More than 23,000 people will soon be notified by their internet service providers that their subscriber information is being turned over to lawyers suing over the 2010 Sylvester Stallone flick The Expendables.
As we first reported Monday, the case is the largest BitTorrent file sharing lawsuit in U.S. history.
We just updated our IP Detective tool with the 23,322 IP addresses targeted between February 5 and April 22 in the mass lawsuit filed by the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Copyright Group on behalf of Nu Image Inc.
All told, more than 140,000 BitTorrent downloaders are being targeted in dozens of lawsuits across the country, many of them for downloading B-rated movies and porn. 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.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great resource on what to do if you’re a target.
As before, our widget also will attempt to check if you’re one of the nearly 6,000 targets in the controversial Nude Nuns with Big Guns case, or the Openmind Solutions lawsuit that’s going after nearly 3,000 alleged porn downloaders.
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Falling DVD sales and piracy of movies is leading to renewed calls by Hollywood for new technologies to prevent unauthorised distribution of their intellectual properties.
A recent study by Adams Media Research found that DVD sales declined by 27 per cent since the heady days in 2004 when sales reached $12 billion worldwide.
To boost falling revenues and protect content, studios are “exploring on-demand delivery of theatre movies direct to consumers’ homes, confident that the service will not impact traditional theatre movies and DVD releases — that is, unless the business model is disrupted by piracy,” says global security software security firm Irdeto.
To prevent illegal viewing of pirated satellite signals around the globe, Irdeto has patented new “watermarking technology for set-top boxes.”
The company said that “studios are requiring additional security measures to mitigate potential threats of piracy and new software must be deployed to every set-top box offering early release entertainment.”
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Piracy worries and BitTorrent lawsuits have made their way into the generally very liberal anime industry. Last week, the producers of the new anime series Fractale told distributor Funimation to stop the online broadcast of the their show in the United States over piracy concerns, and a few days later Funimation announced a lawsuit against 1337 alleged BitTorrent downloaders.
Piracy is an issue that is troubling many content publishers worldwide, but the responses to copyright infringement differ from company to company. A great example of how not to stop piracy was made by the the producers of the new Anime series Fractale last week.
In an attempt to stop the illicit distribution of the series, the American anime distributor Funimation was ordered by Fractale’s production company to stop the online broadcast of the series on Hulu. The producers wanted Funimation to get rid of all pirated copies online before the broadcast could continue.
An interesting take on how piracy should be dealt with, and arguably one of the worst things a company can do to stop illicit copies from appearing online. Since the broadcast ban was limited to the US but not Europe, it only created an increased demand for pirated copies, while it did little to stop illegal copies from showing up online.
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An Indian firm claims it was hired to carry out denial of service attacks against film download and torrent tracker websites at the behest of Bollywood movie distributors in India.
Girish Kumar, managing director of Aiplex Software, said it was paid to search for sites offering download of newly released films, before issuing copyright takedown notices.
“Generally speaking 95 per cent of… providers do remove the content,” Kumar said. “It’s only the torrent sites – 20 to 25 per cent of the torrent sites – that do not have respect for any of the copyright notices.”
In cases where providers fail to take action on takedown notices, then Aiplex goes to plan B – launching a denial of service attack against offending websites, a tactic that differentiates Aiplex’s tactics from the track-and-sue technique of Western legal firms employed by Western film studios.
“The only means that we can put the site down is denial-of-service,” Kumar explained, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. “Basically we have to flood [the site] with millions and millions of requests and put the site down.”
Bollywood studios are Aiplex’s main clients, but it also claims to do work for Fox Star Studios, a joint venture between Fox and Star TV targeting the Asian film market.
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NEW YORK—Lucas Entertainment has filed a federal lawsuit against 65 unnamed individuals the company claims used a gay BitTorrent index to share illicit copies of one of its movies.
Filed July 19 in United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division, the suit seeks monetary damages and a permanent injunction barring defendants from infringing any of Lucas’ copyrights.
According to documents filed with the court, each of the defendants, who are known only by their internet protocol addresses, participated in round-robin sharing of the Lucas title Missing after logging on to the BitTorrent index Gay-Torrents.net. The site is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
The piracy lawsuit is Lucas Entertainment’s first. President and Chief Executive Officer Michael Lucas said his company departed from other gay studios’ anti-piracy tactic—suing the websites involved or ganging several individual defendants in smaller actions—in favor of an approach that has worked for Hollywood and the recording industry: broad-based litigation against individuals. Lucas said mainstream lawsuits targeting hundreds or thousands of individual defendants at once have proved more efficient than repeatedly pursuing several smaller cases.
“While many sites are responsive and take down content once notified of a copyright violation, some are not and we have decided to take a more forceful approach with the more difficult sites and their users,” Lucas said. “Too many people assume the internet provides them with unlimited access to our content at no cost. Instead, it gives us exactly the tools and information we need for lawsuits like this one. I will be ruthless with those who are stealing my films.
“You only have to conduct a quick Google search to see the rampant piracy all over the internet,” he added. “I am always surprised that users would deal with torrent sites and all the hassle that requires instead of streaming through LucasEntertainment.com, but I guess there are many people out there who have endless patience. We appreciate our fans wherever they are, but business is business and we have to make some money off our content.”
The complaint is here.
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Hollywood is finding an audience with the administration of President Obama that it lacked during the era of George W. Bush.
On June 30, the Homeland Security Department’s U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement arm used a vacant sound stage at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank to announce the seizure of nine websites with names like NinjaVideo.net and Thepiratecity.org that allegedly traffic in illegal movie downloads.
The operation, which involved 100 special agents, follows a move by the Federal Communications Commission in May that opened the way for movie studios to offer cable viewers first-run movies at premium prices for films still playing in theaters.
Hollywood may also get a win in the pending financial legislation aimed at reshaping the regulation of derivatives. Tucked into the bill is a Hollywood-promoted ban of futures markets in box-office ticket sales such as one planned by securities brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald LP.
“We feel like we’ve got the wind at our back,” says Barry Meyer, chairman of Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. unit, who has led the industry’s anti-piracy initiative. “We’re getting a good hearing on the issues that matter to us.”
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The crackdown, which included seizing assets from 15 bank accounts, involved police, customs and the movie industry.
The closure of the sites, which had 6.7m visitors combined each month, was described as the “largest takedown of illegal movie and TV websites in a single action” by the government.
Some films were available hours after their release in US cinemas.
Previous crackdowns on film piracy have focused on illegally copied DVDs.
The latest action is the first of its scale to target websites which profit – by selling advertising or taking donations – from offering pirated films for free.
Website warning
Search warrants were executed in New Jersey, New York, North Carolina and Washington in an investigation which involved about 100 agents in 11 US states as well as the Netherlands
Websites targeted had links to films including Knight and Day, Jonah Hex and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – all currently showing in US cinemas.
A warning placed on the websites state they have been seized by officials.
The government has only seized domain names which means computers running the sites could be used with different URLs.
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A woman accused of using the video recording feature on a digital camera to record several clips of ‘Twilight Saga: New Moon’ during a screening last November will sue the movie theater she was in before being arrested.
Samntha Tumpach, 22, filed the $50,000 civil suit in Illinois’ Cook County Circuit Court against Muvico Theaters. Two recorded videos on the camcorder had 114-second and 85-second video clips, along with pictures taken during a birthday party hosted at the theater.
Tumpach reportedly was testing a new digital camera and recorded the movie in an effort to see one of the characters take his shirt off.
The theater’s manager, working under monetary incentives by the Motion Picture Association of America, demanded Tumpach be arrested, with emotional distress noted in the lawsuit. After being escorted out of the theater, she was arrested, and spent two days in jail related to the case.
“Samantha, in the open theater area and in plain view of others, was subsequently placed under arrest, handcuffed and was walked through the theater and out to the officers’ vehicle where she was placed in the rear seat of the squad car, while numerous theater guests witnessed, pointed and gasped as Samantha cried with fright, humiliation and shame,” according to the lawsuit.
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Adding some swashbuckling to its tough talk on fighting piracy, the federal government on Wednesday seized several websites that had offered downloads of pirated movies such as “Toy Story 3″ and “Iron Man 2″ within hours of their release in theaters.
Federal authorities announced that they had seized domain names from nine websites engaged in the “criminal theft of American movies and television.” The websites include TVShack.net, PlanetMoviez.com, ThePirateCity.org and Ninjavideo.net. Combined, the sites drew 6.7 million visitors a month, authorities said.
Officials also seized assets from 15 bank, investment and advertising accounts and executed residential search warrants in North Carolina, New York, New Jersey and Washington, according to a statement from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which coordinated its investigation with the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.
The crackdown, which involved 100 agents working in 11 states and the Netherlands, was part of a renewed campaign dubbed Operation in Our Sites by federal authorities to curb Internet counterfeiting and piracy. The announcement comes a week after the Obama administration unveiled a detailed plan on how to tackle global piracy, including targeting illegal websites.
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The record labels have told a federal judge LimeWire is liable for possibly “over a billion dollars” — the latest sign that the industry is seeking to annihilate the New York-based file sharing company.
The Recording Industry Association of America’s court filing Monday comes a week after the labels asked U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood to shutter LimeWire (.pdf). Weeks before, the New York judge ruled LimeWire’s users commit a “substantial amount of copyright infringement” (.pdf) and that the Lime Group, the company behind the application, “has not taken meaningful steps to mitigate infringement.”
“The amount of statutory damages awarded in this case easily could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars (if not over a billion dollars),” the RIAA wrote to Wood, in seeking a court order to freeze LimeWire’s assets (.pdf). The Napster case eventually settled for more than $300 million.
The RIAA’s latest court filings underscore that the record labels are seeking to shutter and financially decimate the company. Two weeks ago, Zeeshan Zaidi, LimeWire’s chief operating officer, said he was hoping to work out a licensing deal with the labels to enable them to sell their music on LimeWire’s online store.
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The Motion Picture Association of America is always talking tough about cracking down on piracy anywhere and everywhere, so much so that it has even been sending out its fabled “you are breaking the law” copyright infringement notices not just to slacker college kids, but soldiers stationed in harm’s way on overseas military bases in Iraq, threatening them with suspension of their Internet service provider accounts if they continue to watch pirated movies.
So if the MPAA is so serious about combating piracy, when is it going to go after Ashton Kutcher? In case you missed it, Kutcher (who has a huge following on Twitter, which in itself is a sad commentary on the taste level of the American public) has announced that he plans to “pirate” part of his upcoming film, “Killers,” and put it online sometime this week. As he put it in Tweet-speak, he’ll be “going live 2 the web & pirating the 1st 10 min of Killers from the premiere.” He later told Ellen DeGeneres that he plans to “pirate the first 13 minutes of the movie.”
As the Hollywood Reporter’s legal eagle Matthew Belloni shrewdly points out, this is all simply a way to hype “Killers” – and judging from its lackluster trailers, TV spots and weak early buzz, the movie needs all the hype it can get. As Belloni wrote Tuesday, “the free preview is a transparent marketing stunt by Lionsgate, the studio behind the film, which has decided to hide the movie from critics and instead put the first few minutes in front of its target audience during the run-up to its release. To that end, they’ve enlisted the movie’s co-star, a genuine Internet phenomenon, to help promote that effort.”
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Warner Bros. has been sued for stealing an antipiracy technology patent.
The claim comes from a German company called Medien Patent Verwaltung. According to new infringement lawsuits filed against Warners, Technicolor and Deluxe in New York and Germany, MPV says that in 2003, it introduced the studio to a method of marking films with a distinctive code so it could track back sources of piracy to the exact theater in which an unauthorized copy originated. MPV says it has been trying to get Warners to pay for use of the technology since it allegedly began incorporating the invention in prints throughout Europe in 2004.
“We disclosed our anti-piracy technology to Warner Bros. in 2003 at their request, under strict confidentiality, expecting to be treated fairly,” MPV says in a statement. “Instead, they started using our technology extensively without our permission and without any accounting to us. However, we had taken care to obtain patents to protect MPV’s technology, and we are now in a position where we must assert our rights.”
Warner Bros. declines to comment on the dispute. But we’ve discovered that MPV made a little mistake in its New York lawsuit.
The patent that MPV cites in its complaint is 7,187,633, entitled “Motion Picture and Anti-Piracy Coding.”
But our search of the patent records reveals that patent number has another title: “Marking of a Data Medium Material for Information Intended for Reproduction.” There is another patent entitled “Motion Picture and Anti-Piracy Coding.” The assignee? You guessed it: Warner Bros.
Did the Germans accidentally steal the title of Warners’ own patent when suing the studio for stealing?
The answer appears to be yes. Reached for comment, New York attorney Richard Garbarini, representing the plaintiffs, admits the error and says he will file an amended complaint.
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