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Originally Posted by johnsteele
I am amazed at the posts here and feel I must respond to some of the more unbelievable and misleading statements here. I would say that my thoughts on the matter should bear some credibility as I am probably the only person here who has actually sued pirates, collected money, and has software to go after pirates. Here goes:
1. "Sell a product worth paying for and you'll cut down on the downloading." Really? So the better the movie, the Less likely someone is to steal it. That makes no sense. Statistics show the most downloaded porn, or mainstream movie, is the good stuff. Why download crap when the #1 porn of the year is also available?
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your half right there
yes more people will want to steal it but if you do things right like setting up a private tracker correctly, you will slow the unauthorized torrents to a crawl.
produce a better product combined with slowing down the unauthorized alternatives is more than enough to get the sales back up.
there is a better way than the we are going to publically out your porn preferences if you don't pay us blackmail scheme to do this.
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2. Backlash. If someone wants to stand up for the rights of pirates to steal content, I'll take that fight any day, especially in court. Stealing content is a crime. I have to believe that the most of the people defending theft are thieves. I can't believe people depending on selling content to make a living think that stealing content is ok.
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wow a lawyer who is so fucking clueless about copyright law that he doesn't realize that infringment is closer to fraud than to theft.
but that the point, the guy fighting you in court won't be defending thieves he will be defending fair use of the content.
fact the torrents are the worlds best backup for content you don't care about confidentiality for.
every leacher becomes a redundant backup for your content (fair use of backup) the piece nature of the distribution means that during the entire process of transfer it nothing but a transient cache (fair use of cacheing). The infringement only happens when the pieces are put back in order so the copy is working. Technologically you don't have half the shit you need to do to make this case winable when you get a real fight on your hand.
unless steve is giving lifetime access to the content bought your attempting to take away that fair use right. If you were a copyright lawyer with some experience with fair use you would understand what kind of problem your going to cause for all of us when this fight is lost.
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3. false positives. I have not had one yet. Our firm's software is so much more advanced than RIAA, that I laugh when people mention us in the same breath as those simpletons. There are trade secrets involved, but I can say that the amount of proof we have that person X downloaded file Y at exactly Z time, etc. is pretty impressive.
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really and your software tells the difference between a person simply using the torrents to recover content they already bought, and people who never bought the content.
ignoring fair use is a false positive too.
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4. The people we represent have content being pirated on a massive scale. I have seen attacks on people like Steve Lightspeed, saying he has old content and is not making any money anymore so he is resorting to suing pirates to make money. I do not know how much Steve earns selling content. But I can say he has massive pirating going on, so that means a lot of people want his content.
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past success establishes multiple legitimate uses of the torrents (see backup and recovery above)
which you don't address at all in your current system
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5. I will keep saying this until I am blue in the face, but here goes: We work on contingency and NEVER make more than the content producer when we do collect money for them. This canard that "all the money just goes to the lawyers" is silly. I wish I got most of the money. I have to suggest that to Steve next time I see him.
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i would not fault you if you did make most of the money, if you built a system which was not going to lead to fucked up precedent that is going to screw us all.
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6. Blackmail. If making people pay you when you catch them stealing content is blackmail, then so is making someone pay you when they are caught stealing your car. Prosecutors tell Defendants "You agree to this plea deal, and pay X in restitution, or we go to trial and see what the jury thinks of our evidence." If someone did not do what we allege, and we are just making up our accusations, we will have the mother of all counter suits. Despite what the armchair lawyers here think, filing federal lawsuits and going before a judge appointed by the president is no minor task. Since we are batting 100% with our requests to all of the judges hearing all of our cases to date regarding discovery, and our suits in general, I would respectfully suggest that if 1/3 of the federal judges (hey, we are filing a lot, what can we say?) in the Northern District of Illinois thinks these suits have merit, I will trust them over an anonymous poster on gfy.com.
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so would you be willing to say agree to pay any person who simple used the torrents to recover the porn they bought say 1 million dollars if you get access to their personal information (for the act of violating their privacy)
say the world and i would make sure to be in your cross hairs, after i bought the dvd of the content in question.
argueing that we have to go to steve and reup the membership just to get content we already paid for is about as valid as when jack valenti said
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If you buy a DVD you have a copy. If you want a backup copy you buy another one.
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the mpaa lost that fight.
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7. Some claim that lawsuits lose money. The RIAA pay their attorneys by the hour. Those attorneys are incentivized to bill as many hours as possible. I work on contingency and only make money if my client does. If my client makes 0, I make less than zero, as I front the costs of the suits. I promise to stop filing these lawsuits the minute I stop making money.
I welcome reasoned responses.
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you just hit the nail on the head, your only going to do the amount of work to keep it profitable
your not going to spend a second of your time determining the negative consequences of any precedent that is set if you lose.
i wish the legal system made lawyers who set bad precedents responsible for the legal fees of every case that has to live with those conseqences.