23,000 File Sharers Targeted In Latest Lawsuit 386
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the go-big-or-go-home dept.
from the go-big-or-go-home dept.
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."
Busy Work... (Score:5, Interesting)
Comcast and Time Warner are going to be busy. Just IDing and notifying the downloaders is going to be a pain in the ass, and God forbid the customer moved, switch, and/or can't be found. As a manager, I would file a motion to stop this just to keep my cost down. Furthermore, this is a witch hunt and the sitting Judge needs to step down for being incompetent. While I may not have a JD, any rational person can see that the company is just trying to start a legal phishing scheme.
What really irks me, is that they'll try to sue these people into paying rather than engaging them as customers. MPAA, here's an idea, instead of sending notices to ISPs about someone stealing a movie, how about you work with ISPs to send the downloader a link to pay for the movie instead. Give the option to rent or buy it, and play with the price until you find a sweet spot these el cheapo's are willing to fork over. Threatening them with lawsuits because it seems like a great way to set an example hasn't worked thus far, why keep beating this dead horse then?
Re:Busy Work... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I wonder what would happen... (Score:4, Interesting)
They'd pick the richest hundred or so of the group and destroy them in court, and drop the rest.
UNLICENSED Private Investigators (Score:5, Interesting)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: All of these cases are based on the work of unlicensed private investigators, working behind closed doors, doing who-knows-what. There is absolutely no proof that ANY of their "evidence" is real. These "investigators" and their shyster lawyer accomplices are the real criminals. They are the ones who should be fined and imprisoned. And given a good flogging.
Re:Rent, Rip, Return, Encode (Score:4, Interesting)
Rent movies cheaply (ie Redbox for $1), Rip to HDD, return movie, then encode to DivX or other bitrate-efficient codec. Only costs $1 per movie, and is 100% offline and thus untraceable.
As much as I hate these lawsuits, I really don't feel sorry for the people getting sued. There are plenty of ways to get movies really cheap, or even free, without getting sued. And seriously, are you really that desperate for "entertainment" (and I use that term VERY loosely) that you're downloading some shitty Sylverster Stallone movie? WTF?
Re:MAFIAA at it again (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue is that if any of those 23,000 people didn't do it, then we've chucked our values down the toilet to bend over for corporate greed. If they've got the goods fine, but they should have to go through the process of filing separate suits for each and every one of those people, unless they can demonstrate that the IPs belong to the same person or they're acting together.
Filing suit is their right, but it isn't their right to do it in such an economical way, make them pay for all the suits necessary and see if they still feel that this is a valuable use of the court's time.
What's more, I doubt very much that all those addresses really correspond to people for which that one court has jurisdiction.
Re:Busy Work... (Score:2, Interesting)
Somewhat related, is there any comparable tactic to Selective Prosecution that can be used in civil disputes?
Re:What really irks me.. (Score:5, Interesting)
If they did not put it there, then they are still guilty of copyright violation, because in order to find out who is downloading a file, they have to have a copy of the file for comparison! This issue has been brought up before: they cannot use illegal means to pursue legal "solutions" to their piracy problem.
Remember that in the past, their means of detecting who was violating copyright (I won't say "pirating", because a pirate has to distribute, not just copy) was itself accused of being illegal. Frankly, I don't see how they could devise a legal means to do it.
Honestly, I think these cases are dead in the water. I don't think they'll go anywhere anymore. Too many judges have become aware of how this all works. Or doesn't work, as the case may be.
Is it really illegal? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now the question is, what does copyright apply to? The entire film or all the little bits that make up the film? I don't think any sane person could claim it's the latter, because practically that would make every sequence of bits someone's intellectual property. Even if we couple that idea with a context how do we legally define the context? The name of the file those bits are a part of? And what happens if I encrypt or compress those bits? What if I mix them with bits from other sources? There's just no way to make this definition work. So if I'm not distributing the film in its entirety, if I'm not even distributing large parts of it to the same people, then I think you could argue that distributing it over Bittorrent doesn't violate any IP laws.
Lets say I have a counterfeit bag, some expensive designer one. If I sell that bag to someone, or even give it to someone, I've distributed counterfeit goods. But if I cut that bag up into hundreds of little pieces of fabric, then distribute those pieces to hundreds of different people, have I broken a law? What if I do this 10 times with 10 bags, over thousands of people, have I distributed 10 bags to people? I don't think so. Even if you could reassemble those pieces into an original bag I still haven't given a bag to any one person.
Even the law itself [copyright.gov] defines infringement to be "any secondary transmission by a cable system that embodies a performance or a display of a work which is actionable as an act of infringement". How can anyone claim a small segment of the billions of bits that make up a movie embodies it? Without the rest of it, they're nothing. Even if you argue that a person could extract a single frame from them, then a simple encryption pass would turn them into truly random noise. At least, until you have the whole file to decrypt.
Sure it's all technicalities, but isn't that what law is?
Re:What really irks me.. (Score:4, Interesting)