Are You One of 23,000 Defendants in the US' Biggest Illegal Download Lawsuit?

reply to post by mayabong


I hear THAT! Thanks for the laugh!!

Originally posted by edog11
How can one sue more than 23.000 people, based on IP's?

no idea, but here's a bit of contrast...

Supreme Court rules that companies can block class-action lawsuits
www.rawstory.com...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday handed businesses such as AT&T Inc a major victory by upholding the use of arbitration for customer disputes rather than allowing claims to be brought together as a group.

By a 5-4 vote, the high court ruled that an AT&T unit could enforce a provision in its customer contracts requiring individual arbitration and preventing the pooling together of claims into a class-action lawsuit or class-wide arbitration...

..."Because companies can ask all of their consumers, employees, and perhaps even shareholders to sign arbitration agreements, this decision has the potential to permit companies to escape class action liability in almost all of their activities,"

I see a problem with this. It's called DHCP.

Like many other people, I receive a dynamic IP when I connect to my ISP, and it is (usually) different every time. My ISP has a range of IP addresses that it can use, but any particular IP address could have been assigned to any number of users over the course of days or weeks .... The IP address I have today could be someone else's tomorrow, and since I am on satellite it might not even be anyone close to me.

In some respects this is annoying and noticeable (my online banking runs me through my security challenge questions almost every time I log in), but perhaps in this case it will be an advantage for some people. I can't imagine that the ISPs have a record of who was assigned which particular IP address at any given moment.

reply to post by arrus75


the RIAA said long ago when music was still produced on cassette tapes that it "did not care if you made a single copy for/from a friend".

there is no difference in a peer-to-peer download.

infringement comes when i profit from the content. then im stealing somebody elses profits.

the problem is, so many people do it now that they are displeased with their own profits. and they channel the blame on a loss of 'perceived' profit. when in reality they lost nothing.

reply to post by RelentlessLurker


The difference in this case is that with cassette tapes, you give out physical object to people you know. With digital content, you distribute nothing material, so you incur no expenses, and you distribute it to the whole world. Not defending RIAA by any means, by the way.

i pay for my internet,therefore i download...regardless.

i don't care if these mega media corporation profits are down..

reply to post by frozenspark


incorrect. the physical copy is my hard disk.

its physically written to a material just as the cassette or a cd would.

and there is no requirement that i know the person in whom i give or receive it.

reply to post by TheMaverick


wow ive never considered that argument.

you make a hell of a point.

Not me no, but my neighbour is (for some odd reason).

Originally posted by neo96
you and ats will never know

for all i know is that this thread is a mpaa plant gathering information for the lawsuits!

so nope my lips are sealed.

I feel you 100%, and to think of how many people divulge info so easily! Then get served with a sopena, and now you have a punk ass fed felony case on you for life.

Originally posted by Xcathdra

Out of curiosity, who thinks the people who donwload illegally should get a pass and why? I have seen people on here argue that sharing software / music / movies / etc should be outside the law. Just curious where peoples mindset comes in that its ok to steal.

Here is the problem with this X. Many people that are naive to the computer world can have their computer used as a repository for downloads and they don't know anything about it.

How? something called a Trojan horse, or if some hacker is even smoother they will find open ports or MS exploits, and use someone else's computer for downloading and storing files.

An IP, or person gets a lawsuit based on what maybe 100's of hackers using one IP for illegal purposes, not fair.

Some poor soul to gets drag into federal court and have to retain legal services for $5000 and they are innocent and could spend upwards of 30k proving they are innocent.

Shouldn't they be suing the cable companies ?

Originally posted by Xcathdra

Originally posted by thatonedude
What if someone owned a legal dvd of the expendables and downloaded it for a digital copy?That doesn't make them a thief does it? I though that was legal.What a horrible travesty of a movie anyway.

edit on 10-5-2011 by thatonedude because: (no reason given)

When its downloaded from a site that is not authorized to distribute the video it does.

All copyrights, patents and banks for that matter need to be thrown away. However the newer laws are unconstitutional and need to be struck down, or completely ignored by the people.

The old and more correct law was simple. If you have cable and the show ever aired on cable, anyone could get it from anywhere because its only a digital form of recording a vhs or dvd from your player.

False~ Its fear mongering at its finest. They are trying to scare people just because we were smarter than them and were able to unilaterally obtain movies without paying the over charged price.

Besides, IP is hardly evidence. Anyone can use TOR and have a completely different IP address located in another country. Those PTB would be chasing ghosts!

reply to post by RelentlessLurker


Do you give people a chunk of your hard disk? No. That is what I am talking about. You need to buy cassettes to distribute them. It is a hassle to go to the store, buy cassettes, and then copy music onto them. It is a lengthy process and most people did it only a few times for close friends. With digital content it is very easy to distribute content to millions of people while incurring no expenses.

It really is a simple matter of securing your h/w, 128 bit encrypted firewalls work wonders for holding down a secured platform.

Avoid clinking on links that you do not know

Opening email from suspicious sources.

Do not visit websites of dubious natures.

Trust no pirated s/w for they are re-authored and could hold malware or exotic code.

Just be aware of your digital surroundings and if you torrent...

Well for the sake of our audience, let me say, Don't Do It! It is against the law and just plain wrong.

56% of americans are now capped.

AT&T's bandwidth cap for DSL users,which went into effect on May 2,limit users to just 150 gigabytes per month this is were you will pay for your downloads.

while they claim the limitations are intended to ensure every user has adequate bandwidth at all times,which with the outrageous profit margins,they could easily afford to re cable highways and invest in better advance technology

the industry standard figure for the cost of bandwidth is $1 per month per customer,so you see what a cash cow this capping is.

getting to my point...you pay for your internet,so you are paying for your downloads,and at a very high cost,why should you keep paying for the same product.

it's just big business corporations making you believe your a criminal,and laying on the guilt trip.

I thought tracking seeds is illegal.

"The Expendables" did really well, I guess not as well as they thought it should have done. A sequel is planned.

The movie industry in the United States made about $10.5 billion dollars last year, only slightly less than 2009 which was the highest gross for movies in history (Avatar deserves a lot of credit for that). Ticket prices have also been increasing by a larger percent each year, which is possibly both due to and the cause of piracy (although the poor economy should also factor in). Last year, the average ticket price increased by $0.39. Almost the same amount of people saw movies in 2010 as in 2008. If last year had a bigger movie than "Toy Story 3" I'm sure that 2010's numbers would have been a lot bigger.

SOURCE

I am so tired of greedy celebs and corporations.

There have been many times where I had downloaded something and actually went out and bought the damn thing in the end because i wanted the real copy.

I DL songs and many times I buy the entire CD because I get addicted to a song or two I have DL of an artist.

These companies aren't losing the insane amount of money they claim.

They need to just go away..and that movie was horrible!