Wednesday, January 26, 2011

TorrentFreak Email Update

TorrentFreak Email Update

Movie Studio Tells BitTorrent Users: Turn Yourselves In!

Posted: 26 Jan 2011 01:56 AM PST

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Earlier this month we reported on a case brought by movie studio Liberty Media. They had been boasting to the media of a huge $250,000 settlement they had extracted from a BitTorrent user. After becoming suspicious on seeing this huge amount, a record in BitTorrent terms, TorrentFreak did some digging and came to a handful of conclusions.

Essentially the defendant in the case would not be paying anything like $250,000 and this amount had been touted around publicly in order to scare others into not sharing Liberty Media content. We concluded that since this was a single person lawsuit, and not those containing the hundreds and thousands of Does to which we have become accustomed, the motives behind this action were unlikely to be turn-piracy-into-profit.

We are reporting today that in the latter respect, we were far too generous.

Through the adult entertainment industry’s XBIZ Newswire, Liberty Media, via their subsidiary Corbin Fisher, have announced their latest anti-piracy scheme which demonstrates clearly why they were so concerned with their $250,000 settlement headline.

So, BitTorrent users, have you downloaded any Liberty Media movies? If so the company says it is time to hand yourselves in. From 8th February for 14 days, the kind folk at Liberty are offering an amnesty.

"Despite the fact that these people are stealing from us, we wanted to give them a chance to admit their mistakes and move on," said Brian Dunlap, Corbin Fisher's COO. "Therefore, we are offering this limited period where we will resolve these cases quickly and cheaply."

That’s right folks. When handing yourselves in, you shouldn’t go empty handed but have a crisp stack of dollars in your fist totalling a cool $1000. In return the company says you won’t get sued and will get a year’s membership to their websites as a bonus.

For those that choose not to settle, Liberty is warning that it will soon launch lawsuits against BitTorrent users.

“A list of thousands of torrent users has already been provided to Corbin Fisher by an independent research group, and all of these users will be targeted in the first wave of lawsuits to be filed in February,” the company added. “Anyone who has shared Corbin Fisher content via a torrent site is encouraged to contact the company immediately.”

“The company won millions of dollars in court judgments in the past year, including a recent $250,000 judgment against a single torrent user,” Liberty warns.

And there you have it. That’s what the earlier boasting about the $250K settlement was for – propaganda and scare tactics to fuel their pay-up-or-else scheme.

Liberty Media’s lawyers are currently fairly busy. Earlier this month the movie studio filed suit against file-hosting site Hotfile and 1000 of its users. PayPal was also named as a defendant alongside calls for it to freeze Hotfile's account. The court was also asked to seize Hotfile's domain name.

BitTorrent Users Sued for Sharing Paris Hilton’s Sex Tape

Posted: 25 Jan 2011 01:37 PM PST

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one night in parisBitTorrent lawsuits have been popping up everywhere in the United States in recent months, especially from companies dealing with adult content. They have embraced this new revenue stream by the dozen.

Through these mass lawsuits the copyright holders are trying to obtain the personal details of BitTorrent users who allegedly shared their material online. Once this information is handed over, they then offer the defendant the oppotunity to settle the case for a few hundred dollars, thereby avoiding a full trial.

In the United States the judicial system is currently being overloaded with new cases, and it has reached a point where it’s virtually impossible to track every new case introduced. However, one case filed recently stands out from the rest, as it concerns one of BitTorrent’s most downloaded videos ever.

The Paris Hilton Sex Tape, officially released in 2003 and currently owned by XPAYS Inc., is now the subject of a new round of lawsuits. The motion picture, as it’s referred to in court documents, is still being shared among thousands of users every week and 843 alleged downloaders have now been sued at the District Court of Central California.

XPAYS claims that they "spent a substantial amount of time, money and effort to produce, market and distribute" the film, and that their profits are now dwindling due to mass copyright infringement. In addition, they claim that the illegal distribution is a threat to minors, since the illegal copies can be downloaded without age verification.

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Aside from the noble deed of protecting minors, most of the complaint deals with the losses and irreparable harm BitTorrent users have caused the company. This is in line with most other complaints we’ve seen so far. A special section and several attached ‘exhibits’ further show that XPAYS is the legitimate copyright holder of the sex tape.

In the hope of stopping ‘copyright trolls’ such as XPAYS, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed an amicus brief last week in which it asks an Illinois judge to quash subpoenas issued in pay-up-or-else lawsuits involving alleged illegal file-sharing of pornography.

"Copyright owners have a right to protect their works, but they can't use shoddy and unfair tactics to do so," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. "We're asking the court to protect the rights of each and every defendant, instead of allowing these copyright trolls to game the system."

Despite the increasing resistance, both from judges and opponents of the lawsuits, we expect that similar cases will continue to be filed for the time being simply because they have the potential to be extremely profitable. XPAYS for one is determined to continue legal action against those sharing the Paris Hilton Sex Tape and says it will keep monitoring BitTorrent networks for further infringements.

Law to Shutdown P2P Sites Resurrected By Spanish Coalition

Posted: 25 Jan 2011 10:30 AM PST

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Traditionally, Spain has been one of the few countries where courts have affirmed that P2P-sites operate legally. This, to the disappointment of the United States who behind closed doors helped the Spanish Government to come up with new laws to protect the interests of copyright holders.

As a result the Spanish Government proposed new legislation last year under which sites offering links to copyright works could be taken offline without a judicial order. This could potentially shut down all the major file-sharing sites, and is generally seen by the public as a plain act of Internet censorship.

This legislation, an amendment which is part of the Sustainable Economy Law (LES), was drafted by Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde with help the United States Government. The proposed legislation, also known as 'The Sinde Act', has been widely protested by the public and last month these protests resulted in a major victory for those who are against the legislation.

After a lengthy debate the House of Representatives decided to adopt the Sustainable Economy Law, but reject the controversial amendment. This meant the law would go to the Senate without the amendment, but yesterday this turned out to be idle hope.

Just hours before the deadline to submit new amendments passed, a coalition of The Socialist Party (PSOE), the People’s Party (PP) and Convergence and Union (CiU) reintroduced 'The Sinde Act' with some minor changes. This decision comes after several weeks of meetings behind closed doors between the involved parties.

The new and revised version of the legislation has been changed on a few points, but the main goal still stands. It will make it easier for the authorities to shutdown P2P sites and others that facilitate copyright infringement. The proposal will be voted on by the Senate in the coming weeks.

The major change compared to the previous version is that the new Sinde Act will allow for more “judicial control”, which in reality means that a judge has to sign off on a request to hand over the details of a website owner. However, there is no judge required to determine whether a site is “infringing copyrights” or not.

Today the Spanish news is dominated with hundreds of reports on the new legislation and the reactions from the public are not mild. The majority of Internet users and many artists disapprove of the new legislation, and even the President of the Academy of Cinema, Álex de la Iglesia, criticized it as “a law that does not suit anybody.”

“It would have been better to start from scratch. It is a law that from the beginning has been very unpopular,” De la Iglesia added. Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde did not want to respond to this critique and said the law promotes “innovation” and poses no threat to the Internet at all.

The law will now be sent to the Senate in a few weeks where it’s expected to be passed through easily by the three parties who approved it yesterday. However, the public is not yet giving up yet, and major off- and online protests are currently being planned. No doubt that we will hear more about this in the near future.
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