Just another news site
Hart erkämpfte feministische Werte sind unangreifbar? Wie die Evangelikalen den Kulturkampf über die Abtreibungsgesetze antreiben
The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending May 7, 2022, are in. A Disney/Pixar animated original is this week’s top-selling new release. Find out what movie it was in our weekly DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Bl…
The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending May 7, 2022, are in. A Disney/Pixar animated original is this week's top-selling new release. Find out what movie it was in our weekly DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales stats and analysis feature.
Eine Organisation mit dem Namen Diplomatic Council hat ein liederliches Potpourri mit viel Kriegsgeschrei verfasst. Auf 260 Seiten finden sich kaum Informationen, dafür aber eine Menge Unsinn
The Pakistani operator of popular torrent site MKVCage can be held personally liable for contributory copyright infringement in the US. The case in question was filed by the makers of the film Hellboy. US District Court Judge Seabright concludes that the use of US-based services invokes jurisdiction, even though a magistrate judge concluded otherwise.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
In 2019, the makers of the superhero film “Hellboy” (HB Productions) filed a lawsuit against torrent site MKVCage at a Hawaii federal court.
The movie company accused the site and its operator of promoting and distributing pirated copies of the movie, demanding to put an end to the activity.
The lawsuit had an almost immediate effect as MKVCage became unreachable soon after the case went public. At the same time, the uploader stopped pushing torrents to other sites as well. This meant that part of the plan had succeeded, but HB Productions wanted more.
The company argued that the torrent site caused irreparable damage and demanded compensation from the alleged brains behind the operation, a Pakistani man named Muhammad Faizan.
Since Faizan didn’t show up in court, the movie company’s attorney Kerry Culpepper requested a default judgment. First, he demanded $270,000 but after the court raised questions about the calculation, this figure was lowered to $150,000. However, the amount wasn’t the only problem.
The Hawaii federal court also questioned whether the defendant, who didn’t put up a defense, could actually be sued in America. In 2020, the court concluded that a US court doesn’t have jurisdiction over the Pakistani defendant.
According to the court, the filmmakers failed to show that MKVCage’s activities were expressly aimed at the United States. In addition, the defendant’s contacts with the US were insufficient to invoke nationwide jurisdiction.
The ruling was a setback for the rightsholder and its attorney. However, the case wasn’t over just yet, as the court left room to file an amended complaint, to fix the shortcomings in its allegations.
The filmmakers seized this opportunity and added more details to their claim, arguing that U.S. courts do have personal jurisdiction over the defendant.
Initially, this renewed effort appeared to fail. In January, Magistrate Judge Mansfield issued a report and recommendations, concluding that the provided evidence is still insufficient. However, US District Court Judge Seabright sees things differently.
In a detailed 45-page order, Judge Seabright highlights the novelty and complexity of these types of jurisdictional questions. In this case, the defendant allegedly operated a torrent site from another continent, while also uploading torrents to third-party sites.
“Defendant was not physically present in the United States while committing the alleged actions—instead, Defendant sat behind his keyboard in Gujranwala, Pakistan,” Judge Seabright writes.
To be held liable, the filmmakers would have to show that the man has a substantial connection to the United States. In legal terms, this is referred to as the purposeful-availment and purposeful-direction tests.
Judge Seabright recognizes that courts can have different takes on this matter. Some require an actual physical presence, while others also count virtual access, through a web server for example.
The Magistrate Judge evaluated this case based on the more strict “physical” requirement but Judge Seabright disagrees.
“Tortious acts that once required international travel, and later the somewhat faster process of international mail, can now be accomplished in a matter of seconds with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks.”
According to the court, the Internet has transformed how foreign defendants interact with the United States. In this case, the defendant used US-based servers from a remote location, which is sufficient to invoke liability.
“[T]he court concludes that when a defendant uses the Internet to commit a tort confined to the digital realm, the defendant’s tortious actions occur at the location of the computer (e.g., web server) that the defendant manipulates to commit the tort,” Judge Seabright writes.
Now that the operator of MKVCage can be held liable, it doesn’t automatically mean that he is. With regard to direct copyright infringement, Judge Seabright doesn’t believe that the allegations are plausible.
The filmmakers accuse the man of ripping the “Hellboy” movie, for example, but it’s not clear if US servers were used to do that. In addition, the Judge doesn’t find it plausible that the defendant uploaded actual copies of the movie to torrent sites.
The latter shows that the Judge has a good understanding of how BitTorrent works. The ‘torrent’ files that are shared online are just metadata, and not actual copies of the movies.
“It would make little sense for a ‘torrent website’ to host and provide downloads for the larger movie files. That would defeat the purpose of a torrent network’s peer-to-peer architecture, which achieves greater reliability than a traditional client-server architecture in transferring large files because it does not suffer from bottleneck issues.
“For those reasons, the court finds implausible Plaintiff’s allegation that Defendant uploaded movie files onto torrent websites in the United States,” Judge Seabright writes.
Adding to this, the ruling includes another interesting legal observation. According to the Judge, uploading torrent files that point to pirated movies is not seen as direct copyright infringement.
“[I]f Defendant uploaded onto the torrent sites torrent files associated with the Hellboy movie, then there is no reproduction infringement, because the torrent files do not contain copyrighted material”
The court concluded that direct infringement is implausible, but the same is not true for contributory copyright infringement. The torrent files themselves are not infringing, but they do allow others to pirate the film.
As such, the MKVCage operator can be held liable for this offense, particularly because the website used servers that were based in the United States.
“Defendant hosted his mkvcage websites on servers leased to him in the United States. Accordingly, Defendant’s publishing and promoting of infringement-enabling torrent files, and his general facilitating of connections between direct infringers, occurred in the United States,” Judge Seabright concludes.
After nearly three years, this means that the filmmakers can move ahead with their request for a default judgment. This can potentially result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for MVKCage’s operator.
Perhaps just as importantly, the copyright holders have a favorable verdict that they can use in similar cases that may come up in the future.
—
A copy of US District Court Judge Seabright’s order is available here (pdf)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Fortnite was famously booted from the App Store and Google Play Store a few years ago when Epic Games intentionally flouted Apple and Google’s rules in order to kick off a legal challenge. While it’s still fairly easy to install Fortnite o…
Fortnite was famously booted from the App Store and Google Play Store a few years ago when Epic Games intentionally flouted Apple and Google’s rules in order to kick off a legal challenge. While it’s still fairly easy to install Fortnite on an Android phone by sideloading it, the game has only recently returned to […]
The post Lilbits: OnePlus Nord 2T, Moto G71, and GeForce NOW brings Fortnite to iOS (and Android, and anything with a web browser) appeared first on Liliputing.
Thomas argued that social networks are like common carriers.
Enlarge / Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas speaks at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Drew Angerer )
With tech groups asking the US Supreme Court to block the new Texas law against social media "censorship," the state's defense relies in part on an opinion issued last year by Justice Clarence Thomas in a case involving Donald Trump and Twitter.
Thomas' opinion, as we wrote at the time, criticized the Section 230 legal protections given to online platforms' moderation decisions and argued that free-speech law shouldn't necessarily prevent lawmakers from regulating those platforms as common carriers.
"In many ways, digital platforms that hold themselves out to the public resemble traditional common carriers," Thomas wrote. "Though digital instead of physical, they are at bottom communications networks, and they 'carry' information from one user to another. A traditional telephone company laid physical wires to create a network connecting people. Digital platforms lay information infrastructure that can be controlled in much the same way." The similarity between online platforms and common carriers "is even clearer for digital platforms that have dominant market share," Thomas also wrote.
Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Too many siblings and not enough timeline spells trouble in this Netflix series.
The third season of The Umbrella Academy will debut in June on Netflix.
The Hargreeves siblings return to 2019 only to find themselves caught in an alternate timeline where they were never adopted by their wealthy father in the official trailer for The Umbrella Academy S3. Instead, they must confront their alt-timeline counterparts, the Sparrow Academy, and ward off yet another apocalypse as they try, once again, to return home.
(Spoilers for first two seasons below.)
For those unfamiliar with the premise, in S1, billionaire industrialist Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore) adopted seven children out of 43 mysteriously born in 1989 to random women who had not been pregnant the day before. The children were raised at Hargreeves' Umbrella Academy, with the help of a robot "mother" named Grace (Jordan Claire Robbins) and became a family of superheroes with special powers. But it was a dysfunctional arrangement, marred by the tragic death of one of the children, and the family members ultimately disbanded, only reuniting as adults when Hargreeves died. They soon learned that they had to team up to prevent a global apocalypse.
Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
The first laptops with Intel Arc 3 discrete graphics began shipping earlier this year, although notebooks with Intel’s entry-level GPU still aren’t exactly common. Even less common? Notebooks with Intel’s higher-performance Arc 5 and…
The first laptops with Intel Arc 3 discrete graphics began shipping earlier this year, although notebooks with Intel’s entry-level GPU still aren’t exactly common. Even less common? Notebooks with Intel’s higher-performance Arc 5 and Arc 7 discrete GPUs. The chip maker said we’d have to wait until this summer for those models to arrive. But […]
The post A gaming laptop with Intel Arc A730M graphics is up for pre-order in China appeared first on Liliputing.
Yes, the Warner Bros. pastiche is weird. But its co-op arena battling is refined.
Enlarge / Yes, we're as surprised by this game being good (at least in its closed alpha state) as you are. (credit: Warner Bros. Games)
Starting today, Warner Bros. Games is taking the formal veil off its worst-kept video game secret in years: Multiversus. When we saw the leaks about this upcoming free-to-play PC and console game, which stars various WB and Time Warner intellectual property in a cartoony, Smash Bros.-style arena fighter, we had our reservations. Was WB seriously trying to compete with Nintendo's biggest fighting game by pitting Arya Stark against... Shaggy from Scooby-Doo? Whose dream cartoon face-off is that?
A few days ago, WB invited us to go hands-on to see for ourselves what the game is like ahead of today's launch of a closed alpha test to address those kinds of questions and more. So far, we've come away impressed and surprised. In a world that didn't necessarily need another Smash Bros. clone, the devs at Player First Games have seemingly cracked the code—and made something that could neatly coexist with Nintendo's massive hit, if not surpass it. (Even better, at first blush, the F2P stuff seems tolerable!)
Just a normal, everyday mash-up of WB intellectual property. (credit: WB Games)
Most of the "arena fighter" genre basics, as established by Smash Bros., are accounted for in WB's latest fighting game. Instead of wearing down an energy bar à la Street Fighter, Multiversus players try to "ring out" their foes by racking up damage and setting up knockout blows. Movement is pretty Super Mario-like in terms of dashing and jumping between floating platforms, and players have a range of basic and special attacks that don't require complex joystick and button combos.
Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Strength of $44B agreement comes into focus as Musk appears to have second thoughts.
Since the financial crisis, corporate lawyers have aspired to build the ultimate ironclad merger contract that keeps buyers with cold feet from backing out.
The “bulletproof” modern deal agreement now faces one of its biggest tests, as Elon Musk, the Tesla boss and richest person in the world, openly entertains the possibility of ditching his $44 billion deal for Twitter.
Musk said in a tweet this week that the “deal cannot move forward” until the social media platform provides detailed data about fake accounts, a request that Twitter seems unlikely to meet. Twitter’s board, meanwhile, has stated its commitment “to completing the transaction on the agreed price and terms as promptly as practicable."
Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.