MPAA, Reloaded
Published by: Codrut Nistor, in News
May26th2008
The sites we're talking about are ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net. Well, it's better to say "have been ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net," because if we try to visit them, the first one displays a parked domain page, and the other, the following message: "This site has been permanently shut down because it was operated in violation of copyright laws. On May 7, 2008, a federal judge in Los Angeles issued a $1.375 million judgment against Cinematube.net for the infringement of numerous popular copyrighted motion pictures and television shows. There are plenty of sites that offer legal downloads and streaming of premium film and television content. A list of these sites can be found at http://www.mpaa.org/piracy_LegalOpt.asp."
Oh, my! MPAA is helping us, by giving away that precious list of "premium film and television content!" Thank you very much, but now, let's get back to ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net, shall we?
So, what did they do so wrong, after all? They weren't hosting a single bit of copyrighted content, but they were both showing the path to such content. Basically, we're talking about the same thing as a Torrent tracker that has torrents with illegal content, so ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net, despite the fact they weren't hosting anything illegal, ended up by being found guilty of contributory copyright infringement, simply for searching, finding, collecting and indexing links to illegal copies of various movies and TV shows. Ta-taa!
That's it. The money? Well, damages totaled $2.7 million for ShowStash and $1.3 million for Cinematube, and the most funny part is that none of them was particularly well-known - at least I never heard those names until now!
If you know anything about this deal, please don't hesitate to enlighten the rest of us. Some details about these two sites I mentioned today would also be great, so feel free to drop those comments!
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2 Comments on MPAA, Reloaded
On 05/28/2008 at 5:21 pm Jonathan Bailey said:
I covered this story this weekend on my podcast and may be able to help some, but it is a very murky area of the law.
The two sites were not actually successfully sued for direct copyright infringement, but contributory copyright infringement. It takes place when someone is aware that an infringement is taking place and then does something to support or induce it.
The two elements are both critical though, one has to be provably aware of the infringement and then has to take some kind of direct action to support it. Both have to be proved.
This is actually what much of the Grokster case hinged on. If you'll recall, it was Grokster's users, not Grokster itself, that was making infringing copies of works, however, Grokster was successfully sued on grounds that it contributed to the infringement.
If you are not aware that something is infringing and could not know that it is, linking to it is not an issue, but once you become aware, continuing to provide the link could be a legal problem, especially if you build a business model around linking to likely infringing works, as these sites did.
I hope that shed some light on these issues, there really is a lot more to this but I think from here one should be able to look up what they need.
On 05/31/2008 at 8:40 pm Codrut Nistor said:
Thank you very much for letting us know!
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