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LucasFilms suing 'net Pirates
Tony Garcia writes "Apparently, LucasFilms was not happy to find out that PM videos were being distributed over the 'net; they hired a mean team of badass lawyers to take care. The story at SiliconValley News. "
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I wonder how the author of the article sees the ability to threaten people into stopping the flow of any kind of information as a Good Thing (tm). If anyone with enough money (or anyone theoritically) can accomplish this, then there really is something to be concerned about. What if I said that I thought that the author's article should not be posted on the web because it was counter to ideals that I held. Then I went out and called his or her ISP and threatened them in order to get them to shut down the web site. I've accomplished the author's goal of removing information that I'm opposed to, but I've also violated the basic right of free speech. Now I'm not saying that piracy is free speech. I'm saying that the generalizations made in the article lead to some, IMHO, bad conclusions.
Episode I (part b)
THE NET MENACETurmoil has engulfed the Internet. The wholesale pirating of MP3s and lousy movies on outlying websites is in dispute.
Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade of deadly lawsuits, the greedy LucasFilm Federation has stopped all Internet traffic to the small ISPs....
- Richie
Did anyone else find this article particularly lame? I mean, this quote:
"But these were no ordinary lawyers. They had a second whole computer system ready to press their case. The bootlegger ran to another Web site, and the lawyers followed. Then the Internet Service Provider stepped in and shut the bootlegger down."
Gives me an oddly unsettling picture of caped-crusader 'net-savvy, cyber-clued geeky lawyers out to save the world (wide web) from the bad ol' Internet pirates in thier skull&crossbones black matte t-shirts. Jezzum. Makes me want to retch.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
Of course, how good is your net connection going to be? I'd hate to download a GB from Iraq.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Star Wars, but I saw The Red Violin two weeks ago because I remembered all these people on Slashdot saying how great it was. They were right! So not everyone here is a Neanderthal :)
toward the masses. It seems to want to provide a convenient security blanket for those who want to believe that the flow of information can truly be controlled on the net. The fact is that it can be controlled somewhat on the web, but certainly not on the net as a whole. The people sending things back and forth just need to practice a little more ingenuity than setting up a public web page. :). ) Yes life can be made more inconvenient for the less clever of the ripper kids out there, but information will still be tranferred.
From what I read, said lawyers were not monitoring DCC bots on IRC nor FTP sites that act as online dumping grounds for such files (should I say FiLeZ
So Lucas' lawyers sent out cease and desist orders to a couple hundred bootleggers. If they (or this Moira Gunn who wrote the article) think that what Lucas managed to do is control the flow of information on the internet they are dreaming.
If you want a copy of TPM you will be able to find it on the net or on irc and there ain't a damn thing that Lucas can do about it.
To quote Gunn "So, the next time someone tells you -- `You just can't stop information from being passed around the Internet!` -- think twice. We can stop most of it with a little determination."
Ms. Gunn you obviously have no clue exactly how the internet works so don't try to spout off some Lucasian propoganda which has no basis in reality.
Everybody that has ever looked at any of the ripped copies of SWE1 will notice that they will not get the whole emotional feeling without having seen it on the big screen. So everybody that took the time to download it was surely disappointed and went on to watch it on the big screen. So there is no loss there. Most people that are likely to d/l the movie have watched it more than once I would bet.
So why would he bother? Why would he bother with such court costs? He is doing nobody a favor, especially not his image in the public.
The only thing I can see hurt is the VHS and DVD sales but since Lucas wont have them released for a long time from now its his own fault...
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
I know I could sell anything if I had enough money (say like Bill Gates) in America. Even some old senile man sitting in a chair swearing and mumbling incoherently would sell with the right advertising.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
You are right, Lucas is doing what he has a legal and (probably) moral right to do. However, the sucess of his product does matter.
Compare these:
1. A starving man procecutes a man who stole a loaf of bread from him (say, a full day's meal).
2. A rich man who has more bread than he can reasonably want procecutes a man who stole a load of bread from him (one that was just going to go stale and be thrown away anyhow).
Which one are people normally going to approve of? Both are acting within their legal and moral rights.
The reason that people hold his army of lawyers against him is that he has no demonstrated need for the money that he is protecting. Also, consider the wrongs being done here. On the one case, he loses some portion of $8. On the other, the bootlegger gets a $50,000 fine and years of imprisonment. He's now doing that to people when he has no demonstrated need to. Yes, he's within his rights, but come on. Doesn't he have anything better to do than get people who did him very little harm very large punishments?
That's why people hold it against him. Because he can easily afford not to go after these people and the net suffering of humanity will be less then when he goes after them.
So is he in the right, in a sense, yes. He may be completely in the right. I don't really know. His soul is his own business. But this is basically the case of the big man bullying the smaller ones. Remember something about rights - Shylock was within his rights in demanding his pound of flesh from the merchant of venice.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
>Why not have a `Cyber Patrol` which is constantly vigilant, watching the World Wide Web?
Because the internet is not a US only entity, fool! I'm sure it's just totally shocking to imagine, but US laws are not applicable outside the US, and what's more is that the US concept of legal and illegal on certain issues may be totally the reverse in other soverign nations. An example:Son May Records. This is a company in Taiwan that sells CDs, DVDs, VCDs (MPEG1 movies on CD), etc. They sell 'The Matrix' and probably PM by now too. All of their merchandise is copied from elsewhere. No money is paid to the copyright holders. No 'rights' were obtained in any way. And... hold on to your enchiladas...THIS IS 100% LEGAL in Taiwan. Son May is not an underground company. They are locally licensed, pay taxes, and follow all local rules and regulations. They are following the law! IP law is simply non-existant in Taiwan. It's a different philosophy in the East. It's not "backward" or "wrong", it's just different and as equally valid as we hold out own perceptions of copyrights/patents to be (gasp!). Deal with it. The 'net, however, brings radically different cultures and ideas together in a way that's never been done before. There's no "right side" and "wrong side" here. Some people just happened to believe that knowledge or art can't be "owned". This just freaks some people out. Accept it. And cutting off chunks of the world that don't play ball your way won't work either. Isolationism ultimately hurts more than it helps. One must look at the big picture. Cutting off Taiwan for piracy would do far more economic harm to US businesses than the piracy it sought to stop. Recognizing and accepting each other's differences will lead to a better world and a more propserous society.And before anyone laughs saying I'm just taking advantage of Taiwan's "errant lawlessness" let's look at a quick counter example: PORNOGRAPHY is illegal in many nations (not just "backward and oppressive" ones). Many hardcore sex videos are illegal in the UK. This porn is LEGAL in the US and there are countless porn sites on the web up and running in the US. They are legal, the owners are taxed. They follow local laws and regulations. Should they be shut down by the UK because guys in London are downloading porn MPEGs? Should their laws apply here? Should the US shut down these legal businesses for violating forwign laws? How would Americans react if MI6 agents from the British Isles raided local porn web sites operating on US soil? We'd be outraged!Now tell me again that "pirates" worldwide must be stopped because it is "the right thing to do" or "the law". We may not agree with it. I don't agree with Taiwan's stance on IP law, but we must tolerate the world so long as we expect the world to tolerate us.
You said:
No capitalism isn't fair (its more laize faire.. hehe), but it works and the US proves it.
Oh you are so so so wrong. Lets look at your definition of the word "works." Who does it work for? The gigantic corporations which can give huge contributions to campaign funds to control politics, which can hire high-caliber lawyers to control the law.Sure yeah, it "works" for them, but what about the other guy -- the individual who gets taxed on gross income, verses the business who gets taxed only on profit. The small business which has none of the legal benifits and incentives that large businesses do. Nothing that is "not fair" can work. It may *seem* to work, but that is all dependant on your perspective.
In the Middle ages, feudalism "seemed" to work for kings, queens and propertied gentry. In all less than 5% of the population. It "worked" for many hundreds of years. But for the majority of the population it did not even close to work.
I think if you asked "everyone", the majority would say "yes, capitalism is working." The thing is that unlike the medieval peasants, they _don't even know_ that they are getting screwed by the system. That as a wage earner a person barely makes enough to stay even and in an industrialized society which has capacity to produce far more food and goods than are needed, the average wage earner still has to take out a *huge* loan to buy a house, and even a vehicle and get raped for years by interest.
Capitalism does not work.
That might have been *preferable* to Jar Jar.
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
"spread so more people could see it."
Are you kidding? TPM is one of the most-seen films in the history of the world! Indeed, probably among the most-seen works of authorship of all-time. Still further, I doubt you can get to more than a few digits by counting the number of people who would be capable of obtaining an internet copy who have not already seen it at least once in a theatre.
Exposure to his art is not George Lucas' problem. He has that problem licked, and it is not at all apparent to me that any free distribution would accomplish as much or more widespread interest than his proprietary closed model. It would appear that the IP/market regime is doing just fine in terms of satisfying his concerns for his art so far as distribution is concerned.
Make no mistake, this art costs money to make. But for the astronomical revenues the work can produce, it would not have been produced.
This is lovely. Too bad there wasn't an article there after all that lavicious worship of Lucasarts lawyers. Pirates of the stripe that take in cameras to movies and then sell the tapes are less than ethical, but lawyers will always be somewhere down there with them.
Choice quotes from the article:
"The lawyers actually got organized back in April. They started out by warning some 700 Internet Service Providers they would be held responsible for anyone offering bootleg copies on their services."
In other words, in a typical corporate lawyer maneuver, they threatened and hassled a good number of people/ISPs who probably never engaged in piracy of SW:TPM or presented resistance to Lucasarts, now or later.
"But these were no ordinary lawyers. They had a second whole computer system ready to press their case."
This doesn't make a shred of sense. Perhaps she meant they had another IP to come in from? (Probably just something caught up in techie-jargon-to-journalist translation.)
"In the end, some 300 Internet Web sites were shut down and hundreds more individuals withdrew their offers to sell stolen copies. All in all, it was a great success."
Until site #301 opened up somewhere in a former Eastern Bloc nation for free (this is a possible EXAMPLE). Of course it was a great success - one doesn't tell one's clients otherwise, epsecially if they happend to be a one Mr. Lucas. This is just a publicity statement.
"Why not have a `Cyber Patrol` which is constantly vigilant, watching the World Wide Web?"
Of course. Those of us who are law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide, right? *shudder*
"So, the next time someone tells you -- `You just can't stop information from being passed around the Internet!` -- think twice. We can stop most of it with a little determination."
Pirates get what they deserve, especially if they sell their stolen wares, but that line gives me the creeps. How would we like it if that quote came from Louis Freeh, let alone some corporate lawyer?
Again, it appears mainstream press and corporate lawyers do not understand the concept of information: once it's out, it's out, regardless of legality or origin. (Or regardless of accuracy for that matter...)
----- The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they will be when you kill them.
Copyright violation is copyright violation. George Lucas is using legal means to slap the wrists of little kiddies who distribute property he holds a copyright on. Good for him. It won't really work but its amazing so many people hold it against him.
If I tomorrow grab the source tree for Linux, strip out all that nasty copyright information and redistribute it sans license (or maybe under my own license) hoards of screaming Free Software zealots would beat down my door bearing torches and rightfully so.
The success or lack of success of the object who's copyright is being violated doesn't make a difference except in the minds of the deadbeats who think everything everywhere should be free regardless of the authors intent.
Is violating the GPL on Linux any more ethical now than it was say 4 years ago when it was less successful?
This is just like pirating anything else. Nobody's making money off the piracy (well with the exception of a few lamerz and YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE), it's all about collecting baseball cards in the 90's. I've got this, I've got that, watch it once then burn it to a cd which will soon be dust-covered and forgotten. Lucasfilm isn't losing any quantifiable amount of cash from this because as someone said earlier, anyone who takes the trouble to download it has probably already paid the dough to see it in the theatre. And who in their right mind would pay to see it twice?
At any rate, art shouldn't be so expensive. Not even bad art at that. Eventually, will people have their memories erased after seeing a movie? Because once you watch something, you remember it, which means you have an illegal offsite copy of something that's copyrighted! I can hear the thought police lawyers now...
I like the sig.
I just saw a bumper sticker on a pickup truck last week that said:
One Country, One flag, One Language
next to a picture of an american flag. Really makes you wonder what kind of people worry about a symbol being burned as well as other people in the country only knowing a non-english language. And worrying enough to put a bumber sticker on their truck over it!
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
OTOH there are tons (er, I mean gigs) of this material available on usenet. I know that a very high quality MPEG of TPM was just posted last week (in addition to the lower-grade copies that have been around for some time). Not that I would download it of course. I just happened to notice that it was there. Really.
On a completely unrelated topic. Does anyone know how to "overburn" a CD 'cause I've got a 750MB file that I'd like to move off of my HD.
Creativity and inspiration should be (and can be (and is, if you are childish enough :))) free.
``Phantom Menace'' is not the only film to be peddled on the Internet. Several publications have reported that ``The Matrix'' and ``Shakespeare in Love'' were among the films that could be found in recent weeks.
These guys are really out of the scene if they think that these were the only movies being moved around two weeks ago. Shakespeare? Um, didn't that come out almost a year ago???
``This was cutting-edge stuff,'' McMahon said, noting that the law firm staff worked around the clock, seven days a week for much of May and June scouting for pirates.
Achieving that required some serious cybersleuthing, McMahon said, though he declined to provide any technical details. Those are trade secrets, the lawyer said.
Gosh, wish we were all privy to those 'trade secrets.' He sure is smart.
There were certain spots that they would regularly patrol. ``You have to know the dark street corners of the Internet -- the bad neighborhoods,'' said Neel Chatterjee, another Orrick, Herrington lawyer who worked on the case.
Oooh...the 'dark street corners' of The Internet. Thank god those lawyers are patrolling the bad places for us, and making The Internet safe for everyone...
Once again it all comes down to the money, I heard Lucas in a previous interview say "If I could do it for free I would, but the other people want their money". How noble. If Lucas really cared more about the art and less about the money he would want the movie to spread so more people could see it.
I never meant to say that the people who pirated Lucas's work were justified. I never said it, either. I just said that noone is going to be particularly sympathetic to him because he doesn't need the money. That and do you really think that $50,000 fines plus up to five years in prison is really justified by cheating Lucas out of some portion of $8?
My point wasn't that people should pirate Lucas's work, they're not justified in doing it. Just when you compare relative evils (stealing Lucas's work (less than $8 dollar value to lucas) versus $50,000 + five years imprisonment), which do you think is worse? That's why people are against Lucas. Not because he's fighting innocent people, but that he's breaking ribs in return for insults. The retribution is many fold more than the crime.
This actually is due to the fact that if you made the punishment fit the crime, noone would care about the penalty. Still, does it make sense to make the punishmet 1000 times more significant than the crime just so that the punishment acts as a deterrent? I guess the argument is that the damage is done to the fabric of society, and that's what the punishment is about. Maybe. I don't really buy it, though. Society did just fine without copyright for too long to believe that we're that dependent on copyright now.
Besides that, there's just too much piracy going on right no for me to believe that piracy really is going to rip apart the fabric of our society.
Oh, and I saw the movie in theaters twice, and I never saw it in bootleg copy on the net. If Lucas keeps up this money-grubbing unforgiving greed that he seems to be displaying ("I wish that the toys were cheaper but it's the manufacturers who are driving the prices up, my licensing fees don't have anything to do with it... really."), I may not see his next movie on the principle of the thing. Given how much money the guy is making, it really doesn't make sense that he cares about the piracy going on. It's got to be a drop in the bucket, when you get down to it. As you pointed out - how many people actually have the systems and bandwidth to get a bootleg copy and didn't go see the movie?
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
Just another happy, fluffy story of how the "good guys" (big filmmaking corporations and their equally big lawyers) kicked the "bad guys" (those nasty internet pirates! Fear!) squarely in the pants. Not quite.
Wow, they caught 300 people selling TPM? That's barely scratching the surface. They only trolled the WWW for pirated copies, nothing else.
The lawyers actually got organized back in April. They started out by warning some 700 Internet Service Providers they would be held responsible for anyone offering bootleg copies on their services.
How can they hold an ISP liable for stolen information? That's like the FBI holding the owner of a parking lot liable for any stolen cars found in the lot.
Then they switched their focus to the bootleggers themselves. With Electronic Cease and Desist Orders at the ready, the lawyers lie in wait, constantly patrolling the Internet. When a bootlegger would pop up, they'd email the order, threatening the possibility of a $2 Million fine and 10 years in jail.
Most complied immediately, but some cyber-pirates didn't take kindly to these digital equivalents of bad news on legal letterhead. One indignantly replied, `Who do you think you are?` and promptly cut the lawyers off their Web site.
Can someone explain this last bit of drivel to me?
Why not have a `Cyber Patrol` which is constantly vigilant, watching the World Wide Web?
Who would control such an orginization? The government? A private company? Who decides what is acceptable and what is not?
For example, what about those Web sites that offer personal information about citizens like you and me? Does the world really have a right to our home address and telephone number?
Sure does. Ever heard of a phone book? (BTW, how did this article shift from "bootlegging" to "loss of privacy"?)
Here, I think we can take a page from George Lucas' book. For the `Phantom Menace`, it was a success to have simply stopped the great bulk of the bootleggers.
So, the next time someone tells you -- `You just can't stop information from being passed around the Internet!` -- think twice. We can stop most of it with a little determination.
"Great bulk"? "most of it"? Yeah, sure.
What a load of crap. With the insane amount of money Lucas has made off of TPM and its marketing blitzkreig (please stop playing those damn Pepsi can commercials with that rapping idiot; I couldn't care less about finding the Golden Yoda) I don't think he needs to worry about loss of revenue from bootleggers. Anyone who wasted enough time to download a copy of the movie almost certainly saw it in the theater first.
paranoid.android
And the ISP community at large laughed them back into the shadows. Some even sent back forms to the lawyers describing their hourly consulting rates for finding and deleting said content, and included an application to start consulting service.
Why not have a `Cyber Patrol` which is constantly vigilant, watching the World Wide Web?
Because you're on crack? A good portion of trading happens independent of the public, and independent of the World Wide Web. Policing those means would be a breach of privacy for the traders, and therefore would be unacceptable.
Does the world really have a right to our home address and telephone number?
Of course they do.
So, the next time someone tells you -- `You just can't stop information from being passed around the Internet!` -- think twice. We can stop most of it with a little determination.
No you can't. 99.99995% of the time, it'll be mirrored somewhere. That's the good thing about digital media. Providing you have the space to store it, there's really no cost for materials to reproduce it, aside from possible bandwidth costs.
And you can't track it. Most of the best stuff is being traded on the inside, you are only privy to the stuff that bubbles to the surface.
Truthfully, most of the crap that comes out of the big studios isn't even worth the disk space it occupies. Especially the Phantom Menace.
While it's true that the "underground" as you put it is alive and well, I think you are greatly overestimating it's size. In order to reap the benefits of these private FTP sites, you have to make a significant investment of time and effort in order to be accepted and gain access. The vast majority of people are not going to bother making that investment (even if they could figure out how.) While you say "millions more downloading it from private ftp sites", I would guess that the actual number is probably more like thousands.
What the studios, Lucas, RIAA, etc, are worried about are easy to find pirate sites. If somebody has a high speed FTP site, and gets a link up on Yahoo so that anybody who searches for "Phantom Menace" gets back a working link that says "download your own copy here", Lucas is going to have a problem. So, he hires a few lawyers whose job is to make all the pirates keep their heads down so that 99% of the population can't find the goods. Trying to catch that last hard-core 1% just isn't worth the effort on their part (especially considering the fact that they aren't likely to be successful anyway.)
If the pirate underground was really home to millions of people trading goods, the entire commercial software industry would have collapsed years ago. The reality is it is not easy to find out exactly where to go to find reliable sources of warez. And once you do find out, it's still a pain in the ass to actually find what you want and get a copy. And then it's often of dubious quality. All the studios have to do is make sure it stays this way. As long as the underground is actually underground, they don't have anything to worry about. If it manages to become highly-visible and reliable, then they are screwed.
I know the following isn't what most /. readers want to hear, but I think it needs to be said.
Certain Slashdotters characterize how "easy" it is for them (and thus, their friends) to obtain bootlegs, inferring from this how ineffectual it is to undertake enforcement activities with respect to these works. Taken in the broader context, this misses the point, and all evidence is to the contrary except in the narrow context of those statements.
I am here to tell you that media clients do not casually call a lawyer to chase flies -- in exchange for the sizeable fees they pay, they want measurable accountability. They wouldn't do what they are doing and pay what they are paying if it didn't accomplish what they wanted. Arguing that LA is not getting what LA wants because they didn't eradicate piracy is merely pounding upon a straw man.
The bottom line of LA's activities to date is that it is no longer trivial and cost-free for average joe to obtain his bootleg, or to manage and distribute a bootleg haven. Despite allegations made here to the contrary, I think Lucas has the better of this argument.
While it is easy to find TPM bootlegs when you know where to look, only a small percentage of the population (and our immediate friends) know where that is. Yes, yes, with sufficient perseverence, it is possible to find whatever you want on the net, but Average Joe doesn't have that attention span, and AJ's parents won't let him risk the family abode to watch a movie. AJ's ISP will auto-punt on receipt of a DMCA letter, and by and large, the deed was done precisely as LA wanted it.
The goal is simply to assure that the vast percentage of AJ's out there won't have a bootleg, and won't harbor bootleg sources.
Lucas isn't trying to STOP piracy (he would like that, but it isn't close to important to do so), he's trying to preclude a piracy so rampant as to have a financial impact on his revenues exceeding his cost of enforcement.
And with all respect to my colleagues here, I think it is hubris for us to presume that our estimates of the financial costs of piracy are better than those of Lucasarts and media players. Unlike us, LA actually measures the cost of piracy and demonstrates faith in their beliefs by paying Yankee dollars for enforcement. They budget these costs based upon actual research and agressive bean-counting. If they didn't think the expenditures were justified, they wouldn't do it.
In short, they are never going to have the straw man absolute non-piracy, but who cares? They are getting enough protection to suit their purposes and satisfy the market infrastructure whose purchases are their primary source of revenue -- good enough for Jazz, so to speak. And they are getting protection whose value exceeds the costs of enforcement (or the cost of non-enforcement) -- or else they wouldn't be paying those costs.