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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.
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.
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.
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.