Major Labels, RIAA, Homeland Security All Spotted 'Pirating' Works

from the telling dept

Early last week we noted that, using the tool, YouHaveDownloaded, some folks in the Netherlands noticed that the local music collection society appeared to be engaging in infringement. You knew that wasn’t where things would end. Soon after that, people spotted infringement emanating from NBC Universal, Sony Pictures and Fox Entertainment — three of the biggest supporters of ever more draconian copyright law. And, of course, that was just the beginning. The RIAA and Homeland Security have now also been identified. And, no, in most of these cases, it’s clearly not just for research purposes or to find infringers. The RIAA, for example, could probably get away with downloading music… but the first five seasons of the TV show, Dexter? That’s tougher to believe. The folks at Gizmodo have calculated just how much the RIAA’s likely infringement here should cost, using the RIAA’s own metric of the maximum statutory rates of $150,000 per infringement… and figured the RIAA owes about $9 million. Somehow I doubt we’ll see the RIAA pay up any time soon.

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Companies: fox entertainment, nbc universal, riaa, sony pictures

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Comments on “Major Labels, RIAA, Homeland Security All Spotted 'Pirating' Works”

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33 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: They were... uh... testing?

Sometimes you people really do a terrible job detecting sarcasm (btw, I’m not the author of the post you’re responding to, but it’s obviously sarcastic).

Then again, I have failed to detect sarcasm before, mostly because the true trolls are often indistinguishable from the parodies.

Grey Ferret says:

This doesn’t prove anything. An IP address doesn’t identify an…. um… (lawyers whispering in background). I mean, this was obviously an isolated act by one of our scapegoats… what? (more whispering) I mean, a rogue employee who was induced into infringement by these horrible rogue web… (whisper)… um… grifting (“grifting” that’s the term we’re using now? really?) Um, grifting sites dedicated to infring… (whisper) I mean, theft of US property. SOPA must be passed to prevent this from happening in the future. (right?) Right!

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