So you can do it!!
If you’re a BitTorrent user and you’ve illegally downloaded the 2010 action flick The Expendables, you may be receiving word soon from the U.S. Copyright Group that you’re being sued. There are thought to be over 23,000 BitTorrent users who have been caught pirating the movie.
The pirates were found thanks to permission from a federal judge to subpoena Internet service providers to find the identities of the illegal downloaders. Each person that’s notified may face up to a $150,000 fine, but most settlements usually end up being around $3,000. Still, $3,000 for a movie that got a 41-percent rating on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer, is quite a lot to pay. Okay, so the movie stars Sylvester Stallone, Mickey Rourke, Jet Li, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but still, I wouldn’t want to pay that much money for it.
When Thomas Dunlap, the head of the Copyright Group in Washington, D.C., first started the court case in February, he had 6,500 IP addresses. As of last Wednesday, he had 23,322. That’s quite the increase in number in just a few months. Now that the Copyright Group has the subpoena, that number could grow even more.
But this 23,000-strong case is nothing compared to the over 140,000 BitTorrent users facing lawsuits in the U.S. for pirating files. Most of the files are porn or B-list films. Since film companies can make so much money off of these types of cases, some have apparently started paying people to troll BitTorrent sites and find the IP addresses of people who are sharing.
Let this be a lesson to our readers that film companies are cracking down even more. Since it’s become a form of profit, companies aren’t just sitting idly by anymore; they’re actively looking for ways to make money. And whereas you’re thinking you’re saving a few bucks by pirating a movie, the company is thinking how many thousands of dollars it can get out of you for the same thing.
However, as we saw a few weeks ago with the case of the wrongly-accused child pornographer, accusing someone of an illegal activity solely from their IP address is not always accurate. If the Copyright Group is spending enough resources to ensure they have the right offender, you know the fee won’t be anything to sneeze at.
