Hollywood studios win lawsuit against peer-to-peer website
8/5/2008 17:40
Major Hollywood studios have won an anti-piracy lawsuit against a
now-defunct website that indexed peer-to-peer file-sharing of movies and TV
shows, according to court documents released yesterday.
US District Judge
Florence-Marie Cooper, in a four-page opinion issued Tuesday, ruled that Valence
Media -- the parent company of the TorrentSpy website -- had encouraged,
promoted and enabled copyright infringement.
The judge ruled there were 3,699
acts of copyright infringement- - and ordered the company to pay US$30,000 for
each one -- bringing a total monetary judgment of over US$110 million.
Cooper
also issued a permanent injunction that bans Valence Media from engaging in
similar activity in the future.
The Motion Picture Association of America
hailed the judge's decision as a "significant victory."
"This substantial
money judgment sends a strong message about the illegality of these sites," said
MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman.
He said the demise of TorrentSpy is a clear
victory for the studios and demonstrates that such pirate sites will not be
allowed to continue to operate without facing relentless litigation by copyright
holders.
Major studios, including Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros. and
Paramount Pictures, filed the lawsuit in February 2006.
Judge Cooper issued a
default judgment last December against TorrentSpy and ruled that its operators
were liable for copyright infringement.
TorrentSpy was permanently shut down
on March 24, stating in a message on its website that "the legal climate in the
USA for copyright, privacy of search requests and links to torrent files in
search results is simply too hostile."
The motion picture industry loses more
than US$18 billion annually as a result of movie piracy, according to the
MPAA.
More than US$7 billion in losses are due to illegal Internet
distributions, while about US$11 billion is the result of illegal copying and
bootlegging, the trade group said.
Xinhua
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