Posted on 05/29/2010 5:44:48 PM PDT by grand wazoo
Producers of Oscar-winning film "The Hurt Locker" have made good on a promise to file copyright lawsuits against people who have illegally downloaded the movie via file-sharing networks.
Voltage Pictures, an independent production company, filed a copyright complaint on Monday against 5,000 John Does in federal court in Washington, D.C. According to court records, next on the company's to-do list is to learn the names of the John and Jane Does from their Internet service providers.
Attorneys for Voltage wrote in the complaint that unless the court stops the people who pirate "The Hurt Locker," then Voltage will suffer "great and irreparable injury that cannot fully be compensated or measured in money."
Voltage has asked the court to order anyone who downloaded the movie illegally to destroy all copies of "The Hurt Locker" on their computers and any other electronic device that they may have stored the film.
As for monetary damages, the movie's producers did not ask for a specific figure but want those found to have pilfered the movie to pay actual or statutory damages and cover the costs that went into filing the suits.
So, here we go again.
Some big hurt The "Hurt Locker" producers aren't the first to kick off this new round of suits against individuals. A company calling itself the U.S. Copyright Group seems to be spearheading these efforts and has filed lawsuits on behalf of 10 other movies, including "Far Cry" and "Call of the Wild 3D."
None of those flicks have come close to earning the notoriety of "Locker." The film won six Academy Awards this year, including one for "Best Picture." The movie was a disappointment at the box office, however, grossing only $16 million domestically. Nonetheless, a film with an Oscar pedigree could potentially whip up a lot of sympathy among independent filmmakers for the idea of taking a stand against file sharing.
"The plaintiff has identified each defendant by the IP address assigned to that defendant. The plaintiff believes that information obtained in discovery will lead to the identification of each of the defendant's true name." --Voltage Pictures in complaint
But the filing of a lawsuit does not a successful legal campaign make. Not when you're talking about the volume of file sharers Voltage has set its sights on.
This is well tread ground after all. The four top record companies attempted to use litigation as a deterrent for five years and were confronted by bad publicity, big legal costs, and this little nugget: the suits didn't slow illegal downloading.
And the labels are large corporations with lots of cash to fund antipiracy operations. Voltage is relatively small and isn't backed by the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade group representing the six largest film studios, including Disney, Sony Pictures, and Paramount Pictures. The MPAA employs staff to help prevent studio-backed films from leaking to the Web and track them down when they occur.
It appears the Copyright Group, which is private and has nothing to do with the government despite the official-sounding name, is offering smaller film companies a means to fight back against piracy.
Your IP address Whether Voltage can bankroll a legal campaign involving 5,000 people, or whether litigation can make up for lost profits remains to be seen. But two things are for certain: First, Nicolas Chartier, who co-founded Voltage, doesn't appear afraid of some bad publicity. On the contrary, he seems to welcome it. Not only did he get banned from the Academy Awards for lobbying judges to vote for his film, but he recently called those who disagree with his lawsuits "morons."
The second thing that "Locker" downloaders should know is that according to the filing, Voltage already has the Internet protocol addresses of the 5,000 John and Jane Does. There was some question whether companies such as Time Warner and Comcast would provide the information because the Copyright Group has filed so many requests for IP addresses; about 50,000 for a dozen or so films. The ISPs say they don't have the resources to chase down this many. Remember, in five years, the RIAA filed suit against less than 40,000 people.
"The plaintiff has identified each defendant by the IP address assigned to that defendant," Voltage's attorneys wrote. "The plaintiff believes that information obtained in discovery will lead to the identification of each of the defendant's true name."
What they really hate are the Movies that get posted before the DVD gets released. I got a letter from my ISP over one of those.
Honestly tho, I stopped pirating stuff when it became easy to buy music from Itunes, games on Steam, Get fast movies from Netflix etc. It was always about being easier to pirate than to buy, not because I didn’t want to pay. Or retarded DRM on games. Now I just don’t buy games that have ridiculous DRM like Assasin’s Creed 2.
I’m still surprised how many full movies there still are on YouTube, yes they are in 10-minute segments, but still they are there.
Too many to deal with, which is why so many are still up. Remember even the South Park guys put their shows up quickly after it airs because THEY were tired of having to pirate THEIR OWN SHOW!
true...BUT more than 90% of them do if we are talking about BT DL’s. They dont care and work for over the info. You are a complete fool if u are not able to change your IP address, use Peer Guardian and update the ban lists..umm, that’s what I heard from my neighbor’s kid.
I use a ban list and also use the following, too ...
Peer exchange or PEX is a way for the computers in BitTorrent file sharing networks to connect with each other. It helps to maintain the group (known as a "swarm") of users (or peers) that are collaborating to share a given file. In the original BitTorrent design the many peers (users) downloaded a ".torrent" file describing the file(s) to be shared and then depended on a central computer called a tracker to find each other and maintain the swarm. Later development of distributed hash tables (DHT) meant that sub-lists of peers could be held by other computers in the swarm and ease the load on the central tracker computer. Peer exchange allows the members of a swarm to exchange information about the swarm directly without asking (polling) a tracker computer or DHT. This is swifter and draws load off the tracker.
Peer exchange can not introduce a new peer to a swarm entirely on its own. To make initial contact with the swarm, each peer must either connect to a tracker with a list of computers using the desired ".torrent" file, or use a router computer called a bootstrap node to find a distributed hash table which also contains a list of peers in that swarm, but is not held on any one central computer. For most Bittorrent users DHT and PEX will start to work automatically when they start a torrent. A notable exception is "private torrents" which are not freely available; these will disable DHT.
Distributed hash tables (DHTs) are a class of decentralized distributed systems that provide a lookup service similar to a hash table; (key, value) pairs are stored in the DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. Responsibility for maintaining the mapping from keys to values is distributed among the nodes, in such a way that a change in the set of participants causes a minimal amount of disruption. This allows DHTs to scale to extremely large numbers of nodes and to handle continual node arrivals, departures, and failures.
DHTs form an infrastructure that can be used to build more complex services, such as distributed file systems, peer-to-peer file sharing and content distribution systems, cooperative web caching, multicast, anycast, domain name services, and instant messaging. Notable distributed networks that use DHTs include BitTorrent's distributed tracker, the Kad network, the Storm botnet, YaCy, and the Coral Content Distribution Network.
I don’t play with it anymore. The neighbors kid told me to knock it off. (cough)
Honestly tho, I stopped pirating stuff when it became easy to buy music from Itunes, games on Steam, Get fast movies from Netflix etc.
I've used iTunes from the time it furst went online ... :-) ... the day it went online and still do now.
But, there are times when someone wants to just hear something a couple of times and I don't want to buy it for just those couple of times -- just to hear it, and I'll download and then I'm done with it. Most of the time it's not my kind of music.
I don't have anything to do with the games or stuff so that never interests me, but TV shows do. I've got a DVR and I can record them all anyway there. That's no problem for me to get it on the DVR and then get it over to my computer.
But, I'll sometimes get a whole season when a new season is coming up. For instance I was thinking about doing that with Burn Notice (a show I like) and downloading the entire prior season and running through them. HOWEVER, I noticed that they're putting the entire previous season on anyway, one right after the other, all day long, so my DVR is set for the whole thing.
So, the whole thing is kinda silly, as I'll switch back and forth between some of the shows online on sites like Hulu, or set my DVR and just record a bunch and put it on my computer, or download a bunch and watch them and trash it afterwards...
I like 24, too, but I didn't watch this season's shows. I usually like to watch the whole thing at once, over a couple of weeks of viewing for the entire season. I could have just left my DVR with it on record for the whole season and transferred it over to my computer, but after I started doing that (got about half-way through the season), I decided to stop the DVR recordings and just pick up the rest on bitTorrent. And I just did that and I'm going through "24" right now ... about to episode 10 right now.
I've got NetFlix, too... and I just get the DVD, put it on my computer and send it back ... pretty quick. Then I watch it a bit later. So, that's no big deal either.
I think that eventually, this whole industry is going to change the way they do it anyway... as going from NetFlix, to DVR, to Hulu, to bitTorrent -- it's just about all the same anyway ... :-)
What they really hate are the Movies that get posted before the DVD gets released. I got a letter from my ISP over one of those.
The ones that come out the same day as they're being released to the theatres are "cam shots" ... so they're nowhere near the quality of the DVDs. And, of course, a big screen at the theatre and the big sound is much different on a big production than what you're going to get with that cam shot.
All you're getting is an idea of whether you might want to see it at the theatre. A lot of them are not worth going to the theatre, because if you did, you would be sorry you ever spent your money for it. You find that out right away with the cam shots.
Thanks for the info. I’ll pass on this useful stuff to the umm...neighborhood kid who does this download thingy.
But in regards to the cam shots, at least they are titled as such. One must check upon the comments section if indeed, it is a fake or not.
I would agree with that.
what an absurd abuse of the judicial system.
Protection of property?
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