RSSLink to movie downloads? Be prepared to pay millions
By Tim Conneally | Published May 23, 2008, 2:19 PM
Now-defunct movie sharing sites Cinematube.net and Showstash.com were ordered by Los Angeles judges to pay $1.375 million and $2.7 million, respectively, to the MPAA for linking to movie downloads.
Like the $110 million case against TorrentSpy.com, Showstash and Cinematube were cited for "actively searching for, identifying, collecting, organizing, indexing, and posting on their websites" links to pirated copies of Hollywood films and TV shows.
Following a new trend in legal action by the MPAA, the two sites were not charged with hosting the copyrighted content. Even unlike BitTorrent sites that facilitate downloads by hosting torrent files, Cinematube and Showstash simply pointed to movie downloads on other servers.
Nonetheless, as a result of the lawsuit, both sites are offline, with Showstash simply returning unreachable, and Cinematube displaying a message with a short explanation of the May 7 judgement against it and a link to the MPAA's list of sites with legal content.
The suits were filed in July and September of 2007, before the MPAA admitted its evaluation of losses due to piracy were greatly overestimated.
I have absoultly no issues whatsoever with people that facilitate piracy being brought to justice.
My only issue is where that money goes to.
I'd like to know exactly how the MPAA distributes those funds.
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|Unfortunate, in any event, f*ck 'em all, RIAA, MPAA... You win some, you lose some. Fortunately even with this spree they've been on of terrorizing people & websites, the people (us) are still winning this war.
We'll see how their model changes in the next 5 years as the # of people who discover that they never actually had to pay out of their a** for music, movies and software quadruples.
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|Well I am making a new site for movies, only best quality RIPS. http://www.moviefox.org
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|That will teach them to host their links on our shores!
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|What I am really wondering if all these lawsuits are really paying off for the MPAA. I mean to file a lawsuit is not free, it costs money and I don't think these torrent sites are going to pay a dime. The MPAA is certainly not going to stop file sharing if that's the impossible task they are after.. We all know there will be more and more sharing sites sooner or later.. so whats the point of all this?
I think instead of nailing people who probably are not going to buy the music or movie in the first place because it costs too much, make it worth their while to purchase it. I mean the other day I was at a friends house and they bought a movie from the Itunes store. So they can play it on their computer or on their Ipod|? Well what good is that? I want to play it on my DVD player. After all the money I spent on a plasma tv and DVD, I want to see it on a big screen.. Not some 5in screen or sitting in my work chair.
In my honest opinion its alot easier to download a movie from some torrent site and burn it to a dvd then to buy it from Itunes which is impossible to burn without a 3rd party software anyway. And the Itunes version is also cropped and scaled to an almost terrible viewing quality.
If the MPAA really wants a WIN WIN situation why not make it easier for people to cost effectively buy a movie or music and burn it properly with full 1080p quality? I think this is the best way to go about it.
Also having the MPAA bust sites here any there only makes people wonder what those sites are for. People are curious. If you bust a torrent site, people will wonder what that is and may take up file sharing themselves.
Lets work together.. Lets end the file sharing and copyrights war with a positive solution.
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|"before the MPAA admitted its evaluation of losses due to piracy were greatly overestimated."
I would put on a surprised face, but I just can't.
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|Much like patent law, seems the only reason to make a movie anymore is to bank on the money you'll get from the idiotically conservative courts that guarantee lawyers lifetime income for doing nothing. Thank you, conservatism.
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|Obligatory "what about Google, and sites that link to google, and sites that google links to that link to illegal activity, or computers that come with links to x links to bring you to "illegal" movies?"
i.e., why is the court drawing the line at piddly companies that do this and not major sites that do this?
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|"...why is the court drawing the line at piddly companies that do this and not major sites that do this?"
If memory serves, these companies linked DIRECTLY to movie content as the main motivation to drive traffic. Google (as your example asks) doesn't link directly to copyrighted material. Not to say you can't find copyrighted material using Google, but that would be a function of the page Google indexes and is not the primary means of revenue. Google also has a history of removing material that violates copyright laws.
The court is not unfairly targeting "piddly companies". They are imposing fines against companies that used copyrighted material to drive their own revenues w/o permission.
Perspective, people. It's all about perspective...
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