Remember Joel Tenebaum? He's a 28-year-old graduate student at Boston University pursuing a physics PhD. He's also enjoying a little more than 15 minutes of fame for fighting the RIAA in a copyright case in which Mr. Tenebaum was originally ordered to pay $675,00, a amount that was later reduced to $67,500 before a federal appeals court on Friday reinstated the original verdict.
Ruh-roh Shaggy, peer-to-peer file sharing just became a little more dangerous. Hackers up to no good (and no, those two don't always go hand-in-hand) set their sights on BitTorrent.com and uTorrent.com, sneaking in the back and replacing legitimate downloads with tainted copies brimming with malware.
File hosting and sharing service, Hotfile was sued earlier this year by a consortium of copyright holders including Warner Bros, Disney, and Fox. The MPAA recently scored a victory when it was ruled that Hotfile has to divulge user details. Now Hotfile is firing back, accusing Warner of abusing the anti-piracy takedown tool built into the service.
By now, US torrent users are used to the nagging worry that a copyright holder could seek damages against them. Now these mass lawsuits appear to be making the journey to Canada, where Voltage pictures is seeking the identities of users they claim have pirated the film Hurt Locker. Major ISPs have been subpoenaed, but the number of defendants is not yet available. 
To file-swapping pirates, the terms “free download” and “Shady Russian warez sites” are almost interchangeable – and the US government knows it. Washington’s exerted a lot of pressure on Moscow in an effort to shut down numerous sites (most notably allofmp3.com) that infringed on the copyrights of US citizens and companies. But hold your horses! At least one Russian minister thinks top US sites like YouTube (and Google, YouTube’s parent company) regularly violate Russian intellectual property laws, too.
Suing file sharers in bulk has become the hot new thing in antipiracy cases, as it allows content providers to associate names with IP addresses quickly, but that tactic just suffered a major blow in the Golden State. The physical locations of P2P defendants have been a bone of contention in courts. Steele Hansmeier, an antipiracy law firm, used geolocation to confirm that the 188 porn pilferers named in its mass lawsuit actually lived in California, but the judge presiding over the case still axed 187 defendants off the suit, making it a single-party case.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) isn't finished making an example of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the 34-year-old Native American mother of four from Minnesota who was found guilty in 2007 of illegally sharing 24 songs via peer-to-peer. Attorneys representing the RIAA have filed an appeal against last month's decision by Judge Michael Davis to knock the fines down to $54,000.
How many times have you been told that when one door closes, another one opens? Probably a whole bunch, but what no one ever bothered to disclose is that this idiom isn't always an inspirational motivator to carry on with life and can sometimes apply to those with less scrupulous intentions. Case in point: a security firm warns that the Koobface worm is no longer spreading through social networks and is now slithering its way across BitTorrent sites.
Netflix and its all-consuming thirst for bandwidth may get a lot of the headlines these days, but don't make the mistake of thinking illegal P2P file sharing is dead. Hop onto one of the big name torrent sites and you'll find a veritable ocean of available titles being seeded by a whole heck of a lot of people. But just because the media's forgotten about file sharers doesn't mean the lawyers have; in fact, over 200,000 pirates have found themselves slapped with a lawsuit since the beginning of 2010.
Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the woman who made numerous headlines for taking on the RIAA in a losing battle over file sharing, may want to heed the advice of Kenny Rogers. Among his more notable lyrics, Kenny Rogers sang "You got to know when to hold 'em, known when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run." Now that a federal judge has again lowered Thomas-Rasset's verdict, this time from $1.5 million to $54,000, it might be time to run.
-
Technology
Entertainment
-
Music
-
Creative
Sport & Auto
- About Future
- Jobs
- News
- Advertising
- Digital Future
- Privacy Policy
- Cookies Policy
- Terms & Conditions
- Shop
- Investor Relations
- Contact Future
© Future US, Inc. 4000 Shoreline Court, Suite 400, South San Francisco, California, 94080. All Rights Reserved.