May 13, 2010
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The fight between Peer-To-Peer downloaders of copyrighted content versus the copyright owners continues… This time it has to do with the 2010 Best Picture Oscar winner “The Hurt Locker.” The movie only made $16 Million in the Box Office, which is understandably disappointing for the people behind the film. I personally think that it’s because it didn’t really get much of a wide-release and had a very limited run (for the record, I DID see it in theaters), but Voltage Pictures and the US Copyright Group is going to say that it’s because of illegal downloading and are suing the “tens of thousands” of people who downloaded the film.
From the news article… “The firm uses tech from GuardaLey, which collects the IP addresses of users that are believed to be downloading the film from BitTorrent. From the IP address, it figures out which ISP is responsible and e-mails it, asking the ISP to retain all logs for the IP address identified at the time in question. Once the content of the download is verified, the lawyers take over and subpoena the ISPs for subscriber information in order to find out exactly who has been naughty. Once the users are unmasked—and according to the group, nearly all ISPs cooperate—the firm sends settlement offers.”
I’ve already said my piece about how I feel about downloading copyrighted material; “just don’t get caught,” so I don’t feel like contributing to the topic further. It can be such a time-waster to read all the comments resulted from this new “threat” against P2P though. I posted a couple of posts from some of those comments below, but if you really want to follow the news and the thread, click on the link below.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/hurt-locker-torrenters-prepare-to-be-sued.ars
CHIEFTOM – Downloading the movie without the permission of the owner is stealing. It is no different than walking into a store and shoplifting the DVD.
PLAMONI – Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a huge fan of copyright infringement. But it’s certainly not stealing in any sense of the word. Well, maybe in the sense of the word where you say, “He stole 2nd base.” But not in the sense of the word you’re using.
If I walk into a store and take a DVD, then the store is out the DVD. They would have to replace it. And if their insurance covered the cost, well, then the insurance has to replace it. The fact is, someone is actually losing out every time someone takes a DVD from the store.
When you download a movie that you had no intention of purchasing, you’re not depriving anyone of anything. If you hadn’t downloaded it, there would have been no difference whatsoever in sales. The idea that every download equals a lost sale is a complete fallacy.
Sure, there are people who might have bought the movie if they hadn’t been able to download it. And those people should be ashamed. But you still can’t equate an act of copyright infringement to an act of theft. It’s like saying that shooting someone in Quake is the same as shooting someone in real life, because if you hadn’t been able to shoot them in Quake, you probably would have shot them in real life! It makes no sense whatsoever!also from PLAMONI – I have to wonder about the effectiveness of suing BitTorrent users in the US. It’s been shown time and time again that the “Making Available” argument is a no-go. Since the plaintiffs are required to demonstrate actual distribution in order to prove infringement, they are going to be in a major bind when it comes to BitTorrent.
It’s impossible to say that anyone on BitTorrent aside from the initial seeder (in the event that there’s only one) actually uploaded an entire copy of the file in question. All you can say is that certain hosts contributed to the general swarm. And in that case, they’re not necessarily uploading anything that can be marked as an actual infringing set of bytes. How much (as a percentage of total bytes) do you actually have to be shown to have uploaded before you’re considered infringing?
It just seems like this is going to be a nightmare to litigate. Judges have a hard enough time understanding plain old direct P2P, they’re probably going to cry when the geeks try to start explaining BitTorrent to them.ADMINFOO – people are taking more than they can afford to acquire properly. Which badly screws up the market; it’s less honest than it has ever been. I’ve never argued from statistics or industry claims that they sold less this year than that other year; I have in fact argued against such statistics being considered authoritative statements on the ‘cost of piracy’.
My position revolves around the very fact that rampant piracy renders the market badly broken, and thus monkeys horribly with the production pipeline for new works of art*. But it centers on my conviction that it’s simply wrong to take what was not freely offered. Wrong on a personal level, but these personal wrongnesses percolate up to much larger wrongnesses which affect us all in ways I don’t think we have a good chance of predicting fully.
