Australian Copyright Troll Rumored To Have Shut Down 67
An anonymous reader writes "Remember how a shadowy group arose a few months back with the promise of suing thousands of Australians for allegedly pirating movies? ... Well, it looks like the effort has bit the dust as quickly as it was kicked off, with the organization's vice president of sales and marketing leaving and its website shut down. Sounds like that bright future of mega-lawsuits for Internet piracy wasn't so bright after all."
Re:There's a time for silence (Score:4, Informative)
Not really... in most cases, the industry groups are more concerned with uploaders, rather than downloaders. It just so happens that most file sharing is synchronous. If you leeched all those files from an ftp site, they probably wouldn't care all that much about you, unless you ran into a particularly vindictive group of lawyers. Instead, they'd go after the guy who uploaded the files.
When some dumb teenager pirates an MP3, he doesn't get charged with thousands of dollars in fines. It's only when they upload the file, allowing hundreds (or thousands) of other people to download it, that you see people getting those kinds of fines. It makes more sense when you realize that uploading is the big problem that they're trying to stamp out. Kids (and stupid people) don't understand how the technology works, and they don't realize that they're uploading the files at the same time that they're downloading. Some people have tried to argue this in court ("I didn't know the program was sharing the files!"), but it didn't work out too well for them. Ignorance and stupidity don't usually work too well as a defense, unfortunately.
It's entirely possible that the rights holders will go after you for downloading a pirated movie from Megaupload, but it's really not worth their time. They'd rather go after the person who uploaded it and sue him for millions of dollars. Even if they did sue you, like you said, the amount of money they could claim to have lost is miniscule, since you haven't shared the file with anyone else.