Court Rules "Locker" Site Is Not Direct Copyright 45
suraj.sun writes "A federal judge in Miami has dismissed direct copyright infringement charges against Hotfile, a popular online "locker" service that the major Hollywood studios allege is responsible for massive copyright infringement. But he allowed the case to proceed on charges that Hotfile has induced and profited from the infringing activities of its users. The case, which began in February, represents the latest front in the never-ending arms race between Hollywood studios and users seeking free copies of their movies. Hotfile is a "cyberlocker" site. Users upload files they wish to share with others and are rewarded financially if these files prove popular. The studios allege that the overwhelming majority of the files users upload to Hotfile are copyrighted content being distributed without the consent of copyright holders' like themselves."
Also just in... (Score:4, Insightful)
Court rules title on website not a full.
Re:Also just in... (Score:5, Funny)
Or maybe, as you say, they just accidentally a word.
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Yoda, is that you?
Me, it is not. ....
O'dh!
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"[A]ccidentally a word"?!? More like accidentally all of Slashdot.
not particularly exciting (Score:5, Informative)
This is fairly standard given current law, and is the "easy" part of the win. Hosts of these kinds of user-driven content sites (e.g. YouTube) are not themselves considered to be violating copyright when copyrighted material ends up on them. The harder part is that sites alleged to be largely organized around promoting infringement can be held liable, under circumstances not completely clarified, for some variety fo inducement or contributory infringement. The Napster case was the leading one in that area.
So the fact that they got direct-infringement charges dismissed doesn't mean a whole lot, for better or worse; that was mostly a foregone conclusion, and I'd guess was thrown in just on the off chance that plaintiffs would get lucky with their draw of judges. The controversial part of the case, whether Hotfile is more Napster-like or more YouTube-like, is still to come.
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Is directing people to copyrighted material a crime?
Could I be convicted for standing on a street corner handing out maps marked with the locations of drug dealers?
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The DOJ is acting extrajudicially, though possibly with the figleaf of legitimacy provided by the 2600 case (in which linking to DeCSS was found to constitute a DMCA violation).
What Hollyweird really wants (Score:1)
is to kill "locker" sites entirely.
"Lockers" take away from the things the studios want you to purchase, simple as that. Alleging "oh they use these as dropboxes for infringement blarrgh rawr think of the children terrorism rawr" is just bullshit.
It's rather like Hollyweird's quiet support for the various "restrict video game sales think of the children" bullshit laws - Hollyweird is being eclipsed by interactive media.
That and the quiet push to make it so that DVR's can't play back to a recording device. T
Re:What Hollyweird really wants (Score:4, Insightful)
Many firearms are used in the commission of a crime here in the United States, go ahead and try to ban guns based on that fact. Never happen.
At some point, we have to accept that people are going to misuse services and devices to break the law. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater by banning said service or device because of the misuse by a small segment of the population is a tad too Orwellian for me.
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Bittorrent =/= The Pirate Bay.
As for the piracy figures, how the hell does anyone even know for sure what percentage is being used for what? Are ISPs now capable of reading bittorrent packets and seeing what type of file they are pieces of, and even if they are capable, are they legally allowed to do it?
Just another case of Big Media playing the "moral panic" game to try and secure their monopoly on content delivery again. "I hear that there might be child porn on the internet, guess we'd better shut it d
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*facepalm* Are you really that fucking stupid or dense? Of course the Pirate Bay was an example of a Bit Torrent tracker. The point is that Bit Torrent is used for far more than the kind of crap you find there. Jesus christ, numbnuts.
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I think someone was trying to make a distinction between vast majority and small minority. Yes, some firearms are used to commit crimes but only an extremely small minority of firearms in the US are used for such purposes (as in 99.999% are not used for criminal purposes). So yes, some sites are used more heavily for non-infringing purposes and some sites are used almost exclusively for infringing purposes.
Overall, I agree that shutting down types of sites is wrong. However, shutting down individual sites b
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But not a majority of guns are used in violent crime.
* Roughly 7% of all violent crime in 2008 involved a firearm... ( http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/percentfirearm.cfm [usdoj.gov] ) ... let's say 98,000 ... this does not include manufactures outside the US.
* Number of violent crimes in the US in 2008 - 1,392,628 ( http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm [disastercenter.com] )
* Quick math: 97483.96
* there were over 4 million firearms manufactured in the US 2008 (4,152,082)
* there were about 3.8 million produced in 2007
That
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They want more than that. They're totally unreasonable. They want to kill off the entire Internet. They want to turn the clock back for us to circa 1985 when the Internet was unknown to the general public, hard drives were far too small to hold 80 minutes of music, the mp3 format and the CD-R didn't exist, and they had a rock hard monopoly on distribution. They themselves would like to benefit from newer technology, as long as the rest of us can't.
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and they're using all of the Democrats that they've bought off. Hollywood = Democrat. Democrats = the ones pushing crap laws these days about "copyrights" and making it a felony to have a video camera in a movie theater.
They're not even trying to hide it anymore. Five RIAA lawyers placed in cabinet positions by Obama? FIVE of them. Even Bush didn't obviously suck up to one trade group like this administration has.
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Don't just blame the Democrats. Republicans from the deep south are equally on the hook here.
It's really rather bizzarre. They happily bend over forwards for interests in another state 2000 miles away that they will gladly eviscerate as totally immoral.
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Politics and morality... An interesting combination... Is that like sweet and sour?
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and they're using all of the Democrats that they've bought off. Hollywood = Democrat. Democrats = the ones pushing crap laws these days about "copyrights" and making it a felony to have a video camera in a movie theater.
*yawn* not this stupid canard again. Republicans are just as much supportive of this crap as the Democrats. Hell, the DMCA was introduced to the House by a Republican Representative and face pretty much no Republican opposition neither does most of the other copyright lunacy.
"They want to get paid for their content" (Score:3)
They use DRM.
That is, they have decided to create a situation where pirated content (the stuff they don't get paid for) is worth a lot more: easier to use, more reliable, more functional, and interoperable with more devices than their own for-sale content. And they are entirely in control of this; it's a decision, not a accident of fate or luck.
If you offer them money in exchange for hassle-free con
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How does use of DRM equate to 'kill off the entire internet'?
If have some scheme where you can 'do what the pirates do' and still get paid for your content, I am sure the studios would LOVE to hear about it. Actually, I am sure that the studios would be happy to do business with anyone who wants to run such an operation - just buy the copyright from the studio, then 'do what the pirates do'.
A little disingenuous (Score:2)
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I think in this context "their movies" refers to the studios.
Comforting (Score:2)
Find comfort in knowing that while the copyright trolls continue their march into the bowels of the internet, other companies will have opportunities to succeed who take advantage of more creative business models (i.e. Hulu, Netfix) rather than force old models down the throats of customers. Those new models don't have to spend millions on lawyers and instead can spend that money on R&D and outpace and outprofit those older models. Essentially the damage has bee done, these companies are the new Borders
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Protip: Hulu is owned by major media companies. People who make up the very same people you call copyright trolls.
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WTF are you talking about? The 'new model' which you refer to is: Netflix pays studio for right to stream content. When they don't agree on a price, Netflix does not stream the content. Without the studios and their content there is no Netflix.
DMCA (Score:3)
Isn't the DMCA supposed to protect such services against these kinds of lawsuits? So long as the operators of these websites respond to DMCA takedown requests on a timely manner, they really should not be held responsible for their users' actions. To make the operators of these services liable for their users' actions would no doubt harm those who seek to use them for legitimate purposes such as distributing their own original content.