How a Virginia Law Firm Outpaces the MPAA at Suing Over Movie Downloads 237
Jamie points out this Ars Technica piece on a series of suits brought by the Virginia law firm of Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver against users they accuse of illegally downloading movies. The firm has an interesting business model in these suits; sue enough users in a DC Federal court to be worth splitting the sum of many small settlement offers (generally $1,500-2,500 apiece) with the filmmakers, rather than rely on winning after trial a small number of larger judgments. Most people settle, and Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver has so far named more than 14,000 "Does" — as in John Doe — including, as mentioned a few days ago, 5,000 who downloaded The Hurt Locker.
worth a read (Score:5, Interesting)
I found this on the topic: the actual settlement form. Read it all at http://www.copyrightsettlement.info/wfesettlement.pdf [copyrightsettlement.info]
Payment. You shall pay to the Company the total, lump sum of Two Thousand Five Dollars (US $2,500) by cashier’s check or credit card with no charge back or check cancellation.
Confidentiality. You agree that the terms of this Agreement shall remain STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL and MAY NOT be disclosed to any other party including but not limited to internet or on-line forums.
So don't go post this on slashdot or you'll owe this lawfirm $15,000!
--
The Founder Conference'2010 [thefounderconference.com]
Re:worth a read (Score:4, Informative)
So don't go post this on slashdot or you'll owe this lawfirm $15,000!
That's not true. If you post about this on Slashdot, you just cannot automatically opt for the settlement. You still have the option to fight this in a court of law if you feel that you are innocent and publicize that as much as you desire. Once you go public though, you cannot select that settlement option. Also I think the plaintiff would aim a court decision more between $150,000 or $1.5 million though from what we've seen with prior cases that go to court where the individual is found guilty.
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Also I think the plaintiff would aim a court decision more between $150,000 or $1.5 million though from what we've seen with prior cases that go to court where the individual is found guilty.
Not so sure about the court decision, but they'll almost certainly sue for the maximum of $150,000/work. Obviously they are going for a min-max strategy here and they want a lawsuit to look as unappealing as possible.
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Not if they don't own the rights to the work or represent someone who does.
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The movie studio received $0 prior to it being downloaded, so as long as the final legal bill is greater then $0 they make more then what they would have otherwise received. (This doesn't take into account negative press impacting future revenues though). The law firm makes money pretty much no matter what. Infringers don't win, but they brought it on themselves for downloading it. The only people that really lose are the mist
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Basically pay us and shut up. That's really extortion.
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My lawyer would tell me that it's not worth bothering for less than $2500, so they've got a reasonable plan there.
It would take far more to fight that in court, even in Canada, where we've got that loser-pay system.
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alain94040 (785132) is under no obligation to adhere to your definition of what constitutes a "signature." His formatting mimics that of the standard Slashdot signature. No reasonable person could mistake it for the content of his message.
Therefore, your Off Topic moderation was inappropriate. His
Bizarre Editor Abuse? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bizarre Editor Abuse? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't bother submitting anything on /. b/c I *know* it's a waste of time.
Some users are favoured over all others.
This is the same for all blogs.
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Quit yer whinin.
I've submitted stories and got rejected without explanation. Sort of like Internet dating, and for the same reasons.
I pretty much don't bother to submit unless it caught my eye and seemed out of the norm for /. (interesting, out of the mainstream, and understandable to a normal person, yeah I know, pine inthe sky). /. is not a democracy. Get used to it. I vote with my page views, so if you're offended out there in /. admin land, you can get over it too. Happy, Visiting, or Complaining.
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The journal I submitted got through (it was a question about PERL vs PHP for web development/security), that was my first one. I think I then posted my next journal as a story by mistake, but it got rejected anyway as it wasn't a question or story.
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It happens. maybe 25% of my submissions [slashdot.org] are accepted, but a lot of them are rejected and then accepted when somebody else submist the same story. Like moderators, sometimes the firehosers have their heads up their asses.
Don't sweat it. You [slashdot.org] get more accepted than I do!
Yeah.... (Score:5, Funny)
In the case of The Hurt Locker, when you stand to make almost as much money suing 5,000 people for "stealing" your movie as it did at the box office, maybe you should have made a better movie.
This makes no sense... (Score:2, Insightful)
I know you are just being overly sarcastic and trying to get karma or something, but it just doesn't apply here. Why are you getting modded up for an unfunny, non-insightful comment that is flat out wrong? The Hurt Locker won the academy award this past year. I personally feel it rightfully deserved it, it was a fantastic movie! Light years better than Avatar, which had huge sales, and probably huge downloads as well.
Perhaps more people downloaded The Hurt Locker because they heard about it from the aca
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perhaps the people who want to see the hurt locker, prefer to see it at home than at the theater ?
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The Hurt Locker was a decent movie up until the ending, which was among the worst I've ever seen.
It certainly wasn't worthy of Best Picture, when you have films like Burma VJ that actually capture real human suffering and struggle, and some of the people who filmed it were likely imprisoned or killed.
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In 1990, New Kids on the Block had a number 1 hit on the Billboard charts. I'll say that again: New Kids on the Block had a number 1 hit.
First doesn't always mean best.
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Not only that, but in 2008 Barak Obama was elected president. I concede your point.
Re:This makes no sense... (Score:5, Informative)
- Hurt locker box office: $ 16,4 million domestic (box office numbers [boxofficemojo.com])
- Hurt locker extortion: $ 12,5 million (2500 × 5000 and counting...)
I'd say that's a fairly significant amount of money, and should not be discarded as motive for this scam. If they are true artists they would not participate in this witch-hunt-for-pay against their own biggest fans.
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I doubt the makers of the film have anything to do with it. It's far more likely to be the publishers/distributors.
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well crafted intelligent works of art?
I`m not sure we saw the same movie..
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The Hurt Locker for me was just a bunch of well-scripted, well-acted and well-directed tense sequences. The first half hour or so was really promising and absorbing, but it was all downhill from there. The story line wasn't that interesting, and the absurdity of the events was getting more and more (it was a hilariously unrealistic depiction of the US army). I enjoyed every single moment of it, but this is not enough to make a fantastic movie. It wasn't memorable, it didn't engage my mind during its whole d
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I know you are just being overly sarcastic and trying to get karma or something
"Funny" gains no karma. Just the FAQs, ma'am. [slashdot.org] His +5 isn't helping his karma a bit.
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Why do you equate commercial success with critical success? The Hurt Locker won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director. It was a good movie even if the masses did not really go out to watch it.
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You're gonna have to clue me in on the joke... I mean, if the cost of settling for those 5,000 Does is $2,000 each, then that's $10M to split between the producers and lawyers. Hurt Locker has racked up about $48M in worldwide box office so far (against a production cost of $15M). How is $10M "almost as much money" as $48M? (Not to mention the $28M from DVD and BD sales.)
And, let's see....9 Oscar nominations with 6 wins, including Best Picture and Best Director; about 100 awards from groups that like to han
Re:Yeah.... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're gonna have to clue me in on the joke... I mean, if the cost of settling for those 5,000 Does is $2,000 each, then that's $10M to split between the producers and lawyers. Hurt Locker has racked up about $48M in worldwide box office so far (against a production cost of $15M). How is $10M "almost as much money" as $48M? (Not to mention the $28M from DVD and BD sales.)
You're right, it isn't.
And, let's see....9 Oscar nominations with 6 wins, including Best Picture and Best Director; about 100 awards from groups that like to hand out prizes; 97% on Rotten Tomatoes; the praise of two Iraq veterans with whom I watched it...yeah, it's a crappy film. Are you forgetting that it's lowest-box-office-ever-for-Best-Picture status in large part stems from its extreme shortage of prints?
I never once said it was crappy. I personally liked it...not enough for a best picture, but I liked it. Apparently, a LOT of other people didn't. Hence my post.
And just because it's slashdot....what's up with putting "stealing" in quotes? Are you saying that if I'm offering my car for sale and someone drives it away without paying, that my car hasn't been stolen?
You would no longer have access to your car, hence it would have been stolen. If someone took a copy of the DVD from a Virgin Megastore, that would be stealing, as it would prevent another person from having that same DVD.
Downloading a movie isn't stealing, as it isn't restricting your ability to obtain those exact same zeros and ones. It's illegal and immoral, but it isn't stealing.
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"...in large part stems from its extreme shortage of prints?" ...and they are now suing people for making copies? Now THAT'S funny!
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what's up with putting "stealing" in quotes? Are you saying that if I'm offering my car for sale and someone drives it away without paying, that my car hasn't been stolen? And that the fault for that is mine, by virtue of it not being a very good car?
wrong analogy, if they took a picture of your car and went home and built an identical car to yours, would that be a problem? Funny thing about that, in social circles I've seen people get honestly mad when they get a new car and someone they know goes and ge
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what's up with putting "stealing" in quotes? Are you saying that if I'm offering my car for sale and someone drives it away without paying, that my car hasn't been stolen?
You answered your own question. If someone makes a copy of your car and drives off with the copy, you still have your car and it hasn't been stolen. Calling copyright infringement "theft" is a lie.
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I caught it one night on-demand while spending a night at a friend's house. I actually kinda wish I had seen it in theaters...it seems like one of those movies where the large screen size is required for some of the impact.
Avatar actually suffers from this same fate...we have a pretty decent 42" flatscreen, but it wasn't nearly as engaging at home as it was on the big screen.
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That's why you wait until it has been out for a few weeks:-)
Some movies, however, are made better by seeing them with a large audience. A couple of examples:
The South Park movie. I saw that shit in a theater so packed people were overflowing into the aisles (yes it was opening night, and yes people snuck in). That was one of the best moviegoing experiences of my life...every single person in that audience were huge South Park fans, and every single person was way into it. It was kind of like going to a
So In Essence (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So In Essence (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting, isn't it? Here, you have some indie film makers suing downloaders...and yet, many other indie film makers rely on downloaders to get the word out about their work. Other than Hurt Locker, I sure as hell never heard of the other movies.
I guess that's the difference between an artist and a professional?
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Some directors have thanked pirates.
I would have never heard of the Man from Earth [torrentfreak.com] if it didn't show up in an RSS feed.
Ink [justpressplay.net] is another more recent movie.
Games too [joystiq.com]
Seriously... (Score:5, Insightful)
At this point, I think I'm just holding out hope that a competing law firm will think things through and decide they can make money by suing these vulture law firms for harassment and whatever else they can drum up. After all, if those firms can make money just suing at random, surely another law firm can also make money counter-suing, right? Well, where is our white knight law firm who's eager to make a name for themselves? If the feds won't put a stop to it, maybe a last-to-sue war between legal firms can put a stop to it.
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Well, the main kink is that the defendants know they can't take them to court, win, and then sue them to recover court costs because the defendants (whether you agree with copyright law or not)know they committed an illegal act.
So it's really more a problem of whether the law should be the way it is then lawyers extorting people. If it's OK to get big companies to settle by threatening to take them to court when they've done something wrong it makes sense that it should work the other way around. The onl
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Wh
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I think your probably just trolling but I'll bite. No, I'm saying it's OK because if the company truly doesn't have the evidence to win the cases then they are taking the risk of being actually taken to court, losing and being countered sued for court costs and filing frivolous lawsuits the punishments for which could range from monetary payments to disbarment.
I am also making the claim that I personally believe most people, or so far the IP Addresses, in this case probably did in fact commit the act they
Re:Seriously... (Score:5, Insightful)
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how they are being allowed to get away with this shit.
Because our justice system is wholly subservient to business interests. It's not that hard to understand.
In a sane, logical world, somebody (the feds, the bar, whomever) would come down on them like a ton of bricks. Sadly, I don't think we live in a sane world any more...
Is this really what tipped you off? Were the hundreds of thousands of pot smokers in jail not enough?
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Because our justice system is wholly subservient to business interests. It's not that hard to understand.
No, our justice system is wholly subservient to lawyers. It's just as common for individuals to exploit the system in the manner described by the GP as it is for businesses. The fact that it costs less to settle than to fight a lawsuit is leveraged by all manner of legal practices that have nothing to do with "business interests". In fact, some of them are directly opposed to "business interests", like the ambulance chaser that my insurance company settled with even though the accident was not my fault.
Re:Seriously... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, and who hires the lawyers? The bigger the business, the more lawyers you can afford, and the more you can pervert the justice system.
Re:Seriously... (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to climb off your horse and realize that not every ill in this country can be blamed on business.
I got sued by someone who rear-ended me at a stop light. There is no conceivable way that accident can be attributed to my negligence. My insurance company settled with the asshole for $12,000 and then raised my rates. Their reason? It's cheaper to settle than to fight the lawsuit. The person who sued me was an individual who perverted the justice system. It had nothing to do with business.
Re:Seriously... (Score:4, Informative)
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That was with Esurance and I bailed on them a long time ago for this and other reasons. One of my favorite stunts they pulled was to change their billing date from 15 days before the policy renewed to 45 days prior without telling me. They sucked $800 out of my checking account on the basis of this change and my rent check bounced as a result. They refused to make it right until I got the NYS Insurance Department involved.
Now I'm with a smaller company [nycm.com]. Not sure how they would have handled the lawsuit
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If the lawyers are in charge, why don't we pass a law requiring insurance companies to fight it out in court? Certainly that would benefit the lawyers by making more work for them fighting the original offense *and* make more work for them suing companies that fail in their duty to protect their customers. Such a law should be easy to pass, since lawyers control the legal system, and this law would *never* be blocked by lawmakers who finance their campaigns with donations from the industries that would be
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I feel the same way about you.
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Fair enough, not every business can afford to buy protection from the government. What I don't understand how you can claim that it's the lawyers that are running the system, when deregulation has been the driving political force for at least 30 years. Obviously more regulation leads to more demand for lawyers to write the regulations, to vet the legality of an action before doing it, and to prosecute and defend when the regulations are broken. Not every evil can be blamed on businesses, but I see a lot
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I cannot, for the life of me, understand how they are being allowed to get away with this shit.
Because our justice system is wholly subservient to business interests. It's not that hard to understand.
In a sane, logical world, somebody (the feds, the bar, whomever) would come down on them like a ton of bricks. Sadly, I don't think we live in a sane world any more...
Is this really what tipped you off? Were the hundreds of thousands of pot smokers in jail not enough?
And here we are, at the real reason none of this will move forward. Instead of making substantive claims why this activity is illegal or unconstitutional, it gets dragged toward another, completely unrelated debate where it is sure to die a slow death. Good job! Next time, if you want to actually make a point instead of rubbing salt in the wound, leave the pot alone!
Re:Seriously... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think it is completely unrelated. Marijuana prohibition began at the behest of the paper industry, and continues today because of the alcohol, pharmaceutical, and prison industries. If we're talking about the perversion of the justice system by business interests, it's worth pointing out that copyright abuses are the tip of the iceberg. As Americans we have to understand that we have an extremely serious problem with corruption that goes back for decades, if not centuries.
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As Americans we have to understand that we have an extremely serious problem with corruption that goes back for decades, if not centuries.
Nail, meet head. Can you really call it corruption if it's been going on *the whole time*???
You can't "correct" something that has always been the way it is. You need an approach other than "it should have always been legal" because no one attaches to that, even if they may agree with you. Slow and steady change that can't be refuted is the way to go. Look at gambling. Once a completely taboo business in any but two of the 50 states, it's now got a brick and mortar presence in half of the states in the
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If you need to be convinced that marijuana prohibition is wrong, or that this type of copyright barratry is wrong, then I wasn't really addressing you. I wasn't trying to argue that these things are wrong, I was trying to address why these evils occur in our society. At this point, with this audience, I don't really need to argue that this is wrong. There are only a few people here who would disagree, and they're too far gone to reason with. I've had that discussion often enough.
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The fact that the government does not protect it's citizens in this case (even after some years of exploiting
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Can't the people sued make a class action suit ?
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If you get caught stealing a DVD from a store in Los Angeles, you'll be hit with up to a $400 fine. If you are a repeat offender, you may get up to 6 months in jail.
If you get caught downloading a DVD in Los Angeles, you'll be hit with $150,000 damages, an additional $100,000 fine, and legal fees (let's say 50k). Oh, and up to 1 year in jail, if pursued.
$400 for stealing a DVD, or $300,000 dollars for copying it. I think right there you have your problem.
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Seriously, when is something going to be done about these guys? Their business model is built on "it costs more in legal fees for people to fight these accusations than to settle with us out of court so they'll just pay up" which, really, amounts to extortion.
So if you feel for good reason you have been wronged for $x, but a full trial would cost $y where $y >> $x, what would you do:
a) Eat the loss because it'd be extortion to pursue it in court
b) Offer to settle for what you think you might get in court
c) Insist on a trial even though the only ones winning are the lawyers
Imagine the neighbor's kids kicked a ball through your living room window, pure accident and all civil liability. Only by the most absurd logic would you not demand that he pay because if
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then you offer to settle for what you think you might get in court (i.e the cost of a window). The equivalent here would be to offer to settle for $2500, and if you don't get it, to sue for $2500. But they'll likely sue for millions, or at least 100s of thousands. Of course, if you sued for $2500 for a $100 window, you wouldn't get $2500 either.
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If they sue enough people, they'll eventually sue someone who's not right in the head, and this person will take care of the problem permanently. We can hope anyway.
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I'm actually hoping some class action attorneys get in on this and start representing the 5,000 people sued as a class. I'd like to also see them add in additional damages - emotional pain and suffering inflicted on the people being extorted.
When two law firms fight each other, everybody wins!
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In a sane, logical world
This is Earth. As far as we know, a sane, logical world doesn't exist.
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The problem is that most people under 30 or so do not see "copyright infringement" as any sort of law worth paying attention to. In first grade the teacher was downloading software without paying for it and pretty much every day in school the same lesson was reinforced, day after day.
Sure, it is illegal and you can be sued. You can also get a ticket for speeding but this has no effect whatsoever on half (or more) of the drivers on the road today. There is no respect for the content owners, whoever they a
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S2S (Score:5, Funny)
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AKA the Sue-torrent business model:
Sue a bunch of people for small amounts w/o courts to collect a total higher than they would get by suing ONE person for large amounts in courts.
Reminds me of a scam were crooks were fake sending invoices to small companies for printer/copier toner cartridges that were never sent and demand payment. The scam worked because it was cheaper to pay the invoice(s) than paying a lawyer to go after them.
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Reminds me of a scam were crooks were fake sending invoices to small companies for printer/copier toner cartridges that were never sent and demand payment. The scam worked because it was cheaper to pay the invoice(s) than paying a lawyer to go after them.
Why would you bother to do either? If it's truly a scam, are the crooks really going to hire a collection agency to harass you? They're not going to be able to put a black mark on your credit report, either.
I had a disaster of a DSL installation by AT&T about two years ago. Apparently the salesperson shouldn't have even offered my service in my area, but they did. Three technician visits and about three weeks later, I had had functioning service for a total of about 72 hours. I called and canceled, and
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That's not how the scam works. They just work under the assumption that once a business reaches a certain size, the board/owners/whoever doesn't sign off on every single thing anymore. So some invoice for 100 dollars or whatever, a secretary or somebody is authorized to pay it. And if it looks legit enough it might get paid without a second thought. So if you send out small invoices to thousands of companies and say 200 end up paying, that's a pretty decent ROI.
Usually it's about something like being listed
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I had a company actually send me some supplies unsolicited and then demand payment. We had just gotten a new credit card machine at our business, and I guess this fly-by-night company bought a list of people who had bought the credit card machine, and the
Re:S2S (Score:4, Interesting)
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I don't think that it was a reverse class-action was it? (not that I've RTFA, of course). Our old friends at the RIAA got told to stop joining unrelated defendants some years ago (not that they stopped). But in any case, you shouldn't be able to show up at the courthouse one day with 5000 lawsuits naming unidentified people as defendants. Quite how such a rule would be defined would be tricky. Perhaps some sort of regulation on the template of the UK's 'vexatious litigant' rules would work, but it may need
I've been wondering when this would happen (Score:3, Insightful)
RIAA and MPAA were limiting themselves so that they wouldn't have the publicity generated by suing over a thousand defendants at once. They must have known that that looked just a bit like extortion.
Anyway, I'm glad they did this, now the country can decide whether they want to spend their time on federal lawsuits of importance, like civil rights, or on this bullshit.
Unfortunately I'm also convinced that the answer is the latter.
Bittorrent Users Sue Movie Studios (Score:5, Funny)
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Movies are the new addiction.
That's one of the dumbest things I've ever read.
Film Industry Saved by IP Chasers! (Score:5, Funny)
Washington, D.C.-- Super Lawyers Duenlap, Grubb and Beaver declared today that they had been able to save the ailing film industry via a new, innovative IP-chasing strategy. "It's really simple," declared Duenlap. "You just put a really shitty film on the internet," said Grubb. "And then you wait for peoples' cousins dogs to come download five minutes from the honeypot, and SUE everyone in their zip code," said Ms. Beaver.
Due to this innovation, Hollywood stars will continue to be able to walk the red carpet with millions in diamonds and rubies, instead of being reduced to begging at soup kitchens, said Duenlap, Grubb and Beaver.
CNET news attempted to contact the IP addresses involved in this article but ping requests were not returned.
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Even the law firm's name sounds like a Tom Wolfe invention. I loved the name he came up with in A Man In Full:
Clockett, Paddit, Skinnum and Glote.
ROFL.
So don't settle. Got it. (Score:3, Insightful)
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The problem with that is that the average person would have to sell his house (assuming he has one) to defend against such a lawsuit. As much as it would pain me, I couldn't do that, could you?
Being Threatened? (Score:2)
Movie revenue (Score:3, Interesting)
Today, without major restructuring of the Internet at large, it can be assumed that within a few days of release of a DVD that the movie content will be ripped and made available online.
If an Internet user has the knowledge to access these "available" movies, they can be downloaded and viewed with little or no risk to the downloader. This may require some fancy work to prevent the content from being redistributed and if you do not know how to do this you are certainly exposing yourself to redistribution and the legal penalties that come from that.
If someone does not have this knowledge, they have to buy their content. Because of this we are rapidly approaching a two-class environment: some people know how to get content for free while others have to pay for it. Right now, the division between these classes is also enforced by lack of broadband capacity - if your connection is dial-up or a weak DSL link you can't download free content no matter what you know.
Today it is possible for content providers to still make money from the 2nd class "payers", but this is going to change rapidly. I don't see any possibility for stopping this movement, no matter how many lawsuits are filed. The penalty is just too remote a possibility and too far removed from the act of redistribution. You get a notice in the mail six months after doing something and you are supposed to remember doing it? Worse, there is a trial over something that occurred two years before. It is like getting a speeding ticket from a state you used to live in and six months after you sold the car. There just isn't any connection between the act and the penalty for it to seem real and not arbitrary.
I'd say the content providers are going to see their revenue shrink rapidly as more and more of the "payers" die off and are replaced by well-educated (in the Internet black arts) younger people with better Internet connections. They might be able to replace the direct sales revenue (which retailers share in) with some kind of ad-supported content in the future - but retailers will not be sharing in that at all. This puts WalMart as a content retailer out of the business entirely, as it does with Amazon and anyone else that would consider themselves a "retailer".
Oh well. I think it plain to say "Piracy Rules!" If your business model depends on people paying for digital content, someone out there is going to ruin your day.
Prove it was me. (Score:2)
Here's an interesting one. In my recent federal criminal action, the Government presented multiple Usenet postings they claimed I wrote. They blathered on about "since my name was on it, it was clearly my work." My lawyers (ptui!) hadn't a clue so I asked to address the Court.
I asked the AUSA how he knew they were my writing, and his answer was "well, your name is on it." I then gave a short soliloquy about Usenet propagation, headers and nntp, just until I saw the glaze staring to form on the judge's eyes.
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When they get a search warrant, make a copy of your hard drive and find the movie still on there. There are some people that are smart and can cover their tracks, but when piracy is mainstream, even the idiots do it. That is the real problem, it is no longer hackers that steal movies, but the average joe.
Even if they can't prove it was you the media company will just lobby for a law that declares copyright infringement from an IP address is the responsibility of the person owning the ISP account then y
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With this in mind, how could this law firm prove that it was me that actually downloaded the movie? What with wifi and all them nasty stealers of bandwidth, exactly how could you prove to even a preponderance standard (the civil standard) that it was me who did the deed?
Same way they always prove it [cnet.com], by filing a discovery motion to have all mass storage devices (e.g. computer hard drives, external hard drives, flash drives, tapes, etc.) turned over to a third party for expert examination. If the files are there, you did it. If the files were deleted, but still on drive, you did it.
FYI: You don't have have to overwrite data 7 times or even 30 times to erase on today's drives. Once is enough. The original recommendations were based on 1980s technology with large magneti
Re: (Score:2)
"I HATE fucking lawyers."
Sounds like it =>
PS: If, I had an ISP contract that said I was responsible for the content that was being downloaded, couldn't 'suing party' just sue the name associated with the ISP account? I imagine most if not all common carrier ISP's have such a clause either through service agreement the someone signed, or through law. I'd be shocked if this black hole of 'responsibility of infringement' has been sealed up somewhere. Now if you don't have your name on such an agreement then
Re: (Score:2)
If necessary, they will do it the same way they did it with red light cameras. They will (through their duly purchased governmental representatives) make the owner of the connection that was used legally responsible for any content that
How do you stop a lawyer from drowning? (Score:2)
Take your foot off his head.
I HATE lawyers.
But I thought HDMI took care of this ? (Score:2)
Most people settle (Score:2)
And right there is the problem. Its how the entire legal system gets away with crap like this and attorneys get richer and richer, without even going to court and proving their case.
Attorney Emails (Score:5, Informative)
* Dunlap, Thomas M - tdunlap@dglegal.com vcard
* Dureska, Geoffrey M. - gdureska@dglegal.com
* Grubb, Daniel L. - dgrubb@dglegal.com
* Ludwig, David - dludwig@dglegal.comvcard
* Kurtz, Nicholas A. - nkurtz@dglegal.com
* Novel, Sur - snovel@dglegal.com
* Policasti, Eugene - epolicasti@dglegal.com
* Tate, Christopher F. - ctate@dglegal.com
* Weaver, Jeffrey William - jweaver@dglegal.com
* Whitticar, Michael C. - mwhitticar@dglegal.com
* Gurganous, Tom - tgurganous@dglegal.com
Someone want to get home addresses, phone #s, list of first-born children?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe a licensed PI in their state could snoop on the net habits of their households. I'm betting there is an even chance that at least 2 of those folks have illegal downloading going on...
Re:Attorney Emails (Score:5, Insightful)
* Dunlap, Thomas M - tdunlap@dglegal.com vcard * Dureska, Geoffrey M. - gdureska@dglegal.com ... snip ... ]
[
Someone want to get home addresses, phone #s, list of first-born children?
Individuals at the company may be scum, they may not be - however attacking an individual's personal life for what he does in public I find offensive. The lawyers, are, at the moment within their legal grounds to perform this service for the MPAA and their ilk, as much as it leaves a bad flavor in my mouth.
If you want to change the world, stop attacking people and start attacking the issue. Fuss at your congressman to change silly lawsuits that are extortion schemes.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Your congressman doesn't listen because people who benefit from the status quo pay him good money not to. Just because this filth can buy laws doesn't mean they are acceptable and that you should take the punishment lying down.
The people at this law firm ruin lives for monetary gain. They chose to do it on their own free will. They aren't doing this because they have to. They do it because they WANT to. For that they are as guilty as the corrupt politician who took the bribe. Even more so, because they are
Re:Attorney Emails (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not find it offensive in the least. You don't get to do whatever you want and hide behind the "It's just business, nothing personal" excuse. You are responsible personally for any business you conduct whether it be private, public, business, or personal. You are complicit in everything you do. I don't want to hear about how the lawyers are just doing it to put food on their family's table. You really think the guy who owns the law firm is just barely scraping by? These guys are just greedy fuckwads, plain and simple. And they are supporting an entire industry of greed and abuse. It doesn't matter if it's legal or not. There are plenty of things that are technically legal that are not ethical. Just because it's legal doesn't mean you should do it. I say fuck them and their personal lives.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do I think these lawyers are performing what their job requires them to do? In all probablity, yes
Would I quit my job if I was required to perform work I consider detrimental to society? Absolutely.
If a job forces you to behave like scum, you either quit the job, or you are scum.
I respect lavatory cleaning staff far above copyright lawyers.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Someone want to get home addresses, phone #s, list of first-born children?
Why? What's the point? To be a childish dick? To threaten and intimidate?
No thank you. We're adults.
That's original. Period. (Score:2)
Gee! Wow! I've never heard THAT line of argument before.
Maybe if you and the other drones repeat it a million more times it'll magically become true!
If you honestly can't understand why that argument is broken, then you need to hold your breath for, oh, ten minutes ought to do it. Make Darwin proud!
Stop typing now. It's wasting bandwidth. And it makes the drool splash in an unsightly manner.
-FL