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Technician

Biggest U.S. BitTorrent Lawsuit Ever

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More than 23,000 people will soon be notified by their internet service providers that their subscriber information is being turned over to lawyers suing over the 2010 Sylvester Stallone flick The Expendables.

As we first reported Monday, the case is the largest BitTorrent file-sharing lawsuit in U.S. history.

We just updated our IP Detective tool with the 23,322 IP addresses targeted between Feb. 5 and April 22 in the mass lawsuit filed by the Washington-based U.S. Copyright Group on behalf of Nu Image.

All told, more than 140,000 BitTorrent downloaders are being targeted in dozens of lawsuits across the country, many of them for downloading B-grade movies and porn. Film companies pay snoops to troll BitTorrent sites, dip into active torrents and capture the IP addresses of the peers who are downloading and uploading pieces of the files.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great resource on what to do if you’re a target.

As before, our widget also will attempt to check if you’re one of the nearly 6,000 targets in the controversial Nude Nuns with Big Guns case, or the OpenMind Solutions lawsuit going after nearly 3,000 alleged porn downloaders.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/bittorrent-lawsuit-checker

Are they serious? This is one hell of a crack down. This is going to hurt a lot of people.

I'm glad I don't download Hollywood shit.

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Jeez, this is some serious shit. So, is this just from the entertainment industry, or does it cover other stuff (like software)?

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Technician said:

More than 23,000 people will soon be notified by their internet service providers that their subscriber information is being turned over to lawyers suing over the 2010 Sylvester Stallone flick The Expendables.


Why would anyone even want to steal that dreck? That movie is abominable. They should sue the makers of the movie instead for subjecting audiences to that horrid waste of expensive film stock. You would have to pay ME to watch that.

More news. http://torrentfreak.com/23322-expendables-downloaders-accused-in-bittorrents-biggest-lawsuit-110510/

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It will be interesting to see what happens when this circulates around a bit more or makes it to higher courts. I'm surprised they didn't link it in the article.

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This might not be so easy for them. A judge in a pedophile bust gone bad (swat team busted in on the wrong guy, and gave him hell) recently ruled that an IP address doesn't automatically represent a specific individual. In that particular case, the neighbor had been downloading porn over his open wifi.

Probably they will try to scare those people and ask them to settle out of court.

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That appears to be the way these extortionists work, demand a substantial payment by way of settlement with the implied threat of an expensive lawsuit if John Doe doesn't comply.

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awesome.

because you wouldn't download a car.

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More than 23,000 people will soon be notified by their internet service providers that their subscriber information is being turned over to lawyers suing over the 2010 Sylvester Stallone flick The Expendables.

Does this mean jail to them? :(

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40oz said:

awesome.

because you wouldn't download a car.


I would if I could. :V

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neubejiita said:

You would have to pay ME to watch that.


LOL I interpreted this as meaning "You would have to pay for Windows ME to be desperate and/or dumb enough to watch that".

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printz said:

Does this mean jail to them? :(

Highly unlikely, unless the commission agents lawyers encounter a particularly intractable John/Jane Doe. I expect they're being paid a percentage from each settlement and would much prefer money in their pockets to the satisfaction of knowing they've put away a hard-core downloader.

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ahh, the future of the internet and information. since most people would probably download a car or a new home if it were (more) possible...
and other than suing everyone with internet access and/or solving the world's unemployment problems by hiring en masse net metermaids what can possibly be done? dramatically increase the cost of using the internet to cover royalty costs/fees?

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GreyGhost said:

Highly unlikely, unless the commission agents lawyers encounter a particularly intractable John/Jane Doe. I expect they're being paid a percentage from each settlement and would much prefer money in their pockets to the satisfaction of knowing they've put away a hard-core downloader.


Yes, but like a good dictatorship, corporate america finds fear useful in controlling its cattle. Cut off one persons head, and profits will increase as the rest are scared into paying. I guess decapitation was an overly humanitarian example due to a quick and painless death. In reality, making an example of the first victim involves being humuliated as cameras record videos of him pooping in a cell shared by 25 other guys for some "the running man"esque prison reality show that plays between large gaps of geico commercials, then being raped and shanked multiple times before finally committing suicide. That's the punishment for downloading movies on web 3.0 internets that suck as much as old media television. Movies should all be free just to make people like Tom Cruise have to work at McDonalds like the rest of us. His pinkey finger is worth more than 1000 of you and he spends all his money funding scientology. Earth needs some sort of rehaul so brains = power instead of money and power doesn't = more power.

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I swear, ggmork, every time you post it's some kind of illuminati drivel.

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Meh. Everyone and their dog knows that torrents are completely insecure to being with. The only time I'll touch them is as an absolute last resort, and I certainly wouldn't download anything folks are still trying to make money off of. That's asking for trouble.

neubejiita said:

If it was a movie trilogy based on the DooM novels


That is the worst idea ever. We're trying to get a better Doom movie, not three 1000x worse.

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>He uses torrents!
>laughingpirates.jpg

Seriously? Using torrents has always been one tiny step away from using Limewire in terms of shit your computer can catch. Maybe this will teach some people to step up their security measures.

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Belial said:

Nude Nuns with Big Guns...

Must have.


Haha, that sounds awesome.

It's pretty low putting a title like that up and expecting men NOT to download it. But then again that's pretty much the point I guess.

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Good thing I haven't downloaded anything illegally over torrent in well over a year. All the smart pirates moved on to stuff like Megaupload years ago.

40oz said:

awesome.

because you wouldn't download a car.

Obligatory:


gggmork said:

Yes, but like a good dictatorship, corporate america finds fear useful in controlling its cattle. Cut off one persons head, and profits will increase as the rest are scared into paying. I guess decapitation was an overly humanitarian example due to a quick and painless death. In reality, making an example of the first victim involves being humuliated as cameras record videos of him pooping in a cell shared by 25 other guys for some "the running man"esque prison reality show that plays between large gaps of geico commercials, then being raped and shanked multiple times before finally committing suicide. That's the punishment for downloading movies on web 3.0 internets that suck as much as old media television. Movies should all be free just to make people like Tom Cruise have to work at McDonalds like the rest of us. His pinkey finger is worth more than 1000 of you and he spends all his money funding scientology. Earth needs some sort of rehaul so brains = power instead of money and power doesn't = more power.

What in the god damn fuck are you going on about?

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Oh for the good old days and simpler times of VHS pirating, where you either payed for the real thing or payed less for an unwatchable blurry sequences of images and muffled audio. It's really not that far-fetched to assert that the entertainment industry will eventually be non-existent.

Danarchy said:

What in the god damn fuck are you going on about?

I think he's trying to say that movies and shit should all be completely free, however that's supposed to work.

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Someone should film an amateur version... Call it Renegade Sisters with Big Jugs, or Nuns Gone Wild, or something. Then release it free over bittorrent. :)

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A similar mass-suit over one of those Japanese cartoons was more-or-less dismissed earlier this year.

The company thought they would be cute and sue 1,337 users, but the judge said that because those users were acting individually rather than in concert, each individual user would have to be sued individually, and cut the last 1,336 users from the list. That meant the company had to pay the filing fees and other legal costs 1,337 times over if they wanted to process everybody on the list, so they just dropped it. Hopefully we'll see some similar sense brought to this case.

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Mr. Freeze said:

Using torrents has always been one tiny step away from using Limewire in terms of shit your computer can catch. Maybe this will teach some people to step up their security measures.

arr yee talkin' 'bout bittorrent itself orr clickin' on porn ads at sum' stinkin' porn-riddled search engine?

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Interesting. While my IP is not on there, I was scanning the PDF for IPs similar to mine out of curiosity. There's actually someone from the same city as me who's on there.

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Lüt said:

A similar mass-suit over one of those Japanese cartoons was more-or-less dismissed earlier this year.

The company thought they would be cute and sue 1,337 users, but the judge said that because those users were acting individually rather than in concert, each individual user would have to be sued individually, and cut the last 1,336 users from the list. That meant the company had to pay the filing fees and other legal costs 1,337 times over if they wanted to process everybody on the list, so they just dropped it. Hopefully we'll see some similar sense brought to this case.


If we can no longer file class-action lawsuits against corporations, then they have no right to sue thousands of people at once. Hopefully this case will be dismissed as well.

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Lüt said:

A similar mass-suit over one of those Japanese cartoons was more-or-less dismissed earlier this year.

The company thought they would be cute and sue 1,337 users, but the judge said that because those users were acting individually rather than in concert, each individual user would have to be sued individually, and cut the last 1,336 users from the list. That meant the company had to pay the filing fees and other legal costs 1,337 times over if they wanted to process everybody on the list, so they just dropped it. Hopefully we'll see some similar sense brought to this case.

Suing 1337 users over piracy of a show about pirates? Suspicious cat is suspicious.

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Irony isn't a dead scene after all.

Not to mention the episode was available for free online viewing on their official website anyway, so it sparked a debate over whether the issue was actually the free viewing, or the saving of the source material (which would apparently make criminals out of people using VHS or TiVo to record their favorite TV shows).

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