Tag: movie

Hollywood makes up settlement figures

Posted on December 29, 2014 by - News

1910-carl-laemmleFor years Hollywood has been claiming that it has made giant settlement figures with those it considered pirates, to use fear to drag the IT industry into doing its bidding.

But now, thanks to the Sony hack, those figures are being questioned.

At the end of 2013, Hollywood claimed it managed to get  IsoHunt to ‘pay’ $110 million and Hotfile agreeing to ‘pay’ $80 million. In both cases, we noted that there was no chance that those sums would ever get paid.

TorrentFreak has been combing through the Sony emails and found that the Hotfile settlement was really just for $4 million, and the $80 million was just a bogus number agreed to for the sake of a press release that the MPAA could use to scare others.

“The studios and Hotfile have reached agreement on settlement, a week before trial was to start. Hotfile has agreed to pay us $4 million, and has entered into a stipulation to have an $80 million judgment entered and the website shut down,” the email from Sony’s SVP Legal reads.

The $4 million was paid out, in three separate payments, but Hollywood would have lost a fortune bringing the case.

It is also unlikely that any of the $4 million went back to any content creators, it would have been used to fund MPAA’s vast “anti-piracy” machine, allowing it to be used for other lawsuits and funding investigations by state Attorneys General.

It makes you wonder if anything they say involving money has any shred of truth.

 

Google sues Mississippi Attorney General

Posted on December 22, 2014 by - News

516EDMTJSNLGoogle has sued the attorney general of Mississippi accusing him of conspiring with the movie industry.

The search engine claims that Jim Hood had been improperly influenced by major Hollywood studios that are trying to crack down on the distribution of pirated movies on the Internet.

The lawsuit also questioned the authority of state law enforcement officials to regulate Internet service providers.

Hood and Google have been at war for a while now. Hood issued a 79-page subpoena in October, asking that the company turn over information about its search engine and sales of illegal drugs, pornography and other materials. He suggested that the company was knowingly profiting from such sales and demanded a response from Google by early January.

However during the Sony hack Emails and other records showed how the movie industry, through a nonprofit group it funded, had hired the former attorney general from Mississippi, whom Hood used to work for, to put pressure on Hood to attack Google.

The Sony emails also showed how the major movie studios, working through the Motion Picture Association of America, had created what they called Project Goliath, to press state attorneys general to question, subpoena and sue the company.

All this is a bit tricky for Hood to squeeze out of – although he did have a go. Hood said Google was using its deep pockets in an attempt to “stop the State of Mississippi for daring to ask some questions.” Nevertheless, he said he would call the company and try to work out a deal.

It also accused Hood of essentially acting as a pawn for the MPAA., arguing that. Hood “took these actions following a sustained lobbying effort from the Motion Picture Association of America.”

The MPPA, which was clearly caught out, went onto the attack with its usual bile about how Freedom of Speech is being used as a shield for unlawful activities and “the Internet is not a license to steal.”

However if the case gets to court, it could be a mess for the studios. You can hardly play the victim when you are buying politicians to bully those who disagree with your business model.

Studios try internet take over

Posted on December 1, 2014 by - News

hollywoodThe movie and nusic studios have taken their first steps towards controlling ISPs who do not do what they are told, and, indirectly the internet,  with court actions.

BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music have sued Cox Communications for copyright infringement, arguing that the internet service provider does not do enough to punish those who download music illegally.

BMG and Round Hill are clients of Rightscorp, a copyright enforcement agent whose business is based on threatening ISPs with a high-stakes lawsuit if they don’t forward settlement notices to users that Rightscorp believes are “repeat infringers” of copyright.

Saying this is a high-stakes, game is an understatement. The studios are trying to hold an ISP responsible for users engaged in piracy. If it comes off, then ISPs could find themselves responsible for all the content that users post online.

BMG and Round Hill claim that they have notified Cox about 200,000 repeat infringers on its network, which means trillions of dollars.

The music publishers describe the Cox network as an out-of-control den of piracy. “Today, BitTorrent systems are like the old P2P systems on steroids,” BMG lawyers write. “Despite its published policy to the contrary, Cox’s actual policy is to refuse to suspend, terminate, or otherwise penalize subscriber accounts that repeatedly commit copyright infringement through its network in any meaningful numbers.”

Cox has ignored “overwhelming evidence,” and the complaint lists a few examples. A “Cox subscriber account having had IP address 70.168.128.98 at the time of the infringement, believed to be located in Fairfax, Virginia, was used to infringe twenty-four particular copyrighted works 1,586 times since December 9, 2013,” they note. “Cox subscriber having IP address 24.252.149.211 engaged in 39,432 acts of copyright infringement over 189 days.”

Rightscorp is furious that  Cox started treating its e-mails like spam.

Part of the issue here is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998, which requires ISPs to have a policy to terminate “repeat infringers,” but there’s not a lot of clarity as to exactly what that means.

If a “repeat infringer” has to be defined by a judge rules then the music publishers and Rightscorp have many more hoops to jump through before they have any hope of beating Cox in court. However if Rightscorp’s notifications are enough to find a user is a repeat infringer, then the Interent could be in trouble.

Rightscorp believes, of course that all it has to do is accuse someone of being a witch, er movie pirate, and Cox should dump them as a client.

Big Content has not wanted to pick this particular fight. If they win, they could get more enforcement tools, but if they lose then they would end up with less power over ISPs than they have now.

ISPs are compromising on the issue and slowly moving forward with a “six strikes” system. That would go out the window if ISPs have a legal precedent to tell the studios to get a court order.

There is also the additional problem that if the ISPs, lose it will make it possible for anyone to censor the internet for the price of a stamp. All you need to do is sue the ISP and they will either take down the content or have to go to court to defend it.

MPAA only wants to save pirates from malware

Posted on October 29, 2014 by - News

0099413191_LIt turns out that when the MPAA sues you for $100,000 for every file you share it is just because it is trying to save you from malware.

Lobbying outfit Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said it is concerned that intellectual property pirates are being exposed to malware and other dangers.

It told US trade officials that the websites that traffic in infringing movies, television shows, and other copyrighted content do not harm only the rights holder. Malicious software or malware, which puts Internet users at risk of identity theft, fraud, ebola and Justin Bieber (we made the last two up).

The group added that “such risks jeopardise legitimate e-commerce and consumers” and that the “MPAA continues to work with global partners against criminal organizations and activities in an effort to protect consumers not only from the dangers of illicit audiovisual goods and services, but other potential threats, such as malware.”

So in other words the MPAA’s efforts to crush P2P piracy sites were not out of a fear that file-sharing will mean that the profits from such great films as Sex Tape and the The Legend of Hercules will be reduced. It is doing it to protect the poor pirates from evil malware makers.

Chris Dodd, the MPAA’s chairman, said in a statement that “Robust protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights both domestically and abroad are vital to ensuring the sustained growth of America’s creative industries.”