MPAA is Awarded $110 Million In TorrentSpy Case

An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA was awarded a staggering judgment in its case against the BitTorrent indexing site TorrentSpy. According to Slyck.com, a judge in California rendered a $110 million victory for the MPAA, and a permanent injunction against TorrentSpy."

Re:That's all?

[DustyShadow]

Hmm, wasn't this a civil case?

How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!!

[Z-Knight]

For the love of GOD and all that is mighty how the heck is this even possible?!?!?!! Are we electing complete idiots to the courts these days?!?! Oh, wait, don't answer that one.

Torrentspy contained ZERO copyright material...ZERO, NIL, NADA, NOTHING. It contained no songs, no movies, no books, no videos, no nothing. It simply provided a search functionality that I could do on google (money grubbing bastards) today: searchword filetype:torrent

Why isn't google or microsoft or yahoo or any other site stopped from doing this...geezus krist, the Music And Film Industry Association of America (MAFIAA) can go MAFUCKthemselves.

Re:Perspective

[DAldredge]

That isn't the complete picture as you most likely know. "WASHINGTON (AFP) -- The White House said Wednesday that Myanmar had still not answered its offers of aid for cyclone-ravaged areas, and warned that such a silence risked hampering relief efforts. "Everybody can understand that there is no substitute for being there on the ground to help people directly and trying to do so remotely is going to be impossible," said spokeswoman Dana Perino. "Our understanding is, not only have we not heard anything about our disaster team being allowed to go in to implement the help we have offered, but no one has been granted access to go in," she said. The United States has asked Myanmar to grant visas to a US disaster relief team now in neighboring Thailand, so that they can come in and assess aid needs, with about 60,000 people dead or missing in a tropical cyclone's wake. "We are increasingly concerned about the desperate situation that many people are facing there after the cyclone and we stand ready to help," Perino told reporters. "And we will try to help as best we can if we can't get into the country, but not being able to be there to help directly is going to hinder our efforts to help," she added. The White House announced Tuesday that it was offering three million dollars more in aid to the secretive and impoverished country, on top of an initial emergency allocation of 250,000 dollars. It also said that it was prepared to send four US Navy ships, laden with emergency relief supplies like blankets and water purification tablets, to Myanmar. The vessels were off Thailand's coast in a disaster-response exercise. "

Re:Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to completely miss the point.

Re:Future News, MPAA raids isoHunt

[Shadow-isoHunt]

That'd not be a good idea on their part. isoHunt is hosted in Toronto right now, and Gary's a Canadian citizen that'd battle it out in a Canadian court(possibly while relocating to another country). We also comply with DMCA takedown notices(even though we don't have to) - assuming they follow our copyright policy [isohunt.com] - and current legal proceedings in California aren't going as planned for them. [isohunt.com]

Re:LOL

[JFitzsimmons]

They didn't host them; they indexed other sites that did.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAL, but it AFAICS bans:
<quote>"Defendant, and its officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys, and all those in active concert or participation with Defendant who receive actual notice of this Permanent Injunction shall immediately and permanently be enjoined from directly, indirectly, contributorily, or vicariously infringing in any manner any Copyrighted Works..."</quote>

So presumably, valence media is a proper company, not just a trading name, the MPAA have won against the company, so they have to cease operations (within the US), and their 'officers, agents, employees', must not go about infringing copyrights, but that's presumably when acting in those capacities, not on their own time. Similarly for their attorneys, and 'all those in active concert or participation with Defendant who receive actual notice of this Permanent Injunction' presumably is a fancy way of saying 'the other people named in the suit'.
So all they have to do it jump ship, set up another shell company, and put their expertise to use doing exactly the same thing - the most they lose is the hardware & office furtniture. Next time, they just need to remember to set up shop in a country with less batshit-insane courts.

Re:Perspective

[Grimbleton]

That would imply that Ford invented cars. Which he didn't.

Re:How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!!

[Gutboy]

Except, theres no such crime as accessory to copyright infringement, or 'contributory infringement'. It doesn't exist, the RIAA/MPAA wants there to be one very badly, but such a thing doesn't exist

Time for you to read the DMCA. Contributory infringement [chillingeffects.org] is alive and well.

Re:How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!!

[mrbcs]

Google does its best to remove pirate sites from being indexed, does it not?

Have you ever even used Google? Search for "something" Torrent ok?

The court's order...

[crankyspice]

...is online here: http://www.packetlaw.com/documents/public/MPAA_vs_ValenceMedia_final_judgment.pdf [packetlaw.com]

Re:Congrats MPAA...

[piojo]

Yes. That's typical, in the US legal system. For example, if a patent is infringed upon, the owner of the patent can sue the the inventer/owner, the manufacturer, and the organization that is selling the infringing product.

(At least, this is my impression, and I don't remember where I heard or read this.)

Re:LOL

[geniusj]

This really shouldn't be all that crippling for the individuals involved. It appears that it was a corporation. The corporation is therefore liable, not the individuals involved. Corp goes bankrupt, liquidates, and everyone goes on with their lives. It's not a financial death sentence for the officers, etc.

Re:Perspective

[mr_matticus]

You can't own information and to pretend anyone does is stupid.

And anyone who believes (or disingenuously argues) that the 'property' in Intellectual Property is the information is dumber still, to the point of being what my neighbor from Texas calls a slack-jawed idjit.

As for the incentive argument, it's questionable.

It's really not. Protections in place protect a creator's ability to choose to reap the rewards of his invention in whatever manner he sees fit, not the manner a greedy bystander with entitlement issues and an Internet-connected computer chooses.

I don't care that this is Slashdot. People need to grow up and face the simple reality that IP is the only thing that secures an information-based economy. It's a mechanism that needs to be tweaked and maintained, but it's absolutely essential to the first world staying the first world.

If you create something and go through the effort of making something that has commercial value, it's yours to control, exclusively, for the duration of the patent or your life as a copyright. Nothing that is copyrighted is needed by anyone else to advance human society. There is no penalty and no loss by giving authors lifetime control of their creative works. If they want to share it with everyone, they're free to do so. If they want to squeeze every last penny out of it, they can do that too.

It's not yours. It's as simple as that.

Re:LOL

[fishbowl]

>Imagine it like giving someone more than one life term. What's up with that anyway?

1. Usually this is a result of being given separate sentences for individual counts. It means
the convict is being sentenced for each victim. If somebody kills three people and only gets one
sentence, they are getting two "free crimes" from the victim's / survivor's point of view. If the
sentence is something like a max of 20 years, and the convict does not get sentenced twice for two crimes,
which of the two victims is not getting justice?

2. A life term has eligibility for parole. Multiple sentences affect this eligibility in a profound way.
Plenty of people with life sentences are out in the world in 15-20 years on parole, sometimes less. Consecutive sentences make it much less likely to happen.

3. When multiple sentences are made, an appeal may overturn one of them, but not all of them, because an appeals court may find error in one case or problems in one jurisdiction. If a sentence is suspended while an appeal is pending, another concurrent sentence can keep the convict locked up.

Re:*shrug*

[Slawshdork]

Yes. I explain. [blogspot.com]

Re:Perspective

[fishbowl]

>No, the US thinks the people of Burma will cost $30 each to save. Big difference. Since many of them could be
>saved just by properly burying the dead, there is some plausibility to this low figure.

Now this is something I hear repeated after each disaster. But the biological/epidemiological basis for the claim is not there! Dead bodies, at least those killed in a natural disaster, are not inherently dangerous, and the risks of the spread of contagions is *much* higher with the living survivors than the corpses. As long as you isolate the fresh water supply from the corpses, it is better to not try to "properly bury them" right away. The labor involved in doing that can be put to far better purpose. If you hastily start burying the dead, you fail to document the victims and you make it impossible to ever get accurate counts. 24 hours after the flood or whatever, all the bodies are the same temperature as the surrounding environment, and the bodies start decaying, but the organisms that cause the decay are not really dangerous.

Unless a particular corpse was a person with a highly contagious disease to begin with, it's not really the biggest problem, and it should not be the survivor/rescue worker's first priority to try to bury the dead. And this is exactly how disaster relief personnel are trained, and I can put you in touch with professionals in health care, including several MD's and one MD/Ph.D. epidemiologist who will confirm what I'm saying in much more detail than I can.

Dead bodies smell bad and are demoralizing and frightening in a primal way, but they DO NOT inherently cause the spread of disease.

You guys should read the post above!

[mrmike37]

This judgment was a SANCTION, and was not adjudicated on the merits: "having terminated this case as a sanction for Defendants' misconduct and having entered default, now renders final judgment as to all claims of Plaintiffs against Defendant Valence Media LLC."

Re:LOL

[arkhan_jg]

Vicarious copyright infringement is actually a specific offence of indirect copyright infringement in the US. It's where someone has a direct financial interest in the infringing actions being committed by another and has the ability to control it, even if they do not know that the infringement is taking place and do not directly take part in it.

The other form of indirect infringement, contributory infringement, requires (1) knowledge of the infringing activity and (2) a material contribution -- actual assistance or inducement -- to the alleged piracy.

These are the laws that were used to bring down napster. In the US, because of these laws, running a tracker is actually pretty illegal. It's assisting others to breach copyright even if you yourself don't, and the tracker itself has no copyrighted material.

And yes, google should be worried. By indexing the content of sites such as torrentspy, they potentially open themselves up to the same charges. They bought youtube specifically to get in on the lawsuit by viacom, so they could help affect the judgement.

Note, one of the big differences with the piratebay is that sweden does not have offences of contributary or vicarious copyright infringement, so running a tracker is legal there.

Re:Perspective

[mr_matticus]

You want coherent and logical? Simple. If you've got at least half a functioning brain, it's not that complicated.

Property at law, in its simplest definition, is an exclusive right. Intellectual Property is a term of convenience, just like "Family law". The property is the copyright, the patent, the trademark, the contractual instrument, etc. Hell, it says right in the Copyright Act that information isn't owned, and spending a little time with how the law has evolved would confirm the distinction between what is and is not property.

Likewise, your real property isn't the land (because no one has the authority to give you, and you don't have the power to own, land itself). It's your legal rights to control the land, which may or may not be comprehensive, depending on what sort of title you have.

Metonymic extension by the laity is regrettable, much like your attempt at humor.

Re:Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

All cars outside of FORD are also based on STOLEN intellectual Property.

Err, what? You are aware that the car - specifically, the engine that pretty much all modern cars use - was invented by Karl Benz, right?