Hurt Locker Lawsuits

Piracy is bad, m'kay? No amount of bad business models can justify stealing the creative works of others.

That being said, the fines being levied are essentially a revenue stream for lawyers and the production company, and typically are out of proportion to the crime.

And it's been proven that making content easily available online for a modest fee typically eliminates most of the casual pirates.

Voltage Pictures hopes to recover millions of dollars in damages from the defendants for money lost due to piracy.

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I don't think "recover" is the right word. I doubt ~25K people not paying to see the movie stopped the company from getting even half a million dollars, let alone millions.

LOG said:

I don't think "recover" is the right word. I doubt ~25K people not paying to see the movie stopped the company from getting even half a million dollars, let alone millions.

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Srsly. What's it cost to get into a movie these days? At $5, that's $125k; at $10, it's $250k. Then you take out the cut for the distributors, the theatres, and everybody else gets a cut, and what's the net to the Voltage Pictures? Millions? Right.

Dommo said:

Here are my problems with this action.

1. The penalty is completely disproportionate to the damage done. I'd say the fine should be the internet equivalent of a speeding ticket. You get caught multiple times the fine goes up, and you lose the intertubes for a year or so.

2. This type of "shakedown" approach is completely open to abuse. Unlike a criminal proceeding, in a civil situation, the burden of proof is a lot lower. This is basically "mafiosi" style extortion, except its given the veil of legitimacy. How about I produce a 90 minute file of white noise, distribute it, then sue for 1k a pop? That's the kind of can of worms this opens up.

3. It keeps "real" criminals from going to jail. When the Internet Providers have to waste their time chasing down teenagers who downloaded back-door sluts 5, they can't respond to subpoenas put in by the FBI or the police, and actual anti-piracy efforts will be coloured by the extortionate practices.

4. Innocent people are going to suffer here, and potentially be devastated financially. Grandma with her unencrypted WAN, is going to end up getting letters to settle, because someone next door pirated a movie. Someone splitting rent with a roommate, who happens to have the internet bill in their name, is going to be put at risk because their roommate pirates shit. The list goes on.

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5. This kind of thing delegitimises actual anti-piracy efforts because John Q Public is not going to side with the lawyer that tries to extort five million dollars from the grandmother of five whose only crime is to use WEP encryption on her wifi.

Don said:

Srsly. What's it cost to get into a movie these days? At $5, that's $125k; at $10, it's $250k. Then you take out the cut for the distributors, the theatres, and everybody else gets a cut, and what's the net to the Voltage Pictures? Millions? Right.

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It also completely ignores the fact that not every illegal download is a lost sale.

Maxinquaye said:

5. This kind of thing delegitimises actual anti-piracy efforts because John Q Public is not going to side with the lawyer that tries to extort five million dollars from the grandmother of five whose only crime is to use WEP encryption on her wifi.

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Do you mean they can only go after the people who encrypt their wifi? would that be b/c without encryption anyone could be hijacking the signal? I always wondered how they (the man) could ever be sure that they were getting the real pirates when, with a wifi, anyone could be using it, right?

Sydewinder said:

Do you mean they can only go after the people who encrypt their wifi? would that be b/c without encryption anyone could be hijacking the signal? I always wondered how they (the man) could ever be sure that they were getting the real pirates when, with a wifi, anyone could be using it, right?

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I suspect that the aforementioned grandmother using WEP had her wifi hacked and used to illegally download.
WEP is an old encryption standard and is easily hacked these days. Most people have upgraded to WPA, which is far more secure.

JimmyB27 said:

I suspect that the aforementioned grandmother using WEP had her wifi hacked and used to illegally download.
WEP is an old encryption standard and is easily hacked these days. Most people have upgraded to WPA, which is far more secure.

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I wonder if leaving your connection open would be a valid defense that, hey, it wasn't me. Someone used my connection.

WEP is often the factory default on many wifi routers. That said, even WPA can be cracked more or less easily, depending on the password used. If it is simple, and easily remembered, it can be cracked in a number of hours. If it consists of letters, numbers and special characters, you're safe.

But in these cases it seems you have to prove your innocense, rather than have the accusers prove your guilt. If they have your IP and a record where your IP was connected to an illegal download, you seem to have to prove that you didn't do it. In the case of the grandmother, she'll be liable for an illegal download one of her grandkids did when they visited.

Sydewinder said:

I wonder if leaving your connection open would be a valid defense that, hey, it wasn't me. Someone used my connection.

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It probably should be. If you leave your car unlocked and someone steals it and plows into a group of school kids, are you liable?
The defense to that would probably be "But you can't prove it wasn't you, whereas in the car you can."
To which I would reply "No, *you* can't prove that it *was* me."

JimmyB27 said:

It probably should be. If you leave your car unlocked and someone steals it and plows into a group of school kids, are you liable?
The defense to that would probably be "But you can't prove it wasn't you, whereas in the car you can."
To which I would reply "No, *you* can't prove that it *was* me."

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The analogy would be closer if you left your keys in the car with it unlocked, and in that case, I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of negligence charge (whether or not it would stick is a whole other thing).


You should be responsible for what happens on your wifi. That being said, WEP is a joke, and WPA isn't a whole lot better. They're both, for anyone determined to get in, trivial.

I've heard of new neighborhood wifi systems getting set up to provide internet access free of charge to lower socioeconomic areas. Like a neighborhood sized hotspot. I wonder how that would change things. Same goes for hotspots like starbucks, or the public library, or hotels ... lots of places to download without getting caught I guess.

I'm giving serious thought to hoisting the Jolly Roger myself. The money isn't a factor, but dealing with the !@$% DRM is just way too much hassle.

In the last year I've had not one, not two but so help me ---> 3 <--- Blu-Ray players die in the middle of their firmware upgrades. Two of them are big paperweights at this point.

At $300ish per player, the costs add up quick, but the money actually isn't my main objection. Even when the damn upgrades DO work, they take an hour or so to complete. I usually work about 70 hours a week. On the rare occasion when I do get a couple of minutes to kick back and watch a movie, I don't want to spend an hour waiting on a !@$$ firmware upgrade. The last straw was Friday before last. I stuck in (IIRC) Crazy Heart. My LG BD-370 went to the web to download yet another upgrade and promptly died. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with customer service, the upshot of which was she's going to mail me a USB with a new firmware. It should arrive in a couple of weeks. Meantime I'm out of luck.

It so happens that I know a couple of truly world class video pirates. They assure me that with a few fairly simple precautions your movie pirating experience can be 100% anonymous.

To get full value out of my spiffy home theater I'd have to invest in a burly media server. I priced it out and I can put one together for about the cost of 3 new blu-ray players.

With any luck I may get to it this weekend.

shawkins said:

I'm giving serious thought to hoisting the Jolly Roger myself. The money isn't a factor, but dealing with the !@$% DRM is just way too much hassle.

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This is one of the reasons I say that the number of illegal downloads is not equal to the number of lost sales. I've bought games before and then downloaded them too to get past the DRM that assumes I'm a thief.

JimmyB27 said:

This is one of the reasons I say that the number of illegal downloads is not equal to the number of lost sales. I've bought games before and then downloaded them too to get past the DRM that assumes I'm a thief.

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I've purchased CD's and then downloaded the songs so I can have a playlist on my comp b/c it's faster than ripping the songs off the CD's. I agree that the majority of pirated works aren't lost sales.

Music piracy was on its way to be eliminated here in Sweden - you know the home of Pirate Bay - because of a service called Spotify.com. It was an awesome service that used an old model in a new way. It used the music radio model in a neat little client, and had 10+ millions o tracks to choose from.

Alas, the recording industry demanded that the music radio model had to go if they were going to allow Spotify to come into the US, and Spotify complied. Now the service seems to be bleeding users to pirate bay again.

It's not just the RIAA you have to worry about if you have an unsecured wi-fi.

FBI Porn Raid Leaves Innocent Family Reeling

Imagine waking up in the morning to the FBI at your door, and accusations involving possession and dissemination of child pornography. That's what happened to a Milford family, who spent two years wondering what might come next.
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For two years the Tracys didn't hear a word from the FBI. They sent letters to government officials demanding resolution.

"The worry and stress and sleepless nights have aged us," said Tracy.

After NewsCenter 5 made inquiries to the FBI, the Tracys were finally called and offered an apology and promised to return their computers.

In a statement the FBI told NewsCenter 5: "We understand it must be very upsetting for innocent people to have their home searched by the FBI. They were victimized by a wireless trespasser."

But the Tracys believe the FBI victimized them, According to police, that wireless trespasser had been living just across the street. Robert Diduca was arrested last November.

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So it took six months and an investigation by a new station for the FBI to step up and clear the family.

Don, I was going to mention a very similar event I heard of a few years ago. The scariest part is you don't have to be on wifi to be accused of child porn, and have it actually go through your computer. A virus (which you could get from the usual downloads and websites) could set up your computer as a child porn server (ISTR this was what happened in the earlier case), the masterminds then sell access to YOUR computer, leaving them out of the loop and all evidence pointing to your computer. All you notice is a little slowdown and some extra flashing of the disk drive and DSL lights. These flash by themselves anyway with all the stuff running in the background such as local file indexing and programs "phoning home" looking for updates.

Then you get a knock on your door...

As for getting pirated file downloads, bittorent seems to be the way it's done thesedays. There are legitimate uses for bittorent (it's how I heard about it ten years ago - companies such as Microsoft were supposedly going to use it for updates), but I've never used it. At this rate there's good reason to never ever use it, even for only legitimate purposes.

Dommo said:

Pirating sucks ass when you consider how much shit you deal with in doing it. Viruses, bad quality video, bugs, etc. Think on that for a second. If someone is willing to spend 8+ hours downloading something that may be a virus infested piece of shit, then I think its a sign that there's a problem with your business model.

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lmao! You hit the nail on the head, Dommo.

benbradley said:

As for getting pirated file downloads, bittorent seems to be the way it's done thesedays. There are legitimate uses for bittorent (it's how I heard about it ten years ago - companies such as Microsoft were supposedly going to use it for updates), but I've never used it. At this rate there's good reason to never ever use it, even for only legitimate purposes.

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A few years ago I worked for a startup that was trying to make a living putting legal content on peer-to-peer networks (bittorrent, limewire,...). The idea was that you, the user, could have your music video/mp3/whatever legally if you'd just sit through a short ad first. We signed up a couple of fairly big content providers to try it, set up a server farm, and away we went.

Within a coupld of months all the peer-to-peer networks had flagged us as bad nodes. (I forget the term, but it's how the protocols filter known virus distributors out of search results). They did it because we were offering legal content, only with ads. The company went out of business a few weeks later. It's hilarious when you think about it.

As if on cue:

U.S. goes on offense against digital piracy

Visitors to these websites are redirected first to a government warning banner bearing the seals of the Department of Justice, the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center and Homeland Security Investigations. The banner states that the government has seized the domain name, that it is illegal to reproduce or distribute copyrighted material without authorization and that willful offenders risk prosecution for criminal felony violation copyright law. If convicted, the banner warns, even first-time offenders "will face up to five years in federal prison," plus "restitution, forfeiture and fine."

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Well, they have to do something, even if it's wrong. The Big Six are too big to fail. They'd probably take the whole economy down with them.