else is either a band-aid or an arms race.
If intellectual property is abolished, there will be no piracy, so in a way you are correct.
an unnatural monopoly has been imposed by anti-consumer laws bought by media cartels
Why can't the constituents instead choose to outbuy the cartels or choose to elect legislators less vulnerable to such buying?
Assuming that by "consume" you mean view:
You and I are also free to not consume their product
I don't see how. Feature-length motion pictures are advertised to the public using a "trailer", or a short film consisting of excerpts from the motion picture. The trailer is just as copyrighted as the full work. So when I am viewing another motion picture, and its presentation is interrupted by a trailer, I am all but forced to view the first second of the copyrighted trailer.
Despite that I paid nothing for access to this trailer, I pay with being legally deemed to have had "access" to this trailer. Once I have had access, if any of my own works ever end up appearing accidentally similar to the trailer, I could get in trouble for nonliteral copyright infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music.
Libertarians tend to have a bit of trouble when it comes to shared resources of any sort.
Lets say we're neighbors. There's a river a mile away that we both have to walk to in order to get water (because we live in pre-industrial time or whatever.)
You get sick of walking and since you happen to be rich, you hire a bunch of yokels to dig a tributary down to your property (and being a good libertarian, you're careful to ensure you have the right of ways for the necessary strip of land.)
So now I need a bucket of water. I have the option of a) Walking a mile to the river or b) walking a hundred feet to your pond. Lets further assume that your pond is close enough to my property that I can reach over and grab a bucket of water without damaging even a single blade of grass on your side of the line, just to make the example completely pure.
In the libertarian view, I should always be walking that mile because the tributary is not "mine." I didn't build it or pay for it. That much makes sense. Where it kind of falls apart is that the bucket of water is the exact same whether I take it from the head of the tributary (ie: the river) or the base. It does no harm to you at all for me to take it from your pool. And yet you refuse to let me for no reason other than ideology.
From what I've seen this is the general mindset of libertarians -- its not so much about "I worked for it so its mine" as much as it is denying anyone else from enjoying your labors, even if it costs you absolutely nothing to allow it. And in that mindset, copyright makes perfect sense since they're interpreting it not so much as granting you a monopoly as much as they are interpreting it as denying me things I didn't directly earn -- the "if I can't have it, no one can!" attitude.
Now of course a flamebait claim like this will draw all the self-proclaimed libertarians that will either try to say the same thing in nicer words (which doesn't really change the claims..) or say that their personal form of libertarianism makes exceptions for these situations (which is fine.. they're welcome to believe whatever they want. But that also doesn't change my claims which aren't tailored to any one person's specific beliefs beyond my own, which are based on my own observations.)
PS: Can any of you libertarians point out where even my carefully tailored example fails to meet the pure libertarian ideal? Lets assume I'm honest and that the failure isn't something sideangled like preventing me from taking my bucket in the middle of the night when you aren't watching, but an actual failure in the layout of the example.