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from the sudden-outbreak-of-common-sense dept.
A District Court judge in Seattle has taken a novel approach in a series of default judgments targeting alleged BitTorrent pirates. Since the defendants are accused of sharing files in the same swarm, they should also share the penalty among each other, the judge argues. According to the order, these cases are not intended to provide a windfall to filmmakers.
Many Hollywood insiders see online piracy as a major threat, but only very few are willing to target alleged file-sharers with lawsuits.
LHF Productions, one of the companies behind the blockbuster "London Has Fallen," has no problem crossing this line. Since the first pirated copies of the film appeared online last year, the company has been suing alleged downloaders in multiple courts.
[...] This week, Judge Ricardo Martinez ruled over a series of LHF cases at the Seattle District Court. The movie company requested default judgments against 28 defendants in five cases, demanding $2,500 from each defendant
[...] The filmmaker had argued that $2,500, and even more in attorney's fees and costs, is a rather modest request. However, in his order this week the Judge sees things differently
[...] Instead, the Judge places the damages amount at the statutory minimum, which is $750.
Even more interesting, and the first time we've seen this happening, is that the penalty will be split among the swarm members in each case. The filmmakers alleged that the defendants were part of the same swarm, so they are all liable for the same infringement, Judge Martinez argues.
[...] This means that in one of the cases, where there are eight defaulted defendants, each has to pay just over $93 in damages.
As for the lowered damages amount itself, the Judge clarifies that these type of cases are not intended to result in large profits. Especially not, when the rightsholders have made little effort to prove actual damage or to track down the original sharer.
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(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday February 20 2017, @05:02PM
First, I absolutely agree that our current U.S. copyright system is broken and needs major reform. It makes absolutely no sense within the original idea of copyright "to promote progress in the arts..." that a creator and his/her descendants should get to live off the proceeds of a work for generations. At best, we should have terms like the original copyright act of 1790 -- 14 years, then you have to make something new.
Copying any form of information is trivial and cheap. Creating original content is expensive and difficult. A business model that relies on doing the latter for free and attempting to make up the costs by charging for the former is fundamentally flawed.
Well, it seems "fundamentally flawed" NOW. Copyright systems basically worked for roughly 500 years, since they were first used in some Italian cities in the late 1400s. In the past 20 years or so, however, the decreased cost of copying digital information has made the system all blow up.
So the question is where do we go from here? What alternative "business model" do you propose?
Here's the thing with copyright, as traditionally conceived: It was a lot more democratic than previous systems of funding arts. Before copyright, artists were primarily workers -- skilled craftsmen -- and since most average folks centuries ago struggled a lot more to have basic stuff to meet their needs than today, they couldn't afford to hire artists for random jobs. Hence, most art was created for rich patrons who dictated the form of art. OR it was created by the rich folks themselves, who had the leisure time to devote to learning how to write literature or whatever, which the average Joe didn't have the time or resources to do. If you were a poor dude and wanted to create art, the best you could hope for was to find some rich guy who liked your work and might hire you -- and even then, you couldn't "create" what you wanted in most cases. Instead, you served your patron by making the kind of art HE wanted.
Copyright changed a lot of that, first in the area of writing, then (sheet) music. You could be a middle-class dude (or dudette) and just try writing a book. Yes, you still had to convince a publisher to take a chance with it, but if it was successful in sales, you'd get revenue that might allow you to continue your pursuit. Particularly in the 19th century, you begin to see a lot more writers who started out as middle-class folks and rose to prominence through their writing talent. Without a copyright system, most of them probably would have had difficulty convincing anyone to fund their writing. In the 20th century, with the advent of sound recording, a lot of poor or middle-class musicians also found a way to finance the distribution of their work and get profits through sales to continue it.
I'm NOT trying to paint a too rosy picture of copyright though -- obviously publishers took advantage of writers too, and there were various abuses. But copyright did create a more democratic business model than the one it replaced.
So the question becomes: if we don't have copyright now, what do we replace it with? Your post seems to hint at financing of the creative process itself. But then you either need to find patrons (i.e., investors) or perhaps subscribers (e.g., through crowdsourcing). Subscription does have a long history in publishing projects too -- but it mostly worked for established artists/writers with reputations that could draw subscribers.
And you also encounter the problem that successful art generates less revenue to promote future art. Not every movie by the "greatest" director or set of actors or whatever is successful. (Nor is every book or song or whatever, even by great artists.) Nowadays, the market still responds a bit to revenue after the fact, which is a rough gauge of popularity. But if you remove copyright from the equation as a source of revenue, you get more gross mismatches and "see-sawing" investments in artists that don't track actual successful works. An independent movie that's a "runaway hit" doesn't make additional money for its creators. Instead, it might get some big investors to pitch in for a future big-budget film that turns into a major flop. But you've now encouraged these "one-hit wonder" idiots with oodles of cash to keep making more crap. Obviously this stuff happens today anyway, but you end up incentivizing the wrong things: creators get "big money" not when they score a major success, but only if such success convinces people to finance future projects (which may not deserve such rewards).
But perhaps most importantly, the lack of copyright discourages everyone but the real "big artists" to even bother trying. Projects that involve "less popular" or unusual creations are less likely to be attempted in the first place. A writer who thinks, "You know, I think the world really needs a book about [obscure topic X]" could write it, and see what happens... perhaps even contribute to some publishing costs. And maybe the book sells a few thousand copies, and they go home with a few thousand dollars in their pocket, which is enough to encourage them to create more stuff, while they keep their day job. But such folks are less likely to be able to convince other people to give them money for a future project with such low interest. Admittedly, Kickstarter and other crowdsourcing stuff MIGHT begin to work for such projects, but so far it seems the funding projects get through crowdsourcing is VERY unpredictable, if you can even "get the word out" about your obscure project.
Anyhow... I'm not saying there aren't other possible models. I'm saying it's really easy to say, "Meh. Copyright is a stupid business model." It's a lot harder to figure out a different way to encourage future artists to create works without either putting it mostly in the hands of rich investors again (who will dictate tastes even more than the RIAA and MPAA do) and also still allowing unknown artists to have a chance to get a little encouragement for pursuing their dreams, rather than just financing established "professionals."
It's as if Henry Ford gave away cars for free and charged for painting them, then had enough laws passed that this became an established business model and painting your own car was a criminal offence.
I'd just like to note that you chose an example to make sure a business model sound the most stupid. But there are plenty of actual business models that are based on idea of investing in stuff and only later making a profit. For example, a lot of real estate rentals (residential and commercial) depend on investors to put money into the "hard part" of building the actual buildings, but the "renting it out" is a lot cheaper... they make investments with expectation of future return. Lots of businesses depend on those sorts of investments from rich dudes to start things up, and they have the expectation of future returns. Copyright was one of the very few "democratic" systems that allowed a middle-class person to engage in that sort of speculation around his/her own creative endeavors. It's easy to dismiss it now because "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREEEEEEE!" but it's a lot harder to come up with a replacement system that encourages the same diversity in artistic creation.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Monday February 20 2017, @10:37PM
So the question becomes: if we don't have copyright now, what do we replace it with?
No need to get rid of copyright, we just need to fix it with someting like
the original copyright act of 1790 -- 14 years, then you have to make something new.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.