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Piracy Movies

Telecom Giants Sued for Failing To Stop Movie Piracy (hollywoodreporter.com) 63

Posted by msmash from the tussle-continues dept.
Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Comcast were hit with copyright lawsuits accusing them of turning a blind eye to customers who illegally distribute and download pirated films. The production companies seek to force the internet providers to implement policies that provide for the termination of accounts held by repeat offenders and to block certain piracy websites. Hollywood Reporter: The trio of complaints filed throughout September, with the most recent filed Tuesday in Pennsylvania federal court, come from Voltage Pictures, After Productions and Ammo Entertainment, among others. Two law firms, Dovel & Luner and Culpepper IP, are representing the production labels. The internet providers knowingly contributed to copyright infringement by their customers, the lawsuits claim. Plaintiffs say they sent Verizon, AT&T and Comcast hundreds of thousands of notices about specific instances of infringement. They claim, for example, to have sent over 100,000 notices to Comcast concerning the illegal downloading of I Feel Pretty using its services. The lawsuit seeks to hold the internet providers liable for failing to investigate.

"Comcast did not take meaningful action to prevent ongoing infringements by these Comcast users," states the complaint. "Comcast failed to terminate the accounts associated with these IP addresses or otherwise take any meaningful action in response to these Notices. Comcast often failed to even forward the Notices to its internet service customers or otherwise inform them about the Notice or its contents." The internet providers, therefore, vicariously infringed on plaintiffs' movies since they had the right to terminate the accounts of customers who violate copyright law, the suit alleges. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1988, criminalizes services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works. It provides protection from liability for services providers. But the production companies argue the internet providers don't have safe harbor under the law since it only shields companies if they've adopted and implemented policies that provide for the termination of accounts held by repeat offenders.
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Telecom Giants Sued for Failing To Stop Movie Piracy More

Telecom Giants Sued for Failing To Stop Movie Piracy

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  • Next: road construction companies sued... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Friday September 16, 2022 @04:27PM (#62888077)
    .... for not stopping all kinds of trafficking done by users of their streets.

    • Re:Next: road construction companies sued... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Friday September 16, 2022 @04:43PM (#62888115)
      Electrical supply companies to boot. Seriously, the judge needs to throw out these law suits. Phone companies aren't expected to listen in on phone calls and disconnect lines if you plan a crime on the phone, your internet connection should carry the same expectation of privacy from your carrier.

      • they are utilities internet is not so we need to make it that way.
        A long with the same laws that cover meters to cover caps how willing will Comcast be to capping if they had to do under local weights and measures rules?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by sarren1901 ( 5415506 )

        The phone company shouldn't carry seditious messaging. That'd be wrong, right? Therefore it would totally be cool if the telecoms scanned our conversations and dropped our calls if we said something stupid, like Let's go Brandon!

        I can't wait for the future!

    • road construction companies are government contacted to build that road and the road is owned by the government.

    • Re:Next: road construction companies sued... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Friday September 16, 2022 @06:17PM (#62888351)

      That’s the thing:
      The law says that if an ISP is a common carrier, they aren’t liable for the content flowing through their pipes

      The law says that if an ISP isn’t a common carrier, they have no liability protection for the content flowing through their pipes

      ISPs say that they are neither common carriers nor liable for the content flowing through their pipes, which makes no sense.

      Content providers are calling them for it on the one side, and net neutrality advocates are calling them for it on the other side. They can’t have their cake and eat it too.

    • Except this is about the safeharbor under the DMCA which isn't applicable to companies that make roads. I agree that it isn't true as a general principle of copyright liability but there is at least a non-frivolous argument that these ISP aren't complying with the provisions they need to to gain safeharbor under the DMCA.

      Having said that, your broader point is still a good one and I expect that if you fought this one out in the courts for long enough to get SCOTUS to weight in you'd eventually get a ruling

  • Wait a second. "I Feel Pretty" is only 35% on Rotten Tomatoes. You really mean to tell me that 100k people pirated it when only O(5 million) people bothered to watch it in theaters and only a third of those liked it? That would mean that one out of every eighteen viewers who enjoyed the movie liked it so much that they just had to download a copy illegally. Seems sus.

    Who wants to bet it's really 150 downloads of the movie, plus 99,850 downloads of the song "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story? Either

    • Remember that modern streaming formats send partial segments of a video as needed instead of one single video file, each segment is it's own copyright violation. By watching one movie you may be responsible for 100s of copyright violations by the distributor!

    • There is also the chance that people saw it was reviewing terribly, so they decided they weren't going to waste their money on seeing a possibly terrible movie in the theater, at theater prices. Instead, they'll just download it when it becomes available, and if it's indeed a terrible movie, they are only out the 90 to 120 minutes to watch it, as well as a few gigabytes of bandwidth.

      Here's a little tip to Hollywood: stop making terrible formulaic retread movies if you would like people to go pay to see the

  • I pay for internet service from Comcast and they own Vudui.com which has some free movies, with commercials. Ever since Comcast put Vudu.com under its umbrella, Comcast throttles my connection resulting in not really being able to not only not watch the free movies but ones I own that are on the cloud under vudu.com

    Maybe Comcast is just confused as to what it's supposed to be copyright-protecting.

  • are they willing to go court with the clams?
    and have the repeat offenders? be proven guilty with the criminal court standards?
    Can they prove in court that they own the content that they say is being pirated?

    • are they willing to go court with the clams? and have the repeat offenders? be proven guilty with the criminal court standards? Can they prove in court that they own the content that they say is being pirated?

      They convinced a jury that Cox was guilty to the tune of $1B for similar infringement claims, and while that judgement is still going through appeals, it does suggest that they are willing, and able, to be successful in a court of law.

  • It was 1998, lest we forget

    • Hollywood is still partying like it's 1999.

    • Nice catch. Kind of a funny error because fighting that was a hot issue for a long time on slashdot before it finally passed. Kinda our version of fighting for Roe v Wade haha.

  • An ISP might be able to handle a handful of complaints but hundreds of thousands? I doubt any ISP is configured to handle that scale and the entity making the request not only represents zero income but actually a significant labor and materials cost to the ISP.

  • They have a pretty good shot (Score:4, Informative)

    by cpt kangarooski ( 3773 ) on Friday September 16, 2022 @04:59PM (#62888173) Homepage

    A few years ago (and elements of the suit are still being litigated) Sony and a few other publishers sued Cox Communications, a large US internet provider for not permanently cutting off users who had been accused repeatedly of pirating works. Cox lost and is currently liable for $1 billion in damages.

    While much will depend on the facts, this is surely the sort of thing that the publishers are aiming for and having won once before, they may well win again. Don't underestimate them.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by truedfx ( 802492 )

      (and elements of the suit are still being litigated)

      It would be useful to know which elements of the suit are decided already and which elements are still being litigated; it is hard to find up to date information about this. The most up to date news on this I can easily find is that "[a] skeptical Fourth Circuit panel signaled it may nix the music industry’s $1 billion copyright infringement award against Cox Communications Inc." (https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/cox-appeal-probes-1-billion-mus [bloomberglaw.com]

      • The suit was filed in July 2018. Jury trial was held in December 2019. The jury held Cox vicariously and contributorily liable for infringement of all 10,000+ works at issue in the suit, awarding about $100,000 per work, for a total of $1 billion in damages.

        Cox moved for three different kinds of relief: Judgment as a Matter of Law; Remittitur, and a Retrial. (For laypeople these are: a ruling that the law is on Cox's side obviating the need for a jury trial on the facts; a ruling that the damages are too

  • The other problem is just because you found a case of infringement doesn't mean you'll get a user with thier Internet shut off
  • Anyway...

  • Imagine how this would play out in news (Score:3)

    by kenh ( 9056 ) on Friday September 16, 2022 @07:13PM (#62888435) Homepage Journal

    Johnny logs into a BitTorrent site and uploads and downloads movies, denying Hollywood their profits.

    Johnny's dad has Verizon internet in his house.

    Verizon cancels Johnny's dad's internet service.

    Johnny can't download movies. YAY!

    Johnny's dad can't work from home. BOO!

    Did I mention this was happening during a pandemic?

  • If there are web sites out there that are hosting infringing content, the studios should go after those web sites and get them taken down rather than pushing ISPs to block the sites.

    And if individuals are pirating content (either uploading or downloading) they should sue the individuals who are making the infringing copies rather than the ISPs.

    • I think the idea here is that they want to sue the individuals, but the ISPs get the notice, roll their eyes, and drop it into the circular file. No consequences from the ISP (because they don't care) and they can't get an actual name to serve a lawsuit. So instead of trying to solve the problem like the music industry did, they just file lawsuit against the only party they can.

  • I'm getting what can be something like a dozen faked caller ID calls in a day. Most of them hang up after a few seconds of dead air, the rest are obvious scams from people with funny accents. They don't know who they are calling when I ask, and they don't even know what state I'm in most the time. Aren't there laws against these random calls? Aren't the "telecom giants" supposed to do something about people that abuse the phone system like this?

    A telecom getting sued over pirates on their system seems p

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )
      Actually, the law says they have to put them through, no matter how dodgy of a VoIP provider they come from. That's because in that context they ARE a "common carrier", and can't just arbitrarily block the calls. In my case, I have access to a block list, which is ME requesting them prevent calls from certain numbers, but that's completely useless when most of these assholes just use a random number for every call. It's also based only on the full phone number, no wildcards, no name field match. It blocks a

      • There are fines for violating the "do not call" registry. Call centers violating this will be fined. Since the people making these calls are often not who they claim to be then investigations of "do not call" violations should quickly turn into investigations of identity fraud. With enough evidence they can be shutdown. Since the people running the scam are almost certainly running these scams from some foreign nation they aren't likely to get locked up but they can have the call center closed over it.

        P

        • With so many options for communications today there's ways to live life without a phone number and not end up disconnected from the world like some Amish farmer.

          Until you end up having to sign up for a service that requires all users to enter an SMS number at which to receive a six-digit verification code, and its relevant competitors also require all users to enter an SMS number at which to receive a six-digit verification code.

  • I guess these lousy movies are attempting to use an alternative revenue stream to increase their profits.
  • So I've always thought that there would come a point where large companies realize that you can only squeeze the general population so much for money. And eventually, you'll have to start squeezing other large companies. It has begun! There can be only one! *insert highlander music*

  • Under the Texas anti-censorship law, Telecoms will be *required* to carry the content. No moderation or filtering allowed.

  • This article gives a misleading sense of what's going on in this lawsuit. It's not just an argument that anyone who provides a service that's used for copyright infringement thereby becomes liable for the infringement. That's absurd.

    Link below is a better summary that explains that the pleading alleges that these ISPs haven't fulfilled the conditions necessary for the DMCA safe harbor (because they only count violation notices on a per month basis). That's not an obviously frivolous argument.

    Now, if they

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