Friday, July 15, 2011

TorrentFreak Email Update

TorrentFreak Email Update

70 Year-Old Grandma Threatened Over BitTorrent Download

Posted: 15 Jul 2011 04:47 AM PDT

Since 2010 tens of thousands of regular people have been sued in the U.S. for sharing films on P2P networks without the consent of copyright holders. Unlike other lawsuits, the aim of the copyright holders is not to take any of the defendants to court, but to get alleged infringers to pay a substantial cash settlement to make legal action go away.

As has been reported in the past, many of the people suspected of sharing copyrighted material are wrongfully accused. The problem for them, however, is that fighting the case is more expensive than paying a ~$3000 settlement fee. Justice aside, settling seems to be the best option for many innocents.

But not for a 70 year-old grandma from San Francisco. This retired widow has been accused of sharing porn using BitTorrent, but says she doesn’t even know what BitTorrent is.

The Jane Doe in this case is being pursued by lawyer John Steele, whose law firm is currently involved in dozens of file-sharing related lawsuits, ostensibly to protect the rights of adult media companies. It is the same law firm that sued people for downloading mislabeled files.

Like many other defendants the 70 year-old doesn’t have the money to defend herself, but unlike others she’s not planning to settle the case either.

“It smacks of extortion,” she told SFGate in a comment, a conclusion that was reached by many others in the past.

Determined to put up a fight the grandma said she may have to go to court to defend herself. And she already has a plan of attack.

“I’d say to the judge, ‘I have no idea how this happened. If Sony can get hacked, if the Pentagon can get hacked, my goodness, what chance does an individual have?” she said.

As we’ve seen in the past, the lawyers don’t see Jane Doe’s age as an excuse, nor do they buy the claim that someone else may have used her unsecured wireless network to download files. Jane Doe has to pay up or convince the court she’s not guilty, they insist.

A full trial is also an option, as is usually noted in the settlement letters, but the lawyers are quick to add that it would put Jane Doe at risk of having to cough up $150,000 instead of a few thousand dollar to settle.

A settlement is the wise choice according to the law firm.

“We believe that providing you with an opportunity to avoid litigation by working out a settlement with us, versus the costs of attorneys' fees and the uncertainty with jury verdicts, is very reasonable and in good faith," the settlement letter reads.

A tough choice, and that’s the beauty of these pay-up-or-else schemes.

News of their potential profitability quickly spread and as a result copyright holders of more obscure and adult content have embraced them. Often described as copyright trolls, these companies can make more money from speculative lawsuits than actually selling the films they produced.

Source: 70 Year-Old Grandma Threatened Over BitTorrent Download

Final Ruling Confirms ‘Pirate’ Sites Act Lawfully in Spain

Posted: 14 Jul 2011 07:49 AM PDT

Several rulings over the past couple of years have indicated that sites providing mere links to copyright works act legally under Spanish law. One key case, however, threw uncertainty into the mix earlier this year.

The case dates back to May 2009, when music rights group SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores) filed a complaint against Jesus Guerra, the operator of file-sharing link site Elrincondejesus.com. SGAE claimed the site abused the copyrights of its members.

At full trial Judge Raul N. García Orejudo ruled that offering an index of links and/or linking to copyright material is not the same as distribution, noting that under current Spanish law there is nothing which prohibits such sites from operating.

In March this year, however, an SGAE appeal resulted in Elrincondejesus.com being subjected to a fine of 3,587 euros by the Provincial Court of Barcelona.

In addition to P2P links, Elrincondejesus had offered links to files held on sites such as MegaUpload and RapidShare. The Court said that by offering these direct links Elrincondejesus had made copyright works “publicly available”, even though the site had not uploaded them to the Internet. This, the Court concluded, was a breach of SGAE’s rights.

All this must’ve seemed like very bad news for index-web.com, a site with the same structure as Elrincondejesus that had been fighting an almost identical case against SGAE dating back to 2009. After initially being cleared of wrong-doing at a May 2010 hearing, following an SGAE appeal Index-web.com would now have to face the Provincial Court in Barcelona, the same court that had found Elrincondejesus liable in March.

This month that case went ahead, but rather than SGAE coming out on top again as it had done against Elrincondejesus, the pendulum swung the other way. The Provincial Court, with the same judges presiding as in the previous case, decided that links – whether to material on P2P networks or cyberlocker-type services – do not infringe intellectual property rights.

Lawyers for Index-web.com, Javier de la Cueva and David Bravo, say the ruling is significant and represents the “..first final decision in civil proceedings issued in our country stating that pages of links to P2P sites or direct downloads do not infringe any intellectual property rights.”

Cueva and Bravo say the ruling from the influential Barcelona court will become the legal standard for interpreting Spain’s intellectual property laws in future, and will have implications for Ley Sinde, the Spanish government’s troubled anti-filesharing legislation.

Following the ruling in favor of Index-web.com, Cueva and Bravo – who also represent Elrincondejesus – have filed an appeal on the site’s behalf, hoping to overturn the 3,587 euro fine handed down in March.

What remains to be seen now is how the US government will react. As part of Operation in Our Sites, US authorities previously seized the domain name of sports links site RojaDirecta on the basis that it operates illegally. The Provincial Court ruling appears to put the legal status of RojaDirecta beyond doubt.

Nevertheless, just this week federal prosecutors urged a judge not to return the site’s domain following a request by Puerto 80, the company behind Rojadirecta.

"Returning the Rojadirecta domain names at this time would provide Puerto 80 with the very tools it used to commit the crimes the government has alleged it engaged in prior to the seizure," the government said in its filing.

Since it is committing the same ‘crimes’ as RojaDirecta, will Index-web.com have its domain seized by the US too?

Source: Final Ruling Confirms ‘Pirate’ Sites Act Lawfully in Spain
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