23,000 File Sharers Targeted In Latest Lawsuit 386
wiedzmin writes "Subpoenas are expected to go out to ISPs this week in what could be the biggest BitTorrent downloading case in US history. At least 23,000 file sharers are being targeted by the US Copyright Group for downloading The Expendables. The Copyright Group appears to have adopted Righthaven's strategy in blanket-suing large numbers of defendants and offering an option to quickly settle online for a moderate payment. The IP addresses of defendants have allegedly been collected by paid snoops capturing lists of all peers who were downloading or seeding Sylvester Stallone's flick last year. I am curious to see how this will tie into the BitTorrent case ruling made earlier this month indicating that an IP address does not uniquely identify the person behind it."
Re:Busy Work... (Score:4, Informative)
I can't wait till a few Governors, Congressmen, Senators, Justices get hit because their kids downloaded content.
There are about a thousand individuals in the US with enough political power to get the ball rolling for change in this matter. Of them, their demographics put them with an average age of upper 40's to lower 50's making well over a million each year. Among those who still have kids living at home, to most of them, their thousand dollar settlements is chump change.
Given a US Internet population of about 200 million, and the assumption that 50 thousand will face legal action of similar nature, statistically, there is not even a 1% chance that someone with political sway has dealt with this.
Re:MAFIAA at it again (Score:1, Informative)
What type of behavior? Stealing? Call it what you want and use whatever technical detail to obfuscate the fact that a subset of 23,000 people took something from someone else without paying for it.
And seriously. All that for a Stalone flick?
USA! We're number #1! (in extorting our citizens for corporate greed)
This is the MPAA going after (with almost 99.9% certainty, illegal) downloaders. Not Haliburton lobbying congress for a no bid contract to deploy security and infrastructure services in Iraq to the Army (which already has it's own security and infrastructure services). Or Morgan Stanley not claiming their debts to inflate their growth numbers so the gov't no longer has a say on executive bonuses.
Re:And if you still want to see it (Score:1, Informative)
I clicked on this because I thought it might have been something relevant but generally disapproved of. I was greeted with my speakers blaring the meatspin song and my monitor spinning the meatspin dicks. At work.
To the poster: fuck you. To the cowardly moderator who used overrated: fuck you much, much more.
Re:This IP/person issue...it's obvious to me. (Score:2, Informative)
You're right, they don't "deserve" anything.
An artist is not entitled to be paid by people who watch their movie or listen to their music. Now, I think they should be paid, and Richard Stallman came up with a way to do that which I think would be fair to everyone which involves a small tax on internet use with money being distributed to artists based on a cube root formula. Additionally users can press a button to give one or two dollars at a time based on their genuine desire to support artists, and not out of fear of being sued. People who are too poor to pay don't have to, and the extra cost to their internet would only be a few cents. Everyone who should get paid does, culture remains free, and people can share everything they want like they should be able to.
Re:Busy Work... (Score:5, Informative)
But....
They aren't paid per rental. Video stores (if they still exist) buy videos licensed for rental use. They're a bit more expensive, but the individual payments go to the store, not to the studio.
From what I understand, the licensing for a new-release DVD for rental is higher than a new-release DVD for retail. But companies who do bulk purchases also enjoy price breaks.
Then the math gets fuzzy. How much was lost between the pirates, purchase DVD's and rentals?
Say the movie cost $29.99 retail (I didn't bother to check the price). 23,000 * 29.99 = $689,770. Oohhh, over half a million dollars lost.
But what if they were all renters? We can assume not everyone watches the movie in the same night. Say 500 DVDs were purchased, at a rental-licensed rate of $35.00 (again, arbitrary number), and all the customers rented it over the next month and a half. 500 * $35.00 = $17,500. And then your number comes into play. Assuming $5/ea for video rentals, the rental companies took in $115,000, so after the cost of the DVDs, the rental companies made $97,500.
So exactly who lost out there? The MPAA, or the local rental stores? Well, the MPAA likely still made exactly what they would have before, as the stores still needed to stock their stores. If I was a rental store, and I lost $97,500 because of piracy, I may be a bit miffed.
But...
Not all of those 23,000 are going to buy it, nor rent it.
[cue soothing music]
[In a Mr. Rogers-like voice]
Long ago, it was a simpler time... People had just discovered the wonders of indoor plumbing, microwave ovens, color television, and then the home video cassette player. This was long before most of you were born. A video cassette, in simple terms, was a box roughly twice the size of a netbook, which could hold up to 90 minutes of low quality analog video with two channel sound. This wonderful innovation allowed you to view movies in the pleasure of your own home.
This was before "The Internet", Netflix, Redbox, Hulu, YouTube, or BitTorrent ever existed, so what was this simple culture to do? They would get into their cars, and drive to local video stores to rent movies... But they cost approximately $5/day to rent. Lets not forget that this was during the era of Reagan Economics, so that was roughly equal to the monthly income for a family of 4 hard working Americans. Not everyone could afford a video cassette player, nor the cost of the rental of the video cassettes. Friends and family would get together to watch movies on home video cassette players, and promptly rewind and return the video cassette to the rental establishment.
Then the evils of piracy was invented by evil one eyed people who lived on ships and sang drinking songs before looting and pillaging.
ok, I'm making myself nauseous with the sarcasm now, so I'll stop.
23,000 people downloading does not equal 23,000 purchases, nor 23,000 rentals.. Assuming all 23,000 people were interested in viewing the movie if there was a cost associated with it, they may watch in groups of 2 to 10 (we'll say 5 for comfortable seating). That's 4,600 rentals or purchases. And lets not forget that those who purchase are likely to lend out movies to friends, which would lower the number even more. Say 75% of the original set would be willing to spend a few bucks on a rental or borrow it from a friend. That brings the number down to 17,250 people intending to watch. At an average of 5 viewers a session, that lowers the number down to 3,450, which could still be comfortably managed by movie rentals rather than movie purchases, which means the original price paid to the studios for rental movies is still $17,500, which is pretty close to breaking even for the video stores. Luckily,