TorrentFreak Email Update |
- 200,000 BitTorrent Users Sued In The United States
- Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent
- And When Even The Death Penalty Doesn’t Deter Copying — What Then?
| 200,000 BitTorrent Users Sued In The United States Posted: 08 Aug 2011 04:29 AM PDT Mass file-sharing lawsuits have been filed all across the United States in recent months, almost exclusively targeting BitTorrent users. Copyright holders have embraced this new revenue stream by the dozen and new lawsuits are being filed every week. The United States judicial system is currently being overloaded with new cases, and a few days ago the number of targeted Internet subscribers in federal courts broke the 200,000 barrier. Through these mass lawsuits the copyright holders are trying to obtain the personal details of (mostly) BitTorrent users who allegedly shared their material online. Once this information is handed over, they then offer the defendant the opportunity to settle the case for a few hundred up to a couple of thousand dollars, thereby avoiding a full trial and potentially even bigger financial penalties. A fairly exhaustive spreadsheet shows that the current number of Does that have been sued since the beginning of 2010 currently stands at 201,828. Nearly all of the defendants are accused of sharing copyrighted files via BitTorrent, and 1,237 allegedly used the eD2k network. Over the course of the year several cases have been dismissed and settled and the estimated number of defendants who are still at risk lies at 145,417. Most defendants are being sued in the high profile case brought by the makers of The Hurt Locker. As of May this year this lawsuit targeted 24,583 alleged BitTorrent users, and the first batch of settlement letters have been sent out to the people who pay for the allegedly-infringing Internet connections. Despite the massive number of defendants, none of the cases have made it into a full jury trial as the copyright holders ask for in their original complaint. This also means that the evidence they claim to hold has not been properly tested. It is believed that a significant amount of the people who are accused in these cases are not the actual infringer. However, since the copyright holders prefer settlements above full trials and because defendants don’t want to risk a $150,000 fine, the accuracy of the evidence remains a mystery. What’s very clear is that for the copyright holders, tracking companies and lawyers, the settlement scheme is extremely profitable. If half of the original defendants eventually settle for an average fee of $2,500 they would generate a quarter billion dollars in revenue – from piracy. Source: 200,000 BitTorrent Users Sued In The United States  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent Posted: 08 Aug 2011 01:11 AM PDT
Blitz is the most downloaded movie this week. The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| And When Even The Death Penalty Doesn’t Deter Copying — What Then? Posted: 07 Aug 2011 11:01 AM PDT I remember the first time a proposed law in Sweden said that people should be cut off from the Internet and sent into social exile for unauthorized copying. It was a proposal written by Cecilia Renfors in close cooperation with the copyright industry. “A very balanced proposal,” said the copyright monopolists in an entitled tone of voice. “Shameless mail-order legislation,” said everybody else. On arriving in parliament, the proposal was thrown unceremoniously into the wastepaper basket, sponsored by no one. The copyright industry just wants more, more, and more, and they don’t think twice about ruining our hard-won fundamental civil liberties to prop up their crumbling monopoly and control. When one tough measure doesn’t work — and they never do — the copyright industry keeps demanding more. A few centuries ago, the penalty for unauthorized copying was breaking on the wheel. It is a term we’re not very familiar with these days, but it was a form of prolonged torturous death penalty where the convict first had every bone in his body broken, and then was weaved into the spokes of a wagon wheel and set up on public display. The cause of death was usually thirst, a couple of days later. Breaking the WheelThe copy monopoly in those days concerned fabric patterns. It was in France, prior to the revolution. Some patterns were more popular than others, and to get some additional revenue to the crown’s tax coffers, the King sold a monopoly on these patterns to selected members of the nobility, who in turn could charge an arm and a leg for them (and did so). But the peasants and commoners could produce these patterns themselves. They could produce pirated copies of the fabrics, outside of the nobility’s monopoly. So the nobility went to the King and demanded that the monopoly they had bought with good money should be upheld by the King’s force. The King responded by introducing penalties for pirating these fabrics. Light punishments at first, then gradually tougher. Towards the end, the penalty was death by public torture, drawn out over several days. And it wasn’t just a few poor sods who were made into public examples: sixteen thousand people, almost entirely common folk, died by execution or in the violent clashes that surrounded the monopoly. In practice, everybody knew somebody who had been horribly executed for pirating. Here’s the fascinating part: Capital punishment didn’t even make a dent in the pirating of the fabrics. Despite the fact that some villages had been so ravaged that everybody knew somebody personally who had been executed by public torture, the copying continued unabated at the same level. So the question that needs asking is this: When will the copyright industry stop demanding harsher punishments for copying, since we learn from history that no punishment that mankind is capable of inventing has the ability to deter people from sharing and copying things they like? — — — Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy. Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge. Source: And When Even The Death Penalty Doesn’t Deter Copying — What Then?  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This week there are four newcomers in our chart. Bad Teacher is marked as new because the R5 version was released a few days ago.
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