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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, @07:27PM
Surely the civil damage and the criminal punishment should be decoupled. The company should at most get the value of the what the damage has cost them, and, separately, the perpetrator fined (or imprisoned if bad enough) by the state for the crime of theft.
I have to agree with this. Punitive damages on any tort, where they are allowed, should generally go to the state. It makes little sense that random companies (or individuals, for that matter) should get a financial windfall just because somebody else wrongs them in an illegal manner.
From the UK I don't understand the USA legal system. [...] Perhaps it has roots in the Wild West culture of settling everything between individuals, with the law not in sight - at gunpoint possibly. Like you stole my beer so I shall take your cattle and burn down your barn.
Actually, as with many horrid things that the English hate about Americans, we inherited this tradition from you. (I mean that as a joke... sort of.)
Punitive damages were formalized as a matter of English law going back the mid-18th century, though a type of punitive damages in the form of granting double or treble damages goes back well into medieval England. (This, in turn, was based on ancient Roman concepts of malicious acts by the defendant or "outrage" against the acts committed in determining penalty.) You can read a bit on the history of punitive damages here [csuohio.edu]. The difference in modern practice is due to a court ruling in mid-20th century UK, which reined in the scope of cases where punitive damages can be applied. But in the U.S., where tort law -- derived from English common law -- is a matter of tradition in individual states, the development of punitive damages continued into recent decades.