MPAA Sues Hotfile for 'Staggering' Copyright Infringement 213
The lawsuit, filed by the MPAA against Hotfile, is on behalf of 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures, and Warner Brothers. "The MPAA argues that Hotfile not only encourages its users to upload illegal content, but actively discourages them from uploading files for personal use, because the site offers incentives for users to upload the most popular files (which invariably end up being copyrighted movies). And because the site charges membership fees before people can download the content uploaded by others, the MPAA says Hotfile 'profits richly while paying nothing to the studios' for the bootleg files."
Incentive structure discourages noninfringing use (Score:5, Informative)
When a bank robber drives to the bank he is going to stick up no one suggests banning driving or suing the road designer; how is this any different?
The difference is that the site's incentive structure actively discourages noninfringing use, unlike roads and automobiles whose design generally does not discourage noncriminal use. Copyright has a long-established doctrine of secondary liability [wikipedia.org]. If the maker of a product or service knows that infringement is occurring using the product or service, and the product or service has no substantial noninfringing use, the maker of the product or service is a contributory infringer. If the maker of a product or service profits from infringing use that it has power to prevent, the maker of the product or service is a vicarious infringer.
Re:Ergh. I hate this. (Score:5, Informative)
Eh, isn't your ISP profiting off P2P, especially if you have some form of usage-based billing, or are paying extra for higher speed and/or transfer cap?
As for the "must pay to download", it's blatant bullshit -- all these sites (hotfile, rapidshare, megaupload, and a host of others) offer basic service for free and charge more for premium -- typically free users get something like 1 download at a time, 30-60 seconds staring at ads before you can start a download, and maybe a 1GB/hour download limit. If you pay for a membership, you get fewer or no ads, no delays, and greatly relaxed limits on downloading.
Using bittorrent, where your download bandwidth is provided by some other bittorrent user's upload bandwidth, everyone only sees bandwidth on the order of one file. Here you're downloading from a server farm, which sees the aggregate load of all downloaders -- and that has to be paid for somehow. You're not paying for the content, you're paying for (or watching ads to pay for) transport -- all the "xxxx should be treated like a common carrier" arguments apply here.
And, like bittorrent, there are legitimate uses -- I've seen some open-source software distributed this way (little scripts where the author didn't have a web server), and one Android tablet has even got official firmware updates from the manufacturer via rapidshare.
you can download from hotfile with paying a fee (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Plausible (Score:4, Informative)
However, the summary is misleading here:
And because the site charges membership fees before people can download the content uploaded by others, ...
Hotfiles allows for downloads (though at limited speeds) for non-premium accounts too.
Re:Good sites like Hotfiles are a blight (Score:4, Informative)
Complying with DMCA notices isn't really sufficient. The EFF has a pretty good analysis of the status quo of US copyright law: https://www.eff.org/wp/iaal-what-peer-peer-developers-need-know-about-copyright-law [eff.org]
Re:Incentive structure discourages noninfringing u (Score:5, Informative)
When a bank robber drives to the bank he is going to stick up no one suggests banning driving or suing the road designer; how is this any different?
The difference is that the site's incentive structure actively discourages noninfringing use, unlike roads and automobiles whose design generally does not discourage noncriminal use. Copyright has a long-established doctrine of secondary liability [wikipedia.org]. If the maker of a product or service knows that infringement is occurring using the product or service, and the product or service has no substantial noninfringing use, the maker of the product or service is a contributory infringer. If the maker of a product or service profits from infringing use that it has power to prevent, the maker of the product or service is a vicarious infringer.
Remember when Sony was sued for helping people infringe copyright by selling Betamax VCRs?
The "Beta can be used to make illegal copies" lawsuit alerted more people that such could be done and Sony sold a bit more units because of this newly publicised use-case.
Lets not kid ourselves, Betamax cassettes were primarily used to "pirate" TV or other cassettes; Sony knew this hence: double cassette "duplication" models, models with timed recording settings, etc.
So, Universal sues Sony -- Sony Inc. v Universal Studios [wikipedia.org]:
The Court's 5-4 ruling to reverse the Ninth Circuit in favor of Sony hinged on the possibility that the technology in question had significant non-infringing uses, and that the plaintiffs were unable to prove otherwise.
On the question of whether Sony could be described as "contributing" to copyright infringement, the Court stated:
[There must be] a balance between a copyright holder's legitimate demand for effective - not merely symbolic - protection of the statutory monopoly, and the rights of others freely to engage in substantially unrelated areas of commerce. Accordingly, the sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses....
(emphasis mine)
So, WTF, file sharing services meet the qualification of merely being capable of substantial noninfringing uses.
It's amazing how X on a Computer or X on the Internet somehow requires a whole new legal precedent rather than just X on a cassette or CD.
Ignorant judges and jurors are the main cause of my copyright rage today... It's quite simple to understand, yet blows my mind on a regular basis just how ignorant the general public (including courts) are about such things.
File sharing technology much like Sony, has made available something that could help people infringe copyright; In neither case does the file sharing site or Sony's Betamax cassettes require that the users infringe copyright. If someone does infringe copyright using a file sharing service, Bittorrent search site, or a Betamax cassette then you don't hold the creator of the tools in use responsible.
Hint: Betamax cassettes, blank CDs, blank DVDs, Flash USB drives, magnetic hard drives, the Internet, file sharing protocols & websites -- All these things havesubstantial noninfringing uses. The DMCA exists, if the MPAA issuing take-down notices and the hosts are not removing the content, they lose safe harbor and may be culpable. Simply charging for a service (or for Betamax cassettes) which can be used to commit copyright infringement, does not imply contributory infringement.
Re:Ergh. I hate this. (Score:3, Informative)
So Pirate Bay is registered as a non-profit and has open books that are freely auditable?
What difference does that make? I don't have to register as a non-profit to not make money.
Sure, it's all speculation, but I agree with the GP that between operating the site and paying lawyers and other professionals, there's probably not a lot of profit in running the Pirate Bay.
Pro bono, or pro-Bono? (Score:4, Informative)
people are constantly stealing their content and then slamming them for protecting it.
The movie studios are notorious for taking from the commons without giving back. Walt Disney Pictures especially is known for adapting films, often right after they go out of copyright (such as Pinocchio and The Jungle Book), and then closing the barn door behind it by not only successfully lobbying for successive legislative extensions of the term of copyright in all works published during the existence of the company but also acting like it owns the original work and harassing smaller studios that make their own adaptations. Case in point: Disney owns a trademark on "Pinocchio" for dolls [uspto.gov], so good luck selling toys based on your own film adaptation of Collodi's novel. Disney has also sued GoodTimes Entertainment over "trade dress" rights in the packaging of its direct-to-video adaptations of the same stories that Disney had adapted.
Publishers of proprietary computer programs such as Apple also own copyrights. But some Slashdot users have a better view of Apple and tolerate its action to defend its copyright in Mac OS X (Apple v. Psystar) in part because Apple does charitable work by contributing to Darwin, WebKit, and select other free software projects. If the major record labels and major motion picture studios were to do some analogous pro bono work* by releasing some of their back catalog under a license for free cultural works [freedomdefined.org], Slashdot users might have a better opinion of them.
* That's pro bono [wikipedia.org], not pro-Bono [wikipedia.org].
No safe harbor here. (Score:5, Informative)
Question: What does a service provider have to do in order to qualify for safe harbor protection?
Answer: In addition to informing its customers of its policies (discussed above), a service provider must follow the proper notice and takedown procedures (discussed above) and also meet several other requirements in order to qualify for exemption under the safe harbor provisions. ...
Finally, the service provider must not have knowledge that the material or activity is infringing or of the fact that the infringing material exists on its network. [512(c)(1)(A)], [512(d)(1)(A)].
If it does discover such material before being contacted by the copyright owners, it is instructed to remove, or disable access to, the material itself. [512(c)(1)(A)(iii)], [512(d)(1)(C)].
The service provider must not gain any financial benefit that is attributable to the infringing material. [512(c)(1)(B)], [512(d)(2)].
Question: What is third-party liability, also known as "secondary liability"?
Answer: The concept of third party liability refers, as the name implies, to situations in which responsibility for harm can be placed on a party in addition to the one that actually caused the injury. The most common example comes from tort law: a customer in a grocery store drops a bottle of wine and another customer slips on the puddle and injures himself; he may bring an action for negligence against the customer who dropped the bottle and against the owner of the grocery store. Under the common law doctrine of third-party liability, a plaintiff must show not only that an injury actually occurred, but also (in most cases) that some sort of connection existed between the third party and the person who actually caused the injury.
As such the concept of third-party liability is often divided into two different types: contributory infringement and vicarious liability.
Typically, contributory infringement exists when the third party either assists in the commission of the act which causes the injury, or simply induces the primary party to do so commit the act which caused the injury.
Vicarious liability often requires the third party to have exerted some form of control over the primary party's actions.
In copyright law, vicarious liability may be established if the third party had the "right and ability to control" the infringer's activities, and if the third party received some financial benefit from the acts of infringement.
Frequently Asked Questions (And Answers) about DMCA Safe Harbor [chillingeffects.org]
If you know you are hosting infringing content and do nothing about it you are dead.
You can't let things slide until someone rats you out.
If you are aiding the infringer in any way - or rewarding him for posting infringing content - you are dead. If you penalize the legitimate content provider you are dead.
If you are making money on the infringement you are dead.
Re:Ergh. I hate this. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But why upload freeware to Hotfile? (Score:5, Informative)
You asked. I answer. Pull up a chair, lad, it's story-telling time:
Once upon a time, there was a company called 3dfx. They made video cards, the first of their kind, with all kinds of gee-whiz video acceleration.
Now, along comes nVidia. Their first few 3D chipsets sucked, but later on, they grew up and made real competitors to the 3dfx line.
Eventually, 3dfx was bought by nVidia.
And, it just happened that the weekend after this, I was at a small LAN party with my PC.
3dfx's website was gone. No 404, no response, no nothing. nVidia didn't mirror anything. And I, of course, needed drivers for my 3dfx Voodoo3 2000.
Every. Single. Fucking. Link. From. Every. Single. Fucking. Web page. was a dead link to 3dfx's defunct site. So, there simply weren't any drivers to be found. I didn't even know, yet, that 3dfx had been bought out: I failed miserably at playing games that weekend, despite my keen sense of Internet-fu and the help of the fellow geeks around me.
Some time later, an ad-hoc support structure of hobbyists began providing 3dfx drivers, but that was far too late.
In addition, 3dfx's sudden demise abolished what was left of STB's drivers and documentation. See, sometime before all of the above, 3dfx bought STB, who used to make a variety of different add-on cards for PCs, including video adapters and other stuff.
I have here, somewhere, an STB I/O card which is completely inoperable. Why? While 3dfx did keep STB's old support site alive, nVidia flushed the whole lot. This, despite written, personal assurance from a pre-3dfx STB that they'd keep the old information online indefinitely. The information is simply lost to time, which is plainly fucking retarded.
And don't get me started on the X-Fi card in my desktop. It's an OEM variant that, while quite good and versatile, was never sold separately. Instead, it only came in (IIRC) some Dell, Alienware, and HP machines -- I haven't even seen it for sale in the white-box OEM market.
Creative Labs, in their infinite wisdom, will not let you install software items that have been downloaded from their website unless you already have that software installed (can you spot the glaringly-obvious Catch-22?). Alienware, in their own infinite wisdom, packaged a bad driver disk with the system, wherein the X-Fi drivers and software were both broken and did not match those that were pre-installed with the default load of Windows. And both Dell and HP seem to ignore the fact that the card exists at all when it comes to software support.
Now, Alienware does have 32-bit drivers, with a complete and installable suite of software, available for download on their website (unlike Creative Labs). And, lo, they do work. It's a few hundred megs of shit, though, and it's difficult to find (and Google isn't much help except to find other people looking for the same thing, but failing to find it), and much of it doesn't work on a 64-bit system.
I eventually found and downloaded this, and made it all work on my desktop Alienware box after upgrading to 64-bit Windows. And things are good, the Creative Labs update program works well and automatically downloaded and upgraded stuff, and I'm able to stay current with things.
But: Alienware's buried download is the only place the drivers are available from. If/when it vanishes (and it's not so much if as it is when -- see above), it will be gone. I've burned them to CD, of course, but I'm by no means the only person with this card.
So, while currently functional, it's a fragile situation. The next installation of Windows may not be so easy.
Accordingly, having learned from my previous STB/3dfx experiences, I tried to seed the drivers on The Pirate Bay, hoping that TPB's high Pagerank would let others find them easily. I included a good description of how to make them work, what card they were for, and why I was posting it, but they banned my account and nuked the .torrent after a