Monthly Archives: May 2010

Collecting The Pirate Bay Fines is not Easy

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The Pirate Bay team were ordered to pay the entertainment industries $6 million in fines,Due to several verdicts against them. As predicted, actually getting hold of the money is not going to be an easy job for them. Thus far, the debt collecting agency has only seized $30,000 of the total sum.

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King Kong Bay - TPB LogoThe Pirate Bay Four were ordered to pay nearly a million dollars each to compensate various music and movie companies for their alleged losses about a year ago.

Even though the case will be appealed later this year, Swedish Enforcement Authority has already started seizing the assets of the defendants. That was the plan at least.

In response to the fines handed down at the main trial, former Pirate Bay spokesman and defendant Peter Sunde earlier noted: “We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay if we could. If I would have money I would rather burn everything I owned.”

A year later and the total sum of money owed adds up to a massive $6 million. According to the agency that is tasked with collecting the money, the entertainment industries have only seen a fraction of it so far. It turns out that Peter’s prediction may have been right.

Of the total sum of outstanding fines just $30,000 has been collected, and this came from the wealthy ‘fourth’ defendant Carl Lundstrom, who actually had very little involvement with the site. The debt collectors have been unable to find any assets for Peter Sunde and Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm.

“We cannot find any assets when there are none,” Lars Grimby of the debt collecting agency told Swedish Radio in a comment. Grimby added that the movie and music companies find the loot that has been recovered so far a meager outcome.

One of the problems, according to Grimby, is that all the Pirate Bay associates have all emigrated from Sweden, either before or right after the verdict. Since the debt collector’s jurisdiction ends at the Swedish border, it is unable to seize any of the assets abroad.

Money isn’t the only issue the entertainment industries are dissatisfied with either. While awaiting the appeal of the main trial, currently scheduled to take place during the summer of 2010, The Pirate Bay continues to operate. Despite efforts from the entertainment industries to shut it down the site is now bigger than ever before.

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Piracy Will Earn Hurt Locker More Than the Box Office

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Hollywood often complains that unauthorized downloads are causing the industry to lose huge sums of money. The makers of The Hurt Locker discovered that this doesn’t always have to be the case. Through an extortion-like scheme, The Hurt Locker is set to make more money from settlements with BitTorrent users than it ever made at the box office.

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Hurt Locker Poster

Two days ago, the makers of The Hurt Locker filed a complaint against the first 5,000 ‘unidentified’ BitTorrent users. Helped by the U.S. Copyright Group (USCG), the film makers are requesting the personal details connected to the IP-addresses that allegedly shared the film on BitTorrent.

With The Hurt Locker’s Oscar for the Best Picture of 2009, the case has received a lot of press interest, but it’s not the first movie for which BitTorrent users were targeted. Earlier this year, the USCG employed the same tactic for lesser known films. For one of these, Call of the Wild,  obtained the settlement papers.

With the document, alleged infringers have the option to settle the case for $2,500 and avoid further legal action. Because the case is similar to that of The Hurt Locker, we assume that a similar settlement amount will be proposed. This allows us to calculate how much money is involved in this case, and the results are quite interesting.

Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer at the USCG, earlier said that in the Hurt Locker case they could pursue tens of thousands of users. Let’s be careful with our estimate and assume that some 20,000 BitTorrent users will eventually receive a settlement letter in the mail. Of these, half will choose to pay the $2,500 without complaining, a number that seems to be fair based on the results of similar schemes.

With this $25 million the film makers would have collected more money from BitTorrent users than they did from U.S. movie theater visitors. Despite the recognition from Academy members and the huge success among downloaders, the U.S box office revenue has been relatively low at $16.4 million.

The settlement money is not net profit for the makers of Hurt Locker though, as they have to give up 70% of it to the USCG. Still, if they want to earn more they can simply continue to track down BitTorrent users and send out a couple of thousand extra settlement offers. Easy money.

This whole scheme is in no way intended to protect the copyrights of the Hurt Locker producers. USCG don’t want to go to court at all, they want to see money, as much as possible without too much trouble. Lengthy and costly court cases would only get in the way of this goal and could even bust the whole scheme if they lose. The ultimate goal is to ‘monetize’ piracy, this is also how the USCG pitched their scheme to rights holders.

A good example of this ‘money orientation’ is the letter that downloaders of the film Far Cry received from the USCG. Here, the alleged downloaders were offered an initial settlement amount of ‘just’ $1,500, but this would go up to $2,500 if they wouldn’t pay up within three weeks. A classic persuasion tactic, which was followed by a threat that going to court could lead to a fine up to 150,000.

Yes, it’s all about extracting as much cash as possible. We have to say, if they can beat the Box Office revenues of an Oscar winning movie with these threats, they sure delivered as promised.

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Police Probe Pair Over Phony Pirate Porn Privacy Plunder

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Earlier this year, malware which purported to be an erotic PC game punished file-sharers who believed they were downloading the real thing. Instead of endless hours of digital titillation, unlucky pirates had their personal details published on the Internet and had to pay a fee to have them removed. Now police have arrested two men in connection with this unusual fraud.

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Cross Days Cover

After a endless delays, the pervy PC title Cross Days from developer 0verflow was finally released.

Compatible with some delightful USB ‘hands-free’ devices for experiencing ‘climax scenes’ (NSFW: male and female versions) many preferred to obtain the title via unofficial channels. Those that did were in for quite a shock.

A fake version of the game was widely available on file-sharing networks, but when installed it punished the would-be pirates. After gathering highly personal information from the victim’s computer, accompanied by a screenshot of his or her desktop and what they were doing at the time, the malware uploaded the whole lot to a public website.

It was possible to have the stuff taken down, but at a price. Not only would the victim have to apologize for downloading the ‘game’ for free, but they would also have to pay money to their tormentors.

According to a Japanese media report, this week two men were arrested on suspicion of creating the Cross Days malware and using it to extort money from victims.

Kenzo Oka, 27, of Tokyo, and an unnamed second man, 20, were arrested earlier this month on suspicion of defrauding several people out payments of around $64 each to have their personal details removed from the website.

While writing computer viruses isn’t a crime in Japan, extorting cash with them is. The pair become the first to be arrested in the country while using a virus as a tool to commit fraud.

As reported ,In March 2007,on another bizarre piece of Japanese code which taunted file-sharers, threatened to report them to the police and even threatened to kill them.

The author of that code was eventually arrested for breaching copyright – because he used cartoon graphics in the virus without permission.

But, as they say, what goes around, comes around & Its now on them.

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