US Copyright Group Drops A Bunch Of Cases... But Will It Refile?
from the waiting-game dept
There was some news last week about copyright trolls, US Copyright Group (really DC-based law firm Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver), dropping thousands of lawsuits it had filed against people for file sharing. While some are declaring victory, I'd wait and see. It may simply be setting up to refile those lawsuits in the proper venues, as the firm has done in the past. It would be nice if USCG and the various studios had realized that this was a dead end strategy, but I find that unlikely...
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Filed Under: copyright, lawsuits, pre-settlement
Companies: dunlap grubb & weaver, us copyright group
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This will be fun to watch.
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Started in Germany
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Depends on PIracy
In contrast the US copyright group/ ACS law business model absolutely does depend on piracy - strange that our regular critics here have never complained about it.
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You hit the nail on the head. The arguments made by the entertainment industry are ridiculous in the extreme. All you have to do is apply their arguments to other industries. Is each stolen car or shoplifted candy bar a 'lost sale'? Of course not. I'd like to see Ford to start going after car thieves.
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BTW the answer is yes they have.
The flawed thought is...
If someone downloaded it = they would have purchased it if not for those meddling kids.
The studios and lawyers often say downloading a copy is theft, and try to evoke the emotional response in the audience that something tangible has been stolen.
I can press control+c and control+v a buncha of times, and copies of the movie do not disappear from the studio warehouse.
The focus of this type of litigation was merely to extract money they feel they should have gotten.
Someone who downloads a film, often watches it once and then deletes it.
They are not, in the majority, producing knock off copies of the movies to be sold everywhere to actively deprive the studios of income.
They are not supporting terrorism or drug running.
Often it is response of people fed up with the imposed scarcity of the product, designed to keep a business model going ignoring the customers desires in the equation.
Now if not for the studios imposing silly rules about when things are available to rent or purchase, are they not really out whatever they get from a rental?
And then they decided to create special "Rental" versions of the movies and not be upfront about that.
They create crappy subtitles to save a few bucks and then scream how a fan made set of subtitles is killing them.
They create menus designed to annoy, and can not see annoying people who actually paid you is the dumbest thing ever.
There are the collectors who buy the movies or TV shows they like and then download copies to avoid bad subtitles, or the hassle of trying to format shift it so they can enjoy it where they want.
There are the Studios who make truly crappy releases of properties they own, and then complain it is piracy that killed the sales not their own inept methods.
But we have a law, so we are owed trillions of made up dollars.
Rather than wasting time and money on trying to outwit the public, why not invest some of that time and effort into finding out what people really want and deliver that.
You will never stop piracy, despite the promises of the lawyers, researchers, elected officals, and paid advisers.
Maybe just maybe it is time to see what the market wants, and move towards that.
If the awards in these cases was the retail cost of the product, do you think there would be a cottage industry trying to pursue these claims?
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Start out with a big case, find out where some of the people are located, and then refile in those areas to keep the jurisdiction right.
Mike, the only dead end strategy is throwing up your hands and embracing piracy. That is like swallowing a cyanide pill.
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Is this what the "death throes" of an industry look like? Interesting that they should lash out at the people they are trying to win over. The "pirates" are obvioulsy media junkies to the extreme, so instead of "feeding" the habit and making money, they are trying to put them in jail or bankrupt them. I feel I am missing something here.......
It's like the fishermen analogy ... but in this case were not feeding him, and were not teaching him to fish, were just running him down with a mac truck.....
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Heh...
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They want to use the law, but have taken every step to lower the costs, and turn it into a protection racket.
They have no hope of actually taking the thousands of people they accuse to court. They did hope that people would just pay them to make it go away.
They have lied to the courts and misrepresented the facts of the cases. They claim to be unable to tell where these people are located, which is false. They claim to have proof the named party is a fault, which is false. They claim the court is the proper venue based on the idea the accused might have been in DC at some point.
They are not the shining knights of copyright protection that the astroturfers would have you believe.
They use a system they refuse to expose to the light of day, because it would reveal the emperor has no pants.
And no one suggests they they embrace piracy, but maybe if they attempted to spend some and time money to find out the reasoning they could address those issues in failing to meet the market demands.
Because honestly if you expected to win $150,000 accepting $3000 to avoid the "hassle" of the trial shows that this is about extracting money, not ending piracy.
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No, not at all. I think you are accepting the standard "techdirt line" here without thinking through to the end.
What do you think it would cost to actually prosecute a full on copyright violation case from one end to the other? I am guessing a rights holder go easily go through $50,000 in legal fees without trying. You know, file the case, discovery against the ISP, withdrawing the case when it turns out the end user is in another state, re-file, more discovery, move to court, the court case, the judgement, the appeal, the appeal of the appeal, and so on. In a blink you have spent $50k.
The person you are suing? Probably isn't worth $5k. Even armed with a full value, full price judgement (and legal fees) of say $175,000 total, the chance of collecting the money is almost nil. Even if the settlement is for $1 plus legal fees, you are still in the hole.
The answer is to try to group the causes together, so that the court costs are spread over a large number of violators. Offer the violators settlement terms up front that are significantly lower than the costs to go to court, and hope to call it a day right there.
The legal system does not at this point provide a simple system to file copyright violation cases. Everything has to be done on the "grand scale", which means it is expensive as hell. Pirating is cheap, easy and fast, prosecuting it is expensive and slow.
Yet rights holders have little choice. The other option is to stop producing content altogether and give up, as the "business models" out there that embrace piracy just don't seem to be workable in the long run.
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Wow.
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The nub of the problem is that copyright itself is predicated on the obsolete theory that copying can only be done "on the grand scale". Because that is no longer true copyright itself is now out of date.
However the AC you reply to is quite right - and in fact you don't disagree with him on this point. The strategy is to try to scare people into settling out of court in order to save your own costs. That is simply an abuse of the law - and judges in the UK and the US have seen it as such.
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If you can't see a way to make money then you are right to give up. That will leave the field clear for those who can.
You are naive if you think that others will not find a way to fill the void. Personally I suspect that you do realise this - and it is your worst nightmare.
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If there wasn't some push back, some legal action, I think the current level of piracy would be even high. Already the recorded music industry has dropped by 2/3 from it's peak, and it won't be long before most people get their music from pirate sites. Movies are a little slower (because the file sizes are larger), but it won't be long.
The quality of what you get shifts dramatically when nobody is paying the freight.
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Copyright wasn't meant to bludgeon people who were sharing what they liked but instead punish those who made their own copies and sold them creating profits.
USCG is trying to be the white knight with clean hands out of all the the shakedown firms, but considering they formed another entity to take on the risk, they knew it could blow up on them.
Then you have Evan Stone and violating the basic rules they teach you in law school, and his 2 man operation of shakedowns.
Then you have Steele, who can't seem to catch a break because he can not get the courts to alter the rules to suit him.
And yes the poor Hollywood Movie Industry and its record 9 Billion dollar year... yeah their sales are just gutted. Mind you the numbers might be down in the same manner the final report for the Harry Potter film showed it LOST money in the end. They managed to pull out all of the profits and stick all of the losses into 1 production company.
And Music, yes CD sales are down. BECAUSE NO ONE IS WILLING ANY LONGER TO PURCHASE THE SWILL THEY FILL THE DISCS OUT WITH. What is the current rate of new CD players being produced now? Oh that is correct... those are down to, because the public has moved onto MP3 and other formats. And digital sales are growing, but they lament the death of CDs. Mainly because they no longer get to extract more from each artists income to pay for the cover, jewel case, easy open wrapper and anything else they can tack on. The artists now have solid numbers to look at not crunched by the labels accounting department, that show what is actually being sold.
Mind you almost all of these numbers are not grounded in factual information, but in FUD spread by the **AA's screaming the world is out to get them and they support terrorism.
Piracy should only be used to label those that take the movie and create and sell copies. That is actual piracy they are depriving the studio of their income from selling the same object.
People using P2P networks and sharing the files are rarely doing it to make money, but more so to share things they enjoy with others.
Rather than try to figure out why people would go through the hassle of using P2P, they assume they are all just "pirates" out to sink the ship rather than customers frustrated with a system that punishes the fans at every chance.
If the losses were as real as you and the other astroturfers would have us believe, at least one of the studios would have collapsed by now.
Oh and taking cheap shots at "Sita Sings the Blues", just makes you look more moronic and pissy that someone was able to do something Hollywood claims is impossible.
Oh and what the legal wrangling has managed to cause is more people using VPN and Proxy services moving them well outside of what the lawyers can penetrate in seeking to extract any portion of the trillions "piracy" supposedly costs.
"The answer is to try to group the causes together, so that the court costs are spread over a large number of violators. Offer the violators settlement terms up front that are significantly lower than the costs to go to court, and hope to call it a day right there. "
Funny how you call the violators, considering the sheer number of people the RIAA went after who were infact innocent. How several of the USCG defendants can barely work email but you'd like them to be seen as these super pirates siphoning millions out of a bank somewhere. And IP address leads you to who pays for the account, not from the "violator". But not one of these shakedown firms take that into consideration. We KNOW you did it, and pay us or else. Some of the settlement agreements go so far to claim that even if you were unaware of it, your still responsible.
The problem is the MPAA hasn't been able to create commando teams like FACT and BRIEN in the US to have them botch case after case. So the litigation is being done to support the idea we are loosing so much money, we need new laws and we need others to pay to protect our works.
And again I point out that if they got around to looking at what the customers really want instead of we've done it this way since we claimed the VCR would be the Boston Strangler, they might manage to change the business model and see a decrease in people getting their movies in "unauthorized" ways.
Now hit me with your best shill shot of I just want them to give it away for free, it'll let me know I'm doing something right.
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If you mean "profits 'earned' by the the RIAA" then, maybe, but definitely Citation Needed. A quick Google search gives this: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=history+of+number+of+recorded+songs&hl=en&safe=off& ;rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS268&prmd=ivns&tbs=tl:1&tbo=u&ei=3JWHTb3vCMSJrQH237mzBg&sa=X& ;oi=timeline_result&ct=title&resnum=13&ved=0CEwQ5wIwDA
I don't see any significant reduction from this info. I'd REALLY like to know where you claim the 2/3s number came from. I think it might be a little dirty from pulling it from your ass....
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I will have to politely disagree that the record industry is where it is because of piracy. While piracy can be called a factor, it's hardly the sling that's slaying Goliath.
It is where it is because the industry as a whole can best be compared to an ogre. Irritable, greedy, overly large, unwieldy, and more likely to attack anything that wanders too close to it than think about how it can benefit them.
While I'm not condoning piracy as a means of "sticking it to the man", the fact that their staunch refusal in regards to adapting or capitalizing on new technologies and instead trying to recreate the glory days when they had free run of anything remotely considered music -like an old shut-in who's most advanced piece of technology in their house is a transistor radio(don't tell me you haven't met those people)- is what is causing their business to collapse, not piracy.
They've been crying the deathknell about everything that has come out since the 1960s, but this time technology has actually advanced to the point where people can actually make music without the recording industry, and that's why they're suffering now. Now that they can no longer strangle anything that dares do something music-related without them, people are willing to work with them less and less.
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If there are enough people like you then you can organise yourselves on kickstarter and fund the blockbusters. If there aren't then they won't get made - and that would be the right thing to happen. What mustn't happen is for the rest of us to be taxed to pay for the blockbusters we don't want.
In short - if enough people really want these films then they will pay for them voluntarily. The poeple who pirate and never pay obviously aren't keen enough on the films to make sure they keep getting made. Trying to force them to pay won't work - since they always have the option of ignoring the content - and if you turn them against you that is what they will do.
I personally will never go back to the cinema until those ridiculous and offensive copyright warnings are removed.
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Yeah - like ACS law in the UK - that worked out just fine didn't it?
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So accepting reality is like swallowing a cyanide pill?
No - continuing to keep your head in the sand is that.
In any case US copyright Group is an organisation that is intending to monetise piracy (in a rather nasty way). So their business model is in fact more than embracing piracy - it absolutely relies upon it.
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It's more like taking the red pill: accepting reality and the responsibilities it brings.
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The ship is sinking and they want out before any blowback happens.
They are going to refile..which may be likely but I doubt that refiling them all in their thousands would be a good financial move. The cost in research and asset analysis to see which targets would be worth filing against would be high as would the cost to their business model if they start losing cases.
Could this also be associted with the suit filed against DG&W? Better to make it all look "above board" before answering charges of racketeering.
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Let's also not forget the price that they will have to pay to hire local counsel for every one of those states. Imagine paying for all of those teams of lawyers for every case in every state that they don't have license to practice in? No doubt it would be a huge cut into their profit margin.
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They had no intentions of filing any named cases, just the mere threats in their "settlement" letters, which really are a step up from - Its a nice house it would be a shame if anything happened to it.
The settlement letters all follow a standard formula of we can prove it 100% that YOU DID IT, and if you didn't your still responsible. Now pay us X, take time to think about it and we want an extra $1000.
There was always the chance they would take someone to court, and that would be the person who answered the letter and annoyed them and made some sort of admission. (see LMH/CF suing a guy, his unicorn, and a leprechaun)
It is all a big gamble to scare someone into settling, or using their admission of guilt to keep the sheeple scared. If they had to argue a case on the merits, it would quickly fall apart.
They would fight having to expose how the propriety tracking system works, yet this is the basis for all of their claims.
Evidence gathered by unknown methodology with no review of the system by any independent experts, and we are to accept that the people with a stake of up to 80% of any award will be completely honest.
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I am sure they will opt to change 1 line in the standard settlement agreement that makes reference to an open case against them where they are about to be named. Heck Steele warned people he had up to 2 years to pursue them and they were not to make any changes to their computers in that timeframe. Shame they get altered at every boot.
The problem now is that it is becoming more common for people to not immediately panic upon getting an ISP notice, or even a settlement letter. There is no major reported case in the media to keep them afraid. LMH/CF had created that level of fear for their filings, and offered up 2 amnesty programs (that provided no real protection) and kept in the press going from 35k to 40k ip addresses they were going to file against. As of now, despite Randazza's claim of targeting South Florida first, no cases have been filed in this arena. They do have a case with a copyright component, but that appears to be from people exploiting a flaw in the CF system and gaining unpaid access to material and an additional charge of copyright infringement for having done so.
So to sum it up, it will take 2 years or a massive failure in the courts to end these shakedowns. They are slowly down currently merely because most Judges are finding the cases improperly joined as a cost savings rather than because they all worked in concert to commit the crime.
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Exactly. As long as the judges don't stomp on the case immediately upon filing, as long as it gets to discovery, this tactic will remain viable as long as even one person is scared into paying. The first person pays for the filing fee and the time spent to get to discovery. The rest are pure, 100% profit that nearly entirely goes directly into the pockets of the attorneys(with a pittance going to the copyright holder).
They don't have to pursue anyone(in fact, the costs associated with that would completely mitigate their settlement harvest profits, which is one of the main reasons that they are hesitant to do so) past the settlement phase. Just getting there is more than enough to ensure their chances as "free" money.
You want to talk about "getting something for nothing"? It's not the "pirates" that you should be looking at in that regard.
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http://archive.recapthelaw.org/dcd/141583/
and discovered that I was one of the people dismissed without prejudice on 15 April 2011.
http://www.archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.dcd.141583/gov.uscourts.dcd.141583.97.0.pdf
However I just received DGW’s demand letter today and it’s dated 26 April 2011. They are trying to scam me into paying on a case they dismissed already?
Is that legal?
Should I notify the judge?
Should I just leave well enough alone???
What a bunch of scam artists!!!
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