MPAA is Awarded $110 Million In TorrentSpy Case 523
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."
Congrats MPAA... (Score:4, Insightful)
LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure the defendants have no where near $110 million, and if they have to keep paying it out of income they receive in the future, what's the point of even working?
Might as well squat an abandoned building in New Orleans instead. Move to some remote wilderness area and live off the land. Sounds like much better options than paying that kind of debt down.
Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
*shrug* (Score:5, Insightful)
More fool them.
Re:That's all? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why start playing by the rules now?
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*shrug* (Score:5, Insightful)
No crime, but still punished. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No crime, but still punished. (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:No crime, but still punished. (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
The US does plenty of stuff to be criticized for. That's not one of them. Way to go for cheap karma farming on slashkos though.
Re:No crime, but still punished. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
To put that into perspective, that is about 24 minutes worth of war in Iraq.
Re:What is the method of determining damages? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:*shrug* (Score:5, Insightful)
More fool them.
Re:LOL (Score:3, Insightful)
What do you have to lose if you are already wrecked financially for life as you have that on your credit history preventing you from even renting a dump apartment?
Its not just that you have to pay 2/3 your income the rest of your life to the bastards, you will never have one again.
And all this for hosting torrent files? This is bloody insane.
someone forgot to tell the immigrants (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just the beginning..
Re:And people wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
[1] If the government was so concerned about the national security from using non licensed Cisco products, why are they not worried about using the "real" Cisco approved products made in the same plant by the same people?
Re:Perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
Copyright laws help bring about all the things in life which you take for granted. Take a look around your room - I guarantee that every item you see at least partly owes it's existence to intellectual property laws. Those laws helped encourage people to invent and create, which in turn enriched out culture and our society. Without them, chances are that you wouldn't give a damn about the "value" of human life. You'd be too worried about where your next meal would come from.
Re:How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
You are, as an individual, either personally infringing, or your not.
Telling you a drug dealer lives down the street does not make me 'contributing to narcotic distribution' (or whatever the fuck we'd call it) anymore than telling you theres an illegal copy of a movie at www.torrentsite.com/illegalshit.torrent makes me responsible with what you do with that information.
Information, and acting on that information are two different things. Thats why you can download the specs for building a goddamn H bomb off the net.
Knowledge truly is free, thats not some open source feel good slogan, its true. What is done with that knowledge is the important part, and the only part thats actionable.
United States (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the whole world laughing. At you.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait until the lawsuits roll in from every other movie studio, tv producer, music studio and porn maker that they held torrents for. They're going to end up owing more than the GDP of the world as a whole.
Damn you Glan Dickman, Damn you! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm looking at you, Disney.
And to you, c6gunner, I'm not saying that copyright shouldn't exist, but perhaps... the original 14 year timeframe was adequate. The film, Iron Man, made $100,000,000 in three days of sales, in 14, 50, or well over one hundred years can Hollywood justify why it needs to retain the sole distribution rights to something that was envisioned by someone who has already died? (Referring to the 100+ year copyright terms most countries have these days.)
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
$110m to the RIAA/MPAA is caviar lunch on thursday.
Re:Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
All cars outside of FORD are also based on STOLEN intellectual Property.
so we either play by your rules and roll back to the dark ages, or we play sane and copy the crap out of everyones idea and actually move foreward in technology.
I'm for copying the every living hell out of everything.
Re:Perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, I think you're confusing copyright and patents at least on some level. Most physical inventions are protected by patents, not copyright. As for the incentive argument, it's questionable. There's free software as well as all kinds of content out there available for free. People who create it don't have any incentive in the sense you imply, yet they keep doing it, and they can do so because of copyright.
So I have to disagree to your attempt at putting copyright and patents together as if they were both nothing more than making money for the authors. It's a misrepresentation of both.
They proved a point or two. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't do business in the US because there is no free press there. It's the Napster case all over again and the courts have learned nothing in the last decade. Their lust to protect what they perceive as a big US business interest has them reaching these absurd rulings for tenuous secondary encouragement of copyright infringement. The fact that it's impossible for anyone to tell who "owns" a digital file is reason to rethink copyright not destroy people's ability to share things they have every right to share. Decisions like this will leave the US a broadcast backwater in a world that's bursting with free culture.
Re:Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
does squat for my current standard of living. This is ENTERTAINMENT
we're talking about here and copyright. Even if we were talking about
the right sort of IP (IOW, PATENTS) you're still wildly off the mark
as most of human advancement in the sciences is done through academic
cooperation rather than cut-throat capitalistic competition.
If 100 years ago, patents were like modern copyrights then all of the
cushy conveniences YOU take for granted wouldn't exist.
They would be sued out of existence.
Tivo is a nice case in point here.
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
I have travelled extensively through poor African and Pacific nations. I have dressed in many different ways, although usually in clothing similar to what I wear down the street in the first world nation I live in.
Not only have the people in the ghettos valued human life highly, they are not afraid to show it.
I have epilepsy and after having a seizure at a slum in Nairobi I found that while unconscious I had been collected, taken to a taxi and the fare paid to take me to a hospital. My passport, wallet etc was safe and sound.
If you are too scared to explore some of these countries yourself, I don't think you should paint their people as blood-thirsty tyrants.
Open-source it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. The printing press wasn't created with intellectual property laws. The wheel wasn't created to be patented. Houses were not created with IP. The greatest poems, stories, and music in history were created by authors with no concept of copyright. Medical and scientific breakthroughs - penicillin, radiation, relativity, electromagnetism, chemistry, gravitation - were not made for IP, but for the use of all - the exact opposite of IP. Man's greatest achievement, his ascent to the moon - and the myriad technologies that quest created - was not fueled by a search for patents.
What keeps me safe and secure is not copyright, it is the society I live in and the value placed on human life and liberty by those who surround me, along with the willingness of the government to protect me with police and military force. What allows me to make money and provide for myself and my family is my intelligence, education and ability to solve problems that people want solved, not laws about what I can or can't do with knowledge and information.
Copyright has jack shit to do with how I am able to secure my lifestyle, except insofar as it prevents me from fully enjoying the cultural heritage that has been created over the last 70 years. The other major form of IP, patents, have encouraged some people to create some things - and at the same time have locked away the best technologies of the century behind proprietary bars, in many cases not even being used by the companies that "invented" them, and have wasted countless time and money from government, corporations and individuals that have to deal with the bureaucratic abomination of the patent system.
Re:LOL (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:One Hundred and Ten MILLION Dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
All the money would goto lawyers who would buy two more resorts in Panama.
And the actors and directors would be none-the-less-wiser.
I say the actors guild should sue the MPAA now and ask the Judge to hold the money in an Escrow account until accounting is resolved.
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a difficult issue. (Score:4, Insightful)
If outside commercial pressure is the root cause of the devastation, then the blood price (as the Celts referred to it) should be a function of the gain from that pressure, not simply a function of the need ultimately caused by it. To deprive others of environmentally-provided protection from the inevitable is a crime against society. Indirectness is no excuse if the chain of events is pre-determined and inescapable. However, nobody at this point has identified that that was the reason the mangroves were cut down, so this is no more than an if/then.
If this was an internal political decision, then I fail to see the importance of the politicians. America has never respected sovereign status on any other issue, when it has been convenient, so why recognize it when it is not an issue of convenience but life itself?
If this was a local decision, made in the knowledge that it was completely suicidal, well, if we are now recognizing the right of individuals to terminate their own lives of their own free will, and societies are merely the product of the consensus of individuals, what right do we have to deny soieties the right to terminate themselves? Again, this is an if/then, not a judgement or an opinion of whether this was in fact what happened.
Re:Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
But no civilization (or individual) "has" to survive. That is a choice. It is a choice reflected less by that civilization's attitude towards itself as it is reflected by that civilization's attitude towards others. That is why civilizations with a poor attitude decay, wither and die. It may take a while - the fall of the Roman Empire was spread over 800 years - but if rot is what you give, rot is all you'll have. It may seem a paradox that it is in the giving that you gain, but it is the unmutable truth.
Re:Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright laws have nothing to do with the clothes I am wearing.
Copyright laws have nothing to do with the chair I'm sitting on.
Copyright laws have nothing to do with the light on my desk.
Re:LOL (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:LOL (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:LOL (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
IP protection to creators and inventors are important because of the need to balance creation with production. In an ideal world, IP laws would only allow the creators enough protection to produce enough (or sell enough software if you don't consider duplicating software as production) product to recoup the costs of creating the success, the costs of creating previous and future failures and make some damn profit.
Without IP laws preventing a 3rd party from immediately taking a creators idea and producing it, you would have little incentive to create because you couldn't make any money off of it. Not only that, you'd find that the most powerful companies would merely be copy cat manufacturers without RnD budgets that would beat the little guy with their economies of scale.
I think copyright should be until the creator's death, and maybe a +10 years from creator's death for creator's assigns. Not this in perpetuity crap.
I think the patent durations might be a touch too long however, the real issue is the frivolity of many patents, not their durations.
No one has unlimited resources (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:LOL (Score:2, Insightful)
If you are screwed-over by the corporations-and-courts system, wouldn't it make more sense to direct your angst away from yourself and towards the source ?
Re:Perspective (Score:1, Insightful)
lol! You realise that you're posting on a thread which indicates that the USofA is corrupt as hell? $110 fine for helping ppl to watch films lol. Did I mention 'lol' ?
Re:Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What is the method of determining damages? (Score:1, Insightful)
The best democracy that money can buy too.
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*shrug* (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
>anyways.
From their point of view, they see permanent risks of letting the camel's nose under their tent in response to a temporary crisis. And the value of all this "aid for Burma" is somewhat limited, and coming from nations that are bitter enemies of their very system of government. The dead can't be helped. Nothing is going to bring back the season for the agricultural sector. No amount of "aid" is going to suddenly create an infrastructure that can deal any better with millions of refugees than they can do at this moment themselves. But from the perspective of the Myanmar government (totalitarian asshole dictatorship that it is), it's quite insulting for all these wealthy nations to assume that they can't handle the aftermath of this storm.
I'm not defending them, but I can see why it's difficult for them to accept foreign aid, especially from some of the countries that are offering it, in the amounts being offered. They realize (correctly!) that leaders of some of the countries offering aid would very much like to see the Myanmar government replaced. Why should they be expected to let their guard down when they are weakened? The country will recover from the storm one way or another.
Politics aside, after seeing how the US dealt with New Orleans would *you* invite them to YOUR disaster?
Re:They proved a point or two. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:*shrug* (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, and yet no. Google is simply too big for MPAA/RIAA to go after. Googles lawyers can keep a case like this tied up in courts for decades and the MAFIAA knows this.
But in reality it is exactly the same thing. The court actually said that despite efforts to remove copyrighted materials, despite inplementing a tool that made it easy for rights owners to remove their IP, TorrentSpy are still liable for the stuff they index. Google indexes millions of pages containing illegal stuff, from kiddie porn, over terrorist manuals to IP in all its forms, and they've made no effort to make it easy to remove these things from the index (which would be censorship, but still), so if TorrentSpy is liable, so is Google and to a much higher degreee.
Re:Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
But what are those consequences? A deprived society consumes more than it produces, it is a drain on the economy of the world and a burden to all. A reconstructed society produces more than it consumes and will regenerate the cost of the reconstruction. A society that can pay for itself and more is a society that has repaid those who invest in it being such. A fool might argue that others could benefit too. They probably won't. You tend to receive what you put into other's lives. (You gain almost nothing from what you put into your own life. Hedonists tend to have empty lives and emptier pockets.) An optimal life is therefore one that gives much and gives appropriately. (There are fascinating charts on the different forms of giving and how useful they are. Many forms of giving are not giving at all and are quite useless.)
This is mathematically provable, but it has also been the cornerstone of many a social awakening throughout history. The earliest philosopher-scientists tended to be ascetics, which is going a bit too far, but their underlying principle that all things are linked and that you cannot attain insight or wisdom through the exclusion of a part of life, is sound. That same underlying principle can be found in all social efforts to develop progressive, compassionate societies with minimal suffering.
I've chosen those words carefully, and a few might recognize what becomes the first step. All of life is suffering, and that includes the suffering of fools and idiots. Pomposity, grandiosity, nationalism, copy-cat-ism - they feel great, but ultimately stem from deluded thinking. They are a way of hiding suffering or blaming our actions on others, rather than take responsibility for ourselves. If you believe yourself responsible for your decisions, then the decisions of another are merely the scenery passing by. It is analogous to a full-information scenario. Your strategy, if fundamentally correct, is determined only by the scenario - although the reverse is not true. Not everything determined only by the scenario is correct. It is strictly a one-way function.
If wisdom is ever found in the mouths of children, it is because those adults have lost sight of what matters. Think more like a child, not in their stupidity but in their wisdom. They're smart enough to recognize that many of the things you attach so much weight to just don't matter. They're chimera, impermanent details of the moment, the illusions of ignorance, and have nothing to do with an optimal life.
If you prefer, look at it holistically. A healthy world is like a healthy body. It doesn't matter where a cancer starts, or what mechanisms in the body ignore it, if you fail to treat it, it will kill you. It is of no importance if the spleen fails to pull its own weight, you do what is needed and benefit yourself, or you punish your body to punish the spleen and you will die. If you do what you need to do in the first place, though, the odds of that cancer ever forming are greatly reduced and the odds of you overcoming the harm quickly are greatly increased. That must be your concern, not what some insignificant bunch of cells somewhere decides. (Of course, they do help, it greatly simplifies your task, but the effective cure must be independent of who does what, and be solely dependent on what needs doing getting done.)
This is neither left nor right, neither karmic or non-karmic, it simply is.
Re:LOL (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They proved a point or two. (Score:1, Insightful)
Two questions then:
1. Why is it impossible to do business in a place without a free press? Please describe in detail the micromechanical sequence by which business will be impossible.
2. What is the definition of a free press, and by this definition, which countries have a free press considering that the US doesn't? It would be good if you could refer to any European countries you know about, because that's where I am from.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:nice while it lasted (Score:2, Insightful)
Neither did he, nor his advisors. I don't know about the guys who write the presidential speeches, though.
Re:Perspective (Score:1, Insightful)
Exactly how has copyright prevented you from enjoying the "cultural heritage" of the last 70 years? If you look at history, there have been forms of IP laws since 500 BC. Do you really know about your famous inventors and their IP stances? Thomas Edison had over 1000 patents to his name at the time of his death. I could go on, but anyone can use google for themselves. In closing, don't be so naive that you actually think that there weren't the same IP problems 500 years ago as there are now.
Re:Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
What would happen is that nobody would be willing to go into anything but the most mundane businesses. Who in the world would put their entire life's assets constantly at risk, especially in the Sue S.A., where misfortune is looked upon as a stroke of good luck.
For example, I was witness to this conversation:
Person #1: "...and they had to amputate his arm."
Person #2: "Oh man he's going to get millions! I'd let them chop off my arm for a million."
Also, the corporate shield is not magically impenetrable. If there's gross negligence, for instance, or fraud.
Re:nice while it lasted (Score:4, Insightful)
Makes you wonder if he also said anything to the effect of "wars are advocated only by persons who have not been killed in one" or "capital punishment is advocated only by persons who have not been executed." Somehow I doubt it.
Goes to show that eloquence and logic don't always go hand in hand.
Re:Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
copyright law allows the free market to decide which types of art get funding(i.e. everyone gets to vote) rather than how it used to be, a few very wealthy patrons + the government determining a large body of artwork out there.
In the case of art works, the original has no value without some type of restriction of reproduction.
This, in the end, is just one of those funny verdicts that makes me think of Dr. Evil. Torrent Spy did break the law as it has already been interpreted. It would have taken a great case and no shady actions by them to pull off a victory(though it was possible). But then, who cares if it's a 110 mm dollar verdict or 1mm dollar verdict. The company doesn't have 7 figures of money... I doubt it has 6 figures of money even after taking into account the value of all it's assets. They have probably been draining most cash and assets to pay for lawyers for the last 2 years so the MPAA really gets absolutely nothing in the end.
The debate shouldn't be about what the courts ought to have done(the interpreted the law as is). The debate should be about what copyright law needs to be modified to in the 21st century. of course, as long as it remains just this easy to break copyright laws, I doubt anyone will expend the energy or political clout to tackle this issue. It's just not worth it for the vast majority of people. The RIAA has probably not even gotten around to suing 10,000 people. That is against probably 80 million people in the US committing infringement (and countless more around the world). Really, what kind of political movement can be started by 10,000 people who had to pay a 3k fine? We have bigger problems (really, we do in this country) to worry about what kind of fine you should pay for breaking a long standing law.