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Two users of the torrent site YTS, whose personal details were shared by the operator of the site, have settled piracy claims for thousands of dollars. The Colorado men were taken to court after they initially ignored out-of-court settlement demands. The movie companies’ attorney says that the men were offered “generous” deals due to the hardship they endured due to the COVID pandemic.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
YTS is one of the most popular torrent sites, serving millions of users per day.
All this attention got the site in legal trouble. Various movie companies including the makers of ‘Hitman’s Bodyguard,’ ‘Hunter Killer’ and ‘Mechanic Resurrection,’ took YTS ‘operator’ Senthil Vijay Segaran and the company Techmodo to court.
While lawsuits tend to end badly for pirate sites, these lawsuits turned out differently. All parties agreed to settle the lawsuits, three in total, in change for over a million dollars in piracy damages. The site, however, was allowed to continue and is still online today.
Initially, this was received as great news by the site’s users. However, for some, it turned out to be a disaster. As part of an undisclosed agreement, YTS also shared information from its user database. This was a limited one-time arrangement, we learned from an insider, but one with broad consequences.
After settling the case with YTS, the same movie companies moved on to several users. These film companies had sued BitTorrent users in the past but now they have extra ammunition, including emails, IP-addresses and download logs obtained directly from YTS.
This information was put to use right away. Over the past months, we have reported on several lawsuits where YTS users were targeted, and movie companies also approached alleged pirates out of court by contacting them directly via email. The latter also happened to Colorado residents W. Nelson and R. Flattery.
Both were approached with a settlement demand out of court, which they chose to ignore. Perhaps they had hoped the filmmakers would move on to other targets instead, but that was not the case. A few months ago, they were taken to court.
Flattery and Nelson were sued in federal court, where the filmmakers demanded damages. In theory, that could reach $150,000 per copyright infringement, which is many times the offer they first received over email.
In many federal lawsuits against torrent users, the evidence isn’t exactly rock solid. However, with emails and IP-addresses from the YTS database, the movie companies had a much stronger case here. And faced with potentially live-changing damages claims, both defendants have agreed to settle.
Earlier this week the movie companies asked the court to dismiss the claims against both defendants. Most of the time the settlement agreements remain private but, in this case, they were entered into the court’s records.
Flattery agreed to pay $2,320 in damages to Morgan Creek Productions and admitted to sharing copies of the movie “All Eyez On Me.” He was also accused of sharing several other movies, such as “Lost Child” and “Hunter Killer,” but maintains that this is incorrect.
The settlement amount can be paid off in six months and the movie company offers to waive the final $120 if the defendant pays on time.
Nelson settled with several movie companies, including the makers of “Rambo: Last Blood” and “Hellboy” but no movie titles are mentioned in the agreement. He must pay $10,500.00 in minimum monthly installments of $50.
According to the attorney of the movie companies, both defendants were offered such “generous” deals because COVID already impacted the defendants substantially, suggesting that they lost work.
“These generous arrangements were made in view of the impact the novel coronavirus has had on the employment situation of Defendants and further hardships currently endured by Defendant Nelson,” the attorney writes.
Needless to say, this is a grim ending for the defendants. And the same is true for fellow Coloradoan S. Moody, who settled his case in early November. While they are probably happy to get this burden off their back, it must be strange for them to see YTS continue business as usual.
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A copy of the letter informing the court about the settlement agreements is available here (pdf)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
In the end, it’s likely that cooler heads will prevail.
Enlarge / Starship prototype SN9 has not launched yet. (credit: SpaceX)
There were moments of high drama on Thursday afternoon, and again Friday morning, in South Texas. For two days in a row, SpaceX evacuated the handful of residents remaining in Boca Chica Village. Sheriff's deputies cleared beaches and closed roads. And at the company's launch site, a Starship rocket prototype underwent preparations for launch.
The vehicle was ready, with ground equipment venting away. The winds were light. And then—nothing. As the hours ticked by, the rocket remained on the ground. Unfortunately for SpaceX, the Federal Aviation Administration had not given its final approval to launch. It all made for quite a South Texas Showdown.
SpaceX, which officially said it was targeting a launch attempt on Thursday, has not publicly commented on what happened. Nor has the FAA provided specifics on what transpired other than offering a generic statement: “We will continue working with SpaceX to resolve outstanding safety issues before we approve the next test flight.”
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According to the latest global PC market report from research firm Canalys, PC makers shipped 458.2 million computers in 2020, up 17 percent from shipments in 2019. Much of that growth came in the fourth quarter of the year, with a total of 143.7 mill…
According to the latest global PC market report from research firm Canalys, PC makers shipped 458.2 million computers in 2020, up 17 percent from shipments in 2019. Much of that growth came in the fourth quarter of the year, with a total of 143.7 million units shipped, up 35-percent from the same period a year […]
The post Canalys: Tablet and Chromebook shipments hit all-time highs in Q44, 2020 appeared first on Liliputing.
“Our research finally proves that you really can fit a square peg through a round hole.”
Enlarge / Look at this lovely cube-shaped piece of poo, courtesy of the Australian bare-nosed wombat. (credit: Patricia J. Yang et al., 2021)
Scientists have been puzzling for decades over how the Australian bare-nosed wombat poops out neat little cubes of feces instead of tapered cylinders like pretty much all other animals. According to a new paper published in the journal Soft Matter, the secret lies in their intestines, which have varying stiff and soft regions that serve to shape the poo during the digestive process. Earlier preliminary findings by the same group won the 2019 Ig Nobel Physics Prize.
"Bare-nosed wombats are renowned for producing distinctive, cube-shaped poos. This ability to form relatively uniform, clean cut feces is unique in the animal kingdom," said University of Tasmania wildlife ecologist Scott Carver, a co-author on the paper. "They place these feces at prominent points in their home range, such as around a rock or a log, to communicate with each other. Our research found that these cubes are formed within the last sections of the intestine—and finally proves that you really can fit a square peg through a round hole."
Zoologist Eric Guiler first noted the unusual shape of wombat droppings in 1960, and to date, wombats are the only known animals to produce six-sided cube-shaped poo. It's one of several examples of naturally occurring pattern formation, such as the columns of Ireland's Giant's Causeway (formed by cooling lava), or how vibrating membranes can make grains of sand form "Chladni figures." But naturally occurring cube shapes are extremely rare. The Australian bare-nosed wombat (Vombatus ursinus) can pump out as many as 100 cube-shaped droppings a day.
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Mediacom says heavy uploaders harm network even if they don’t exceed data cap.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Bosca78)
Mediacom, a cable company with about 1.4 million Internet customers across 22 states, is telling heavy uploaders to reduce their data usage—even when those users are well below their monthly data caps.
Mediacom's fastest Internet plan offers gigabit download speeds and 50Mbps upload speeds with a monthly data cap of 6TB. But as Stop the Cap wrote in a detailed report on Wednesday, the ISP is "reach[ing] out to a growing number of its heavy uploaders and telling them to reduce usage or face a speed throttle or the possible closure of their account." Mediacom told Ars that it is contacting heavy uploaders "more frequently than before" because of increased usage triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The company said that heavy uploaders "may be under their total bandwidth usage allowance but still have a negative impact on Mediacom’s network."
Mediacom's terms and conditions say the company charges $10 fees for each additional block of 50GB used by customers who exceed the data cap. But users may be warned about their usage long before they risk overage fees. One user in East Moline, Illinois, who described the predicament on a DSLReports forum in early January, said they paid for the 6TB plan "to make sure we wouldn't go over the cap" and had never used more than 4TB. The user wrote:
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Last year Microsoft introduced a preview of Windows Package Manager, a utility that lets you install Windows applications from a command prompt. Basically it’s the Windows equivalent of the apt, yum, or pacman tools used by GNU/Linux distributio…
Last year Microsoft introduced a preview of Windows Package Manager, a utility that lets you install Windows applications from a command prompt. Basically it’s the Windows equivalent of the apt, yum, or pacman tools used by GNU/Linux distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Arch. But the Windows Package Manager is still very much a work in […]
The post Now you can uninstall apps with Windows Package Manager (command-line tools) appeared first on Liliputing.
Amazon is offering a 3-month subscription to the STARZ streaming movie & TV service for $1 to Prime members. The Microsoft Store is running its annual Anime Month sale with deep discounts on dozens of TV shows and movies. And eBay is running a 15-…
Amazon is offering a 3-month subscription to the STARZ streaming movie & TV service for $1 to Prime members. The Microsoft Store is running its annual Anime Month sale with deep discounts on dozens of TV shows and movies. And eBay is running a 15-percent off sale on refurbished items, most of which seem to […]
The post Daily Deals (1-29-2021) appeared first on Liliputing.
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