Their most successful movie, the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, attracted much of the attention when earlier this year it became the subject of a record-breaking lawsuit.

According to court documents filed this week, Voltage Pictures have voluntarily dismissed around 90% of the original 24,583 Doe Defendants from The Hurt Locker lawsuit. They were dismissed without prejudice, so in theory they could be filed again at a later date. A full list of the IP addresses dismissed from the case can be found embedded below.

In excess of 2,300 potential Does remain in the suit from a range of ISPs including Atlantic Broadband, Bresnan Communications, Charter, Comcast, Mediacom, Midcontinent Media, Qwest, RCN, Sprint, Verizon and Windstream.

Furthermore, according to the documents Voltage have homed in on a number of now-named defendants; Claudio Vazquez, Modern Classics Inc, Sergio Sapaj, Roy McLeese, Kelechi Lane, Shyam Madhavan, Susan Glass, Daniel Bremer-Wirtig, Michael Sein, Elena Ditraglia, .. and J Barry Harrelson.

Defendants Vazquez, McLeese, and … were dismissed, Glass was served and has filed an answer, Harrelson was served and is yet to file a response. Defendants Lane and Modern Classics have been served but have not responded – Voltage are going for a default judgments against these.

Voltage say they have been unable to serve some of the other named defendants above, and have not yet received identifying information for 2,278 IP addresses, mainly due to ISPs stalling due to “motions purportedly filed by the Doe Defendants.” For this reason they request extra time from the court.

“Plaintiff requests at least an additional 60 days in which to effectuate service on Defendants Bremer-Wirtig, Ditraglia, Madhavan, Sapaj, and Sein and to name and serve, or voluntarily dismiss without prejudice, the remaining Doe Defendants,” the court papers read.

How many of the original 24,583 defendants settled with Voltage Pictures for thousands of dollars remains unknown.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

While it’s likely that a significant portion of the people who are suspected of downloading and sharing copyrighted material have indeed done the dead, we can be certain that tens of thousands of defendants are wrongfully accused. After all, an IP-address is not a person.

Every now and then cases appear where these wrongful accusations are apparent. Two weeks ago for example we reported on a blind man who was sued for downloading a porn movie. But things can get even more complicated.

The makers of The Hurt Locker have sued 24,583 alleged BitTorrent users, and starting earlier this year they’ve been sending out subpoenas to identify these defendants. However, it now appears that not all of the accused individuals can easily cough up the settlement fee of a few thousand dollars.

This week a letter was returned to the U.S. District Court, indicating that the addressee is no longer alive. Whether the person in question had already passed away at the time of the alleged offense is unknown.

This is not the first time that a dead person has been sued for copyright infringement.

In 2006 the RIAA reached a new low when they did the same, and even more. After they found out that the alleged infringer had passed away they didn’t drop the case, but instead went after his children. Not before granting the children a 60-day grieving period of course.

“Plaintiffs do not believe it appropriate to discuss a resolution of the case with the family so close to Mr. Scantlebury’s passing. Plaintiffs therefore request a stay of 60 days to allow the family additional time to grieve,” RIAA’s lawyers wrote at the time.

Whether the makers of The Hurt Locker will be this cold-hearted is doubtful. After all, they probably don’t want their shoddy evidence to be tested in court, so they are likely to dismiss the dead person as collateral damage and move on to more lucrative targets.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“This release is created exclusively for interfilm.ru.”

Although these words may not have rung a bell with all viewers, those who use BitTorrent know Interfilm.ru as a prominent BitTorrent tracker. The site was raided in 2009 after the MPAA applied pressure on the Russian authorities, and it is now at the center of copyright infringement claim which runs to a staggering $1.25 billion.

It is not uncommon for this voice-over message to appear in movie torrents uploaded to Interfilm, but it is quite unusual for National State Television to broadcast them.

The message was first picked up by a Belarusian blogger who posted it on his website, from where it spread to several major news outlets including Lenta.ru. National State Television, who allegedly aired the pirated copy of The Hurt Locker, have yet to respond to the mishap.

It is of course painful that this slip-up should happen during the Academy Award ceremony, and that it references the first ever BitTorrent site to be raided in Russia. The Hurt Locker makers, who sued thousands of BitTorrent users in the United States last year, will obviously be upset at this blatant act of copyright infringement.

A DVD copy of The Hurt Locker leaked online in January 2009, several months before the official release. In the months that followed pirated copies were downloaded by millions of people, and now it also has the dubious honor of being the first ‘torrented’ movie to appear on national television.

Update: A spokeswoman for Belarus’ National State television said that proper licenses for the film were acquired through the Russian company GALA Media. The phrase mentioning Interfilm.ru could be a “technical error”, she noted.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

On behalf of the copyright holders, USCG has already sent settlement offers to many affected BitTorrent users. To settle the case the alleged copyright infringers have to pay up to $2,500 or face the risk of higher penalties in a full-blown court case.

The problem with this scheme is that defendants have few viable options to defend their rights. Hiring an attorney often costs more than the settlement amount, and ignoring the settlement offer might lead to an even worse outcome.

Two months ago the EFF published a list of attorneys that could help advise and possibly represent subpoena targets. Although this is a great pointer for individuals who don’t know where to get decent legal representation, all the listed attorneys still ask hundreds of dollars or more for their services.

Attorney Graham Syfert of the Affinity Law Firm is one of the lawyers listed by the EFF, and like the others he has been contacted numerous times by those targeted by USCG. Although Syfert is willing to help them all, for many the costs of hiring an attorney are simply too high.

“One of the major problems that people encounter when trying to hire me on these cases, is that a settlement is approximately what an attorney would need to even begin a defense,” Syfert told TorrentFreak.

To address this issue, Syfert decided to prepare several documents that allow defendants to represent themselves. The forms for pro se (self help) representation include a Motion to Quash, Motion to Dismiss, Affidavit in Support and a Motion for Protective Support. All forms are fillable and are accompanied with detailed instructions of how they should be used.

In preparing the documents, Syfert collaborated with other attorney’s listed on EFF’s website, and he has high hopes that they will be sufficient to dismantle USCG’s ‘pay-up-or-else’ scheme.

“My dream would be to have 10,000-20,000 people file all three documents to the lawyers and severely cripple the entire process and show them that you shouldn’t be allowed to join so many defendants,” Syfert informed TorrentFreak.

However, as is often the case when dealing with lawyers, there is a catch. When first contacting TorrentFreak, Syfert was offering the documents for sale, priced at $99.00. Although that’s still much cheaper than hiring an attorney, we voiced concerns that it looks like another attempt to make a few bucks off the lawsuits.

Luckily, these words didn’t go completely unnoticed to Syfert. “I decided to make it $9.99 instead of $99.00, probably for the next 5 days. Still cheaper than a DVD,” he told us after he slashed the price. Defendants can now buy the full package for under 10 bucks. To our best knowledge that is the cheapest solution to counter USCG’s threats thus far.

Even at the low price of $9.99, considering the target group of these cases it probably won’t take long for ‘pirated’ versions of these documents to appear on torrent and other file-sharing sites. Those tempted should keep in mind though that sharing copyrighted material without consent can sometimes lead to trouble, but it’s highly probable they know that already.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

These practices have been quite common in the UK and Germany for years, and in March this year the US Copyright Group imported this mass litigation “pay up or else” scheme to the United States.

The initial targets were relatively unknown indie films, but this changed when the makers of the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker joined in. After its Oscar victory the film was downloaded by millions of BitTorrent users, and in May the filmmakers sued 5,000 of these alleged downloaders all at once.

To find out whether the download rate for The Hurt Locker plummeted after the news of the lawsuit against BitTorrent users hit the mainstream media, we decided to take a look at last month’s download statistics. Interestingly, it turns out that people seem to be downloading the film undeterred.

In June, the film was downloaded little over 200,000 times, which puts it in the top 25 of most downloaded movies last month. Considering that the film has been available on BitTorrent for more than a year already, this high download number is quite an achievement and only a few percent less than the previous month.

Our statistics further show that 23% of all downloads come from the US, the territory where the US Copyright Group launched its legal action against BitTorrent downloaders.

Whether this means that BitTorrent downloaders are not easily scared by legal threats is hard to say. It could be that the people who downloaded the movie last month simply weren’t aware of the fact that their IP-address might have been noted by the US Copyright Group.

What we can say, however, is that the makers of the film don’t really mind people sharing the film now they might have found a way to make a multi-million dollar profit out of it.

At the time of writing, there are more than 200 torrent files linking to copies of The Hurt Locker floating around on hundreds of torrent sites. Although the makers of the film are quick to sue thousands of downloaders, no effort is being made to take the actual torrent files offline through a notice and takedown procedure.

Nearly every torrent site will remove a torrent file if the copyright holder complains, but clearly the makers of The Hurt Locker haven’t done so – they prefer to protect their newly found business model instead. Taking ‘their’ torrent files down could ironically result in implied losses of several million dollars in missed settlements.

Yes, it’s the world upside down.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

With The Hurt Locker’s Oscar for the Best Picture of 2009, the case has received a lot of press interest, but it’s not the first movie for which BitTorrent users were targeted. Earlier this year, the USCG employed the same tactic for lesser known films. For one of these, Call of the Wild, TorrentFreak obtained the settlement papers.

With the document, alleged infringers have the option to settle the case for $2,500 and avoid further legal action. Because the case is similar to that of The Hurt Locker, we assume that a similar settlement amount will be proposed. This allows us to calculate how much money is involved in this case, and the results are quite interesting.

Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer at the USCG, earlier said that in the Hurt Locker case they could pursue tens of thousands of users. Let’s be careful with our estimate and assume that some 20,000 BitTorrent users will eventually receive a settlement letter in the mail. Of these, half will choose to pay the $2,500 without complaining, a number that seems to be fair based on the results of similar schemes.

If the above scenario becomes reality, The Hurt Locker would make $25 million in settlements alone in the coming months. This number could of course go much higher, as thousands of people are still downloading the movie every day.

With this $25 million the film makers would have collected more money from BitTorrent users than they did from U.S. movie theater visitors. Despite the recognition from Academy members and the huge success among downloaders, the U.S box office revenue has been relatively low at $16.4 million.

The settlement money is not net profit for the makers of Hurt Locker though, as they have to give up 70% of it to the USCG. Still, if they want to earn more they can simply continue to track down BitTorrent users and send out a couple of thousand extra settlement offers. Easy money.

This whole scheme is in no way intended to protect the copyrights of the Hurt Locker producers. USCG don’t want to go to court at all, they want to see money, as much as possible without too much trouble. Lengthy and costly court cases would only get in the way of this goal and could even bust the whole scheme if they lose. The ultimate goal is to ‘monetize’ piracy, this is also how the USCG pitched their scheme to rights holders.

A good example of this ‘money orientation’ is the letter that downloaders of the film Far Cry received from the USCG. Here, the alleged downloaders were offered an initial settlement amount of ‘just’ $1,500, but this would go up to $2,500 if they wouldn’t pay up within three weeks. A classic persuasion tactic, which was followed by a threat that going to court could lead to a fine up to 150,000.

Yes, it’s all about extracting as much cash as possible. We have to say, if they can beat the Box Office revenues of an Oscar winning movie with these threats, they sure delivered as promised.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The first step of the scheme has now been officially initiated as a complaint against 5,000 ‘unidentified’ BitTorrent users was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. If the court approves, the ISPs of the alleged infringers will be ordered to hand over the personal information of the users associated with the IP-addresses.

All infringers that are identified will then be kindly asked to settle the dispute, or face further legal action. In the UK these schemes have been highly criticized by the public, consumer organizations and politicians because of the intimidating tactics and lack of solid evidence.

In the U.S. this particular case has not gone unnoticed either and it generated many headlines before an official complaint was filed. Although the U.S. Copyright Group say that 75% of ISPs are cooperating, most of the bigger ISPs remain skeptical, with Time Warner publicly resisting U.S. Copyright Group’s demands.

The U.S. Copyright Group, on its turn, went on to accuse Time Warner of inducing copyright infringement because of the refusal to expose its users. The group claims that Time Warner’s refusal to cooperate is a publicity stunt to gain the favor of consumers concerned about their privacy.

Then again, the U.S. Copyright Group is not totally open about its intentions either. Although they say it is their intention to sue individuals who do not pay, in reality that eventuality is impossible to maintain on any scale. Their aim will be to scare as many people as possible into paying, perhaps backed up with legal action against a tiny minority to prove a point.

The real winner in this soap opera is in fact the U.S. Copyright Group. As we reported before, the ‘pay up or else’ scheme is not only lucrative for the rights holders, who get only 30 percent of the settlement money. The remaining 70 percent goes to the U.S Copyright Group and its anti-piracy partners.

Ca-Ching!

We encourage people who receive a settlement request to contact us, so we can look at the details and possibly assist in countering the threats of which many more are expected to be sent out in the months to come.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The day after the award show ‘the hurt locker’ was the most typed in search phrase on BitTorrent, with ‘hurt locker’ ending up in ninth place. This increased demand was also reflected in the download numbers which skyrocketed. Since its win at the Oscars the film has been downloaded well over a million times.

Interestingly, The Hurt Locker was already available online in high quality for more than a year, and months before it premiered in movie theaters in the United States. The film’s screener leaked in February of last year, but it has never generated as many downloads as it did this week. Thanks to the Oscar boost, the total number of Hurt Locker downloads on BitTorrent are now nearing 10 million.

The sudden rise in demand is of course not limited to BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks. A film that does well on BitTorrent is usually doing well at the box-office or in the movie stores too, and indeed, DVD sales for The Hurt Locker went up at an equal rate.

This week the DVD topped the bestseller list at the online retailer Amazon and Director of Sky Box Office, Ian Lewis, reports a “significant increase” in demand on its Sky Box pay-per-view service. Similarly, the number of theaters playing the film is doubling this weekend to accommodate the ‘Oscar Bounce.’

The Hurt Locker was not the only Oscar winner to see a boost in unauthorized downloads after last Sunday. Crazy Heart, The Blind Side and Precious and Up saw a similar but less pronounced upswing.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.