Hurt Locker File-Sharing Subpoenas Begin

In May we discussed news that producers of the film The Hurt Locker filed a lawsuit against 5,000 John Does, known only by their IP addresses at the time, for sharing the movie over peer-to-peer sites. Now, reader suraj.sun notes that subpoenas for the lawsuit are finally going out. "Qwest Communications on Monday notified a customer in Denver that the Internet service provider has received a subpoena from lawyers representing Voltage Pictures, the production company that made The Hurt Locker. ... In legal documents, Voltage Pictures has blamed the movie's relatively poor domestic performance on illegal file sharing. As of March 21, the movie had grossed $16 million domestically, but took in $40 million overall. According to reports, the film's production budget was $15 million. The film leaked to the Web five months before the movie's US debut. ... For allegedly downloading The Hurt Locker, DGW told the Qwest customer from Denver that settling the case early would cost $2,900, according to documents reviewed by CNET."

Re:I would like to perform poorly

[rotide]

No, that's not how it works. If you're awesome enough to make something copyrightable, you must be paid millions upon millions in perpetuity. It's only fair. So what if it only cost you $5.29 to make. You deserve $250,000,000,000,000 for it and if you don't get it, there must be rampant piracy and the witch hunt is on!

Re:Culprit ?

[ginbot462]

Devil's Advocate was OK, almost not worth pirating, but certainly not worth buying.

Re:Worst Part

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst part, in my opinion, is that this isn't even a good movie to pirate. I mean, it was okay to watch on Netflix, but there's no excuse for pirating such a mediocre film. Yea, it won an Oscar, but it was basically just Minesweeper: The Movie.

If this had been over Inception or another really great film, I could understand better. This? Please.

FTFM.

The real reason ...

[tgd]

Academy masturbation aside "zomg, a WOMAN made a WAR movie about IRAQ!!!", the real reason it had a poor box office showing was that the movie, frankly, sucked.

The people who downloaded it were the lucky ones.