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."
nice while it lasted (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Congrats MPAA... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Congrats MPAA... (Score:4, Funny)
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:They proved a point or two. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Congrats MPAA... (Score:4, Interesting)
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(At least, this is my impression, and I don't remember where I heard or read this.)
Re:Congrats MPAA... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Buy our product or we'll sue you!".
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-- Ambrose Bierce (Also, quoted in a Civ4 soundbite by Leonard Nimoy)
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.
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.
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Re:LOL (Score:5, Informative)
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:LOL (Score:4, Funny)
Re:LOL (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Informative)
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move to a foreign country? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:LOL (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:5, 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:Perspective (Score:5, Informative)
>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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A wicked idea to pay them back (Score:5, Funny)
Give them three pirated Britney Spears albums. Apparently that's worth about $110 million according to the RIAA.
I can't believe that! (Score:5, Funny)
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Meh, Burma... Israel is where it's at. 3 Billion a year [wikipedia.org] or so ought to do it.
Re:Perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
- displace an entire people
- foment decades of unrest, misery, and death
- attempt to force the hand of god
sounds like something we'd do on a weekend, really.
((btw, I think you meant 'wahrgeld', weregild sounds like something that becomes gold-plated during the full moon which, admittedly, is a cool concept))
Re:Perspective (Score:4, Informative)
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:5, Insightful)
To put that into perspective, that is about 24 minutes worth of war in Iraq.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Perspective (Score:5, Funny)
Now that would be an appropriate analogy, but only if the hobo were a quadriplegic schizophrenic crack addict and if I were, say, the sole owner of ConAgra foods. And we were standing in one of my Peter Pan Peanut Butter factories.
asshole hobos.
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
$110m to the RIAA/MPAA is caviar lunch on thursday.
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
And do you know *why* we're not invited? (Score:5, Interesting)
Watch the video of our "offer". [youtube.com]
Bush turned this from a humanitarian offer to help into part of his "exporting freedom" routine. He wants to have our Navy set up there. He mentions political change.
With what we've been up to lately, can you blame these people for saying no? I can't.
Re:And do you know *why* we're not invited? (Score:5, Interesting)
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So much hatred...
It's not his fault ... he's just been playing GTA IV for the last 8 hours straight.
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, Funny)
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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:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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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 gro
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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 betwe
Re: (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 wo
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.
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.
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This happens in societies where the law allows a small handful of people to suck all the wealth of a country, leaving nothing to the majority of people. This is the norm for turd-world countries such as Mexico, where people are forced in such abject poverty that all too often, their only way
*shrug* (Score:5, Insightful)
More fool them.
Re:*shrug* (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*shrug* (Score:5, Interesting)
They've made INDEXING files illegal, please note they got nailed despite setting up services that let copyright holders take down stuff they owned.
The Legal team over at google is looking at this and going 'oh fuck no'.
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:*shrug* (Score:5, Insightful)
More fool them.
What is the method of determining damages? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What is the method of determining damages? (Score:4, Funny)
The RIAA went after AllofMP3.com for 1.6 trillion (with a T). And here the MPAA could only get a 110 million judgment? What's wrong with them? The MPAA has only 1/15000 of the muscle of the RIAA??? Pishya, amateurs....
d
Re:What is the method of determining damages? (Score:5, Insightful)
Future News, MPAA raids isoHunt (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Future News, MPAA raids isoHunt (Score:5, Informative)
And next week... (Score:3, Interesting)
...there's another site doing the exact same thing, located in a different country.
Attempting to fight these sites is entirely ineffective, and won't even scare the populace like suing individuals does. As for the $110 million, well... good luck? I wouldn't bet on getting more than 1%.
How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!! (Score:5, Informative)
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:How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Have you ever even used Google? Search for "something" Torrent ok?
Re:How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Time for you to read the DMCA. Contributory infringement [chillingeffects.org] is alive and well.
Re:How is this even possible!!?!?!?!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is just the beginning..
Seems like a fair judgement (Score:5, Funny)
Number Two: Don't you think we should ask for *more* than a million dollars? A million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Virtucon alone makes over 9 billion dollars a year! Dr. Evil: Really? That's a lot of money.
[pause]
Dr. Evil: Okay then, we hold the world ransom for...
Dr. Evil: One... Hundred... BILLION DOLLARS!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
someone forgot to tell the immigrants (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Judge is Awarded $? million in TorrentSpy Case (Score:4, Interesting)
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm guessing that... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2008/02/default-judgment-denied-in-atlantic-v.html [blogspot.com]
Chances of the judgement being overturned on appeal: 100%.
Whack-A-Mole (Score:3, Interesting)
1. DRM
2. Congress
Expect to see both. Heavier use of elaborate schemes like those used for Blu-Ray recordings and downloadable media. Branding the owner's ID into the media so copies are traceable. Real use of certificates to manage keys, mandating only online playback.
More stringent use of legal remedies, and criminalization of copyright infringement. WIPO treaties allowing international cooperation in pursuing violators. Tying government aid to enforcement initiatives.
Enjoy it while the fun lasts.
United States (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the whole world laughing. At you.
Open-source it! (Score:3, Insightful)
One Hundred and Ten MILLION Dollars (Score:3, Funny)
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.
If they can't collect, what happens? (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if it is not turned over on appeal, it is not like they are even going to collect 1% of that money in the forseeable future.
What I wonder is what happens in a situation like this? If a person has $50,000 in assets and makes $20,000 a year, and they get, say, a $10,000,000 judgement rendered against them, how the hell is it paid for? Debtor's jail doesn't exist anymore, does it?
$30,000 per infringment? (Score:3, Interesting)
The court's order... (Score:4, Informative)
You guys should read the post above! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That's all? (Score:4, Informative)
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Why start playing by the rules now?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When you're operating as close to the edge of the law as they were, you need to be extremely careful about what you do. A simple statement of "We are not responsible" isn't sufficient if, by your actions, you demonstrate that you are encouraging illegal behavior.
Re:No crime, but still punished. (Score:5, Interesting)
The days of Ragnar Benson [wikipedia.org] have almost faded away into memory.
The companies that used to publish "action books" have almost completely abandoned that genre.
Can you imagine the firestorm if a company started publishing Paladin Press-style books today? In our post-9/11 world? Ha!
Re:No crime, but still punished. (Score:5, Insightful)
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