

Biggest BitTorrent Downloading Case in U.S. History Targets 23,000 Defendants - ygreek
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/biggest-bittorrent-case/

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jrwoodruff
That's an interesting business model.

1\. Make a terrible low-budget porno that few would ever actually buy.

2\. Wait for it to hit the torrent networks

3\. Harvest IP addresses

4\. Sue for millions

It's possible some of these firms will make more money this way than they
would have from regular sales.

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lutorm
I think that's essentially what the EFF is arguing.

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officemonkey
I wonder how many people read the article and saw "The Expendables" and
breathed a sigh of relief.

I just checked Wikipedia and realized that "The Expendables" was a pretty big
hit (80 mil USD to make, 103 mil USD made domestically, 274 mil USD world-
wide). Who knew...

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bane
In other news

[http://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-not-a-person-
bittorrent-c...](http://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-not-a-person-bittorrent-
case-judge-says-110503/)

~~~
lutorm
Yeah, they apparently didn't get the memo.

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johnphillips54
When they sue you, isn't it actually for the uploading (the "posting" of
copyrighted material by allowing other torrent users to download bits of the
file from your computer) and not the actual downloading?

Is that why they don't target DDL users of sites like Rapidshare and Hotfile,
because the file is only downloaded but not uploaded by the user, unlike on
torrents? I'm sure trying to seize the user logs of DDL sites through some
form of legal action might be difficult as well.

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johnphillips54
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I'm now wondering if they can sue you for
just downloading from DDLs or USENET (without the uploading activity inherent
to torrents,) couldn't they theoretically also sue users of youtube or other
video sites for the playing of copyrighted material, which I imagine from a
legal perspective is essentially the same as downloading it from a DDL?

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lutorm
I think the idea is that while downloading a copyrighted work is still
illegal, uploading is distribution, which is one of the indicators of
"willfulness" which exposes you to the high statutory limits.

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pyre
Yea. If they were to sue you for downloading (but not uploading) they could
have huge landmark cases for millions of dollars in damages. Because the
current math goes like:

    
    
      statutory damage limit = $150k
      people we *think* you distributed to = 1 million people
      damages = $150k * 1m = profit!
    

You would have a hard time convincing a judge that either: a) the copyright
owner suffered millions in damages over a single download of a movie or b)
that the person needs millions of dollars in damages to 'teach people a
lesson.'

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lini
\--- Film companies pay snoops to troll BitTorrent sites, dip into active
torrents and capture the IP addresses of the peers who are downloading and
uploading pieces of the files. \--- This is a very vague way of gathering
evidence. I am sure that the ISPs don't hold logs of the actual connections
each IP is making, so I am wondering how is it possible to prove that the
accused person actually downloaded the files in the torrent. Unless the snoops
use a hacked BT client that downloads a whole file from only one specific
peer, which is highly unlikely and will take a huge amount of time for all
23000 people.

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yock
I'm fairly certain that deep packet inspection would be required for an ISP to
connect customer to IP address to visited resource. That being said, it would
be trivial for an ISP to log the date and time each customer held a given IP
address. If a plaintiff were to provide that date and time information, it
seems at least technically possible to link that activity to a subscriber
account.

What I don't see though is how you prove that the person listed on the account
was the one performing the activity. Then again, all it takes is convincing a
few people (6 for a civil trial jury?) who weren't clever enough to get out of
jury duty.

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lini
What I was implying is that a snapshot of the peers in a given torrent is not
exactly hard evidence that each of those peers has a 100% downloaded copy of
the files. For example, I remember that some torrent clients have a "super-
seed" mode, where they appear as a normal peer with less than 100% completion.
I know this sounds a bit like "the dog ate my homework" excuse but it sets a
bad precedent of what constitutes an infringement - is it downloading a whole
copy, uploading a whole copy, or just a part (unusable by itself) of the work?

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yock
Well, what's a worse precedent? Being technically innocent of infringement
since you skipped a single bit on the end of a download or the court ignoring
your intent? Intent has been the cornerstone of many copyright infringement
defenses. It would seem a bad move to claim that intent is irrelevant at this
point.

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hessenwolf
Ooops...

Erm, what should I be using instead?

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josefresco
Apparently you missed the direct download movement a couple years back. BT is
history for the leading edge consumer pirates, DD sites are the next wave and
are not long for this world given how popular they have become.

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lhnz
Disagree. For niche content, private torrent sites are still king.

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geoffc
$3K claim letter to 23K defendants is $69M in potential revenue. The defendant
has potential liability of $150K and probably has to pay more than $3K in
legal fees to defend themselves. My SWAG is 10-20% pay for a $7M - $14M payday
for the lawyers.

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funkshanker
There doesn't seem to be any mention of what tracker(s) these IP addresses
were harvested from.

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Trufa
And THIS is what you call a turning point, let's see what comes out of all
this.

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tripzilch
A friend of mine is in this list. And he didn't download anything.

(I know for sure because he's a vocal proponent of copyrights)

