MPAA Sues Hotfile for 'Staggering' Copyright Infringement

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."

Ergh. I hate this.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I don't want to support what you're doing but, charging to download other people's IP that you have no rights to is so horribly stupid.

What the hell was HotFile thinking? At least no one's profiting off of P2P(well, as far as I know, the developers behind Bittorrent and clients aren't) of IP.

Plausible

[gstrickler]

It's one of the few, perhaps the first plausible claim I've heard from the MAFIAA. They've still got a lot of work to do to prove it, but it's at least a plausible claim.

"Staggering" ....

[unity100]

i dont know these people who use words like 'staggering', 'shocking', 'outrageous' etc while describing things like these think that they can fool the public into buying their word through that wordage still.

its 21st century. not 19th. pretty much everyone knows that the only one 'staggered' with situations like these, are private interests or governments catering to them.

so its pointless to attempt portraying a self-interest, public-enemy move as something positive and socially acceptable. they should just cut to the chase.

Shit, might actually be first valid lawsuit!

[evanh]

Title says it all.

Where have they been?

[techwreck]

Did they somehow miss what has happened to every other site that has attempted to use that same business model over the the past several years? Am I missing something or is this kind of like jumping off a boat to go for a swim after a shark has just devoured every other member of your party that got in before you?

Solution to crime!

[ProzacPatient]

The MPAA has found the solution to all kinds of crime!
Instead of going after individual perpetrators we should instead go after the post office because the post office allows people to exchange everything from child porn to music discs and does nothing to discourage it!

Re:Which invariably end up being copyrighted movie

[Anonymous Coward]

... except when they do go after the users, everyone screams foul on that too.

No matter what they do to protect their content, whether it be technical means (DRM), going after the people breaking the law (users), or going after the companies facilitating the breaking of the law (services), everyone screams that they're evil. It's a really shitty situation to be in - people are constantly stealing their content and then slamming them for protecting it.

Re:Ergh. I hate this.

[bored_engineer]

I've also seen more than one open source software distributed this way, but it's not really relevant, unless they only make a profit on open-source software.

My ISP isn't directly profiting by this, any more than AT&T, my telephone provider (protected monopolist) is. Any use that I might have for Hotfile is indirect, in respect to my ISP, or AT&T. If I download a movie (I won't and wouldn't) any profits or the phone company or my ISP are distinctly indirect. Hotfile, however, is making a direct profit, assuming that they're profitable.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Wow, they have no case here

[KeithIrwin]

Reading the brief they've filed, it's pretty apparent that they're stretching quite a ways. The only evidence of HotFile encouraging users to upload pirated content to their servers is that HotFile encourages users to upload files which are a) heavily downloaded by others and b) large. The MPAA is asking the courts to assume that large, heavily-downloaded files must be illegal content. They make a big deal in their brief of being scandalized by the fact that HotFile is not a service for people to store their own files, as if that's the only legal thing that a website which allows people to upload files can be. That might somehow bolster their case if HotFile was claiming to be an on-line locker service, but there's no reason to believe that they will make any such claim. The MPAA also accuse HotFile of having, prepare to be shocked, an affiliate program.

It's not just that the brief they've filed doesn't contain a smoking gun: it doesn't even assert that one exists. They're accusing HotFile of being what it is: a site which facilitates the distribution of large files to a wide audience and asking the courts to declare any site which does that to automatically be illegal despite full compliance with the DMCA and no evidence that they induced users to engage in piracy. I certainly hope that the courts don't do that because it would set a terrible precedent and effectively rewrite the law to amend the safe harbor clause of the DMCA to say "except for big files which a lot of people download because those must be pirated".

Mostly, though, what all this shows is that the *AA groups are going to have to reach farther and farther. They pretty much got to write the DMCA, but now it turns out that even it doesn't go far enough for them. The problem is that they didn't foresee that sites like HotFile (ad/subscription-supported large-file distribution sites which are completely content-ignorant and have no search or index mechanism) could exist. Now that they do, they want them gone. The reason that these sites can exist and be profitable is that bandwidth and storage costs have fallen so low that a peer-to-peer model is no longer necessary. As bandwidth and storage gets cheaper and cheaper, newer types of sites will be used for piracy too. Next will probably be sites which allow you to host your own blog or other website. As storage becomes cheaper, their maximum allowed file size will reach a point where you can slap a movie up on your blog without violating the maximum file size. Once that happens, the MPAA is going to want those sites gone too. Any site or program which allows ordinary, anonymous users to host and distribute large files (for some definition of large), is going to be on their hit list.

I'm no particular fan of piracy, but you can't remove the sites which allow people to distribute pirated files for free without also removing the sites which allow artists to distribute their own albums and music videos for free because those are the same sites. The long-range eventuality of the plan the MPAA is following will be a total lock-down on any means of widely distributing large files. That's too high a price to pay for stamping out piracy.