Those who oppose suing downloaders, step inside.
 

I know this is turning into a heated debate and everyone thinks they know what's best for everyone else, but please answer this one question in the poll:

Do those of you who oppose such action, actually own intellectual property yourself?

yes i do. but i don't believe in outmoded business models and legal blackmail.

I'm not opposing suing genuinely guilty people.

I am against the scattergun approach of threatening to sue a huge number of people based purely on IP addresses just in the hope that you scare enough of them into a payout to make a profit and not thinking at all about any repercussions that may affect future actual sales while being after a quick pension-pot now.

No, I don't own any porn content.
Yes, I do own other intellectual property.

someone stole your poll.

what are you trying to achieve ?

Looks like they did! Piracy has no bounds!

Do you have a better solution?

It's easy to swing on them, but what is the alternative at this point?

Do you not believe that they will do the best they can to not sue innocent people?

There will be civilian causalities. That is the unfortunate cost of war.

A non-condom utopia.

You?

Not after the way it has played out in the UK, no.

:2 cents::2 cents:

i would like to add that if this goes badly, at all, once, we're going to take a major reputation hit.

if you think record and movie companies have it bad suing single moms over downloads kids made, just wait for 'Tranny Stuffers 6'

Yes.

And I am not against going after people. I am against mass sending of settlement letters to someone they can't even name demanding thousands of dollars for something that has a retail value no where near the amount asked.

In one of the articles I read on the topic, John Stigliano had mentioned that he was unaware of them asking for upwards of $1000 in his name. He had been made out to think they were asking for a reasonable settlement of around $50 - 100.

You want people to back your idea, why go about it in such a scummy way?

You wanna make an omelette, you gotta break a few eggs.

If someone "uses your internet/ip" to download pirated content, are you innocent?
Is your internet connection your responsibility similarly to your car being your responsibility if someone was to use it for multiple robberies?

I don't know - I'm not an armchair lawyer - but I'd like to know

Personally I'm for it... piracy has gotten out of control - something needs to be done other than the cat and mouse game of DMCA notices

The average 'idiot' surfer donkey has learned how to search google for their favourite content the minute it's been released in hopes that google has already indexed some pirated material.... it's disgusting what you'll find in keyword/clicks section of a blog that has nothing to do with pirating. :disgust

good point.

I wish I had a better solution, but i dont. I do own intellectual property but not a ton.
I think if you going to go after end users you need to prove that they downloaded it. Get a court order to seize there computer and actually prove they downloaded the file. You will probably find a lot more this way and create an opening for other lawsuits by non adult major companies.
I know its more cost effective to just go after everyone, but there will be consequences for going after someone who really didnt download anything.
Dont get me wrong I do hate torrent users.
As a webmaster if im promoting a movie or site and the visitor can just do a search for the movie that they want to see and download illegally instead of paying, well there goes my sale.
I just think that suing a handful of people that are innocent far outweighs the thousands that did. The adult industry already has a black eye and making people scared will probably not help in the long run.
I truly hope that going after end users will help the adult biz and not hurt it.

Sell a product worth paying for and you'll cut down on the downloading. :2 cents:

Problem is that the way the IP addresses are being collected has been proven to be very unreliable. There was a study published last year (don't have it here, can try and find it) about this very problem. One of the examples they used was of an IP address that the IP harvesters claimed was used by a computer that downloaded something but was in reality being used by a network printer.

The end never justifies the means.

Committing an act of injustice with good intentions is still committing an act of injustice.

I didn't read that one. Remember where you saw that?

:2 cents:

There are civilian casualties in every war.

Killing enemy soldiers doesn't give bad publicity.

Killing civilians does. By the truck load.

aren't you one of the ones that comments about how shitty america is because of civilian casualties in afghanistan, etc?

Well, that is the angle that lawyers are trying to use. You are responsible for your Internet connection. But, if a friend comes over to your house and uses your phone to call and threaten to kill someone it is not you that is responsible for what was said on your phone. It is your friend. The police have to prove you did it. They can not just say it is your phone so you are responsible. Why is it any different with Internet connections?

Breaking eggs to make omelettes doesn't really work in this scenario.

The eggs are not your customers or potential customers for the omellete.

Drawing the line between voracious consumers and thieves is risky from a financial standpoint. I am not making any kind of a ethical judgement here, I am talking about business and the ramifications of alienating the public.

Metallica scored a huge victory over Napster just in time for everyone to stop giving a fuck about Metallica and music downloading to explode. So who really won?

Someone here linked the article just a day or two back in one of the threads. I think it might have been DamienJ.

I'll see if I can turn it up.

If enough companies sue and enough people get sued on the regular, and people start associating illegal downloads with serious trouble, people will think twice about downloading illegally.

Nothing happens over night. But if this starts and continues, things will change.

I'm against unnecessary and/or illegal war, like the ones the US are currently involved in.

However, sometimes you do have to put a foot in someones ass, and when that happens, there is collateral damage. It is unfair, but it happens.

If someone gets wrongly accused of stealing someones videos, they can always NOT settle and take it to court. Their computer can be checked to see if they did or not. If not and they are in the right, they should be able to counter sue or at the very least have the company who took them to court pay for their legal expenses. That is only fair.

Yes I do own intellectual property...

I have no issue against fighting piracy but this is not fighting piracy this is a money making venture and we have seen it go very wrong over here in the UK.
This is not something new it has been done before and the backlash to the companys who were doing it, was not funny at all. I think this will hurt porn companys even more and as I said in the other thread, time will tell how this works out for the US people and the companys involved in sending out the letters.

the people who seem to be behind it have sites and content from a decade ago and are looking for a quick payout during their exit from an industry which has passed them by.

when the backlash starts and sales drop even more they will be retired snorting some clueless grannies pension up their nose leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.

I don't own porn IP, but I own other IP in the form of patents that are defended by the regular channels when breached.

Just like I find it normal that DWB who holds porn IP to defend it by trying to STOP that IP being shared.

Steve on the other hand has already said in his thread he is not going to try to prevent piracy of his content, but profit from it. THAT is what this shit is all and all those porn companies taking the same route of mass mailing (internet) IP owners probably fall into the same mentality.

Doesn't really matter. Everyone here earns their living from porn. So if you make it, sell it, process it, whatever, if piracy wins, then we ALL go under.

It's only really a heated debate, because no one on the pro side of the blackmail situation can provide any counterpoints aside from name calling, swearing, lying, and putting people on ignore.

Not that I can see, anyway.

But well done for starting ANOTHER thread on the subject.

REALISE THIS. POINTING OUT BLACKMAIL IS NOT A GOOD LOOK DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE PRO PIRACY, IT MEANS YOU ARE ANTI-BLACKMAIL.

Hope that is clear.

doubt it:2 cents:

Here's the article I mentioned:

'Completely misrepresented'

Many of the letters seen by Newsbeat indicate that DigiProtect is acting on behalf of one of the biggest adult studios in the United States, Evil Angel, run by American porn mogul John Stagliano.

When contacted, Mister Stagliano appeared to be unaware of the £500 DigiProtect is demanding from alleged file-sharers to settle out of court.

"It's not my understanding that they ask for anything near that. I think the amount was $50 (£34) or €50 (£43)," he said.

"I would be very surprised and I wouldn't be happy because it would mean it was completely misrepresented to me."

DigiProtect refused to comment directly for this article.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/te...00/7766448.stm

With all due respect Dallas, I believe this is the wrong path to go down. Music did this with dowloaders and it was horrible pr. It wasn't until they got napster that MOST casual piracy in the music industry stopped. And what that took was a concerted effort from the major music companies to make a stand. Until the major players in the adult industry pool resources and make that stand our content will be ripped off and devalued.

Unfortunately, this industry is too disjointed to be able to lockstep and attack the problem. Instead you have big players cutting deals with the biggest offenders under the excuse of adapt or die.

Suing individuals will absolutely backfire and draw unwanted/needed bad publicity to the industry.

The whole digiprotect things takes this scam to a new level, but is illegal in the US afaik, which is why the ambulance chasing lawyer cunts haven't tried it yet.

What happened was Davenport Lyons (legal team) would work with DigiProtect. Digiprotect would get CONTENT OWNING COMPANY to sign over the rights to the content to them.

They then seed it to P2P networks.

They then log which IP addresses download it and give this data to Davenport Lyons who then send out the blackmail letters.

http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2008/...inal-scammers/

Oh look, a link to a citation to back up my point!

And another one!

"Are Copyright Holders Purposely Putting Content On P2P In Order To Demand Money?"

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/200...34182883.shtml

Genius scam, it must be said.

I imagine if you post that on a B2B music biz board you would be laughed at.

because there needs to be precedent to change who is responsible for your phone.

the death of napster pushed the drive towards bitorrent, now these rounds of mass mailings will push people to total anonymity. seeing a trend here?