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2,919 Movie Pirates Walk Free as BitTorrent Trolling Scheme Falls Apart
- vanderZwan 13y agoAs someone on Reddit pointed out: alleged movie pirates.
- Cthulhu_ 13y agoYeah, the title could be done a bit more tactfully. They're not pirates (or, guilty of copyright infringement) until they're convicted by a court, and iirc, the number of people actually brought to court, charged, tried and convicted is very small. Usually they're coerced into paying a settlement and the thing is over with.
- znowi 13y agoCurious why the submitter rounded off the number :) Anyhow, good news. A small win for the pirates.
- kevinburke 13y agoHow did this get to court? Who hired the lawyers to defend the pirates?
- laurent123456 13y agoContra Piracy only had IPs, so they went to court to request the identities of the file-sharers from ISPs. At that point, there was nobody to defend since they had no names.
- beloch 13y agoIt's amusing how the troll-firm defines itself as non-profit. It must mean the firm doesn't accrue any value from its operations. If it takes a few bonuses for the partners to ensure that never happens, well that's okay!
- Cthulhu_ 13y agoIt means they probably siphon the money off somewhere (shell companies, the companies that hire / enlist them, etc) so that they're only non-profit because their books balance out and because of the tax exemption status it gets them.
- nodata 13y agoNon-profit doesn't mean they don't make a profit.
- elnate 13y agoWhat does it mean?
- Retric 13y agoThey can't have dividends, any profit must be reinvested or given to another non profit.
- sliverstorm 13y agoI presume it can also be spent on increased operational expenses, e.g. salary, perks, etc?
- Retric 13y agoUp to a point, there are issues if you start a non profit and then pay yourself as CEO a truly insane income.
- thaumasiotes 13y agoCan you elaborate on some of those issues? I've heard the unsubstantiated claim that the NYSE works on essentially that principle, and the much better-substantiated claim that that's what's going on with Morris Dees and the SPLC. edit: stop impugning the SCLC; correctly impugn the SPLC.
- RubyWestcoast 13y agoWait, let me get this straight. A company with no vested interest in the copyright, no association with the party who owns the copyright, was claiming copyright infringement and trying to subpoena identities? What the heck?
- reustle 13y ago> no association with the party who owns the copyright Did you read the article? > The Swiss firm didn’t hide the fact that they were nothing to do with the making of the film and they also admitted not being involved with traditional movie distribution channels. Instead, they licensed “BitTorrent distribution” and “enforcement” rights from Los Angeles-based Hannibal Pictures.
- ori_b 13y agoThey bought the right to sue from the actual copyright owners. Think of it as outsourcing the copyright enforcement.
- MichaelGG 13y agoDidn't Righthaven get slapped down for that? At least in the US, you can't sell the "right to sue" for copyright.
- nness 13y agoArs did a post-mortem of sorts that explained just that, that Righthaven did not posses any actual interest in the copyrights themselves, and had no standing to sue. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/copyright-troll-righthaven-finally-completely-dead/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/copyright-troll-r...
- MyDogHasFleas 13y agoI don't know about "walk free". If I were Contra Piracy, I would simply go back to Hannibal Pictures' lawyers and get them to file the suit. Clearly as the actual copyright owners, they have standing to file. Thus Contra Piracy would become a subcontractor to Hannibal Pictures, and probably clear fewer bucks, but at least it wouldn't be a complete loss.
- smsm42 13y agoActual copyright holders don't want to, it doesn't scale. The scalable model is to demand settlement (marginal cost of roughly $0 after making email templates and writing IP harvesting software) not to hire expensive lawyers to actually file lawsuits.
- MyDogHasFleas 13y agoIt'll be interesting to see what happens with this. You may be right. Depends on how enterprising Contra is, and how willing the studio is to engage in more than just selling some rights and walking away. It's not really that much potential revenue, the studio may not want to do any more.
- syjer 13y agoWhat's amusing is that being a swiss company, what they are doing is illegal, as IP address are considered part of the private sphere and they cannot be harvested ( http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/switzerland-gathering-ip-addresses-from-bittorrent-sites-illegal/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/switzerland-gathe... )
- GabrielF00 13y agoThere's another interesting copyright issue regarding the film in question here, "All Things Fall Apart". Apparently, 50 Cent wanted to call the movie "Things Fall Apart", but Chinua Achebe, who wrote a famous book by that name in 1958, refused to sell him the rights for $1 million. The crazy part of this is that Achebe took the title from a line from Yeats' 1919 poem "The Second Coming". How Achebe can turn around and prevent someone else from using a title he himself borrowed is beyond me. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/sep/14/chinua-achebe-50-cent http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/sep/14/chinua-achebe-5...
- saraid216 13y agoThat's basically the standard operating procedure for most cases of intellectual property defense in art: culture has always been a thing of remix and locking it down at some point as "original" is the novel and nonsensical behavior.
- yareally 13y agoI think any copyrights Yeats would have had in 1958 were expired. Unfortunately, cannot say the same about ones Achebe has since the rules have extended time periods to be much longer now.
- harshreality 13y agoI don't think that's a copyright issue, rather something more related to trademark (although I don't think you can trademark the title of a book either, there are a bunch of more obscure IP-related protections and this might fall under one of them). Nobody can copyright a three word phrase. [edit: almost never, see [1]] Copyright also applies if you copy enough story elements, but that doesn't apply because 50 Cent's movie is not in any meaningful way a copy of Achebe's story. And if that were the case, even changing the title completely wouldn't avoid infringement. You would violate Rowling's copyright, for instance, if you took a Harry Potter book, outlined the plot (even with character and place names changed), and wrote a new novel from scratch using that outline. "The novel with the said title was initially produced in 1958 (that is 17 years before [50] was born)," replied his lawyers, according to Naijan. "[It is] listed as the most-read book in modern African literature, and won't be sold for even £1bn." I think this was IP bullying by Achebe's legal team (if were laywers at all). They claim to have a monopoly to use the very generic title (even when separated from the underlying story), and when offered a lot of money (I'd love to hear 50 Cent's lawyers reason for offering a million dollars to use that title), they make a category error, confusing rights to the book itself with rights to a fairly generic title. [1] http://fairuse.stanford.edu/2003/09/09/copyright_protection_for_short/ http://fairuse.stanford.edu/2003/09/09/copyright_protection_...