A UK man who runs a Web site that once supported the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing application is facing the threat of being sued by four major US movie studios.
Kevin Reid has been accused of copyright infringement by Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal City Studios and Warner Brothers. They filed a lawsuit in the US courts earlier this month claiming that copyright-protected films have been uploaded and downloaded from bds-palace.co.uk, which Reid runs.
At present, Reid has not been formally named as a defendant in the lawsuit. Lawyers representing the four labels have served him with legal papers which invite him to reach a settlement. Reid, though, plans to fight the action.
"This complaint is entirely without foundation. Mr Reid has behaved entirely properly in running his Web site," said David Harris, an IT and intellectual property lawyer at UKITLaw.com, who is representing Reid and describes the lawsuit as "cynical and premature".
"BitTorrent is an innovative and lawful technology and while some visitors to the site may have engaged in copyright infringement Mr Reid had no role in this. His site did no more than provide a forum for the public to discuss movies and current events relating to films. Mr Reid deplores copyright infringement and when made aware of unlawful sharing he immediately removed torrents," Harris added.
With BitTorrent, a single file is broken up into many small fragments which are distributed between many computers. To download a file, a user first downloads a torrent file which contains a link to a tracker server, which has a log of users who have copies of the relevant BitTorrent fragments on their PCs.
Torrent files were shared at bds-palace.co.uk, but Reid is understood to have removed torrent files that could have been unlawful. Supporters of BitTorrent argue that tracker servers don't violate copyright law as they do not host content themselves, in the same way that a search engine merely points to information.
Reid is at least the second UK-based person to be hit by a BitTorrent-related lawsuit this month. IT news site The Register reported earlier this week that these four music studios had served a lawsuit against Alexander Hanff, who is involved with a site, dvdr-core.org, which the movie companies claim is a BitTorrent tracker server that has been used to distribute copyright-protected films.
Some people who ran BitTorrent tracker servers have closed them down in the face of legal threats from the movie industry, but it appears that Hanff and Reid may both make a stand.
"The movie studios are not interested in preventing copyright infringement so much as killing an innovative technology used primarily lawfully but which frightens them because of its potential for abuse," said Harris.
"The studios could have chosen to work with our client [Reid] and assist him in policing the site; instead they have chosen to posture with meritless litigation. Our client will fight this case aggressively and prevail," Harris added.
Talkback
That's right I sell knives in a knife shop, but its all the others that carry them on the street. And I didn't kill my wife, it was barry the fork salesman.
Its so wrong when big companies threaten people in a way such that they are made to feel they could not afford for the case to go too court.
The Courts system is the cornerstone of our system for deciding fairness and justice yet these large companies with large legal departments try to bypass the courts by making threats like "you won't be able to afford the court case". Its only due to the hold-ups and delays caused by these high-powered legal departments that such legal cases are unaffordable to the general public
This effectivly denies the defendant a right to a court hearing and thereby takes away a cornerstone of UK and EU Human rights law, yet its totally legal.
If he's planning to fight this bullying from the americans he has my full support. It would be wrong for him to buckle in the same way as Suprnova.
Whilst I sympathise with the large media company that the copying of music and films is a problem, one has to wonder what the reason behind why people want to infringe, is it because we are all inherantly criminal minded, or is it that most people are aware that the reproduction of the films to VHS or DVD is such a small price these days, that a mark up of the proportions that the media company's are taking in the selling of these products and films (don't forget, they have invariably recouped there outlay and more from the cinema's (for films)), and whilst the CD's (Music) are most proberly a more major concern, in that the record company pays the artist royalties etc, it is still a marketable product that is majorly overpriced at the outlet. If the Film and Music industry want to reduce the piracy further, they need to reduce the cost of the goods to the customer. If a person can get the genuine article at a more reasonable price, they would be more prepared to buy it, rather than take the chance of a dodgy pirate copy etc. People are fed up with over inflated prices. The record/film company's still make a profit, the artist still gets paid and the retailer makes their money & of course the government gets their bit of the action. result - Everyone happy except the prirates...
Another reason why people may not be buying music online are the restrictive practices of the vendors. Both Apple's and Sony's online offerings can only be played on the computer on which they are downloaded, or on 'compatible' portable players. In effect, this means players from the company selling the music. You can't put a Sony track on an iPod, and you can't put an iTunes track on a Sony player. And if you have a different MP3 player, such as a Creative Zen, or you wish to copy the song to a laptop, as you are legally entitled to do with a purchased CD, then forget it.
And don't even get me started on the fact that to buy music from iTunes you first have to download an install a 20-Meg application - And that's before you can even search the 'shop' to see if they have what you want.
Maybe if the online model was better and the compatibility issue was addressed there might be more interest in buying music online?