A porno house called Hard Drive Productions (obviously) has dutifully collected a swath of IP addresses associated with illegal downloads of its content. Now, as part of a mass lawsuit, the smut peddlers are petitioning for access to the names associated with those IP addresses. The targeted torrenters can keep their names anonymous, sur — as long as they enter their names in the unsealed public record of the case. Which is really, really dumb.
Hard Drive’s prime objective is to bring public shame to its victims for their masturbation habits. It’s essentially blackmail; unless the defendants find a way to stay anonymous, their only alternative is to pay out a big ol’ settlement to Hard Drive to keep their names out of it. The court’s ruling that targets have the option of being legally anonymous while being publicly outed is a total endorsement of HDP’s gross strongarm tactic.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has requested that, legally speaking, the courts pull their heads out of their butts. More specifically, it’s petitioning for the courts to allow the defendants to fight the case without entering their names in unsealed documents, and also to throw the case out for general stupidity. Co-signed. [EFF via BoingBoing]
moggyx
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 8:48 AMI had to read the article, purely because of that photo. The face is hilarious!
antoniaa
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 10:35 AMAnd why isn’t collecting and storing a swath of IP addresses of computers that connected to someone else’s server or to P2P in itself illegal?
Sam
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 11:17 AMThis really highlights the issue well, people want to pirate, they know it’s wrong and want to hide behind privacy to not get caught.
I (as a copyright holder) who is currently being pirated believe it is not the individual that should be pursued but it should be the isp’s as they are the ones profiting from the illegal distribution. The radio plays songs and pay royalties that is covered by advertising, payTV pay royalties funded by subscriptions and advertising, TV pay royalties….etc etc you get the point.
So why should isp’s who are distributing the bits and making money by charging people for those bits not have to pay the owners of those bits a royalty. It would make the system work IMO.
chugs
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 12:39 PMSam you should be raising this with your publisher, and organisation like AFACT etc. Your preaching to the converted here.
bolagnaise
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 12:49 PM+1 best idea ive ever read. Only problem i see in doing this is the expected raise in internet costs as ISP’S attempt to subsidise these payments.
Sam
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 5:37 PMYeah, unfortunately they don’t seem too fussed, it’s a bit head in the sand. I guess we are not big enough fries. That said the weekend our DVD came out it had been ripped and downloaded over 150,000 times on Pirate Bay. At least people saw the film!
It is a tough one and I don’t believe the real cost of piracy is anywhere near figures suggest, lets say that of the 150k DL’s how many would have actually paid to see the film? People seem to DL things just for the sake of checking them out coz they’re new, I’m just guessing here but maybe we lost 10% of that?? and of that 10% maybe people that DL’d it ended up liking it and buying it anyway. It is a very tough one. I still stand by the only people making money are the ISP’s it blows my mind thinking of how you could track legit files with royalties, it would have be like torrent trackers and just hoping people will value a “safe” file with ISP tracking vs a dodgy one without. And yes I imagine Telstra etc would try to pass any royalty cost on, but are people seriously saying that my mums 2GB allowances really cost them anymore than my 50GB, once the cable is in the ground the bandwidth is just cream, they should pay something. I will accept that my theory works in a market like Oz because we pay so much extra for a higher limit, in the UK where unlimited is cheap I can see why the ISP’s would not have the room to wear any extra expense. As I said a tough one, but things need to evolve.
And to Stew, the post man gets paid a set price for his service, nothing to do with the value of what he posts, ISP’s are more like broadcasters of other peoples stuff, once the line rental is taken into account.
Stew
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 1:56 PMWhile I do empathise with your situation, that’s like blaming the post office for someone posting pirated DVDs.
I would much prefer that my data/snail mail/txt msgs/phone conversations – regardless of content – are delivered to me without being scanned first.
I’m sure that a lot of our data is monitored for anti-terror/anti-child abuse etc, but giving that kind of power to businesses instead of government for cash revenue instead of national security/protecting kids is a direction I do *not* want to head towards.
Rob
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 2:20 PM+1
I don’t think it should be the services fault if people are illegally abusing it.
Sam
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 7:18 PMRob, it’s not their “fault” not at all, but they are making money from what people download. You don’t need 200GB a month to check e-mail and surf the web. ISP’s are charging people for bandwidth and this is supported by the people that create the bits in the first place, ISP’s can’t push empty files. Do you think radios want to pay artists to play their music? That is why they pass the cost onto advertisers, ISP’s must either wear some or pass on some cost to the people that are getting the content for free.
You can’t have it both ways, pirates often say “hey, I’m paying for my internet so I’ll DL what I want”, SOMEONE has to pay, nothing is free, the net has caused a weird loophole and this should be filled by the people MAKING MONEY from what you DL.
cleverclogs
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 1:28 PMWhere IS THAT PICTURE FROM!
nathan
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 2:36 PMI too have seen that picture too many times (and the request for the source)
I want to know who she is also
InformedGamer
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 9:22 AMAs I said here:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/11/universities-going-on-xxx-domain-shopping-spree/
Jack’s Teen America: Mission 15
In this movie she goes by “Bree”, in other movies she is “Juliana Kincaid”.
Firefox Google Similar Image addon ;)