There are tens of thousands of people out there receiving letters from lawyers which demand payments to make potential copyright infringement lawsuits go away. Those wrongfully accused have been fighting back in a number of ways, and not without success. Now a team of lawyers is offering to coordinate a group action, with the aim of gathering compensation for victims through harassment claims.
Another day, another anti-piracy campaign. This one, from the MPA and AFACT-backed Intellectual Property Awareness Foundation, is trying a slightly different approach. Instead of accusing people outright of being movie and TV show pirates, it cuts them some slack and treats them like children instead. It seems that some people just don’t know they are pirates.
A company that worked with sites that linked to copies of Hollywood blockbusters has become the target of a new lawsuit. The legal action filed by Disney and Warner Bros. says that Triton Media was guilty of both contributory and inducement of copyright infringement when it assisted several sites with advertising and referrals.
For as long as Internet file-sharing has been considered a problem, copyright holders and their respective anti-piracy groups have been mobilizing with campaigns they hope can reduce the phenomenon. Despite the efforts, downloading continues unabated. Against the law? One in four in Denmark certainly don’t.
A law firm that says it has made more than £1 million by sending threatening ‘pay or else’ letters to alleged file-sharers in the UK, will now face a disciplinary tribunal. ACS:Law, believed to be the most complained about law firm in its field, has been referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. This is the second time in front of the tribunal for principal Andrew Crossley.
Last month the Amsterdam Court confirmed an earlier judgment and ordered The Pirate Bay to cease all of their activities in The Netherlands. Despite denials of current connections to the site, the founders face penalties of 50,000 euros per day for non-compliance. Today BREIN boss Tim Kuik physically tracked down Peter Sunde in Europe, explained the verdict and had their encounter filmed.
While Bitsnoop may not have the profile of The Pirate Bay, make no mistake, this site is a major BitTorrent player. The site indexes more than 8 million torrents linking to roughly 9 petabytes of data. In the last few days Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN began threatening the site with the clear aim of bringing its activities to an end.
An anti-piracy group has caused a storm of controversy by taking down movies it has no rights to. GVU successfully ordered video hosting site Vimeo to take down several Creative Commons videos created by a freelance journalist and an independent filmmaker. The anti-piracy tracking company hired by GVU claims that its technology failed.
In a very rare event, a Chinese anti-piracy group says it will sue several websites and companies for their involvement in film piracy in the country. As it teams up with the studio behind the recent martial arts hit Ip Man 2, not only will web portals and Internet cafes be sued, but one of China’s biggest file-sharing link sites, VeryCD.
Last month a large private BitTorrent tracker became the first site of its type to be hit by Hurt Locker-style mass litigation. Now, just three weeks later, the same studio has returned there for a second time, gathering IP addresses on the site and filing suit against dozens of users a mere three days after.